Google has made a change to the rich result reports for product structured data on December 28, 2021. This rich results report is viewable in Google Search Console and the change may result in the number of product entities and issues being different from previous days.
What changed. Google said the search company “changed the way that it evaluates and reports errors in Product structured data.” Google did not specify any more details than that.
The impact of the change. As a result of that change, Google said “you may see changes in the number of Product entities and issues reported for your property, as well as a change in severity of some issues from errors to warnings.”
Google will annotated the report so that if you see a decrease or increase in these numbers, it might be related to the change Google made on its reporting end and nothing you changed on your end. Again, it might just be a reporting change and the Google search results have not changed.
Why we care. If you notice changes in the product rich results report in Google Search Console, do not panic, it is a confirmed change on Google’s end. If you didn’t make any changes to your site around this date, there is even less reason to be concerned.
You should still review all the errors, issues and warnings Google specified in this report and resolve those issues going forward.
The ability to save product filters has been spotted in Google Merchant Center. We’ve reached out to Google for more details about this feature but have not received a response at the time of publication.
A screenshot of product filters in Google Merchant Center. Image: Kirk Williams.
Tip of the hat to Kirk Williams of ZATO Marketing for bringing this to our attention.
Why we care
This nifty, albeit minor, update can save marketers some time that might otherwise be spent fumbling through data to find what they’re looking for. Being able to save product filters enables marketers to more quickly analyze different product categories, such as clearance items, for example.
Advertisers aren’t just competing against other brands for their audience’s attention. “Nowadays, the digital environment is so busy, we’re also competing against our best friend’s new babies and puppies and really great pictures of food,” Rebecca Debono, creative director at Jump 450 Media and formerly director of creative strategy at 3Q Digital, said at SMX Create.
With so many platforms, technologies and distractions available, it can be incredibly difficult to make ads that actually engage consumers. At SMX Create, Debono and Julia Thiel, VP executive creative director at 3Q Digital, shared their considerations for creating visually stunning ads to help brands cut through the noise and address customers’ motivators as well as barriers that may be clogging your sales funnel.
Design for the part of the funnel you’re targeting
Using different ads to address each part of the sales funnel ensures that you’ve got a pipeline that speaks to all potential audiences, regardless of whether they’re totally new to your brand or are on the tipping point of converting. Below are some goals that Debono associated with ads at different stages of the funnel.
Top of the funnel: Introduce your brand and generate audience interest.
Middle of the funnel: Educate audiences about your brand/product and entice them with your offerings.
Bottom of the funnel: Encourage the audience to take action.
Image: Rebecca Debono.
“Starting at the top, it’s got clear logo placement, that really helps to build brand awareness,” Debono said, referring to a top-of-funnel ad example (shown above). The logo is also prominent on the product itself, which is made more eye-catching by an on-brand background pattern. The background of the ad might also stand out on a white or black website background and uses the company’s brand colors.
The text elements clearly showcase the product’s value proposition and encourage potential customers to move further along the funnel with a strong CTA. Advertisers can also use movement or animation and text overlays to capture people’s attention, Debono added.
“As we start to move down from the top of the funnel and into the middle, I want to talk about how to really speak to certain audiences,” Debono said, noting that the typical creative process might involve iterating on a top-performing creative asset so that it can be used to target a broad audience.
“It’s not a wrong process, but we find that, as we start to get more mid-funnel, this process is often missing a step,” she said, “And that step is what motivates people, what is going to get them to buy or what is their barrier to entry?” Digging into customer personas can help advertisers address customers’ motivators as well as barriers, Debono said.
Image: Rebecca Debono.
“Maybe the barrier is that there won’t be a flavor for me,” she provided as an example, “And so we could hit them with a message that there are 36 flavors that they could try.” Likewise, your messaging could help build a stronger connection with audiences by appealing to their motivators (with messaging like “freshly picked ingredients” for health-conscious consumers) or eliminating barriers (such as local availability, with incentives like free shipping).
Image: Rebecca Debono.
As examples of successful bottom-of-funnel ads, Debono showed a collection of assets for Kombucha brand Suja (shown above). She called out the following factors behind successful performance ads:
The product is prominently displayed for more visual impact. This also informs audiences of what they’re potentially buying.
Offers to save money might nudge bottom-of-the-funnel customers to convert.
Strong CTAs give customers a clear idea of what to do next.
The text and visuals are simple, because bottom-of-the-funnel customers are likely already familiar with your brand and products.
Differentiate your brand by differentiating your ads
Image: Rebecca Debono.
“Being different and standing out in a sea of sameness, especially if you’re in a crowded category, is super important,” Debono said, adding that customers may not understand what brand an ad is from if every brand appears visually similar, as it does in the image above.
In the example below, she highlighted an ad that disrupts the pattern: Instead of focusing on the product itself, the ad seeks to relate directly to the target audience by highlighting the lifestyle that the brand wants to associate with the product. It’s also accompanied by a unique CTA (“Follow your gut”), which also helps the ad stand out.
Image: Rebecca Debono.
Although showcasing product imagery is typically best practice, distinguishing yourself from competitors may help increase conversions, so advertisers should keep an eye on the landscape they’re advertising in to know which type of creative to use.
“Being disruptive doesn’t mean you have to completely throw your brand guidelines out the window and do something that doesn’t even look like it’s from your brand,” Debono said, pointing to another example (below) in which a company used the same fonts and colors to create a sense of cohesion.
Image: Rebecca Debono.
“You can tell that both of these ad themes are from the same brand, but they’re just discernibly different and that’s what makes a really great disruptive ad,” she said.
Using original graphics and photos, as opposed to stock images, can also help your brand differentiate itself. “There’s nothing wrong with the stock image . . . except that the whole world can use that same image if they want to,” Thiel said, adding that the same goes for stock video footage, stock illustrations and stock icons.
For advertisers that may be bound to using stock images (perhaps due to budget constraints, for example), “one solution could be to at least put your own spin on it and overlay your brand colors on the image, maybe you use a different crop,” or add your logo to it, she recommended.
Consider the elements of your brand kit
Determining the right colors to represent your brand often comes down to the psychology of each color and what you want to associate your brand with. The colors your competitors are already using and the right mixture of colors to ensure that your ads will attract your audience’s gaze (usually by including a brighter color) are also important factors.
Image: Julia Thiel.
“Your logo is your storefront — you want it to stand for everything you do,” Thiel said, “So the first step here when designing a logo is to think about what your brand should say.”
Image: Julia Thiel.
Using her agency’s logo as an example, she pointed out that the intertwining of the “3” and the “Q” are meant to convey partnership. She also pointed to the blend of strong and contrasting colors as well as unique iconography to create a visual signature on your ads. “Lastly, but not the least important, is the typeface should always compliment your logo and, in the digital ad context, it also really needs to be highly legible,” she said.
“At a minimum, in your ads, you should always use your logo, your brand font and your brand colors — not all of them at once, but some of them,” Thiel added.
Factor in the format
“There are some challenges when working with RDAs [Responsive Display Ads],” Thiel said, “For example, when it comes to the image and on-image text, some of the banners are very, very small, and they leave very little room for your image.”
Image: Julia Thiel.
Because the placement is responsive, the cropping of your banner might be out of your control as well. “In my opinion, it is not a good idea to have on-image text on RDAs, period,” she said, noting that on-image text can impede your visual branding.
“Headlines and descriptions in RDAs are mixed and matched when served,” Thiel said, “So all of the combinations have to make sense. The banner image can also be matched with all the different combinations of headlines and descriptions, so the visual has to work with all the combinations as well.” Additionally, the copy can be served without the banner image, “so it [the ad copy] really needs to speak for itself,” she emphasized.
When designing for Responsive Display Ads, Thiel recommends:
Being concise with your copy rather than cramming all the content into the visual part of the banner.
Keeping in mind that the copy is just as important as the banner.
Creating strong on-brand headlines and descriptions that can be mixed and matched.
Filling the image space with bright, eye-catching imagery that is really easy to understand at first glance and at a very small size.
Don’t overlook the creative — it’s one of your biggest levers
As the PPC industry becomes increasingly reliant on signals and automated systems, advertisers may feel like there are fewer ways to differentiate their brand or directly influence campaigns.
“It used to be that the best bidding strategy or the best targeting strategy would kind of win out, but in a world of automation, truly, creative is one of the biggest levers that we have to pull in order to stand out and make a great campaign,” Debono said.
Google is testing a new announcement bar or tab at the top of the Google Search Console interface. The bar does not yet seem to function properly but has three levels of announcements depending on the urgency of the information.
Types of announcements. Google Search Console shows these three types of announcements bars:
Informational announcement
Minor issue announcement
Major issue announcement
What it looks like. Here is a screen shot of what it currently looks like, although, clicking on them currently does not do anything:
Why we care. It seems Google will be able to use this to communicate issues with Google Search directly to site owners. Again, this is not fully functioning right now but I suspect it is rolling out soon.
From an SEO perspective, 2021 can be summed up as stressful — not just because of several algorithmic updates throughout the year but also possibly because of the timing of some of those updates. With the COVID vaccine rollout, some businesses began returning to normal, but then the Delta and Omicron variant threw everything for a loop — was it just too much to handle for some?
It may have been a bit too much to handle for Google as well: The search engine launched Page Experience update late, never hit its deadline for the mobile-first indexing this year and seemed to rush out two late. big algorithmic updates towards the end of the year.
Google’s June, July and November core updates rocked the SEO industry
June 2021 core update. Google took a while to release its first core update of the year, the June 2021 core update, which began rolling out on June 2, 2021. That update finished rolling out about ten days after it started, on June 12, 2021. This core update seemed to have been a slow rollout that had a bunch of mixed results based on the data given to us by several data providers.
Image: Semrush.
July 2021 core update. Shortly after the June core update, Google released the July 2021 core update on July 1, 2021 — this was kind of like part two of the previous June core update. This update took about 12 days to roll out, completing on July 12, 2021. Unlike the June core update, the July core update was fast to roll out according to the data providers.
November 2021 core update. Then several months later, Google hit us with the November 2021 core update, that started right before the big holiday shopping season on November 17, 2021. That update rolled out through Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday and completed on November 30, 2021, 13 days after it started. The November core update hit hard and quickly according to the data but many SEOs felt blindsided by the timing of that update.
well, they did do one around this time last year as well but at least it was after black friday https://t.co/VYypG5bHpj
Google’s April and December product reviews updates were new to SEOs
Not only did we have three core updates in 2021, we also had two product reviews updates. The product reviews update was a new kind of update, focused on content written around products and making sure Google only ranked the best and most useful product reviews in the search results.
April 2021 product reviews update. Google’s first product reviews update touched down on April 8, 2021. Google made a point to tell us this is not a core update and only impacted English content, but much of the same recovery advice reflected that of a core update. Google effectively finished rolling out that update on April 22, 2021, but there may have been some edge case tremors later, so it took approximately two weeks to rollout. That update was a big update but not as big as a typical core update, said the data providers.
December 2021 product reviews update. If the first product reviews update in April wasn’t enough, Google ran a second product reviews update named the December 2021 product reviews update that started on December 1, 2021. That update took about three weeks to rollout, and completed just days before the Christmas holiday, on around December 21, 2021.
Image: RankRanger.
The update felt bigger than the April product reviews update, according to the data providers. Of course, timing a product reviews update three weeks before Christmas might also put Google into the category of being out of touch with the e-commerce ecosystem.
Google’s spam and link spam updates provided some transparency for SEOs
Google also released a few spam related search algorithms updates, which Google was upfront and transparent about in terms of timing but, for obvious reasons, didn’t give too much technical detail on.
June 23, 2021 spam update. Google released a spam update on June 23, 2021, which began and finished on the same day. It was a 24-hour update target spam efforts in Google Search.
June 28, 2021 spam update. Then the following week, Google released part two, the June 28 spam update. That update also started and finished on the same day, a 24-hour roll out.
July 2021 link spam update. The following month, Google released a July link spam update that started on July 26, 2021. Google said that rollout would be done in about two weeks but it was completed after about four-weeks, two weeks longer than expected. The rollout finished on August 24, 2021 and target spammy links that tried to manipulate the Google search results.
Google’s page experience update was a bit delayed but went live
Google postponed the launch of the page experience update by a couple of months, but it did go live on June 15, 2021. That rollout took a long time — it rolled out for a few months and finished rolling out around September 2, 2021. As a reminder, you should not have seen huge ranking changes in Google Search for this release. This was a slow rollout and Google originally advised not to expect drastic changes.
Image: Google.
Google did say that next year, in February 2022, the page experience update will be brought to desktop search.
Google’s local update in November
Not to be outdone by the web search algorithmic updates, Google also confirmed after the rollout was complete that it performed a local search update in late November. That update started on November 30, 2021, and ran through December 8, 2021.
Image: Joy Hawkins
This update seemed to focus on proximity factors and was code-named the Vicinity Update by the local SEO community.
MUM, passage ranking and subtopics
Passage ranking. Google spoke about passage ranking in 2020 but it wasn’t until February 2021 where Google actually started to use passage ranking. Passage ranking is a way of Google ranking specific passages from a web page in search; it is not a visual update to the search results but a ranking update.
MUM.Google also showcased MUM, Multitask Unified Model, which is 1,000 times more powerful than BERT.
Examples of search results for vaccines, powered by Google’s MUM. Image: Google.
It was first used this year for understanding the hundreds of variations of COVID vaccine names. Google has lots of ambitious plans for MUM in Google Search and beyond and has already expanded its use cases later in 2021.
Sub-topics. Google launched another AI-based ranking system named sub-topics rankings in November 2020. But Google didn’t tell us it went live until 2021 came around.
Mobile-first indexing delayed again
Google’s mobile-first indexing initiative, which started in 2016, was delayed again and scheduled to be completed in March 2021. Google decided to do away with the deadline this year and said this will get done when it gets done. So, if your site has not moved over yet to mobile-first indexing yet, hopefully sometime in 2022 it will be but Google won’t be giving us any more timelines on this initiative.
Other Google algorithm changes, updates, tweaks or topics
It has been a busy year. Google confirmed in 2020 that it released over 4,500 changes to search. I suspect that number will be higher for the 2021 year.
Google also released a predator update, as I like to call it, that demoted libelous content within its search results.
The company also released an image search update in February that reduced duplicate images in its image search results.
Google’s title tag changes caused a stir in the SEO industry. The company confirmed after the change went live that it made changes to the title snippet and what Google uses to show the title snippet. It also explained why it made the changes and a month or so later, made some tweaks to that title snippet algorithm.
Image: Semrush.
Finally, data has shown that the Google search results were more volatile this year than all previous years. SEOs have been working hard with all these changes and there has been more awareness around work-life balance in this space.
I’d expect more to come in 2022, so hopefully, this crazy busy 2021 prepared you for it.
Catch up on the biggest PPC news of the year or zoom out to see how 2020 unfolded for the SEO industry:
The ability to exclude undesirable ad placements for Smart Shopping campaigns has been spotted in the Google Ads interface. Placement exclusions can be applied to the Google Display Network and YouTube, according to the screenshot (below).
The “Exclude placements” menu in Google Ads. Image: Davey Stokkers and Fabio Antichi.
We’ve reached out to Google for more details about this feature but have not received a response at the time of publication. Tip of the hat to Davey Stokkers and Fabio Antichi for first spotting this feature, and Gianpaolo Lorusso for bringing it to our attention.
Why we care
More and more consumers are seeking to purchase from brands that align with their ethics and values. Being able to control what your ads appear alongside can help you prevent unwanted brand associations, which can, in turn, affect your conversion rates.
Additionally, Smart Shopping and Local campaigns will be bundled into Performance Max campaigns sometime in 2022. It’s not clear whether placement exclusions will still be available when that occurs. We will update this article with more details when we receive a response from Google.
Google Business Profile, formerly Google My Business, has a new feature in the products section that lets you mark a product as “special.” After you mark a product as special, that product will be moved to the top of the products you listed in your Google business profile listing.
What it looks like. Here is the setting in the Google Business Profile products section that says “Mark as Special.” It says “products marked Special are shown at the top of the page.”
Why we care. Clearly, some local SEOs and businesses wanted a method to promote products to the top of the page. This gives them a way to feature one or more products higher up in their Google local search listings and Google Maps listings.
I personally do not see this feature but others like @shemiadhikarath do. We have asked Google for a comment about the rollout of this feature and are waiting to hear back.
In 2021, SEOs faced a flurry of Google updates (including the highly anticipated yet possibly-overhyped Page Experience update), new search results page features like continuous scrolling and countless other updates that could potentially affect visibility for their brands — all while operating amid the second year of the COVID pandemic.
From core updates and title change fiascos to improved shopping options and new ways of tracking data, this year was full of surprises. Here’s our look back at the most impactful SEO news, tactics and tools of 2021.
Core updates. Google released three major core updates — one in June, one in July and one in November. The first caused a lot of search volatility, with tools like MozCast reaching a temperature of 107.3°F on June 3. The July update continued this spike until it all died down around July 12.
On November 17, Google announced a third, somewhat surprising core update, just days before the Thanksgiving holiday, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. According to many tracking tools, this update had higher volatility than June and July’s. Due to the speedy rollout and widespread ranking shifts, many SEOs rightfully wondered why Google chose this time of year to release such a large update.
Page title rewrites. Of all the algorithm updates from this past year, the changes to Google’s page title rewrites in the search engine results pages (SERPs) were the most controversial. Marketers began noticing significant changes to their SERP titles around mid-August.
Examples of Search Engine Land titles that were changed by Google. Image: Brodie Clark.
Following a slew of feedback claiming huge decreases in result quality, Google rolled back some of these updates later in September. But many sites still experienced major ramifications in the following months, including our own properties.
Spam updates. Google released a number of major spam updates throughout the year. The first set rolled out on June 23 and June 28, although there wasn’t much of a noticeable impact on rankings.
The second update, released on July 28, targeted link spam. Rather than penalizing sites with bad links, Google stated that it focused on ignoring those signals.
The final spam update rolled out in November. Google didn’t offer much detail on this update, but search volatility skyrocketed following the release.
Product reviews updates. This year, Google launched two updates to help combat spam and/or thin product reviews. The first update was released in April and the follow-up came in December. Both of these were designed to prioritize reviews with in-depth research, including “content written by experts or enthusiasts who know the topic well.”
Passage indexing. Google introduced passage indexing, an algorithm tweak that ranks segmented pieces of content on a page, to the SERPs in early February. Google now displays these passages as featured snippets and links users to that particular part of the page.
Example of Google’s passage ranking from a specific part of a page.
The year in SEO news
The SERP. Google added an “about this result” box to the SERP in February, giving searchers more information about their results. It expanded this feature in July.
“About this result” display in SERPs. Image: Google.
In a similar fashion, Microsoft Bing launched Page Insights in November, which features a lightbulb icon next to each search result that gives searchers more details about them.
Google added free listings to its Hotel search in March. Later, in December, it allowed hotels to use Google Posts in a limited manner to extend their local reach.
Google also rolled out continuous scroll on mobile search in October, which seemed like it would encourage more clicks on results past page one. SEOs are still measuring what impact this change has had on CTR.
Continuous scroll on Google mobile search. Image: Google.
In November, the search company added features designed to give more visibility to local news content.
On the Microsoft side, Bing Search gained a new interface to make its results more appealing, including an infographic-like search panel and expandable search carousels. It also introduced “Make Every feature Binary” (MEB), a new algorithm model designed to help improve search relevance. And in October, the company released IndexNow, a cross-search engine collaboration with Yandex to set a protocol that would index any new content instantly.
COVID-related updates. As many marketers know, the pandemic has spurred on more interest in SEO as businesses search for new ways to connect with customers. This interest in SEO has remained high over the past year, but there were a number of additional trends. These included an increase in searches for local businesses and pandemic-focused topics.
In April Google announced that additional COVID-related travel advisory information would be shown in Google Search to assist with trip planning. It also expanded its Explore section for its travel site.
In December, Google began rolling out a search feature that lets users see if a doctor or healthcare facility takes their insurance — no doubt spurred on by the increased number of COVID cases worsened by holiday gatherings and the Omicron variant.
Yelp introduced “Proof of vaccination required” and “Staff fully vaccinated” profile attributes. It also added a health and safety measures community feedback feature to help consumers learn more about local businesses’ health and safety compliance. And, to help prevent customer confusion, it added a virtual restaurant attribute.
SEO documentation. Google published updates to its search documentation throughout the past year, though some of those changes weren’t officially announced.
The company quietly published new manual actions targeting News and Discover penalties in February. In June, Google offered an SEO guide to address HTTP status codes, network issues and DNS errors. And in October, it refreshed its search quality guidelines to expand on the concepts of YMYL content and lowest-quality content.
Microsft also published a list of Bingbot IP addresses in November to better alert users when it was crawling their sites.
Diversity and inclusion. In response to the growing amount of hateful rhetoric and attacks against people of color, women, and other minority groups, industry leaders — both search professionals and brands — made pushes for change.
Google announced in February that it would be changing its policies toward diversity research, following its questionable firing of AI ethicist Timnit Gebru. Due to criticism of how the situation played out, the company said it would tie business goals more closely to inclusivity and diversity — and change how it handles employee exits.
In April, Yelp rolled out an Asian-owned business profile attribute in response to the recent rise in anti-Asian violence and xenophobia. Later, in May, the company introduced an LGBTQ-owned attribute option to celebrate pride month.
Third Door Media (the parent company of Search Engine Land and SMX) held the second annual Search Engine Land Award for Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Search Marketing. The previous winner, Areej AbuAli, served as a judge, with Rejoice Ojiaku and hasOptimization earning the accolade in 2021.
Rejoice Ojiaku, winner of the Award for Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Search Marketing
We also put together a list of inclusive marketing resources to help marketers highlight their brand values. Besides being the right thing to do, becoming a more inclusive organization has been shown to be better for your brand.
Image and YouTube. In February, Google provided documentation on image SEO best practices. The advice was focused primarily on ranking well in Google Images, but marketers can apply many of the suggestions to image ranking in general.
YouTube, seeking to assist creators with their reach, added video chapter previews and auto-translate captions. And in December, it launched a new feature that automatically linked to places mentioned in videos, giving users even more context.
Structured data. In May, Schema.org launched its schema markup validator tool in response to Google deprecating its structured data tool. It’s for more “general purpose” use than Google’s Rich Results tool.
In August, Google updated its Article structured data help document to reflect changes to its author properties. It added an author URL property to more easily identify authors of articles.
Industry and legal news. After postponing the mobile-first indexing deadline — first moving it from September 2020 to March 2021 — Google decided to leave the deadline open-ended. It said that there are still many sites not ready to shift over due to unexpected challenges they’re facing.
Mozilla tested Bing as the default search engine for 1% of Firefox users, leading many SEOs to reconsider the importance of optimization for non-Google search engines.
DuckDuckGo pushed past 100 million searches in a single day on January 11, showing how important private search experiences are to a growing number of users. And in December, the company announced that it’s working on a desktop browser, further signaling their support for greater privacy in search.
The battle for data privacy continued throughout 2021 with additional legal actions brought against Google. On March 12, a California judge ruled that Google must face a lawsuit claiming it tracks users in Incognito mode. In response, Google released a court filing saying that it makes clear that “Incognito” does not mean “invisible.” And in November, Google managed to win a dismissal of the U.K. Top Court’s data privacy suit relating to iPhone users.
Google’s run-ins with policy hit issues across the board. In October, the tech giant faced allegations from 17 state attorneys claiming it throttled non-AMP ads to give AMP a boost. This, along with Google’s decision to remove the AMP requirement from Top Stories, led many publishers to reconsider using the format.
Google was also fined €500 million ($589 million) by the French Competition Authority for failing to comply with negotiations with news outlets. Later, it lost a key appeal against the EU’s €2.4 billion ($2.8 billion) fine against the company from 2017, which found that Google broke an antitrust law in how it promoted its search engine regarding shopping.
In December, the company came under investigation for alleged harassment and discrimination against Black female workers. The report said the regulator began looking into the company’s practices after formal complaints.
Google Search Console (GSC). In April, Google released a pilot tool in Search Console that allowed users to report indexing issues; it was fully rolled out in August. Google also added practice problem rich results data, providing more insights for education content publishers. We also saw an upgrade to the AMP debugging section, which now links users to the AMP page experience guide.
To improve accessibility and user experience, Google introduced a new design for Search Console in November (shown below).
Google Search Console’s new design.
On December 14, the Review Snippets rich results report was updated, reducing the number of review objects; namely, the top-level schema.org/Rating objects.
Google Analytics 4. Google announced changes to Google Analytics 4 that included integration with Search Console, new machine learning models and data-driven attribution features. Interestingly, the language in this update suggests that the company may be considering sunsetting Universal Analytics in the not-too-distant future.
Google also unveiled a new version of Analytics 360, the company’s suite of products designed for enterprise-level companies, using Analytics 4 as its foundation.
Bing Webmaster Tools. Microsoft released its Bing content submission API to all users. Unlike its URL submission API, this version lets users submit content, images and HTML to the index as well.
Google Question Hub. In January, Google opened up its Question Hub for US-based publishers — it’s been available to users in India, Indonesia and Nigeria since 2018. The tool “enables creators to create richer content by leveraging unanswered questions,” according to Google.
Retail and e-commerce
In April, Google began enforcing its policy requiring merchants to show the actual price of items throughout the entire checkout phase. The company also updated Google Merchant Center’s product data specification requirements to encourage optimized Google Shopping ads and organic listings.
Google Shopping and WooCommerce partnered together in June to help retailers show their listings across Google. The search engine also released an e-commerce SEO guide to help improve retail sites’ search visibility. These updates reflected the changing landscape of retail due to COVID-19.
In an effort to put more offers in front of users, Google added a “Deals” feed to the Shopping tab and Merchant Center. It also began showing retailers when their items were eligible for badges. And, in order to show relative visibility and other metrics, Google provided Merchant Center users with a relative visibility report.
Google Merchant Center’s competitive visibility report. Image: Google.
In November, Bing Shopping introduced customer-focused tabs to help shoppers find what they were looking for in one place. This update also made it easier for retailers to list their products. And later in December, Microsoft Bing launched the Ethical Shopping hub in the UK, which helps users shop for eco-friendly and fair-trade fashion items.
Microsoft also announced a partnership with Shopify to integrate Bing Shopping with the retail platform, which rolled out in December.
Local
Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business). Early in the year, Google released a tool to help businesses better manage reviews, enabling business owners to monitor the status of reviews they’ve flagged.
On November 4, Google announced it would be renaming Google My Business to Google Business Profile. Along with this update, the company released new features that would give marketers and business owners more control over their accounts, which include:
Claiming and verifying Google Business Profiles directly in Google Search and Google Maps;
Call history launching in the U.S. and Canada;
Messaging directly from Google Search; and
Message read receipts being controlled within Search and Maps.
Maps. The importance of local maps has only increased throughout the past year. We saw a deeper integration between these and local business profiles across the board.
Google Maps started showing price ranges for U.S. restaurants, adding to a rollout of new features focused on expanding indoor business directories, which included airports, malls and transit stations.
Microsoft Bing introduced a new feature that allows users to search local stores. It’s designed to enable searchers to check store stock, helping them choose whether to buy online and pick up in-store.
Bing’s local store search feature in action.
Later in November and early December, Google rolled out an update to how it ranked the local search pack and map pack results. Termed the “Vicinity Update,” the change drastically impacted local rankings across industries.
Local SEO tools. Google Business Profile Product Experts worked together to help users find unique listing identifiers. Using a Chrome extension called GatherUp, they showed profile managers how to find their business’s unique CID number, which is useful to know when listings are merged or duplicated.
To help local businesses expand their reach, Yelp rolled out Custom Location Targeting, budget recommendations and other helpful local features. It also introduced custom search filters, themed ads and Project Cost Guides to support service businesses.
Looking forward to 2022
With so many algorithm and platform updates taking place this past year, many SEOs will be anxious to look at their data. Just remember: many of these updates are broad, and the most important thing for you to do is to keep your clients updated on Google’s changes.
Many brands are responding to user demand for greater accessibility and increased privacy, so be sure your websites and other properties are compliant and support all kinds of users.
Finally, we’re still a long way off from the end of the pandemic, so focus on answering your audience’s most pressing queries and making things as convenient for them as possible. Showing customers your brand’s values is more important than ever.
Google Ads are not serving to all Gmail users, specific to Gmail users on desktop browsers. Google confirmed the issue in the Google Ads status dashboard over here.
What is the issue. Google said the issue is around Google Ads not being served, and thus the ads not being displayed, to users who use the desktop version of Gmail, Google’s email service.
When did it start. The issue started yesterday, December 23rd, at around 2pm ET or 7:01 PM UTC.
When will it be resolved. Google has not given us an estimated time for the issue to be resolved but the company promised to provide an update by Dec 25, 2021, 2:00 AM UTC “detailing when we expect to resolve the problem,” the company said.
Why we care. If you are running Google Ads for Gmail users, then you may see a dip in the number of ads being served. This is a known issue that Google is working to resolve.
In 2021, PPC professionals navigated changes in keyword match types and automated bidding, scratched their heads at the prospect of a future without third-party cookies and navigated their role in an increasingly automated industry.
Prompted by the vision that platforms, like Google, have for their services as well as increased concern over user privacy, these changes underscored adaptability as one of the traits that define successful marketers. Below, we’ve summarized the most impactful changes, announcements and developments that shaped PPC this past year and, in all likelihood, will continue to influence the years ahead as well.
“Broad match now looks at additional signals in your account to deliver more relevant searches,” Google also announced. These signals include landing pages and keywords in your ad group.
The PPC community’s reaction to this news was mixed: “With the recent changes that Google has made, it seems like a bit of a (very) thinly veiled attempt to take back control from advertisers,” said Amy Bishop, owner of Cultivative, “You can’t optimize against what you can’t see, and you certainly can’t optimize against controls that have been taken away.”
Kirk Williams, owner of ZATO Marketing, had a different opinion: “This is simply a logical progression in [Google’s] ever-changing match type behavior that mirrors changes in other areas, pointing towards a world in which Google uses the millions of signals under its control to make auction time decisions for which the limited, human advertiser is unable to make as technology and machine learning bidding solutions progress.”
In Q2 2021, the final nail in BMM’s coffin was hammered in when the platform announced a deprecation date for BMM keywords. To put an end to the saga (for now), Google also made it so that phrase match or broad match keywords that are identical to a query are now always preferred as long as they are eligible to match.
Microsoft Advertising made an important change in this area as well: Beginning in March 2021, it migrated all search, shopping and Dynamic Search Ads campaigns without an automated bidding strategy in place over to Enhanced CPC.
FLoC was heavily debated, but not rolled out
With the deprecation of third-party cookies slated for 2022 (which Google later pushed back to the latter half of 2023), it wasn’t much of a surprise when Google first announced that it was testing an alternative targeting technology in October 2020. Known as Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), the proposal was opened for advertiser testing in Q2 2021.
Despite being billed as more privacy-friendly for users, there were widespread concerns about techniques such as fingerprinting, which could be used to reverse engineer individuals from the cohort. The Electronic Frontier Foundation even published an article opposing the proposal. Marketers also shared concerns that Google was being opportunistic and using the deprecation of third-party cookies to create a “walled garden” for itself.
Chrome’s competitors have no plans to adopt FLoC, which will limit its functionality. There was even a proposal by WordPress to block FLoC by default. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority also engaged Google about the proposal and the search company agreed not to favor its own products or access personal user data.
The Privacy Sandbox timeline. Image: Google.
To keep the industry updated about its progress with FLoC, Google published a Privacy Sandbox timeline. As of December 2021, FLoC is scheduled to undergo testing from Q1 to Q3 2022, with adoption slated for Q4 of that year.
This was also the year that Performance Max campaigns, an automated campaign type that runs across all Google ad inventory, became available to all advertisers. Google bundled that news (as it seems to have done quite frequently in 2021) with another announcement: Smart Shopping and Local campaigns would be “upgraded” to Performance Max in 2022.
Consumer interest insights in the Insights page. Image: Google.
Performance Max campaigns are also part of the Google Ads Insights Page, which shows currently trending searches, auction insights and interest predictions tailored to the account. In November 2021, the company expanded on the Insights page by adding four features: consumer interest insights, audience insights, change history insights and auction insights, and demand forecasts.
In April 2021, instant match rates became available for Customer Match, which allows advertisers to use their first-party data to remarket to customers on Google Search, Shopping, Gmail and YouTube. Then, in November 2021, the platform rolled out some of Customer Match’s features to all policy-compliant advertisers, enabling them to observe their lists to see how well they perform against the general audience, among other capabilities.
Advertisers gained access to some new data when Google announced that it would show historical data for queries that received impressions but no clicks in the search terms report for Search and Dynamic Search Ads campaigns. This didn’t reverse the September 2020 change that initially limited search terms reporting, as the data is still only for “terms that were searched by a significant number of users,” but the data could reveal what’s failing to attract the right audience. If you haven’t exported your historical query data, make sure to do so before February 1, 2022 — that’s when Google plans to remove historical query data collected prior to September 1, 2020, from the search terms report.
In terms of other fresh capabilities and updates, Google Ads ditched campaign drafts in an updated experiments page, which eliminated a clunky part of the workflow for testing. There was also a new budget report, which shows a monthly spend forecast that advertisers can use to understand how editing their budget can affect the campaign’s spending limit.
The Google Partner Program changes that were initially slated to go into effect in June 2020 were pushed back to February 2022 due to the ongoing effects of the pandemic. In addition to the postponement, Google revisited some of the changes, namely enabling Partners to either dismiss or apply recommendations to achieve a 70% optimization score and keeping the 90-day spend threshold at $10,000 (instead of the proposed $20,000 every 90 days). After the delay announcement, Partners that already met the 2022 requirements before the deadline requested to receive their new badges — Google consented.
The company also began testing a new three-strikes program for accounts that repeatedly violate ad policies. The system starts with a warning and no penalties for an initial violation. From there, each violation has an increasingly stringent penalty until the account is finally suspended. PPC professionals were largely in agreement with the program, though they were very skeptical about policy application due to the frequency of incorrectly flagged ads.
Microsoft Advertising made waves of its own
One prominent pattern we observed this year was Microsoft’s investment in industry-specific ad products: it released features specifically for automotive, tour and leisure, credit card and health insurance businesses.
The company also integrated Microsoft Clarity, its free tool to help site owners better understand visitor behavior, with Microsoft Advertising, which may help marketers analyze post-click behavior to identify roadblocks on the path to conversion.
Advertisers in the U.S. might also be happy to know that Microsoft rolled out support for Spanish language ads this year as well.
Vertical-specific ad updates
Shopping. Since Google and Bing launched organic Shopping results, many of their commerce-related product offerings have been designed to serve both advertisers and non-advertisers. One running theme in 2021 was the proliferation of shopping integrations, which are typically plugin-type solutions that enable retailers to get their product listings into organic results or run paid ads directly from their CMS, making it easier for SMBs that don’t work with an agency.
Local. At its annual Marketing Livestream event, Google announced a number of new local campaign ad formats, including:
Auto Suggest ads, which show ads based on the searcher’s location. The example Google gave for this was that if you search for “oil change” in Maps, Google might show an ad for an auto garage that is near your current location.
Navigational ads, which are shown when a person is en route to a destination using Maps driving directions.
Similar Places ads (shown below), which can show when a user searches for a specific business that is closed at the time of the search.
Similar Places ads in Google Maps. Image: Google.
In addition, the company also launched an open beta for US-based advertisers to expand store pickup options by adding a “pickup later” label to their local inventory ads.
Yelp also broke new ground by launching Yelp Audiences, its first offering that enables both location-based and non-location-based advertisers to reach Yelp users across the web, based on their Yelp search activity.
Video and image. YouTube ad creation became simpler for SMBs this year — in June, the company announced a new workflow, enabling advertisers to launch a campaign by adding a video, selecting the audiences they want to reach and designating a budget.
Google also added the ability for brands to show browsable product images below their video ads for campaigns that have “Product and brand consideration” or “Brand awareness and reach” set as the goal. Prior to this update, Video action campaigns were the only campaign type that could be linked to product feeds from Google Merchant Center.
The new mobile YouTube ad creation workflow (left) and campaign metrics (right).
In Q3 2021, YouTube ads were the breakout star of Google’s earnings report, bringing in $7.2 billion in revenue, an increase of 43% quarter-over-quarter. With that kind of success, the company may decide to release more video-oriented features and products for advertisers in 2022.
Brand safety continued to be a concern for advertisers and platforms responded by introducing exclusion controls: Facebook expanded its test of topic exclusion controls, claiming that advertisers were able to avoid appearing next to excluded categories 94-99% of the time. And, Google began rolling out dynamic exclusion lists around April 2021.
Advertising and law
Google was at the center of a number of accusations and regulatory predicaments this year, which is typical in just about any given year. However, this year started out with an event unlike any other — the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. A week after the attack, Google paused all political ads through to the inauguration. Interestingly, five months later, researchers from the University of Michigan School of Information published a study that found that Google serves 48% of all ad traffic on “fake” news sites.
For ads served in India and Italy, Google passed on digital service taxes (levied on it by regulatory entities) to advertisers. It was already doing this to advertisers for ads served in Austria, Turkey, the UK, France and Spain. In March, Maryland became the first state to impose a tax on digital advertising — legislatures in other states, like New York, Connecticut, Washington, West Virginia, Montana, Nebraska and the District of Columbia are also considering imposing their own taxes on digitals ads or the sale of data. It’s not clear how this will pan out domestically, but advertisers should look to their European counterparts to learn how to deal with it (if the time comes).
In June, Google agreed to adjust its ad technology to provide more flexibility and transparency as well as improve the way its Ad Manager services works with rival ad servers and sales platforms, in addition to paying a $268 million fine to French regulators — the French Competition Authority claimed that Google Ad Manager provided AdX (where publishers sell space to advertisers in real-time) with exclusive data to improve its own chances.
And, details from “Jedi Blue,” an alleged arrangement between Facebook and Google in which the latter would charge the former lower fees and give Facebook other advantages in header bidding auctions in exchange for the social media platform’s support on Google’s header bidding alternative, were made public throughout the year.
The collusion aspect may carry heavy consequences for both entities, but it will be a long time before there’s a conclusion to this story. When asked about Jedi Blue, the marketers that spoke to us seemed indifferent, citing the lack of viable Google alternatives for advertising.
Looking ahead to 2022
We’re certain to hear more about FLoC and the deprecation of third-party cookies as we make our way through 2022 — timelines may shift as they have in years passed. While third-party cookies aren’t going away until 2023, ETAs will be sunsetted in July 2022, so advertisers should test out RSAs before they have no choice but to use them.
On February 1, 2022, Google will remove historical query data collected prior to September 1, 2020, so advertisers should export that data to reference later before that deadline. Smart Shopping and Local campaigns are also changing sometime in 2022 — they’ll be rolled into Performance Max campaigns.
And, agencies participating in the Google Partner Program should also mark their calendars for February 2022, when the program’s requirements are set to change.
