As the holiday shopping season is at its peak, Google has given retailers new generative AI tools to help advertise their products online. 

The company recently announced it was adding three new features that will help improve product visibility and help shoppers make informed purchases. These features are:

New Shopping Subcategories For Gifts

Shoppers can more easily explore products and brainstorm what to get their loved ones for gifts using AI-generated curated subcategories for highly specific gift ideas.

The announcement gives an example: 

“Let’s say you’re looking for a present for the budding chef in your life and don’t know where to start. Search “great gifts for home cooks”, and you’ll now see a wide variety of subcategories to explore — like specialty tools, artisanal ingredients, culinary subscriptions and even experiences like cooking classes — with options from brands large and small. Just tap into a category to browse shoppable gift options and select a product to buy.”

AI-generated Shopping Images

Online shoppers often begin with a very specific image of what they are looking for in their mind, but it isn’t always easy to translate that into search terms. 

To help shoppers find exactly what they’re searching for, Google has introduced image generation technology that will create photorealistic images to match your search terms and allow you to search products based on these images. 

“Let’s say you want a new winter coat — a colorful, patterned puffer jacket — but you haven’t found quite what you’re looking for. With generative AI in Search, just look for that style and tap “Generate images” to see photorealistic images that match your vision. And if you want to make an adjustment, like if you’d prefer a colorful metallic jacket instead of a patterned one, just enter that refinement in the text box to see a new set of images. Once you’ve found one you like, scroll down to see similar shoppable products.”

Expanding Virtual Try-On To Men’s Tops

After seeing increased engagement and interactions with women’s tops after the launch of virtual try-on features for those products, Google has expanded the feature to product searches for men’s tops. 

The feature allows shoppers to visualize how clothes will look by showing the products on a variety of real models, including diverse skin tones, body shapes, heights, and sizes. 

These new features are available to all US users now. For more, you can read the full announcement here.

As Google continues to promote its latest content format – Google Web Stories – the company is trying to help brands learn everything they can about the format, including how to use Web Stories to drive engagement and even revenue. 

To do this, the search engine has released a comprehensive Web Stories Playbook (totaling over 100 pages!) which does everything from explaining what Web Stores are, the technical process to create them, and strategic advice to get the most out of the format. 

What Are Web Stories?

Google Web Stories are a new, short-form “snackable” type of content similar to the Stories already popular on just about every social network. The big difference is that rather than being exclusive to a single, third-party service like Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat, Google Web Stories can be posted directly to your site.

To make them more immersive and engaging, the clips (made with videos, graphics, audio, and text) can be expanded to a full-screen view with a click.

Notably, Google has also released plugins for popular platforms like WordPress, making it easy to get started creating and sharing Web Stories. 

Along with being placeable on your site, the short clips can also be found in Google Search, Google Images, and Google Discover, meaning there are tons of chances to increase your visibility using Web Stories. 

Even more, Google Ads integration means you can include call-to-actions, affiliate links, and even your existing campaigns in your Web Stories. 

By combining all these things, Web Stories aim to combine the quick, easily digestible allure of social Stories with traditional ads while simultaneously giving a chance to boost your SEO.

What’s In The Web Stories Playbook

As the book itself describes its purpose:

“This playbook will help you incorporate Web Stories into your website, so you can reach new audiences and help readers connect with content they’ll love.”

At over 100 pages, the Google Web Stories Playbook may sound intimidating, but don’t worry. The guide is made to be highly visual, with big graphics and short, bite-size paragraphs telling you all you need to know across three sections.

Web Stories Playbook Sections

1) Overview – This section gives you the basics to understanding what Web Stories are and how they can be used to connect with new and old audiences in a more convenient and engaging way – even when on the go.

2) Entry Points – The Entry Points section explores the different ways Web Stories can be displayed and engaged with online. Specifically, it details five different  ways users might see your Web Stories, including:

• Singletons (Single Web Story panel placement)
• Carousels (Multiple Web Stories in a single panel)
• Compact Display (An organized selection of Web Stories in a panel)
• Author Highlights (Web Stories organized specifically by author)
• Dedicated Page (An entire page showing browsable Web Stories)

Additionally, this section includes links to a Design Kit with files to help create different entry points on your site.

3) More Design Details – Here you’ll find more in-depth recommendations and best practices for Web Stories. These include implementation tricks for making Web Stories look the best on your site, tips for making your stories more browsable, and content creation best practices to get the most from your Web Stories. 

Lastly, the Google Web Stories Playbook links to even more resources and tools, including a dedicated guide to using Web Stories on your site, tools and plugins, technical documentation, and even a Web Stories Github for discussion with others using Web Stories. 

To explore the Google Web Stories Playbook for yourself, just head over to the official announcement or click this link for the direct PDF.

A recent report from Microsoft predicts the future of online marketing throughout the next decade using a combination of data, surveys, and insights from some of the leading advertising experts at the company.

The report “2020 Vision: Trends to define the next decade” covers a wide range of issues, including the most important online marketing skills professionals will need in the 2020s, new approaches to search engine marketing and advertising, and increasing interactivity.

With how quickly online marketing changes, it can be hard to imagine where we will be in ten years, though Microsoft believes it may look a little like this:

Advertising Without Webpages

Online advertising has long been built on the structure where advertisers show ads on a site which lead to a specific landing page with more information when clicked. Gradually, that is changing as new platforms and apps are providing new opportunities for a more streamlined, interactive ad:

“Think of an interactive ad asking you to “Choose Your Own Adventure” then responding with additional interaction or next step based on your choice. In search, this type of interaction could begin to replace the practice of clicking through to a web page or content download.”

Streaming Brings Back TV Advertising With a Twist

The biggest flaw with traditional television advertising has been an inability to precisely target who the ad is being shown to, let alone exactly how many people will see the ad. The rise of digital streaming platforms will help solve this issue by delivering opportunities to deliver targeted ads to viewers:

“More relevant and targeted advertising will be possible on streaming TV because data on the backend will enable high-performing ads to be delivered to extremely targeted audiences. A mashup of search, audience-based buying and news content will fuel many of the evolving platforms to watch.”

Cameras Change How We Search

Visual search has existed in relatively primitive forms for a few years without ever truly catching on. This is largely because they have largely been unreliable for getting precise search results. Thanks to the power of machine-learning, Microsoft believes that will change in the 2020s:

“We’re addicted to screens and our eyeballs are looking for a new thrill factor — one that takes us beyond links and text, and is powered by images… How easy would it be if you take a picture of something you want rather than trying to search for it using words?“

SEO Remains an Essential Skill For Online Marketing

For the most part, the predictions in the report focus on large-scale shifts the company expects to see in the coming years. In one area, however, the experts see things remaining relatively consistent.

Based on a poll of more than 600 global senior marketer participants, SEO is going to remain the most important “hard skill” for marketers to have. The list is as follows:

Hard skills:

• SEO
• Data analysis
• Copywriting
• Behavioral analysis
• Automation

Soft skills:

• Creativity
• Humility
• Empathy
• Adaptability
• Transparency

The full report delves deeper into exactly why Microsoft’s experts expect to see the changes in the online marketing world in the coming decade. You can download it here.

Bing has announced a new series of link penalties aimed at reducing the presence of spammy or manipulative sites across its search engine. Specifically, the latest link penalties target private blog networks (PBNs), as well as those using subdomain leasing or manipulative cross-site linking.

What Bing is Targeting

For the most part, Bing is looking to penalize sites who are misleading search engines by essentially bundling site level signals to increase the presence of unrelated subdomains. Lately, a number of larger sites have been leasing subdomains while promising high rankings through site-level signals.

Subdomains are regularly used for legitimate purposes to help separate areas of a site. For example, many sites may use a separate subdomain for areas of their site related to customer support, which would appear as support.example.com. In this case, it makes sense for the support areas of the site to still benefit from the site-level SEO signals present.

On the other-hand, you have leasing services such as WordPress which are used to host a wide-range of unrelated topics, brands, and philosophies. In this case, it would not make sense for each subdomain to receive the SEO boost from WordPress’s main domain.

While WordPress follows the best practices of search engines and properly insulates each subdomain, some bad actors have been misrepresenting their site structure to artificially inflate the presence of unrelated subdomains.

As the company explained in its announcement:

“…we heard concerns from the SEO community around the growing practice of hosting third-party content or letting a third party operate a designated subdomain or subfolder, generally in exchange for compensation.

…the practice equates to buying ranking signals, which is not much different from buying links.”

Private Blog Networks

In particular, Bing called out PBNs for misrepresenting their site structure to artificially inflate content:

“While not all link networks misrepresent website boundaries, there are many cases where a single website is artificially split across many different domains, all cross-linking to one another, for the obvious purpose of rank boosting. This is particularly true of PBNs (private blog networks).”

Cross-Site Linking

Another issue that Bing is putting in its crosshairs are sites that are essentially a single site but are broken into multiple interlinking sites to create false link signals.

The graphic below illustrates how this site structure may appear:

Notably, this practice has already been against Bing’s policies and subject to penalties, but the search engine says it will begin applying additional penalties.

The Takeaway

All of the types of activity being targeted by Bing’s latest link penalties are systematic misrepresentations of websites to artificially boost their presence in search engines. It is hard to imagine many cases where legitimate sites could be affected inadvertently – though it is always possible.