A great SERP features glossary, Sitebulb Server, GPT3 emotional goal & ad copy generator, Bing Professional Service Ads and GA4 homepage update
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What's in this episode?
In this episode, you will hear Mark Williams-Cook & Jack Chambers talking about:
- A great SERP features glossary
- Sitebulb Server coming soon
- GPT3 emotional goal & ad copy generator
- Bing Professional Service Ads
- Google Analytics 4 gets a homepage update
Show notes
- ROAST's SERP features glossary
- Selling mattresses via affiliate schemes
- Subdomain's spotted in indented results
- Sitebulb Server is coming soon
- GPT3 emotional goal and ad copy generator
- Google Analytics 4 gets an updated homepage
- Bing professional service ads
Transcription
Mark: Welcome to episode nine of season two of the Search with Candour podcast recorded on Wednesday, the 9th of March 2022. My name is Mark Williams-Cook and I'm joined by my co-host Jack Chambers. And today, we'll be talking about SERP features, some new search result types, as well as a helpful glossary, a new Sitebulb server version, some more GPT3 tools that are quite amazing and Bing Professional Service Ads, as well as a little update on Google Analytics 4.
Jack: Search with Candour is supported by SISTRIX, the SEOs toolbox. Go to sistrix.com/swc, if you want to check out some of their excellent free tools such SERP snippet validators, on-page analysis, hreflang validation, page B comparison and tracking your site's visibility index. That's sistrix.com/swc for free tools. And sign up for the free trial of their premium tools, as well.
Jack: So we'll kick off the show talking about some SERP features, shall we, Mark?
Mark: Yes. I love a good SERP feature.
Jack: Don't we just? Us SEOs blooming love a SERP feature. And there's a fantastic glossary written by Paige Hobart, the head of SEO over at Roast. We'll put links, as always, in the show notes. If you go to search.withcandour.co.uk, you can find the links to everything we're going to talk about on the show, but we'll start off with this lovely little glossary. And it is a really nicely presented interactable list of pretty much every SERP feature you could possibly want and possibly think about and even some you probably haven't heard of. And initially, this came up when we were talking about SERP features for a client the other day. And I know you were looking at something, Mark, and you found a SERP feature. And I was like, "Ah-ha! I've just found this SERP features glossary. I found it on there, as well."
Mark: Yeah, I hadn't seen it before. It was a research carousel. So it was for a client that sells mattresses and Google had a little carousel. So when we talk about SERP features, we are really talking about anything pretty much that isn't traditional, organic results. So it could be featured. Snippets could be PAASS. Or in this case, this carousel, where it said research, and then it had different guides to researching mattresses. And I hadn't actually seen it before so I went through that whole, "Oh, wow. Have I found something new?" And then the, "I better not mention it on Twitter because I'll get told that it's actually three years old"
Jack: "It's been around for years, Mark. Have you been paying attention?" The usual crowd.
Mark: Barry will be straight there if not with, "Not new." So I asked in the safe place of the office first to see if anyone had found it and you came back with this guide. And actually, Paige has done a really nice job here because there was quite a few... Not quite a few, but there was a couple of actually SERP features on there that I wasn't particularly aware of, like, I think, the SOS one. A couple of others like that.
Jack: Yeah, there's the obvious ones I'm sure a lot of the listeners know about featured snippets and FAQs and Google hotels, Google flights if you're in that kind of industry, as well. But even going through to more specific stuff, like knowledge cards for sports and knowledge panels for specific brands, going through obviously, places and map packs. You see map packs and stuff all the time and all that kind of thing. It's a brilliant, brilliant list and almost 50 of them in total and you can dive in and have a look there. There are little examples, there are even gauges of how much impact they have on the SERP itself and how useful they think it'll be in terms of using it for your SEO and PPC strategies and all that kind of stuff. I highly, highly recommend checking that out if you are wanting to learn a bit more about SERT features or, like Mark, you saw something recently and thought, "Huh, I've never noticed that before," they can give you a little bit more information in that glossary, as well.
Mark: One thing I will add in on the show notes, just because I found it really interesting, it's a slight tangent, was actually about mattresses. So when I was having this discussion, we were actually consulting helping someone on a client that sells mattresses, and I was saying to them, "Do you know how competitive their sector is?" And they were new to this sector and SEO, to be honest. And I pointed them towards an article, really interesting long-form story. As I say, I'll put the link on the show notes. It's on fast company.com and it's this story that was posted in 2017, all about the mattress wars between affiliates and just how much money and SEO effort went into mattresses, because they're fairly high ticket items.
Jack: Yeah. You're usually talking hundreds of pounds at a time, right?
Mark: Yeah. This company we're talking to sells £2-3,000 mattresses. And pretty much-
Jack: Wow. A mattress or a car, right?
Mark: Yeah, right. Pretty much everyone needs a mattress, so they're a good affiliate target. And I was showing them actually some of the competitors that highlighted that had... Apart from doing a really excellent job with their onsite SEO, you could see all the clear signs from looking at the backlink profile of all of the content that had been done for years and years to attract links.
Jack: We'd backtracked some of the content five or six years, I think it was, wasn't it?
Mark: Oh, yeah. It was even further than that. And this was just saying to them, "Look, if you want to..." Because they're new in this country to the market, without saying who they are, just saying, "Look, the water's pretty deep already. So you need to come in kicking if you want to stand a chance." I'll post that story. If you're interested in online marketing, affiliate marketing, SEO, it's a really interesting story to read about the dark underbelly of the affiliate side of stuff. This glossary by Paige, is really great. A good reference for even if you're already familiar, as Jack said, with these different features. Also, it gives you some estimates about the impact and importance of them, as well, which is really nice if you're learning. Link in the show notes.
Jack: And kind of spinning off of that, funny enough, talking of the, "Has anyone ever seen this SERP feature?" kind of thing that happens on Twitter regularly, a tweet from Jonas Sickler flagged up on my Twitter the other day. He mentioned Lily Ray, of course, who has been on the show before. Fantastic Lily Ray. And was asking about whether she had seen subdomains appear in indented search results before and kind of went back and forth on Twitter a lot. I know Lily had said she'd not seen it. But a few people specifically from the very specific tech industry, very focused on cybersecurity and support and things like that, where you often get that support subdomain coming into things or a tech subdomain or something like that, they had seen it a few times before. But something to think about, something to feature that might be featured more, going forward.
Mark: Yeah, I saw this and I wasn't that interested in it. But I can see why people are talking about it, because I saw some people mentioning, "Oh, this is surprising that it's an indented result because it's proof that Google doesn't treat subdomains as a different website." And that's sometimes cited as a reason as to why you should use subfolders over subdomains. But I do think if you are thinking about it literally like that, you are thinking about it incorrectly. Google's always said, "Look, we try and work out the relationship between subdomains and domains." And Google says, "Oh, just do whatever's best. It doesn't matter if you use a subdomain or subfolder." Again, in my own anecdotal experience in lots... I know the plural of anecdote isn't data, but everyone I know basically has had better results with subfolders. There's been a few fairly controlled experiments that have shown that. So I don't think it's the correct way to think about it to say, "Google treats subdomains as different websites." But I believe there is a stage Google has to go through to work out if they are connected or not, because-
Jack: Got to be internal links, right? There must be-
Mark: Possibly, yeah.
Jack: There are some hints there, I would think. I know Lily mentions that in one of the replies, rather than treating it as a separate site, Google following the internal links and understanding the relationship between the primary domain and the subdomain and trying to understand where that's coming from and how that is relevant to that page. I would guess that that subdomain is linked somewhere on the page and that would be the way it pulls through.
Mark: Yeah.
Jack: Seems like an obvious answer.
Mark: I imagine it'll be multifactorial and there's a whole bunch of things Google's looking at. But I wouldn't expect to Google "WordPress" and then see indented search results for random-ass blogs because they're hosted on wordpress.com.
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: There's obviously something going on there, so I still think it's the safer bet to use subfolders in most cases. Not in all cases. We had some very specific case the other day where we had a company wanting to target internationally and they had a country code TLD for lots of boring reasons they couldn't change. So in that case, I would say it would definitely be better to use a subdomain, rather than trying to host a French language, French version of a site, say, on a .co.uk/fr, because that's giving some really weird signals to everyone.
Jack: Yeah, .co.uk/fr is very, very confusing.
Mark: So if anything, that little bit of buffer between the sites, if you can get, it might be helpful. It's kind of interesting, kind of not. Maybe it's a good thought process to go through. Take in all these results you see and then let that massage your thinking about actually how it's working. Because nobody working in SEO can take precisely how that's working, but it's all good information to know.
Mark: Sitebulb server version is something I would like to talk about that I just saw, just actually before we decided to record this today. So if you go to sitebulb.com/sitebulb-server, you will see you can now register for interest for the Sitebulb server version, which is really interesting. We covered Sitebulb, obviously, a lot. They sponsored our season one. We had Patrick on the show in episode 68, who talked all about SEO site audits. He talked about the history of Sitebulb and just how it came about, the tool. So you can go listen to that if you want to know more about Sitebulb in general. But what interested me here is Sitebulb for us as an agency is, obviously, a desktop-based SEO tool. We've got cloud-based software as a service, SEO auditing tools, as well. Different horses for different courses, different tools for different problems. Because some of the inherent issues with desktop tools are to do with scaling and how many sites you can do, what you can actually use your computer for while it's doing that.
Mark: And Sitebulb had a little bit of ways around this, in that they did things like scheduling so you could leave Sitebulb set up on a computer and it could run a scheduled crawl maybe overnight. But what they're doing with this server version is quite different. The Sitebulb server version, what it's designed to do is run on a dedicated server machine. And ideally, I do mean server, not the old Dell laptop that you've got in the cupboards.
Jack: Chuck a laptop in the cupboard, exactly.
Mark: Patrick was kind enough to have a quick chat with me, as well, this afternoon before we recorded this, just to give a little bit more information. So I asked him actually about, "Well, what do you recommend that people would run this server version on?" And he said that they will obviously release some recommended specs, but we're talking about 128 gig of RAM, Windows Server Edition computer, couple of terabytes of hard drive, ideally SSD. It is the kind of thing, normally if you had rent a server, it's going to cost you maybe 100, 200 pounds a month.
Jack: Okay.
Mark: Which may sound a lot, but then actually, if you're paying for some of these higher-end cloud crawling tools, you can easily get into the 100s or actually over 1,000 pounds a month for these tools.
Jack: If you're thinking about millions and millions of URLs, multiple sites at once, you're really, really doing it at a large scale. It really does the price also scales with that, as well, essentially.
Mark: Yeah, that's kind of the hook of the SaaS tools. It's usually like, "Oh, wow. This looks cheap and powerful." And then by the time they've stapled on all the bells and whistles, the invoice at the end, as I know, is quite a lot bigger. So what's different with the server version of Sitebulb is basically you have this version running on your server, and with any Sitebulb pro desktop version, you can connect to this server version. So there's a little icon and you can literally click on it will, essentially, magic up all of the audits and settings on the server version on your local machine, as if you are running it there. Anyone in your team can connect to that server.
Jack: I really like that idea of being able to... Because I know you and I have talked about this before, Mark. I did a crawl... Back when I first started at Candour, my first time using Sitebulb when I joined Candour and you were like, "Oh, send me your crawl." And I was like, "How do I do that?" I was like, "Okay, you can export this file. Send me over. I'll run it on my version, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Having a whole team or eveninternational teams being able to access as one thing sounds really, really useful.
Mark: Yeah. Even now, sometimes I do crawls at home and then I have to export them and take them into work, which is annoying. I know some people are using remote desktops to run them on a server. But again, you've got to then transfer that export, which can be quite big-
Jack: Yeah, they can.
Mark: Locally, which can be tricky, again, over RDP. The other cool thing though is not only can your team all connect to that, but your Sitebulb pro desktop can connect to multiple servers. Meaning, if you have clients, which you likely do if they've got an SEO team that have Sitebulb, they can run this server version and you can log into their Sitebulb and actually then see what crawls, what audits they've been doing. So it's a really nice way... There's that whole thing in programming, the dry thing, the, "Don't repeat yourself." And I think that's what's making this really nice, which is you're not all having to repeat the same crawls, especially if it's half a million URLs, that's hours of crawling wasted. The other features to the server edition of this is you can crawl up to 5 million URLs. So that's pretty much all but the very biggest sites.
Jack: They literally use bbc.co.uk on the example video on the page there.
Mark: And you can do... Which you can't do on the current site, but we can do concurrent crawling. So the current Sitebulb, you can put in, say, five sites to audit and it'll cue them up and do one at a time. With this version, you can actually audit multiple sites at once. So again, obviously, if you've got a server with a big old chunky internet connection, because that's what you're going to need, this is a really good way to scale up Sitebulb if you've got lots of clients or if you've really big sites. So really excited about that. There's no launch date on the site. I did ask Patrick a few times. And obviously, they don't want to promise a specific month because he gave the best response when I asked if it's going to be ready, which is basically, "When they're happy with it." To be honest, I really respect his software development, even in things like games development. When you push for a hard release date, you will get crap published because you will find bugs.
Jack: And there's also the term crunch in the gaming industry, which is where, "Okay, we're coming up to publish date. It's the last month, two months, even three months sometimes, and we have to get this done." So that means massive amounts of overtime. Everybody's unhappy. Massive mental health issues and stress for the whole team and all that kind of stuff. I think that "when we are happy with it" is the perfect approach for launching a new product or launching a new service and actually making sure you and your team are happy with it and they're happy with themselves and you're not completely stressing everyone out at the last minute.
Mark: Patrick has assured me though, they're going to be happy with it in Q2.
Jack: There you go. Guaranteed happiness in Q2.
Mark: Between April, June time. He said they're close. It's not far away is what I'm trying to say to you. So register for interest for that. I think it's definitely something we'll be doing, because, essentially, it's going to save us time. Sitebulb server version looks good.
Mark: In the last episode, we covered a really neat GPT3 Regex tool made by Danny Richmond. Actually, I hadn't realised at the time, Danny's published a few different tools that are powered by GPT3. There's, I saw yesterday, a palette chooser, which you can basically enter any word, brand, object and it will generate a colour-matched palette for that. So you could put children's bedroom or snowed forest or something like that and it does a really, really good job. But one I wanted to cover, because I was dead impressed with it, which basically is apparently my default response to anything with GPT3, is he's released a Google sheet that is really easy to use, which is an emotional goal and copy generator.
Mark: So what is an emotional goal and copy generator when it is at home? It is a Google sheet where you can essentially enter a product or service. And then this sheet for you will give you a statement of the emotional goal and it will try and write some ad copy for you. Now, the emotional goal thing itself, I think, is really impressive because I think that's actually something easy to... If you're not experienced at writing ads, to breeze over and not actually think, "What is the core thing here?" So in Danny's example video, he types in "safari vacation" as the product or service. GPT3 has a little think and it says, "The emotional goal is to experience the wild." Again, for a computer, I'm like, Well, yeah. I probably couldn't distil it any better than that."
Jack: Yeah.
Mark: And it came up with this goal based ad copy: "Safari vacations are the best way to experience the wild. Travel the most exciting places in Africa and come face to face with the wildlife."
Jack: That's pretty spot on, isn't it? Maybe your safari isn't in Africa specifically, but it's hard to argue with that result. How simultaneously succinct and specific it is, it is seriously impressive stuff. And being able to do it, like you said, through sheets using open AI's GPT3, doing that whole thing to a larger scale, as well, is just really cool and really impressive.
Mark: I got this sheet set up. And to set this up, all you need to do is go to the URL, which we'll put in the show notes, search.withcandour.co.uk. You need to go to open AI and get a free API key, which is as simple as just clicking "sign in with Google" to get an account. And then you can just click on API and there'll be an API key and you copy and paste that into the sheet. So I tried a couple of products just to see what it'd say. We were talking about mattresses earlier, so I typed in "memory foam mattress" and our survey says... Our emotional goal was "to feel comfortable," which again, is spot on. That's the main thing you want from mattress, isn't it?
Jack: That's the most popular answer from our audience.
Mark: The goal-based copy was, "Our memory foam mattresses are designed to provide you with a comfortable night's sleep."
Jack: It's a bit basic, but it does the job. I think it's not necessarily about writing the copy for you, but getting you in that right direction. It's establishing that emotional beginning for you. And I know it's the classic, age-old marketing thing, going back to way before SEO was a thing and before all this digital marketing stuff came around in their 20th century, 21st century, you want to make your customers feel something. You want to make your potential customers feel something about your products and about your service. It's a little nudge in the right direction, I think, that is perfect for then taking that and using that as a little guideline and a template to then flesh out your ad copy with a bit more specifics and a bit more interesting stuff on top of that.
Mark: So as you were talking then, I just tried another one. I typed in "landlord insurance."
Jack: That's how fast it is, folks. Literally, as I finished that sentence, Mark is on it.
Mark: The emotional goal of landlord insurance is "to gain peace of mind."
Jack: Yeah, I guess. Insurance, yeah.
Mark: And the copy is a bit better, a bit more in-depth this time. It says, "Choose our landlord insurance to gain peace of mind with the highest level of cover you can get. You'll be fully protected against damage, repairs, medical expenses, fire damage, and theft."
Jack: Wow.
Mark: Now obviously, if you're selling that product, you need to be sure that it does all those thing and it is the highest level of coverage and it does protect you against those things. But this is obviously not around your specific product. This is saying to you, "This might be a good ad. This is what I'm seeing, I've been trained on." Again, as a base to go from, I think it's absolutely phenomenal. And I think you can use this anyway in general with your copywriting because this works with loads of really specific things that maybe you don't know about. So if you've got clients with particularly niche products, you can just pop them in here. And then when you are doing your copywriting, think about the emotional goal. Even if you're not doing PPC Ads if you're just doing content for the page.
Jack: It's that emotional grounding. I know I'm totally guilty of this and plenty of others are, as well. You forget what you're trying to make your customers feel about you, this article, your brand, your client, however, you want to put it. I think it's a really interesting little nudge to remind a lot of digital marketers, "Hey, there's emotion behind this. There are humans on the other end of this." It's not just about optimising for bots and crawlers and all this kind of stuff. There are users on the other end of that but they tend to be human. You're going to be writing for people, at the end of the day, to become customers, become clients, use your service, whatever it is your end of the line goal is at the end of that funnel. I think establishing that emotional core is really key. And like you said, Mark, it works for ad copy. It works for long term and longer pieces of content, as well.
Mark: Last thing I've typed in here, as I'm still playing with it-
Jack: I love this, playing the tools live on the show.
Mark: I put "designer sunglasses" and the emotional goal basically lines up with what you said. It says it's "to feel attractive." Now, obviously, there's a functional thing about sunglasses and UV. And I don't know whether it's just picked up on the fact that obviously, I've said "designer sunglasses," But that's the goal of... If I've specifically said, I'm buying a designer pair of sunglasses is because you want to look attractive.
Jack: Yeah. If you're just putting "cheap sunglasses" or just "sunglasses," there's less of that emotional tie towards the look side of it. I think that attractiveness totally make sense there.
Mark: We will put a link to this and the other couple of the other tools that Danny's made, but really, really great stuff. And again, it's all free. So check it out.
Jack: As I mentioned at the top of the show, we are sponsored by SISTRIX here at Search with Candour. And I'm going to dive into a little thing that the wonderful people over at SISTRIX told us about that is the keyword discovery side of things. And you can actually have a look at wider trends across the internet. And also if you have the social media plugin as part of the SISTRIX overall package, if you have that as part of your SISTRIX license, you can have a look at what's trending currently on YouTube, what's trending on TikTok, what's trending on Instagram. And the main one of course I've been looking at is the SEO side of things, looking at the keyword discovery and the trends. Interestingly enough, whatever you do, football is on that list. Football is always popular, no matter where you are searching, when you are searching. It seems like football is always a popular topic.
Jack: And that doesn't surprise me. It's the biggest sport in the world. That makes sense. But this is based on about a seven-day moving average, so the last seven days. And it's specifically looking at things that have changed the most, so what is currently creeping up and crawling up in that little graph there. You see where it was somewhere, now it's really getting noticed and really picking up speed on a lot of different websites and a lot of searches and things like that. So maybe something you can use to plan content if you're looking to be particularly topical with your trends you're covering on your site or with your client or something like that, use the keyword "discovery trends tool," and have a little delve into there, as well. And there's a little sneaky thing that you might be able to use to get ahead of the game, get on board of those trends.
Jack: And you can actually see, there's a meter of how far that trend is, how hot that trend is, essentially. And you can see how much it's trending at the moment and basically how hot that topic is. So if you want to be really topical and dive into something... And I know a lot of people are doing outreach and PR, you need to be really hot on that stuff as it's happening and even just before it's happening so you beat people to the punch there and you get that coverage, highly recommend checking out the keyword, discovery and trends part of SISTRIX. As again, links in the show notes if you do want to go and use that. And if you have a SISTRIX account, you can go and check that out directly from the links in the show notes.
Jack: So we're back with our dear old friend, GA4, everybody's favourite topic to talk about. I actually had a conversation with Luke in the studio, one of our Search Specialists here. And he actually said he liked GA4 the other day. The first person I have ever met where I brought up that subject, he went, "Yeah, actually I quite like it."
Mark: That's a pretty niche subject we bring up with people though, isn't it? That's not a dinner party...
Jack: In SEO though? Yeah, we've talked about SEO dinner parties here before. I'm sure the BightonSEO parties are full of this. There's karaoke and there's GA4 discussions going on. It's the real sexy topics going on.
Mark: So he is now our self self-proclaimed GA4 specialist.
Jack: I did threaten to get him on the show and he was very uncomfortable with that. Maybe we'll hear from our Search Specialist Luke in the future, dear listeners, but maybe not. I'll see if I can convince him. But what I do actually want to talk about very quickly is an update on the homepage of GA4. And they've basically revitalized and updated that whole thing where you can look at the five main categories on the homepage. So if you look at the overview, you've got "real time," you've got "recently viewed," "because you view frequently" and "insights." And they're basically five different categories that you can break down. An overview shows metrics that are relevant to you based on your behaviour in analytics.
Jack: "Real time" shows activities as they're happening using data from the real time report. If you've used Google analytics before, it's not dissimilar to the one you've used in the universal analytics side of things. "Recently viewed" provides links to parts of analytics you visited most recently. So if you are particularly paying attention to conversions or particularly paying attention to tracking particular events or whatever it is, there's a handy little link in there, as well. "Because you view frequently" shows cards you view often. And "insights" shows any unusual changes, emerging trends and other insights about your sites and apps, as well. So a bit more of a breakdown and a bit more detail coming into the GA4 homepage there.
Mark: We'll finish with a bit of Bing. And Bing has, along with a whole bunch of other stuff over the last few months, been launching some new ad types and new features. And they've recently launched Bing Professional Service Ads in the USA and Canada. And I will read out their description of these. This is the benefit of this podcast, which is I've taken their whole 1,000 word posts on it, cut out the sales patter and just telling you what it is. "Professional Service Ads are intent, triggered rich placements that provide real-time information to consumers about your agents, advisors and consultants, all with no keywords required. With the spot on the right rail of the Bing search engine results page running alongside your text ads, you can showcase your professionals more prominently than ever." So basically this is, as it says, running alongside your standard ads. And they've given examples for insurance real estate and tax services. And it's showing individuals, so their names, their years of experience, where they're based, et cetera.
Jack: And you also have companies in there, as well, that I thought was interesting. When you first brought this up for us to discuss in the show, I'd assumed they were like, "Oh, wow. That's really good for freelancers and stuff." Or maybe pick selecting a particular specialist in that particular branch or your office or whatever it is and highlighting them as, like you said, Mark, the person with the most experience in that particular service or something like that. But you can actually highlight specific branches or an entire office of your company, as well, which I think is interesting, as well.
Mark: I think it's interesting in general because it's a marketing discussion I've had quite a few times around basically brands and people. I don't like calling it personal branding, but there's that saying, "People buy from people." And especially with smaller companies, it's normally the individual that gets recommended or individuals that become known. And even actually with big companies, Bill Gates was Microsoft, Steve Jobs was Apple and people developed those kinds of relationships easier with a human than a brand. So I think it's interesting, especially for the things that they've listed here as professional services, so they've given insurance, real estate, tax services are all things that have a high level of personal trust. So I do think it's interesting from an advertising point of view, being able to show, "This is genuinely one of the people that's going to be working with you or be helping you sell your house or sorting out your accounts or insurance," almost the opposite to when you see the stock photos that people use on live chat.
Jack: Absolutely. I know I've picked up on that quite a few times before. And I think once you're aware of stock photos, you can't unsee it in a lot of ways. I think it's really beneficial, going back to what we're talking about with establishing that emotional connection in marketing, again, bringing everything full circle on this episode, like we like to do here at Search with Candour, is you get a face. You get a name. You get a little picture and a little description and stuff. It's not just, "Oh, here's a logo. There you go. Click on the thing." You can actually have, "Jack has five years of experience and has been doing this and blah, blah, blah, blah. And has worked in multinational companies and blah, blah, blah, blah." You get all the different descriptions and it's a nice little way to add a bit of humanity and a bit of personality to those ads in a nice way, as well.
Mark: So let's talk about how these ads actually are going to work. As I said, they're dynamically generated, but this is based on data you provide in a feed, such as your plan type, organisation, category, registration, status, different URLs. And Bing saying, the more details you provide in the feed file, obviously the more information they can include in your ads. I'm sure as with most feed-based advertising programs, there will be required and optional fields that you can do. Bing said, "they're still in the early stages of this pilot," but surprise, surprise, "advertisers have seen great performance so far."
Jack: As if Bing would say, "It's gone really badly, but please keep spending money with us."
Mark: Bing says, "For advertisers using Professional Service Ads, conversion rates have increased by about 60% compared to regular text ads." And they're not... Haven't been 100% clear here because this does say earlier that these run alongside regular text ads. So that I don't know if that's directly clicks on these new ads or whether it's improved the other ads or both.
Jack: Is it comparing like for like text ads for the same product or same service with that? Yeah, I guess that must be a way of doing it.
Mark: The other statement around performance they've given is, "On average, advertisers have seen cost per acquisition decreased by 67%, compared to overall performance in their campaigns." Again, overall performance, I'm not sure whether that includes things outside of text ads there because 67% reduction in CPA-
Jack: It's a lot.
Mark: Is a staggering amount. It's more than a lot. If I said to a client, "Oh, hey. We're going to enable this new feed thing. Oh, it's going to cut your cost per acquisition by two thirds," that's going to be draw on table thing. I'm a little bit, to be honest, sceptical about these figures. I can't see being suddenly reducing most people's CPA by 67% just by enabling a feed with some faces on it, while they are nice. I'm sure it will be beneficial, but my jury's out on that until I actually see it working myself.
Mark: Mechanics-wise, "You can participate in the Professional Service Ads auction with the campaign associated to your feed file. And you can also participate in the text ad auction with your regular campaigns." So this means you can serve in both the text ad block and the Professional Service Ad block simultaneously and Professional Service Ads auctions are CBC-based. So they're charging on a cost per click basis, kind of like your regular text ads. So that's available at the moment in the USA and Canada, so I suspect us poor lot in the United Kingdom will get it sometime this year.
Mark: That's all we got time for in this episode. I hope you have enjoyed it. Jack and myself will of course be back in one week's time, which will be Monday, the 21st of March. And until then, I hope you have a wonderful week and tune in for the next episode.