This day in search marketing history: January 24

Your campaigns, managed by ‘Google Ads experts’

In 2019, some advertisers received an email from Google Ads with the headline: “We’ll focus on your campaigns, so you can focus on your business.”

Unless advertisers opted out, they would have been added to the program automatically seven days after receiving the email. 

According to the email, the Google Ad experts would identify “key changes that can help you get more out of your ads, from restructuring your ad groups and modifying your keywords to adjusting your bids and updating your ad text.” (That was structure, keywords, bids, ads.) They would also offer “setup and ongoing activation of advanced features” and “ensure the right features are being activated at the right moment.”

In a disclaimer (posted by Aron Levy) the company said it didn’t “guarantee or promise any particular results from implementing these changes” made by its experts.

As Levy put it on Twitter, Google was basically saying: “we’re gonna start messing with your accounts in a week unless you explicitly say no.”

What did Google have to say about this pilot program? “Our sales teams are always looking for ways to help customers get the best results from Google Ads. We are rolling out a pilot program that we believe will help businesses optimize their accounts. As always, we build customer feedback into the final product. Customers are in full control of the account and can accept or reject recommendations as they desire.”

Read all about it in: Google tells some advertisers it will handle their campaign management

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Also on this day

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Google tests favicons in text ads

2022: Google confirmed the small experiment designed to help users more easily identify an advertiser.

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New lawsuit targets Google over location data

2022: Google was accused of using dark patterns to get more location data from its users and profit from better search results and Google Ads.

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Google to experiment with more desktop search changes after favicon/black ad label rollout

2020: Google planned to test more variations and changes to the desktop search results based on early feedback from users around the favicon and black ad label rollout on desktop.

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Data: Google organic search CTRs decline on desktop, see big drop on phones

2019: Mobile organic clicks on declined roughly 10 points between 2016 and 2018.

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Search Engine Land adds technical, in-house SEO experts to team

2019: Detlef Johnson and Jessica Bowman would contribute content and expertise to Search Engine Land and SMX events.

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Google dropping Merchant Center feed integrations with BigCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop

2018: Google began emailing customers that support would end as of March 20, 2018.

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Apple says HomePod is finally coming on February 9, but can it compete?

2018: Apple also said that Siri was being used on more than 500 million devices.

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Spotted: New Google ad label test with green outline on white background

2017: The new look was seen in the UK on desktop.

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Merkle: Google Q4 search growth aided by changes other than ETAs

2017: Overall paid search growth remained steady in Q4. Separate device bidding was among the drivers of growth for Google.

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Bing Ads launches Automated Imports to automatically sync AdWords campaigns

2017: Advertisers can now set their imported Google campaigns to automatically update on an ongoing basis.

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Study: 34% Of Google Search Results Have Rich Media, 9 Organic Links & 9 Search Ads

2014: An analysis of the “ten blue links” by Conductor.

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Days-Old Error In Google Search Causes Gmail User To Get Thousands Of Emails

2014: “I’ve been getting thousands of no-subject, blank emails …. 500 of them come every hour, I can’t stop them.”

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Apple Buys Ads On Google & Bing To Celebrate The Mac’s 30th Birthday

2014: Apple’s ensured that anyone searching for “Mac” on Google or Bing knew about the anniversary.

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German Courts Follow French Ruling & Order Google To Block Max Mosley Images In Search Results

2014: A German court ruled Google was responsible for distributing scandalous pictures of the former Formula One president.

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Search In Pics: Google+ Keychains, Instagram Printer & Google Wear Retail Store

2014: The latest images showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more.

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Ask.com Has The Most Long-Winded Searchers, Report Says

2012: Users averaged almost five words per search.

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Google’s $100 Million Gift To Outgoing CEO: Unusual

2011: The $100 million equity award given to Eric Schmidt was a larger version of equity awards given to other Google executives in the past.

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Survey: 6-10 Local Business Reviews Required For Trust

2011: 51% of consumers cited Reliability as the most important trait when selecting a local business to use

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New Report Shows AdWords Interactions Pre-Clickthrough

2011: Google rolled out a report to allow advertisers to view “free clicks” – clicks and interactions that occurred with the ads that didn’t result in a click-through.

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Google Places Now Takes User Photo Uploads

2011: The user-uploaded images would be visible on Google.com and Google Earth, in addition to Places/Maps.

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What Do Eric Schmidt And Oprah Have In Common?

2011: Schmidt was shopping the idea of his own talk show to various outlets.

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Google Maps Adds Fuel Calculator In UK Directions

2011: Google Maps added the fuel calculator widget to the bottom of driving directions

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Bing Promotes Top Image Searches With New Landing Page

2011: The group of images highlighted those top image searches with the use of images.

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Bing Hopes For Touchdown With New ESPN Partnership

2011: The Bing and ESPN partnership involved two pre-Super Bowl promotions

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Customizing Your Search With Ask.com

2008: The other engines also offered some customization features as well.

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Google Gets Demographic Targeting, But Didn’t They Already Have That?

2008: Demographic bidding let advertisers display ads to specific gender and age group audiences on sites in Google’s content network

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Google Testing Click To Call Again?

2008: An apparently renewed test of click-to-call at Google.

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YouTube Improves YouTube Mobile Version

2008: Tens of millions of videos, community features, mobile phone uploads available within moments, and more.

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Day 2: Search Stocks & Is Search Recession Proof?

2008: Although Microsoft, Yahoo. and NASDAQ stabilized, Google kept dropping 

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Politically Tinged Promotion For Live Search

2008: A left-leaning male and a right-leaning female commentator sniped at each other and made quips while they waited for users to input terms into the search box.

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YouTube Readies For “Super Tuesday” With Mapping Site

2008: Call it “Super Tubesday.” The site would offer geotagged political videos from candidates, users, and various news outlets.

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DoCoMo And Google In Japanese Mobile Partnership

2008: The Google-NTT DoCoMo relationship would make Google the default start page on mobile Internet browsers on DoCoMo phones.

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Yahoo Search Marketing To Launch New Ranking Model February 5th

2007: Advertisers would have to worry about price plus factors such as their ad click-through rate.

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Yahoo Fixes Lower Case Titles Bug In Search Results

2007: Searches returned the title tag from pages rather than internal anchor text.

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Beyond Google: Social Media Engines First, Other Search Engines Second

2007: Why search marketers should tap into search engines – including the social media search engines

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Yahoo Announces 4th Quarter Financial Results: Stock Up In Pre Market

2007: Their year-end financial results showed a drop in profits by but increase in overall revenues.

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Google Groups Beta Design Comes Out Of Beta

2007: The new design also came with some feature additions (e.g., pages, member profiles, file sharing).

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A Design Change For Google Images

2007: Among the changes: the image source URL did not show until you moused over the image.

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Baidu Earns License To Produce News Content In China

2007: This enabled Baidu to produce their own content, as opposed to just showing snippets of content from third-party sources.

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Search SEO & SEM Forums With Google Custom Search Engine

2007: The Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) specifically searched the various search marketing and search engine optimization forums on the web.

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Norwegian Data Inspectorate To Investigate Privacy Issues With Google

2007: It was to understand what data Google was storing about users, why they were doing so, for how long and its security measures.

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Google Checkout Testing Large Buttons On AdWords

2007: Google AdWords was testing large Google Checkout buttons underneath ads of merchants that accepted Google Checkout. 

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Search B2B With Zibb

2007:  It was a general engine for B2B users.

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Yell Expanding Mobile Services

2007: interactive maps and turn-by-turn directions would be available either through a downloadable application or on a mobile browser.

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From Search Marketing Expo (SMX)

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Past contributions from Search Engine Land’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)

These columns are a snapshot in time and have not been updated since publishing, unless noted. Opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

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< January 23 | Search Marketing History | January 25 >

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