We’ve officially entered October, and the clock has started ticking for businesses that usually start preparing for the crazy in-person shopping season starting from Black Friday till December.

With COVID-19 safety precautions in place and the uncertain times we’re all living in, this holiday shopping season will surely be a completely new experience.

If you haven’t thought about it yet, now is the time you focus and strengthen your marketing plans; from keeping your website up-to-date to restocking online inventory, delivery, and anything else that you offer. 

The main goal for you would be to make things safe and easy for your customers to do business with you. Here’s how Google can help your business.

“To help retailers plan and respond this season, we have insights and resources available in our 2020 retail guide, and, in June, we surveyed global consumers to better understand how the coronavirus pandemic will impact their holiday shopping.”

Here are the three ways people plan to shop differently this year listed by Google:

• People will discover and buy online even more.
• People will plan ahead and do their research online before in-store shopping.
• People will look for safer, digitized ways of in-store shopping.

Google also notes, 

“Last year, 71% of holiday shoppers used three or more channels to do their holiday shopping, and 57% of shopper-reported purchases were made online. This year, we expect those numbers will grow, as over 70% of shoppers who plan to shop this season said they will shop online more for the holidays than they did in previous seasons, and a similar number said they would browse for gift ideas online and not in store.”

Plus, the desire to support and shop local is more this year.

“67% of shoppers said they plan to shop more at local small businesses.”

Which is why Google also announced a new focus on shopping ‘nearby.’

“Want to see an item in person before purchasing, or can’t wait for shipping and delivery? Whatever you’re looking for, whether it’s a new laptop for working from home, a baby jacket for fall, or a grill for backyard barbeques, Google makes it easy for you to see what’s available locally. Simply tap the Shopping tab, and select the Nearby filter at the top of the page or add “near me” to your search to view product options available from stores located near you.”

Google aims to take the guessing game out of the picture by offering customized recommendations to help small businesses reach their customer base wherever they are across Google Search, Maps, and Shopping.

Introducing Grow My Store

Google’s new Grow My Store is an automated retail store evaluator tool that allows you to get tailored tips if you sell products online.

Take a look at what the all-new Grow My Store promises to do:

• Boost your business with a quick and easy evaluation of your retail website.
• Strengthen your business by analyzing your retail site, getting an overall score, and offering detailed insights and recommendations.
• See how your site does against retailers/competitors in your sector.
• Identify areas of improvement to upgrade effectively.
• Provide access to personalized market and consumer trends to reach new customers.
• Grow with advice from Google’s database of resources and curated Google tools.

Although some of the tips may feel very obvious, it is these simple little things that one often tends to miss when they’re busy or stuck in a project. Make most of the Grow My Store tool by putting your retail site through it. Who knows, you might even end up with some top tailored tips that help boost your sales this year!

What You Can Do:

Review the post here, study the 2020 retail guide, and the recent enhancements to shopping search. After this, put your retail site through the new Grow My Store to get quick tips to maximize your presence throughout Google.

Alongside Grow My Store, email marketing can be crucial for your retail website’s success this year. Make the most of it to connect with your customers, let them know you’re open, what you have to offer, and provide enticements to help your customers support you in this important and different than the usual selling season.

The countdown has begun. Get to work now!

Google has come up with new performance metrics, specifically for Google My Business Insights. In their announcement, Google said, “Business Profile Performance reporting is moving closer to your profile on Search and Maps. You’ll be able to access more of the core profile metrics directly from your Business Profile.”

Google adds, “We start with interactions to let you know how often people have contacted you. More metrics will follow over the next months and will include detailed reports about searches and the number of people who saw the profile. After metrics are added to Performance reporting, the older versions of those metrics will eventually be removed from the Google My Business web and app platforms.”

Further, Google informs that performance reporting is currently available on Search and will soon be available on Maps. Data will be available for up to 6 months. You’ll be able to review your performance by selecting custom time frames, with interaction metrics updated daily and other metrics updated monthly.

If you want to review your performance reporting, follow the below steps:

• To review the new metrics from your Business Profile, go to Performance reporting.
• Make sure you’re signed in with the account you used to sign up for Google My Business.
• To find your Business Profile, search on Google for your exact business name.
• If needed, select View profile to manage your Business Profile.
• Select Promote Performance.
• At the top of the page, select a date range for your report, and click Apply.

Finding new features or attributes in Google My Business comes as no surprise. This has been happening for quite some time now, albeit without much fanfare from Google. Meaning, marketers are discovering these new features only as they stumble upon them while working with their clients.  

The latest addition to the long line of new features in Google My Business is the Video Conferencing option, which appears as ‘Connect in real-time, with video’ in the Home menu.

What This New Feature Brings to the Table

It is safe to assume that the video conferencing option is a part of Google’s initiative to help businesses survive the pandemic with more social distancing friendly alternatives. As of now, this option allows businesses to connect with their customers through Google Meet, Zoom, Skype and Webex.

Get Onto the Video Conferencing Wagon!

Depending on your business category, you may or may not be able to see this feature in your Google My Business profile. If the option’s available, it is highly recommended that you make the most of it.

All you have to do is, when the Stay Connected during COVID-19 prompt appears, activate the Conduct Business Online attribute. In order to help you set up quickly and easily, Google has uploaded a step-by-step guide.

You might also want to consider including a booking link from your existing booking system. In case you do not have one in place, sign up for a system that Google has partnered with or look into Reserve with Google integrations.

From February 2021, Facebook will be limiting the number of ads on a Page. These ads will run based on the highest month’s ad spend in the previous year.

The Improving Ad Performance Through Ad Volume Guidance sets the limits based on Advertiser Size as follows.

Advertiser Size test	Ad Limit Guidance
Small to medium sized Pages (advertising less than $100K in their highest spending month in the last 12 months)	250 ads
Medium to large sized Pages (advertising less than $1M in their highest spending month in the last 12 months)	1,000 ads
Larger Pages (advertising less than $10M in their highest spending month in the last 12 months)	5,000 ads
Largest Pages (advertising $10M or more in their highest spending month in the last 12 months)	20,000 ads

As per Facebook,

“Ad limit enforcement will roll out from february 2021 through Summer 2021. Advertisers can see when their ad limit will go into effect for each Page in Ads Manager and find additional enforcement details in the Help Center. Developer resources can be found here.”

Facebook has also claimed that many advertisers have already started noticing performance benefits after consolidating their ad setup, and you can too “learn more best practices for managing ad volume.”

Actionable Strategy

Visit this page to know more about Ad Limits per page and here to create and manage ads on mobile or desktop.

 

 

 

In July 2020, Google revealed how it plans to protect Google Chrome users from submitting insecure forms, beginning in Chrome M86. The search engine giant announced that the new update will warn users against completing forms on secure (HTTPS) webpages that fail to submit securely.

 

The idea behind this new development

Google says that forms on HTTPS sites that submit insecurely, a.k.a. “Mixed Forms” can pose a huge risk to users’ security and privacy. As per Google, any sensitive information submitted on such forms can be picked up and altered easily by malicious parties.

 

So what will happen to the insecure forms?

1. Autofill will be disabled. However, Chrome’s password manager that helps users input unique passwords will continue to work on mixed forms with login and password prompts.

 

2. Users will see a warning text. When users begin filling out insecure forms, a warning text will appear to alert them that the form is not secure.

 

 

 

 

3. Users trying to submit an insecure form will see a full page warning. This warning page will alert users of the potential risks and will ask them to confirm if they still want to submit the insecure form.

 

 

 

 

To justify these new measures, Google said that the current ones fail to effectively communicate to the users the risks of submitting sensitive data in an insecure form. Currently, the mixed forms are only marked by removing the lock icon from the address bar.

 

How will this affect your site?

Google is making it very clear to all the website owners out there that the time to fully migrate the forms on their sites to HTTPS is NOW! If any developer has questions, they should send an email at security-dev@chromium.org.

 

It has been quite some time now that Google has been giving us signs and indications to fully migrate our sites to HTTPS, which is not very difficult these days.

 

One thing is for certain, migrating your site completely to HTTPS should be on top of your to-do list right now. If your website is still in HTTP, which is not at all recommended, you can get in touch with us and our expert team will assist you with making your site and forms secure.

 

 

 

 

 

Recently, Google added the all-new Call Button to their business knowledge panels. Although there is no official word yet about the addition from the Search Engine Giant, it looks to be rolled out extensively, as it was very easy to find it on the web.

 

 

 

 

What’s Next?

With the introduction of the Call Button, desktop customers can easily click and call to connect with businesses. This could result in a plunge in your trackable incoming calls.

 

When we conducted a test ourselves, we found out that you could use Skype or a similar program to make a call while using a desktop. If you have your phone synced to your desktop, then it could push the call from there too! Before the launch of this new addition, GMB Insights could only track calls from mobile users. But now, we could very well see the rise of calls from desktops being reported as well!

 

 

 

 

Google just added new functions to its ‘access your Google My Business (GMB) listing’ feature in Google Maps and Search. Here’s what Google stated:

 

“Now you can create posts, reply to reviews, add photos and update business information right from Google Search and Maps.”

 

Though this feature of managing your business listing from Search has been in function since September 2017, it is now that businesses will be able to make suitable changes to their listings from Google Maps.

 

Take a look:

 

 

 

Besides adding these new functions, Google is also presenting new features that’ll be available on an upgraded merchant interface. These new features will offer “helpful recommendations” to help businesses enhance their Google presence while learning how the business performs. Here’s what Google had to say,

 

“Business owners and managers will see a revamped performance page with new customer interaction insights. This page will provide refreshed metrics on a monthly basis and will evolve over the coming months to share more helpful data to business owners.”

 

For now, the new functions are only available in English, but Google has said that they will “expand to other languages over the coming months”.

 

How to use it?

Sign in to the Google Account associated with your Agency/Business. To access these tools on Google Maps, tap your profile picture on the top right corner of the mobile app and select ‘Your Business Profile’. To update your profile on Google Search, find your business by name or search for ‘my business’.

 

 

Bing’s recently released, updated webmaster tools give you great new tools. Check out the new tools that we think are showstoppers here.

 

1. URL Inspection Tool – Just like Google’s URL Inspection Tool, this tool reports on the status of the URL from Bing’s perspective. But, there is one difference. Unlike Google, there is no focus on AMP. This tool gives you more overall usable data points. You can see the schema markup listed on the page, SEO tips like missing image alt tags when the URL was first discovered by Bingbot, and more.

 

Image Source: Bing Webmaster Tools

 

 

2. Robots.txt Tester – This tool tests your robots.txt file. Bing explains this tool as “Robots.txt Tester helps Webmasters to analyze their robots.txt file and highlight the issues that would prevent them from getting optimally crawled by Bing and other robots.”

 

3. Site Scan – This tool acts just like the typical scan tool. It allows you to scan your site for technical SEO issues. Though, it is a step away from Google’s tool offerings. Bing describes this tool as “Site Scan is an on-demand site audit tool that crawls your site and checks for common technical SEO issues. Fixing these issues will make your website search engine and user friendly. With this tool, you can improve your website performance not only on Bing but on other search engines as well.”

 

 

 

 

The tool is easy to use and also reports on all the typical parameters. The only issue with this tool is that the scan is very slow. So you will either get your results later that day, or it might even take the next day. Your results will be sent to you via email.

 

Actionable Strategy

If you haven’t used Bing’s Webmaster Tools yet, then we recommend you give them a try. All you need to do is, give a quick click of a button and a couple of seconds to import sites from Google Search Console. Bing has already announced that they are still updating these tools. So you can soon expect something more coming up. We will keep you updated.

 

 

 

 

Looking at the growing popularity of online retail shopping, Microsoft Advertising is now looking out for ways to help retail partners make the most of this change.

 

 

Here’s an announcement that they made last month,

 

“…the availability of free Product Listings, which allow you to show your product offers for free on the Bing Shopping Tab starting in the USA and soon rolling out to other markets — United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, and Germany.”

 

Steps to Enable Product Listings

• Customers that are already a part of Microsoft Shopping Campaigns do not require to take any action for participating. Microsoft Merchant Center automatically opts all the approved product offers.

 

• If it’s the other way round, you can simply create a Microsoft Merchant Center store, submit all the products that are eligible and make sure that they are approved. Once the Merchant Center store is successfully created, you’re opted-in to the free Product Listings offering.

 

• All the approved products get reflected in the free products listings section on the Bing Shopping Tab.

 

Things to Know

• Product Listings reporting will be available in Microsoft Merchant Center by this fall.
• To avail all the benefits of Product Listings, it is advisable to send a complete product feed, along with your entire inventory and more fields to provide a rich data source.
• Clicks from the Product Listings section within the Shopping Tab are free of cost.
• All products are required to –
• Abide by Microsoft Advertising policies and Product Ads policies
• Meet the product specification requirements (similar to paid ads today)
• To opt out of receiving this free traffic, you can click on Show Free Product Listings through the Settings page of your merchant center store in the shopping tab toggle.

 

Bing is also looking forward to partnering with more retailers in order to offer a wider selection of products.

 

Actions to Take

For more information, click here! You can send in your queries and feedback to Microsoft Advertising account manager or email directly to advertising-feedback@microsoft.com or you can reach out to us for assistance.