With online shopping portals becoming popular, the customer journey is getting more complex. There are high chances of a customer engaging with your brand through different mediums over several days, before making an online purchase decision. And to help you understand more about the buyer's thought process, Google has introduced "The Customer Journey to Online Purchase" analytics report today.
Bing re-launches the Bing Business Portal with a new name, "Bing Places for Business". The change will not do much with listings, other than moving the location of where you managed your business Bing Maps listing to bing.com/places.
Some of the features that were available in the Bing Business Portal have also been removed. These include:
- Ability to create deals
- Features to add coupons
After Related Searches filter, Google has now dropped Instant Previews from the search results which are said to be a very low usage.
The Instant Previews feature was launched in November 2010. It was also tested with AdWords Instant Previews and Sitelinks Instant Previews. There was even a feature in Webmaster tools to preview instant previews. Google even said that with Instant Previews feature, searchers were 5% more likely to be satisfied after they clicked on the results.
It is common for marketers and bloggers to have multiple websites. What will happen if these websites are linked to each other?
A similar question was asked to Matt Cutts by a reader. Let's go through the question in details:
We broke out the news of Mozilla being penalized by Google for user generated spam yesterday. The only thing that Google revealed was that it was a granular penalty. The latest addition to the news is that the penalty was on one specific page out of the 22 million pages that Mozilla has.
Here's what Matt Cutts said about the penalty:
Google has introduced the Upgrade Center, which will make it easier for advertisers with lots of campaigns to easily upgrade to enhanced campaigns.
Enhanced campaigns help marketers in reaching out to people with the ads based on their location, device type, and time of day- removing the need of setting up and managing several individual campaigns.
The most famous politician on Twitter, Dr. Shashi Tharoor is the latest in the list of celebrities and politicians using Google Hangout. The Minister of State for Human Resource Development, Shashi Tharoor will be taking questions on The Future of Higher Education on the 9th of May, 2013.
You can ask questions at http://oursay.in/future-of-higher-education
"Related searches" option that was launched by Google in October 2009 has now been quietly removed from the search tools menu. The related searches option appeared within the Google search results page.
When related searches option was launched, it appeared on the left-hand side under the "standard view". But, the placement changed over the years with Google moving the whole search filters to the top in November 2012.
If your website has user-generated content, you need to pay attention to what users are doing; else Google might hit you with a penalty. The recent news of Google hitting Mozilla with spam penalty has become a reason of worry for website owners.
When Google penalized Mozilla, the Web Production manager for Mozilla Chris More took the entire confusion to Google's forums to get some help in dealing with the penalty notice received. Here are the extracts from his post:
Google+ is marking its presence in every Google product, with AdWords being the latest one. From today, AdWords advertisers will be able to highlight their Google+ follower counts in their enhanced campaigns. Google has already told that ads with follower counts have 5-10% higher click-through rate, when compared to regular ads.
Here's an example from Home Depot, when we searched for "dining room chairs".
@pagetraffic
