Latest Posts (153/167)

Depending on where you are right now, these words may have just zoomed thousands of miles, across the bottom of several oceans, at nearly the speed of light, to reach your screen. Yes. The. Internet. Is. Magic.

A few of months ago, my friend Lo and I were given a challenge by the YouTube channel What’s Inside. Could we get our hands on a chunk of an underwater internet cable, so they could attempt to cut it in half? We didn’t know how we’d do this, but figured there was a way (lots of emails). And of course, we were excited to find the answers to our own questions about these cables in the process.

Like, how many underwater internet cables are there? (More than 250 active, fiber optic cables that connect cities and data centers all over the world.) What’s the history of these cables? (The first transatlantic telegraph cable is more than 150 years old.) Do sharks really bite them? (Yes, but they don’t pose as big a threat as internet headlines might lead you to believe.) How much traffic can they handle? (The equivalent of 10 million YouTube videos a second.) How big are they? (Skinnier than a breakfast burrito.)

Our search for a cable took us to New Hampshire to visit one of the factories that creates them, as well as aboard a ship to see the Monet cable being loaded onto it. Our trip also taught us things we never knew to ask. For example, the internet smells like a freshly paved driveway. And when these cables are loaded onto the ship, they’re coiled by hand. Which means they’re literally walked the entire distance that they will eventually stretch. (In the case of the Monet cable, from Florida to Brazil.)

If you haven’t already, please watch the video version of this story above, so you can see for yourself what a fascinating, lengthy part of the internet these cables are. And if you’re curious about something else related to Google or how the internet works, I hope you’ll leave me a comment on YouTube, or send me a tweet. Not only will your words potentially travel thousands of miles and to the depth of the ocean to reach me, but maybe one day, I’ll get to travel to some far off corner of the internet to bring back an answer to you.

P.S. We also successfully completed our mission and delivered a chunk of cable to What’s Inside. To see whether or not they could cut this cable in half, check out their video.

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Make sure your reviews don’t contain profane or vulgar language. If they do, Google can remove your review rich snippets.

The post Google reviews schema guidelines to prohibit vulgar or profane language appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

The post SearchCap: Google review guidelines, photo insights & PPC campaigns appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Digital marketers are under tremendous pressure at the moment to produce results with their marketing budgets. Gone are the days where a business just threw money at something and no care about the result. Instead we are in a world where every campaign needs evaluating to understand how it is performed against other marketing channels.

The first part of this article will help you understand how ROI is calculated. Then the second part looks at how to predict traffic. The final part will bring everything together to understand how predict what ROI will be achieved as a result of implementing an SEO fix.

What Is ROI and How To Calculate It

ROI is a metric used to measure how much was gained vs what effort was put in. It’s a metric that highlights which campaigns have performed best. Marketing & Digital Marketing managers want to be about to know if they spend X, then how much are they going to get in return 2X, 3X.

The formula for ROI is simple:

ROI = (Increase from Campaign – Cost of the Campaign) / Cost of Campaign
(£72,000 – £5,000) / £5,000 = £13.4

This means that for every £1 spent the client has earned £13.40.

How to Work Out ROI for Non-Transactional Websites

While working out the ROI of a website that sells online is reasonably simple to work out, doing the same for a website that relies on advertising revenue is difficult because we need to carry out a few calculations to use the ROI formula.

For example, if we were working on a campaign for an online magazine, which costs £2700 per month and this months, year on year there had an extra 89,122 sessions what’s the ROI?

What we need to do is first work out the revenue earnt. We use the CPM price which stands for Cost Per Thousand which is a marketing term used to denote the price of 1,000 advertisement impressions on one webpage.

In this example, we will assume that the site earns on average £35 per CPM with 3 different ads running on each page means that the revenue is around: £105 per CPM.

So now we have our CPM price we need to work out how many impressions or more commonly known as pageviews we have had. To do this we use the following formula:

(Sessions x Avg Pageviews Per Session) = Pageview

So, in our working example:

(89,122 x 1.55) = 138,139 pageviews

Now we understand how many pageviews we have achieved we can work out the amount of revenue using our CPM:

1,381 x £105 = £145,005

So now we have the total revenue finger we can now using the formula to work out the ROI:

ROI = (Increase from Campaign – Cost of the Campaign) / Cost of Campaign
(£145,005 – £2,700) / £2,700 = £52.70

Which means for every £1 spent we earn an additional £52.70.

It’s worth considering that this calculation presumes that all the advertising slots are sold and it also doesn’t consider bulk purchase deals which is often happens with buying media placements.

Our data is only an example of how the calculation work however the more arcuate the data the more accurate the result.

Working Out Traffic Predictions

It’s now for the second part which is how to make traffic predictions. Now like any form of prediction it is just a prediction which means its highly likely to be wrong. However, the more predictions you make the better you will get. However, we are going to show you some quick technics to make sure you are as accurate as possible.

The first part of any traffic prediction is understanding where traffic will be heading in the next 12 months if you did nothing, i.e. natural growth.

Now there is so many days to do this, however I will share you just one way I do it, however you are free do use your own method.

To predict future traffic, I go to Google Analytics and I click on Acquisition > Campaigns > Organic Keywords.

Then change the date to display data for the last 18 months. Make sure you set the graph to display the metrics in months and not daily as it is set to by default. Export that xlsx file and open it up in excel. Once open select the third tab called “Dataset2” and carry out the following instructions.

In the first column lists the month and in the second column lists the amount of sessions.

The first thing we are going to work out is the month on month percentage increase. We can do this by selecting cell C3 and typing the following formula:

=(B3-B2)/B2

Then set the cell formatting to Percentage and we have now just worked out the month on month percentage increase, YAY.

If you pull that formula down it will then work it down for all months.

 

Next click in cell C1 and type the following:

=MEDIAN(C3:C17)

Which this will work out the median of all the month on month percentage increase.

Next we will move down to work out the year on year percentage increase using the small amount of year on year data we have. (If you do have access to more than 18 months’ worth of data then that will allow for more accurate.)

Now select cell D14 and type the following formula:

=(B14-B2)/B2

This will work out the year on year percentage increase. Now pull that formula down in the same way as month on month.

 

Then we need to work out the Median with the following formula:

=MEDIAN(D14:D17)

So to recap where we are:

We have an excel spreadsheet with 18 months’ worth of sessions data. We have worked out what each month on month percentage increase is. Then we worked out what a few of the year on year figures look like. Finally, we have worked out what the Median figure is for both, month on month and, year on year figures.

Now what we need to do is take these new figures and apply them to past figures to then project over the next coming 6 months.

Now we need to apply the month on month Median to the final month’s data to see what next predicted month will be. So type in the following formula:

=(C17*C1)+B17

This will give the first months projected traffic using the month on month increase. From that figure we can apply the median average increase in C23:

=(C22*C1)+C22

Then for C24 to C27 we can pull down the formula. We now have a completed 6 month prediction based upon month on month growth of 9.79% which was the median growth rate for the previous 18 months.

Next we need to work predicted growth based upon year on year median of 162.01%.

To do this go to D22 and type the following Formula:

=(B6*$D$1)+B6

The above formula takes the figures for November last year and adds 161.01% on top giving us a predicted figure for November data.

As with the month on month predications we can pull down the formula down. Now we have traffic predictions based upon year on year medium growth.

So now we’re left with two sets of traffic predictions. One based upon month on month growth and the other based upon year on year growth.

The final thing we need to do in B22 is to take the Median of both months on month and year on year to find the middle ground by doing the following formula:

=MEDIAN(C22:D22)

Once again we can pull this formula down now for the following 5 months and that is now our traffic predictions for the coming 6 months. They should look something like the following:

November: 9677
December: 9580
January: 11204
February: 12025
March: 13205
April: 14381

Now we have successfully come up with some kind of traffic prediction that allows us to see potentially how much traffic we expect to see in the coming months providing we continue to see the same level of growth.

Keep Examples of other success

So we now understand what ROI is and how it is calculated. We also have learnt to make traffic predictions based upon consistent historical growth.

Next we need to understand how our recommended fixes with impact on future growth. This is probably the hardest part of the process is predicting how much more traffic you expect to gain as a result of implementing a fix.

One of the most arcuate ways of predicting impact is using past examples of successes whether that be for your own client or it is with third party sites. These come in handy when talking with stakeholders of what the expected outcome. They can be used to encourage others to support your recommendations. They can also work the other way as a way to discourage and idea.

All you need to do is take screenshots of Sistrix of what happens when X website does some large change like move a site from sub domain to sub directory. You can keep them in a folder, Dropbox or even on twitter if it makes sense. Try to keep the stuff organised because looking for a particular screenshot months or sometimes years afterwards can be difficult to find. Also, we would recommend recording the date in the title because then you know how to find the issues again.

 

The two key things to take from the entire exercise is these are proven examples, which always have more weight Plus they give you some kind of expectation should you implement the same test.

Keeping an example of changes achieves two things. First of all, its evidence to your stakeholders that it works and the second thing it does is gives you an accurate prediction.

Running Tests

Sometimes when you are making traffic predictions you do not have an example to hand. In which case we would recommend running a test.

What we mean by running a test, is taking a recommendation for example reducing the size of a header image and instead of just implementing it, just taking a couple of pages and running a test instead of applying the fix to all 250 product pages.

By running a test on a couple of pages we should be able to see the impact we will bring. For email after a month of running the image size test we can see that the two pages in a test have increase traffic by 11%. So in theory had we applied the test to the entire site we would expect to see a growth by 11% of traffic.

How to apply predictions to SEO fixes?

So to recap we have predicted traffic for the last 6 months based upon historical growth figures. We then have run a small test on a couple of service pages that saw an 11% growth in organic traffic to the service pages.

So now we have a 6 months of traffic prediction. So now we need to add another line of data that suggests what happens if we implement a fix.

An example of this might be that by adding a xml sitemap to a site increased organic which we expected to see a 10% uplift in traffic.

Now this fix will be implemented in February so we can now create a new graph that shows current predicted levels as well as how we feel the fix will impact on traffic.

Now you can see by the above graph we have two sets of data. The first in blue outlines what traffic we predict we will see at current growth levels. The orange line is the same traffic prediction however it also includes the impact that we expect to see when implementing a fix.

Not only does it allow us to clearly see how much extra traffic we are likely to see, it also shares the importance of implementing fixes sooner to gain maximum benefit.

Working out traffic predictions to SEO Fixes

So now we have traffic predictions for the next 6 months and we have traffic predictions for the amount of extra visitors we will receive as a result of our fixes we are now in a position on how much ROI that increase will bring us.

So the client that we did a traffic prediction is currently paying £5000 per month. To work out their ROI for the last months to do the following sums.

Now let’s work out what the ROI will be for our predicted 6 month’s worth of traffic. Then we can work how the ROI improves based upon out recommended fix.

Now for the purposes of these calculations we can tell you that the clients conversion rate is 2.89% along with an average order value of £50.

Now we need to find the correct figures to work out the following formula that was at the stop of the article:

ROI = (Increase from Campaign – Cost of the Campaign) / Cost of Campaign

Now the client was spending £3,000 a month so we know that the cost of the campaign over the 6 month period was £18,000.

Next what we need to work out is how much traffic did prediction say it would achieve.

Traffic Predictions with fix for next 6 months: 70,073 sessions

The we need to remove last year’s traffic: 18727 sessions.

So we now need to work out how much extra traffic they have received:

70,073 – 18,727 = 51,346 Sessions

Next we need to times the amount of sessions by out conversation rate to understand how any sales were achieved extra

51,346 * 0.0298 = 1484 sales

Now with an average order value of £50

£50 * 1484 = £74,194

Which means we can now calculate ROI:

(£74,194 – £18,000) / £18,000 = £3.12

Which means for every £1 spent the client earned back £3.12

What is also useful is working how much additional revenue our fix will bring in.

To do this you need to so the same calculations as above but with the traffic predictions data that include the fix traffic data.

74,430 – 18,727 = 55,703 Sessions
55,703 * 0.0298 = 1610 sales
£50 * 1610 = £80,491

So from the above calculations we can work out the ROI of the traffic predictions which include the improvements from our fix.

(£80,491 – £18,000) / £18,000 = £3.47

What is interesting is now we have these two sets of numbers we can say that if the client implements the recommended fix we predict that for three months after implementing the fix the site will earn an extra £6296 in revenue.

I believe any digital marketing manager will see how powerful this math is.

Being able to predict that revenue that could be returned will help on some many levels. For a target, it can highlight how you are going to hit revenue figures. The second thing is it allows developers time to understand if implementing a fix would take too long.

For example, we have predicted that implementing a fix will bring in an extra £6296 in revenue which sounds great however if the if the fix costs £7,000 to implement then it wouldn’t produce a positive return on investment.

Summary

Working out potential return on investments allows managers make better decisions by providing them with factual figures that give greater understanding of the risks and rewards.

With these predictions, you must bear in mind that these are just that… predictions and 9 times out of 10 they are going to be off or sometimes wrong altogether. The difference is its far easier to make decisions when you are presented with data compared to no data at all.

These figures are also useful to use when deciding on if an issue is cost effective to fix. For example, let’s say we believe that if a client implements an SEO fix and thus the client expects to see a £3000 uplift in revenue. However, if it costs £4000 to implement then it doesn’t provide a positive return on investment meaning it’s not worth doing.

Plus, the more time you spend predicting your sites traffic the better you will become which will then improve your success rate overall.

Richard Petersen is Search & data manager at Zazzle Media and a contributor to Search Engine Watch

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Starting today, Google Keyboard on Android is getting a new name — and so much more. Gboard has all the things you love about your old Google Keyboard — speed and accuracy, Glide Typing and voice typing — plus Google Search built in. You can search and send information, GIFs, emojis and more — right from your keyboard. As an added bonus, we’ve added multilingual typing to help you switch languages on the fly.

Search and share, right from your keyboard

It shouldn’t be that hard to search and share on your phone — and with Gboard, it isn’t.

You can search Google and share results right from your keyboard — anything from flight times and weather to news. Gboard also predicts possible searches that may be relevant to you. Text a friend “Let’s meet if the weather looks good” and see a prediction for “Weather”. With one tap, you can share today’s weather with your friend and meet up for your next adventure.

You can also search and share emoji and GIFs. Instead of scrolling and scrolling to find ? or ?, just search “monkey” to find that emoji you want. Or, find a GIF for the perfect reaction. GIF sharing works today in Google Messenger, Allo and Hangouts, with more apps coming soon as developers add image keyboard support.

So the next time you’re texting a friend your favorite cat video or news of the day, you don’t have to leave you app. Just search and send — right from your keyboard.

Smarter and faster typing

Gboard is assisted by machine learning to make typing faster and easier, including improved Glide Typing, predictions and autocorrections. And for our multilingual users, communication on a keyboard has never been easier — Gboard will now autocorrect and suggest from any of your enabled languages, so you can type in multiple languages within the same conversation without manually switching between them. Just select your languages and type.

Gboard will work in more than 100 languages as it rolls out today, and will be coming to more languages over the coming months. Get Gboard from the Play Store to swipe, search and emoji away.

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There isn’t any one single hack that will boost your conversions and fix problems like abandoned shopping carts. That’s because the things that drive conversions are unique to every website and every product. When conversions are down, many marketers turn to solutions that promise high conversion rates and guarantee a certain outcome. But the issue of conversions is not so simple that it can be turned into a streamlined, one-move-fixes-all type of situation. However, there are certain things you can do to create a page/website that is hospitable to high conversion rates.

These general issues are things that tend to hold back conversions on any website. While correcting them may not be the one stop cure for suffering conversion rates, it can put you on a step in the right direction.

Poor web design.

A weak web design can and will negatively affect your conversion rate, because it directly impacts the way users interact with your site. Poor web design can be attributed to a lack of aesthetics in color and style, outdated organization or look, over-complicated display features, and any other combination of first-impression factors.

Once a user is on your website, an impression is made within a matter of milliseconds. The aesthetics, as well as the user-friendliness of the page, needs to be on point and consistent. Do your users naturally know how to interact with your site pages? Is there a certain spot their eyes gravitate to? Are you using compelling call to action buttons?

Under-developed product/service.

Sometimes when conversion rates suffer, the issue is really within the product or service you’re trying to push. If all the other factors that weigh into the conversion rate of your unique website seem to be fully optimized and the best they can be, it’s probably time to take a closer look at how the product is doing.

An under-developed product or lack of understanding regarding the audience of that product can hamper high conversion rates. To correct this issue, you have to reassess the foundational questions of: Who is the audience I’m trying to market to? Is my product/service a clear and easily communicated fit for that audience? What piece of the product is a deterrent for consumers?

Lack of security/consumer trust.

Consumer trust is one of the single most important elements factored into high conversion rates. In order for a user to be willing to submit the personal information necessary for conversions, they have to be able to recognize your website as being secure. The slightest sign of fraudulence or error, whether it’s sloppy content or a glitch in the checkout process, can make users doubt your legitimacy.

Fortunately, bolstering consumer trust is a fairly uncomplicated thing to do. First and foremost, make your landing pages, check out processes, and website overall as error-free and polished as possible. Then, to counteract consumer fear of scams and theft, add security /business seals. This will show that your site is verified.

Complicated check-out process.

Having friction in your check out process is a good way to end up with abandoned shopping carts and failed conversions. The end goal should be to have a seamless checkout process that involves as minimal information as possible in as timely a manner as possible.

Slow load time during check out, required fields for unnecessary information (ex: “Company Name”), absent or unclear display of shipping or pricing information, and glitchy form submit buttons can dramatically impact conversions. Go through your check out process the way a user would and test how performance against these conversion deterrents.

 

It’s important to remember that correcting these issues, while helpful, may not completely fix whatever conversion issues you’re having. Your web strategy and approach to conversions should be comprehensive and facilitate the uniqueness of both your brand and audience.

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Local customers now expect a seamless omnichannel experience with your brand, and columnist Adam Dorfman believes that targeting data amplifiers will ensure that you’re present with accurate data across devices and channels.

The post Why data amplifiers matter in a world of omnichannel discovery appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Columnist Aaron Levy, a big advocate of PPC segmentation, discusses the pros and cons of device-specific AdWords campaigns and shares tips on how to get started.

The post Should you create device-specific PPC campaigns? appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Posted by TaraReed_

This week, Whiteboard Friday is hosted by the amazing Tara Reed who’ll walk us through how to use social media broadly and Twitter in particular not only to earn engagement and a following, but to drive visitors directly to our websites and to the content that converts. Let’s dive in!

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription
Hey. My name is Tara Reed. I’m the CEO of appswithoutcode.com, and you’re hanging out with me today for Whiteboard Friday. Today, we’re talking about how to use social media to 10x your website traffic. Specifically, we’re talking about how to use Twitter. We’re doing a deep dive of Twitter and how to use Twitter to do that 10x-ing of your website traffic. How do you take people from your social media content to your actual website and flow them through that funnel? I’m going to be giving you a process today to automate a lot of that work that sometimes we do manually.

Before we jump into that, I just want to ask you a quick question. How many of you feel like you have a well-oiled machine that is taking people from your social media content through and all the way to your site? If you don’t feel like you have a really strong, well-oiled machine, I’ve got one here for you, and you can implement all three parts of this three-step process I’m going to show you in order to really, really drive a lot more traffic, squeeze a lot more traffic out of your social media following and your social media presence.

Reach

So this process has three steps. The first step is reach. This is something that most people skip over entirely. They sit back passively, and they wait for people to find their social media site. So I want to offer an alternative for you that’s going to be a lot more proactive, and here’s how it works.

There are thousands, if not millions of people out there who are actively posting, tweeting, and saying that they want your product, your service, whatever it is that you have. So for example, if you have a company that helps people find apartments, there are thousands of people every day who are posting, “I’m thinking about moving to Seattle next month,” “thinking about going here.” They’re actually saying these things in their social media posts, and you’re just letting them say these things and you’re not actually engaging with them. But there’s a really awesome way that you can do that, and I want to walk you through how.

Keywords

So what you’re going to want to do first, in order to find these people, is write down a couple really clear keywords around the types of things that people are saying in social media to indicate high interest.

These keywords are going to be slightly different than the keywords that someone might type into Google or into a search bar, because the types of things you say on social media are just slightly different. So for example, you might say “looking for an apartment” on social media, but on Google search you might type in “apartments in Seattle,” and that’s a slight difference there. So you want to be conscious of the social media platform that you’re on when you’re writing out your keywords.

Automated workflow

Once you have your keywords, the next thing you want to do is build an automated workflow to engage with these people. There are a couple different things that you can do to create an automated workflow. You get to decide which of these four elements you want to use to create the most organic experience for you and for your brand. But there are four different types of ways you can engage with these people who are actively saying that they want whatever it is that you have. So you can:

Like their posts
Follow them
Add them to a list
Send them a DM that says, “Hey, Tara, saw you were interested in apartments. Check out this blog post of the top apartments in Seattle that we put together last week,” whatever it might be.

But what you’re going to want to do is use some of these, maybe not all four of them. But come up with a strategy that feels really organic and an outreach, because you don’t want to just leave these people hanging out there. You want to make sure that you’re engaging with them in some way. It’s low-hanging fruit, and it’s really going to help you squeeze a lot of value out of your social media content.

Resources

So I’ve outlined some resources for you to use in order to do that. These are two of my favorite tools.

Socedo does a really good job automating this workflow of reaching out to people who are prospective customers, prospective users, prospective visitors of your website. There’s also a tool called Narrow.io that you can use.

Click

So once you’re doing this outreach, you’re not passively sitting back, you’re actually engaging with the people who really want whatever it is that you have, we’re going to move over to the second strategy — to click. Now, what you want to do here is have something really valuable for these people to actually click on, because what they’re going to do is they’re going to click on your profile link and they’re going to arrive here. That is why I recommend people implement something I call a 14-day experiment.

14-day experiment

A 14-day experiment is when you take your top blog posts and for 14 days, every single day you post 14 posts, different blog posts. You can mix them up. But every day you are posting 14 links to a blog post with some interesting, unique content. The reason you want to do this is that the average user spends just 13 minutes on Twitter at a time. So the chances of them seeing more than one of those posts in your day is really slim. So you want to do 14. It may feel like a lot for your company and for your brand, but really that’s where you want to be in order to really squeeze out all that value on your social media site.

Spreadsheet

Now, in order to get prepared for this 14-day experiment, what you’re going to want to do is get out a spreadsheet. In the first column of your spreadsheet, you’re going to want to put links to all of your top blog posts. I’d say grab somewhere between 14 and 25 blog posts that you want to use.

In the next column, for this specific blog post, you’re going to write a tweet, a piece of content. You can grab out a quote from the blog post, or you can do a summary of the blog post, whatever it might be. But you’re going to write a tweet about that blog post, and if you want, you can add an accompanying image.

You’re going to do that again for the same blog post, but you’re going to put a new piece of content, a new tweet, and a new image. This spreadsheet will go on for about 28 rows, because you’re going to do about 14 different posts for each blog post. It’s going to really push you to think about different angles and different ways that people can think about the content that you’ve already written. Most of us just post one or two times on our blog post, but you can really push out 14.

Resources

Some resources to help you do this, obviously a spreadsheet. Really easy, that is all you need. But I also have a book recommendation for you. It’s called “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook” by Gary Vaynerchuk. I’ve had my team and other teams read this book as a group. As they go through putting together their 14-day experiment, it’s a really great way to rally your team around the ideas and get everyone involved. So if they want to contribute some content into this spreadsheet, they’re already on board and excited to do it.

Recycle

Now, then you move on to the third part of the strategy, which is to recycle your content. Again, most of us are posting again and again and again on social media, but people are only seeing a few of those posts, because the average user is only spending a few minutes on Twitter every day. So what you’re going to want to do is use a tool to recycle your content.

Resources

You’re not just going to want to post your blog post one or two times. You’re going to want to take everything you put in the spreadsheet and put it into a tool like Edgar. Edgar is a tool that allows you to recycle content. So after the blog post has gone up one day, 14 days later, a month later, it’ll show up again, that same exact post. People probably haven’t seen it yet, and so it’s going to allow you to recycle your content on auto-pilot.

These two elements on the side of me — the outreach part and the recycling part — those are things that you can get going on auto-pilot. They’re running on their own. This middle piece, you’re going to have to do some upkeep. You’re going to have to maintain content, add new content to your funnels. But for the most part, this is going to allow you to cohesively build a really cohesive strategy that’s going to automate the experience. It’s going to really squeeze a lot of the content, a lot of the engagement that you can get to get people from just looking at your social media profile, bring them to your social media profile, and then funnel them through to actually be on your website.

Thanks for hanging out with me on Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from the world of search marketing and beyond.

This week, Google has been spotted testing a new user ratings feature in film and television search results; the National Football League has rowed back its heavy-handed social media policy; and a new report has revealed the distance that still remains between the marketing and IT sides of a business in the digital age.

Google tests user ratings for films and TV shows

Google was spotted testing a new user rating feature in its search results for films and TV shows with a small sample of users this week. Searchers in Google’s test sample found ‘Like’ and ‘Dislike’ buttons appearing above the Knowledge Graph on the right-hand side, which pulls information from sites such as Wikipedia to provide a quick answer to search queries.

Tereza Litsa reported on the change for Search Engine Watch, observing that the new feature “is a quick way for Google to build user ratings depending on its own audience.

“Even if Google hasn’t revealed its plans yet [for the feature], it could be an interesting addition to its database which may even lead to further plans on building users’ reviews and gather more features on its own site.”

Digital to receive the lion’s share of new ad spending in 2017

Some good news for digital advertising business: according to GroupM, the world’s largest media investment group, digital is due to receive 77 cents for every new dollar spent on advertising in 2017.

Al Roberts reported for Search Engine Watch’s sister site, ClickZ, that “All told, GroupM predicts that global ad spend will top $547 billion next year, up from $524 billion this year. While television will still capture the biggest share of that 12-figure pie (41%), digital’s share will grow from 31% to 33%.”

But the picture for digital advertisers isn’t all rosy, as by some estimates, as much as 80% of this new revenue is being captured by Google and Facebook. According to Kirk McDonald, president of PubMatic, this overwhelming market dominance is set to “reach critical mass” in 2017, while competition heats up between other marketing organisations for the remaining 20% of new ad spending.

CMOs and CTOs need to be more aligned

A survey of more than 500 senior marketing and IT professionals has revealed the differences in perspective between marketing and IT when it comes to communications infrastructure.

The survey’s findings are explored in a new report, ‘Communications Infrastructure: The Backbone of Digital‘, published this week by ClickZ Intelligence and Zayo, a provider of communications infrastructure services. In an article for ClickZ this week, Linus Gregoriadis dived into some highlights of the research, which sheds light on the obstacles that marketing and IT need to overcome in order to truly work hand-in-hand towards the same goals.

National Football League revises its restrictive social media policy

Last October, the U.S. National Football League (NFL) implemented a heavy-handed social media policy aimed at discouraging the posting of video content during games on social media, with fines of up to $100,000 levied at anyone who violated the policy.

The NFL has seen a worrying drop in its ratings throughout 2016 which threatens its television revenue, the League’s main cash cow. Videos posted to social networks like Twitter and Facebook are thought to be the main culprit, as they allow fans to catch the most exciting moments of the game at their own convenience, without needing to tune in to entire games on television.

But a number of NFL teams took badly to the NFL’s new restrictive policy, and took to Twitter to troll the League. Now, as Al Roberts reported for ClickZ this week, the NFL has seen fit to relax its policy two months on. Roberts wrote for ClickZ about the new flexibility that the NFL has afforded to its teams, including allowances for live video and Snapchat.

AMP results are appearing in Google Image Search

Search Engine Roundtable reported this week that Accelerated Mobile Pages, Google’s lightning-fast mobile webpages, are now showing up in search results for Google Image Search.

Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, were first launched in the Top Stories carousel in February before being expanded to the core mobile search results in August. Now, a number of search results with an AMP logo are appearing in Google Image Search, which when selected, will take you to the AMP version of the page in question.

Image: Search Engine Roundtable

With Google’s search index set to go ‘mobile-first’ in the new year, searchers can expect to be seeing a lot more of mobile-first webpages very shortly. To get ahead of the game, check out Amanda DiSilvestro’s guide on how to prepare your business for Google’s mobile-first index.

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