Google lets you add accessibility features to your business listings

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Google has made it easy for businesses to tell users what accessibility features they provide before they ever visit the store with their latest addition to Google My Business listings.

Now, you can add accessibility information about your business or search for places which provide accessibility features like wheelchair ramps and wheelchair-accessible parking.

You can update your listing by simply going to the main menu of Google Maps for Android, pulling up the main menu, and tapping on “Your contributions.” From there, go to “Uncover missing info” and sort by “Accessibility.”

This pulls up locations near you that are missing accessibility information, including your business. Then, you can begin adding accessibility attributes as needed, including:

  • Wheelchair-accessible entrances
  • Wheelchair-accessible elevators
  • Wheelchair-accessible seating, and
  • Wheelchair-accessible parking

The set-up of the new feature allows any users to add accessibility information about any business they visit, but business owners can take the initiative to update their own listings to alert shoppers about what they offer before they make the trip themselves.

Since the release of the new listing information, Google says users have added accessibility information to almost 7 million places worldwide.

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Snapchat makes it easier to link to your website in Snaps

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Snapchat has quickly become one of the most popular social image sharing platforms around, breaking out of its teen-centric image to reach a wide audience of users. With this growth, the platform has also made extensive changes to make it easier for brands to connect with users.

This week, the company released one such new feature with the launch of “Snapchat Paperclip”. The Paperclip feature lets anyone – including brands – to attach a link to any Snap before it is shared. Until now, the only way you could include a link in a Snap was through paid ads.

The launch of Paperclip puts Snapchat ahead of the other most prominent social image platform, Instagram, which only allows links within the bio section of profiles. The only exception to Instagram’s rules is for users with over 10,000 followers. These popular figures can also include links in Instagram Stories.

The ability to include links in individual Snaps may seem like a small change, but it could be a huge win for brands looking to build an organic following. Instead of paying for ads, you can now rely on high-quality content to get users engaged and interested in your site and products. It also allows you to reach more ad-averse audiences, such as tech-savvy users who tend to block or ignore ads.

The Paperclip feature already available around the world for both iOS and Android users and is easily accessible by tapping the paperclip icon within Snapchat’s toolkit.

Along with the launch of Paperclip, Snapchat has released two other new features more aimed at average users. Voice Filters give users the ability to modify the way their voice sounds even when no using a visual lens. The other feature, Backdrops, lets users swap out the background of images with custom designs or colors.

You can see all three new features in action in this video shared by Josh Constine:

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Google’s Test My Site tool tells you how many visitors your website is losing

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In an increasingly mobile world, the speed of your website can be a major make-or-break point for any business. Estimates suggest most sites lose half or more of their visitors just while their page is loading because people aren’t willing to wait around.

So, how can you fix your site and make it lightning-fast? Google can tell you specifically what you need to do with its Test My Site tool, which just received a new set of features this week.

Now, the tool can tell you a number of things about your site, including:

  • Your site’s mobile speed
  • The number of visitors you may be losing
  • How you compare to the competition
  • Specific recommendations about how to make your site faster

To show just how effective it can be to make your site faster, Google points to a case study from a Nashville fencing company. According to Google, Yard Dog Fence Company managed to double its sales just by following the recommendations suggested by the Test My Site Tool, such as reducing image size.

The days of waiting around for minutes while a website loads are gone. These days, people are likely to leave if your page hasn’t rendered in five seconds or less. It may seem like a tough challenge to speed your site up that much, but the Test My Site Tool will give you an actionable list made specifically for your site. With that as a roadmap, you’ll be able to make the changes you need to supercharge your site, improve your traffic, and increase conversions.

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Compare your ad results against your competition with Bing Competitive Metrics

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Analytics is an essential way to measure the effectiveness of your ads, but traditionally your results are kept in isolation. The only thing you have to compare against is past results.

Bing is changing that, with a new way to compare the results of your ad campaigns against how your competitors are performing.

These new competitive metrics, also known as “share of voice” metrics, have been added to Bing’s in-line performance views, with details on your ads and similar campaigns in your industry. You still can’t hand-pick your local competitors and spy on their campaigns, but the new metrics will give you a better view of how you are doing within your market.

To get started, just log into your Bing Ads account and select either Accounts Summary, Campaigns, Ad Groups, or Keywords. Once you’re on any of these pages, click the Columns button. This will allow you to add any metrics from the Competitive (Share of Voice) section. Once you’ve applied your changes, these new metrics will appear in your reports.

Bing says the metrics are compatible with all other reporting features offered by the platform.

The announcement says this latest update is just “one of many” enhancements to Bing analytics the company will be releasing this year, though they are keeping those upcoming updates a secret for now.

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Share your message straight to your audience with Google Posts

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Wish you could put personalized messages into search results? Until now, the only way for you to get a specific message out to people finding your business was to send out tweets popular enough to get included or to publish paid search ads.

That’s all changing now, though. Google released a new feature this week called Google Posts for all businesses with a Google My Business Listing. With Google Posts, you can finally share your message on search results without the costs of ads or hit-and-miss nature of social media.

Any time you share a Post, it will appear in search results and Google Maps pages that include your business listing. The message will initially be just a small snippet, but searchers can expand it with a single tap to read more.

There are potentially limitless ways businesses can take advantage of the new feature. Specifically, Google suggests getting started by updating customers with information about new sales, upcoming events, and new product launches to build excitement.

In addition to your customized message, you can also include photos and custom calls-to-action to encourage making a reservation, signing-up for your newsletter, or linking to your latest special offer.

Google Posts are already available to any business with a verified Google My Business account. You can get started sharing your messages and customizing your listings now from any desktop, iOS, or Android device.

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Google’s Search Results Get Up Close and “Personal”

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Google’s decision to constantly make their search results more personalized for every user has often been criticized for veering into the “invasion of privacy” area from time to time. Its latest experiment takes that to the extreme, with a whole new tab devoted just to you.

The search engine now allows you to filter search results for your personal information collected from Google’s apps, including Gmail, Photos, and Calendar.

The new experiment can be found for most users by clicking “More” on the search results page, which will drop down a list of search options. Click “Personal” and you’ll find only information directly related to yourself, such as events you have in your calendar or recent emails.

Most of this isn’t too eye-raising. It could even be useful in the right circumstances. Where it starts to get weird is when you search for pictures. The personal search feature finds photos that are not necessarily on the device you’re using. It also finds pictures based on the content, even when you haven’t labeled the picture.

To give you an example, I’ve taken a lot of photos of my cat on my phone. I’ve never labeled any of them as being of my cat or shared them to my computer. But, when I search “cat” within the results, I am shown my collection of pictures of my cat Magnitude.

Like this picture

The tool can also be used to find photos of people you know on your phone, as Kevin Murnane reports for Forbes.

Unsurprisingly, the “Personal” search results tab also includes ads at the bottom of the page. Reports vary between one and three ads on any personal page.

Since it is just an experiment, there is no telling whether the feature is around to stay. It first appeared a few days ago, but went offline for a period before reappearing today. It has only been spotted on Chrome for desktop devices, but it could be rolled out to other devices at some point. It could also be removed entirely, if people respond negatively to having Google snooping through their emails.

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Google issues a strong warning against using guest posts for links

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Guest posting has become a staple of online marketing. It allows you to get those coveted links that will help you rank higher on search engines AND spread your message to a wider audience. Plus, it makes you look like a bigger authority in your field.

Unfortunately, when there is something that good, people will always try to take advantage of it. There has been a rise recently in the sites using guest posts to spread spammy links or cheat their way to higher rankings. It has become such a problem, Google had to issue a staunch warning to anyone trying to misuse guest posts.

As Google explains:

Google does not discourage these types of articles in the cases when they inform users, educate another site’s audience or bring awareness to your cause or company. However, what does violate Google’s guidelines on link schemes is when the main intent is to build links in a large-scale way back to the author’s site.

The search giant does specify a few factors you should be wary of when guest posting:

  • Stuffing keyword-rich links to your site in your articles.
  • Having the articles published across many different sites; alternatively, having a large number of articles on a few large, different sites.
  • Using or hiring article writers that aren’t knowledgeable about the topics they’re writing on.
  • Using the same or similar content across these articles; alternatively, duplicating the full content of articles found on your own site (in which case use of rel=”canonical”, in addition to rel=”nofollow”, is advised).

Basically, if you are doing guest posting in good faith, you probably aren’t in danger. You have to go out of the way to start using spammy practices or pumping out low-quality content. However, if you are breaking any of these rules you put yourself at risk of being punished and losing your high rankings.

Conversely, if you are being harassed by a spammy content creator to publish bad content, Google says you can submit a complaint via the spam report form.

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Google creates faster ads using AMP technology

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Google has been using its Accelerated Mobile Pages technology to deliver content almost instantaneously for over a year, and now it is starting to spread the technology to new areas of its platform.

Specifically, Google says it is beginning to use AMP technology to speed up search ads in two different ways.

Firstly, Google AdWords is launching a beta program allowing advertisers to create landing pages using Accelerated Mobile Pages. The result is a faster transition from seeing the ad to being able to convert, and less chance of someone leaving because they get tired of waiting for your site to load.

Secondly, Google is boosting all ads across the entire Google Display Network by automatically converting them to a new AMP ad format. As of today, the search engine has already converted a “significant” number of ads across its display network.

Google says its new AMP ads load 5 seconds faster than regular ads without any visual changes. This way, ads on AMP pages can load just as quickly as the content, creating a more seamless experience.

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Bing Plans To Stop Supporting Standard Text Ads Soon

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Bing is giving advertisers until July 31st of this year to adjust to the new extended text ads format. After that, they will have to make the switch because Bing will stop supporting the creation and editing of the popular standard text ad format.

The company is giving some leeway to those who still prefer standard text ads, saying “all your existing standard text ads will continue to serve alongside expanded text ads for the foreseeable future.” Eventually Bing will stop supporting and serving standard text ads entirely, but they will give advertisers a warning when they plan to finally shut it down entirely.

To prepare for the change, Bing listed several best practices and tips to make the most of expanded text ads (EXTAs):

Create EXTAs within existing campaigns and ad groups along current STAs

  • Use Standard Text Ads as a baseline to measure how well Expanded Text Ads are performing
  • Create a 1:1 ratio of EXTA to STA ads in each ad group to maximize EXTA impressions
    • Helps avoid impression and click loss while testing EXTAs
    • Assures that EXTAs inherit all ad extensions and other set ups from the existing STAs
  • Once you are confident in the Expanded Text Ads performance, customers can move to 100% adoption, and delete their STAs

Take full advantage of the additional character limits

  • Use your best performing STA copy as a starting point when creating EXTAs
  • Experiment with messaging (try different length combinations)
  • Remember that headlines are important. Longer headlines help increase the visual space of text ads and help communicate additional information to searchers
  • Think about using content such as domain, display, description, query in ad title 2
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Snapchat Is Preparing To Launch A Self-Serve Ad Manager

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For years, the only way to advertise on Snapchat was by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to work directly with the company for custom advertising. Gradually Snapchat has been opening the doors to advertisers, but still require interested businesses to work with third-party partners to purchase ad space.

Starting this June, that all changes. Snapchat is preparing to throw the doors open to businesses of all sizes and budgets with a new self-service ad manager and Snapchat Mobile Dashboard.

Combined, these new tools allow any business or publisher to create and track video Snap Ads from anywhere. Most importantly, they also simplify the process so that anyone can get involved – instead of just high-level advertisers with massive marketing budgets.

Compared to other social ad platforms, Snapchat’s Ad Manager still looks to be relatively limited. For example you can’t directly purchase Sponsored Geofilters or Lenses through the tool, however, there is a separate self-serve tool for geofilters. However, it is a significant step forward for the platform that has always seemed like a walled garden when it comes to advertising.

In addition to the new Snapchat Ad Manager and Mobile Dashboard, the company is releasing Snapchat Business Manager to let you control permissions and roles for team members helping publish and monitor your ads. All three will be available in June to everyone in the U.S., U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Australia, and select other countries.

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