Source: YouTube

Source: YouTube

March Madness is upon us and everyone is getting into the spirit, including Bing. The search engine has launched their smart answers in the search results for March Madness and other related searches to see brackets, scores, and predictions.

Users get three options above the normal search results for the basketball tournament. The default view shows the current bracket results, but users can also build their own brackets and see Bing’s predicted outcome. On top of all of this, Bing also offers the schedules and teams playing in the competition.

Below you can see a screenshot of the default view for bracket results, which expands by clicking on the down arrow or the results button:

MarchMadness1

If you choose to view Bing’s predictions, the window gets even bigger. Barry Schwartz captured a large screenshot, which you can click to enlarge:

bing-march-madness-predicts

Bing said:

Now that the bracket has officially been announced, our data scientists are in the lab, working tirelessly to perfect their models so our smarter bracket is powered by Bing Predicts and ready for you to access by Monday morning. Stay tuned for an updated analysis of the Bing smarter bracket on the Bing blog tomorrow.

Pinterest-logo

Pinterest’s promoted pins and ads have made a huge splash in the 18 months of beta testing its small platform with select brands, and now it is set to become even bigger. The site is rolling out its ad tool, Promoted Pins Ad Manager, to all small and midsize brands in the United States.

The company also announced it would be increasing the number of interest-level targeting options from 30 to 420. In the past, advertisers could only choose from 30 broad interest groups such as food, beauty, and fashion. The new options are more specific, so marketers can target their audience much more accurately with categories like “healthy food,” “sustainable architecture,” and “street-style fashion.”

“Pinterest knows more about the interest of its users than any other platforms,” said Nipoon Malhotra, Pinterest’s ad products lead. “This is very different from a graph that represents something you browsed a month ago.”

Pinterest also noted that marketers who spend at least $1 per day advertising on Pinterest see a 20 percent increase in clicks on their posts.

Pinterest Pins function just like normal Pins on the site, however, they are shown to more people than a typical Pin. By using the Pinterest Ads Manager, you can target exactly who you want to see your Pins based on interest targeting, keywords, or customer database targeting using your customer list.

While most users still think of Facebook as mostly a way to interact with their friends, post selfies, and share information, many businesses and marketers are starting to realize just how powerful Facebook’s advertising platform is.

While Facebook ads can be an incredibly powerful way to boost your content and your brand’s recognition, it can be hard to stand out among the over 3 million advertisers on the platform.

Creating the perfect ad to rise above the noise and grab the attention of your audience means balancing several different factors, including the optimal amount of text, creating images and videos with the perfect dimensions, and knowing where to best reach users on the page.

For a brand just getting started with Facebook ads, it can all be a little overwhelming. Thankfully, WebpageFX recently shared the infographic below, which details everything you need to know to make the perfect Facebook ad.

facebook-ad-anatomy-infographic

Want to make the perfect Facebook ad for your business and guarantee you reach your audience? TMO can help. Contact us and we can review your advertising efforts and tell you how to optimize them to get the most out of your advertising.

Source: Robert Scoble / Flickr

Source: Robert Scoble / Flickr

Despite once being the gold standard for assessing a site’s authority and optimization, Google announced this week it will be shutting down PageRank and all toolbars featuring the tool will no longer show a PageRank score.

The algorithm-based tool would assess web pages and rank them on a scale of one to ten based on numerous signals that Google uses to evaluate pages. It was an easy-to-understand way to quickly “score” a website and know if optimization, link building, or other marketing efforts were having a positive effect. However, the tool has not been updated in years.

Many webmasters have been holding onto hope that PageRank would get an algorithm update, but the company has been slowly moving away from it for some time. PageRank scores were never displayed inside Google Chrome, and the scored were dropped from Google Search Console in 2009. The Google Open Directory website, which showed PageRank metrics, was also shut down in 2010.

The last bastion of the PageRank score was the IE Google toolbar, which continued to show scores up until now.

Google has confirmed it will not be updating the tool for the public, but it will continue to be used by Google internally.

The move signals a big shift away from Google’s old way of doing things, but in practical terms it will change very little. Since PageRank hadn’t been updated since 2013, SEOs and webmasters have learned to rely on other tools and methods of assessing their marketing efforts.

Google is experimenting with a new change that could up the profile of local businesses in the search results. The search giant is conducting a limited test featuring a new card carousel of results and content from local businesses near the top of search results pages.

Mike Blumenthal first noticed the test, but it has since been confirmed by Google. The “Local Business Cards” use the same functionality as Candidate Cards, which were recently launched. The main difference with this new test is how limited it is.

Currently, Google is only including a “few dozen” hand-chosen local businesses in the experiment. Instead of pulling the content being used to fill the cards from search engine content or Google My Business listings, Google is also using custom content for the cards.

This test is also notable for being the first time Google has allowed animation or GIFs on the search results pages.

On desktop, you can see the Local Business Cards directly adjacent to the Knowledge Panel featuring that business. On mobile, it is shown below the Knowledge Graph. You can see an example below:

The idea behind the new test is to allow businesses to stand out more in search results and highlight content or information about the business’s products or services in ways not quite possible through the Knowledge Graph. With this in mind, Google has also made content directly sharable from within the carousel.

Screen-Shot-2016-03-04-at-2.33.00-PM-800x490

Most likely this is an early test since Google chose such a small number of businesses and is using custom content to fill the cards. There’s no telling when or if Google will roll out the feature to a wider audience. Hopefully, the cards come soon, as they could be a huge benefit for local businesses that depend on organic search traffic.

AdWords In Store Visits

When Google recently removed all text ads from the right rail of search engine results pages (SERPs), it caused quite a stir among both advertisers and webmasters who rely on organic traffic for their business. The change in design and the number of ads on SERPs pushes even more organic results below the fold and makes the competition even fiercer for both top ad spots and top organic listings.

Google has been overall fairly tight-lipped about the changes, only confirming that it has occurred and implying the change was largely aimed at bringing the desktop search experience more in line with the mobile search experience.

While it’s not an official statement, Google employee Matt Lawson recently went into depth on why Google decided to cut text ads from the right side of search results and how it could affect your pages and advertising account.

It largely confirms what was already suspected: Right side ads performed poorly and they wanted to bring mobile and desktop search closer together. However, Lawson provides data to show exactly how they expect the change to affect advertisers and steps you can take right not to mitigate any changes in your CPCs and ad performance.

Read what Lawson had to say about the change in his column for Search Engine Land.

YourBusinessStory

Facebook announced a new video offering for small businesses called Your Business Story, which would allow Pages to easily create and share montage-videos incorporating still images and music. At the same time, the company let slip that it now has over three million advertisers.

Your Business Story is a simple tool similar to the previously announced SlideShow offering. The company didn’t say anything about ads being included in the platform, but the note about their recent advertising milestone suggests the new offering will eventually work its way into Facebook Ads.

In the announcement, Facebook said:

To celebrate the businesses that use Facebook to grow, we created Your Business Story — a tool that makes it easy to create a video that shows what your business brings to the world. Because we believe the best way to tell the story of three million businesses is to empower each one to share their own.

Three million advertisers is a significant milestone for the social media platform. In September, the company announced it had reached 2.5 million. Before that, it claimed two million advertisers in February 2015. That means Facebook has been bringing in about half a million advertisers every six months for about the past year.

The announcement also said the majority of the businesses that use Facebook’s ad services are small businesses, also saying “50 million small businesses now use Pages on Facebok.”

It can be easy to be distracted by the flash and excitement of new marketing mediums and strategies, but there’s a reason some old staples don’t seem to ever go away. Email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to boost sales and connect with your audience. If you want to see true success with your email outreach, you have to break above the noise.

How many unread emails do you have in your inbox right now? According to some estimates, the average businessperson receives 91 emails every single day, and that number is only going up. That means you have to make your emails worthy of your customer’s time and exciting enough to get their attention.

So how do you make sure your emails get opened instead of shipped off to the spam folder or left unread in inbox purgatory? Online Course Report broke down what makes a successful email outreach campaign and put together a handy infographic that details everything you need to know, from what day and time is best to send to how to craft the perfect subject lines.

Check it out below or over at Online Course Report.

 anatomy_of_email_outreach-1

Google Mobile

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) have been rumored to rollout in late February for some time, and it appears they are finally starting to appear. The AMP listings are being spotted in mobile search results, but it seems they are not available for all searchers.

Accelerated Mobile Pages are pages designed to be super lightweight and allow for incredibly fast load times. It does this by using a unique, streamlined version of HTML that is able to be heavily caches to provide the fastest loading experience possible.

To see if you have access to the new AMP search results, just perform a search on Google.com for any query that would typically trigger a news box. If you can’t think of anything, you can try ‘Trump’, ‘Google’, or ‘Obama’.

Barry Schwartz shared a few screencaps of what you can expect to see as the listings become more widely available. You can see them below:

google-amp-live

This screencap shows AMP listings appearing in the news listings, rather than the carousel:

google-amp-non-carousel

mobile-closeup-campaign

Google has been vocal lately about encouraging webmasters to improve the loading speed of their websites, especially on mobile devices. It has made loading speed one of its many ranking signals and is rolling out Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to improve mobile website speed.

With all this effort to make mobile loading speed an important issue for webmaster, you might think Google would be ahead of the curve when it comes to making sure their pages load quickly on mobile devices. Not so, according to a recent test shared on Hacker News.

The test was conducted using Google’s own PageSpeed Insights tool and several others have replicated the results on their own. The findings seem clear; Google is the slowest loading home page on mobile in its market.

You can see the results of some of the speed tests below:

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Google’s loading speed

DuckDuckGo's loading speed

DuckDuckGo’s loading speed

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Bing’s loading speed

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Yahoo’s loading speed

Somewhat surprising, Yahoo came out ahead of the pack with a loading speed significantly faster than anyone else in the market. That may be part of the reason Yahoo has seen faster growth on mobile than Bing or other alternatives to Google. However, Yahoo’s market share of mobile search still sits at just over 3.5% compared to Google’s 94%.

Several elements are slowing down Google’s mobile home page, including render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content. Once AMP is rolled out, this could change. If Accelerated Mobile Pages are as effective as Google claims, it should have one of the fasted loading home pages on mobile once the new system is released. But, it is interesting that Google is currently lagging behind the field.