IAC buying Angie’s List, will combine with HomeAdvisor into new public company

IAC is buying Angie’s List and will combine it with its own home services lead-gen site, HomeAdvisor, in a deal worth in excess of $500 million. The merged entity will then be spun out as a new public company: ANGI Homeservices Inc.

IAC had been seeking to acquire Angie’s List since about November 2015 for roughly the same price. Angie’s List’s board initially resisted the takeover. However, Angie’s List’s growth had stalled, and the company had come under increasing pressure from activist investors. The deal is expected to close later this year, with HomeAdvisor’s CEO Chris Terrill becoming the new CEO of the new entity.

Angie’s List and HomeAdvisor were essentially direct competitors in the massive home services market. Reportedly, both consumer brands will continue to exist.

Angie’s List was founded in 1995 and began as a Consumer Reports-style membership-based subscription service, offering reviews of local home services professionals. It went public in 2011 but struggled to grow under competitive pressure from free rivals such as Yelp, HomeAdvisor and Thumbtack. In an effort to boost consumer traffic, the site adopted a freemium model in 2016.

HomeAdvisor began as ServiceMagic and was acquired by IAC in 2004. In 2012, the site was rebranded and relaunched as HomeAdvisor. The company has been doing lots of consumer advertising to build its brand and has expanded into international markets.

HomeAdvisor had revenues of nearly $500 million in 2016 and was one of IAC’s most successful business units. Angie’s List had revenues of just over $320 million for the full year 2016.

Buying Angie’s List removes a competitor from the market and improves coverage for both sites.

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Time’s up! MarTech is here and it’s your last chance to attend

In just one week, the world’s largest independent marketing technology conference designed for senior-level marketers and marketing technology professionals happens at MarTech in San Francisco, May 9-11. The show is programmed with one specific goal: to illuminate successful real-world practices at the intersection of marketing, technology, and management — no matter which software products or analyst frameworks are employed.

MarTech features:

• 70+ presentations. See the agenda.

• 100 expert speakers

• A robust Expo Hall with more than 100 exhibitors

• Multiple networking events

You’ll leave inspired with real-life lessons, strategies and ideas to bring back and implement in your organization immediately.

Don’t miss this opportunity to join more than 2,500 martech professionals from the world’s’ top brands:

Two ways to attend: All Access Pass or Expo+ Pass

• Get the complete MarTech experience with an All Access pass for just $1,795, a $100 savings off on-site rates. In addition to the sessions, keynotes and networking, you get breakfast, hot lunches, snacks all day and conveniences that make attending MarTech a unique, productive and enjoyable experience. Register now.
• Dive into the martech ecosystem with an Expo+ Pass! Meet more than 100 amazing martech vendors. You’ll find solutions and providers, attend full-length presentations and connect with your peers at the 2 networking receptions including the Stackies awards ceremony. Buy an Expo+ pass now for just $99.

P.S. Not available for 3 days of intense learning? I recommend an Expo+ Pass where you can plan to spend the day meeting incredible vendors and participate in full length sessions from IBM, SnapApp, DemandFuel, Concentric, Lytics, LookBookHQ, MediaBeacon, Aprimo and Seismic. Register now.

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How to Create the Ultimate Marketing Plan

Four out of five B2B buyers start their journey with a web search. Nearly three quarters of the buying process is complete by the time a prospect is ready to engage with your sales team. With customers now in control, how do you create an effective marketing plan that resonates with target audiences?

Compelling content, martech solutions that support your strategies, reporting plans that establish and track funnel metrics and KPIs – are all critical to marketing success. But it’s more important than ever to understand how customers make purchase decisions before you can put the right plan in action.

Join our B2B marketing experts as they explain how you can develop a great marketing plan that builds your brand, drives demand, and improves the customer experience.

Register today for “How to Create the Ultimate Marketing Plan” produced by Digital Marketing Depot and sponsored by Act-On Software.

The post How to Create the Ultimate Marketing Plan appeared first on Search Engine Land.

SearchCap: Google similar audiences, display network & voice search

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Google rolls out similar audiences for Search and Shopping
  May 1, 2017 by Ginny Marvin

  Now out of beta, similar audiences for Search enables advertisers to target users searching for the same kinds of things as recent site visitors.

• Study: Q1 Google Display Network placements
  May 1, 2017 by Ted Ives

  Are you utilizing the Google Display Network in AdWords? Contributor Ted Ives shares some data on which site categories perform best.

• How to optimize for voice search
  May 1, 2017 by Sherry Bonelli

  Inspired by a recent presentation at SMX West, columnist Sherry Bonelli discusses why small businesses and local search marketers need to be thinking about voice search.

• Drive calls and customers with display ads
  Apr 28, 2017 by Digital Marketing Depot

  Consumers today view display ads on their smartphones. And when they convert, many prefer to call. Display advertising drove over 28 billion calls in 2016, and marketers must change how they measure and optimize display campaigns to be successful in 2017. Read this playbook from DialogTech and learn how to: prove the real impact of […]

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

• Paid search trends from Merkle’s Q1 report
• Google’s Chrome will add new ‘Not secure’ warnings later this year
• The future of local discovery
• Keyword tiering: A systematic way to juggle your AdWords priorities
• How to unlock marketing’s creative side for martech success
• What your paid search KPI says about you
• 10 experts advise how to powerfully pair growth marketing with SaaS product development
• Why your explainer video matters to your B2B customers

Search News From Around The Web:

Industry

• In Europe’s Election Season, Tech Vies to Fight Fake News, New York Times
• The UK wants new laws impose serious fines on Google (GOOG), Twitter (TWTR), and Facebook (FB) for hate speech, Quartz

Local & Maps

• Bing releases 3.67 Million Square KM of new imagery for Turkey, Greece, Argentina, On MSFT
• Google Local Knowledge Panel Tests Reviews Tab, Search Engine Roundtable
• The 2017 Queensland Floods in Sentinel-2 imagery, Google Earth Blog

Link Building

• What Makes Good Backlinks (& How to Build Them!), Search Engine People

Searching

• Google Continues Black Search Results User Interface Test, Search Engine Roundtable
• Send Recipe To Google Home Now Live, Search Engine Roundtable

SEO

• Ask Yoast: Give a division a separate domain?, Yoast
• On-Page SEO: Page Titles, SEM Rush

SEM / Paid Search

• Gain Deeper PPC Insights With The User Explorer Report, PPC Hero
• How AI & Machine Learning Will Impact Paid Advertising, PPC Hero
• SEMCopilot™ Revolutionizes PPC Account Management, PR Newswire

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Google rolls out similar audiences for Search and Shopping

AmsStudio / Shutterstock.com

Google announced the long-awaited rollout of similar audiences for Search on Monday. Similar audiences can be built from past site visitors — remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA). The company also officially announced the global availability of Customer Match targeting for Shopping campaigns.

Google first teased the expansion of similar audiences from display to search-based campaigns last May. With similar audiences for search, Google targets users searching for the same things as users recently added to RLSA lists –meaning it takes into consideration the kinds of searches users were performing when they landed — or even converted — on an advertiser’s site.

An example from Google:

Say you’ve created a remarketing list of people who bought running shoes from your sporting goods site. Instead of helping you reach broad groups of people interested in “running,” similar audiences will identify that people on this list tended to search for “triathlon training” and “buy lightweight running shoes” before coming to your site and making a purchase. Based on this, similar audiences will then find other people with similar search behavior, such as people who searched for ‘buy lightweight running shoes’.

Lists are constantly and automatically updated as users change their search activity. And, once a user visits a site, they’ll no longer be included on the similar audiences list.

Amy McNeil, head of digital marketing at Fiat Chrysler Automobiles US, which beta tested the similar audiences for search, told Google, “In less than two months, similar audiences for search delivered an 11 percent increase in clickthrough rate and 22 percent more conversions across our test campaigns.”

John Deere and GameStop were among the other beta testers.

Remarketing lists will automatically qualify for similar audiences expansion when they meet certain criteria, including having at least 1,000 cookies and enough recent participants who exhibited similar search behaviors. You’ll find them listed under Audiences in the Shared Library. Note that similar audience lists do not apply to sensitive categories.

Advertisers can apply similar audiences to Search and Shopping campaigns and add bid modifiers to the audiences.

Customer Match for Shopping campaigns allows advertisers to target existing customers with Shopping ads — for new styles and so on — in addition to text ads.

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Study: Q1 Google Display Network placements

One of the best ways to fill the early part of the online marketing funnel is to advertise on Google’s network of partner sites, the Google Display Network (GDN). Essentially, these are websites that are either showing AdSense ads or websites that show ads from DoubleClick (some of the GDN inventory is actually “remnant” inventory that no one made specific placement buys for on DoubleClick).

SEMCopilot, our AdWords management software for PPC account managers, collected data throughout Q1 from both beta testers and paying customers’ AdWords accounts; here is some analysis of their GDN placements.

How our data is organized

To make analysis of placements quick, SEMCopilot’s “Placement Insights” feature automatically sorts placements into 40+ categories. Google has its own categories you can use for exclusion purposes; we assume that most customers are already blocking porn or adult sites and so on. The purpose of our categories is to gain insights into where ads are running, for brand protection purposes and for performance analysis.

Based on our users data, the sites we’ve categorized represented 96 percent of the impressions they received on the Google Display Network in Q1.

Why bother categorizing sites?

Because of the number of sites on the GDN, simply examining a placement report is a pretty fruitless effort for most AdWords account managers. At best, they typically look at the top several hundred… then, when the number of clicks they are looking at gets down to one or two, they stop looking further. It’s a very long tail of sites.

Thus, organizing placement reports into categories makes it much easier to glean actionable insights. Below are actual quotes from users who have examined our Placement Insights Report — they’re illustrative of the surprises one often discovers:

“Hey, my ads are running on dating sites!”

“Hmm… what are all these political sites?”

“Whoa, why are my ads running on eBay?”

“What the heck are my ads doing on all these foreign-language sites?”

“Wow, [category] really gets a lot of conversions. Maybe I should do a placement campaign targeting those sites and bid up on them.”

The categories we examined

Most marketers can intuitively look at categories and rapidly decide on certain ones that won’t work for them. For instance, if you’re selling architectural design services, “Comic and Anime” is unlikely to be a high-performing category.

That said, for remarketing campaigns, you’re following your audience around, so who knows? Maybe they like those kinds of sites! The key is always to analyze your conversions and cost/conversion by category; then you can get a sense of where your advertising dollars should best be allocated:

SEMCopilot’s Placement Insights Categories

Okay, where are the ‘fake news’ and ‘extremist’ categories?

You can’t read Search Engine Land or Advertising Age these days without seeing tons of articles about “brand protection,” “fake news,” or how Google is profiting from some ads on some horrible website or allowing ads to run on some pro-ISIS website, or whatever. Just for the record, we’re not in a position of judging what news is fake or who is extreme, and we eagerly await Google’s improvements in those areas. That said… well, there are news sites, and there are news sites.

We do have a “News” category which contains mainstream news sites. We also have a “Viral Amusement” category that contains the type of websites I’m sure you’re familiar with — they appear to be newsy, but articles have provocative photos, with headlines ending in  “…and you’ll never believe what happened next!”– usually next to some AdSense ads about reducing belly fat (you know, those ads with the cartoon drawing of bananas).

Certainly some “fake news” sites may appear in our “Viral Amusement” category, but this is simply because we find that these types of sites don’t really perform as well as mainstream news sites do. And from a brand protection standpoint, often the pictures are NSFW and could result in your upper management asking you, “Why are our ads running on these sites?”

So, which categories performed best and worst in Q1?

Below are the four highest average cost-per-conversion categories across all SEMCopilot customers (top) and the four lowest (bottom).

Highest and Lowest Cost-per-Conversion Categories in Q1

One amazing anomaly that resulted in a very actionable idea

As we were examining the data, one thing really stuck out. Based on our categorization scheme, 96 percent of our customers’ impressions were covered. But the “Uncategorized” sites, while representing only 4 percent of impressions, represented 25 percent of spend, 35 percent of clicks, and a whopping 65 percent of conversions!

Our first theory was that this must be some sort of click fraud. Maybe there are sites out there on the GDN using bots that are automatically filling out forms, resulting in worthless leads, in the hope that you’ll placement target or bid up on them. We took a look, and although we did find four or five sketchy-looking sites with suspiciously high conversions, the volume wasn’t enough to influence the numbers much.

No, when we took the “Uncategorized” category and started categorizing the *converting* sites within it, we found that the vast majority (over 90 percent) were parked domains! Not only that, they were parked domains that were variations on the customer’s brand name!

As it turns out, parked domains are a GREAT place to advertise

For years, Google AdWords reps have been scolding me for leaving Parked Domains on in GDN campaigns. Clearly, they have been disabling them as a suggestion on some sort of checklist. I’ve always left them on because I suspect that people mistyping your brand name may navigate to your site.

Our data clearly bears this out; most of these suspicious-looking conversions were simply from parked domains that were either misspellings of or slight variations on the customer’s brand name. So they are really brand navigational queries. It may be irksome to pay a domain that is infringing, or maybe close to infringing on your trademark, but trust me, you want those customers.

Just don’t advertise on all of them

Of course, not all parked domains will perform well; only ones that are similar to your brand name seem to do the trick. I would suggest turning them on for a quarter and discovering which ones are working. Create a placement campaign for those, and bid way up on them — then turn off the AdWords “parked domains” category in your original campaign.

We roll out new features on a monthly basis, so rest assured I’ve just added a “Parked Domains” category into the hopper. This should make it really easy for our customers to identify likely brand variation domains that they should placement target.

In conclusion

The biggest actionable takeaways I see from the data are:

• YouTube may be worth testing placement targeting on, provided you layer on other targeting methods such as keyword targeting, due to its low CPA.  Note that I don’t mean video campaigns, I mean simply running GDN text (now called “responsive” format) ads targeting YouTube.
• Political sites actually have the potential to perform great for you, provided you’re not too worried about brand protection implications. (By “political sites,” I am largely referring to political news sites — e.g., breitbart.com, huffingtonpost.com, and so forth.) It could be they simply are less popular with advertisers and thus have not been bid up as much as more mainstream news sites. In fact, with the recent campaign against breitbart.com, I would imagine you can pick up a lot of traffic there at bargain CPCs.
• You’re absolutely crazy if you aren’t bidding on traffic on parked domains. Try it yesterday!

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How to optimize for voice search

dennizn / Shutterstock.com

The way people search for information online is changing. Increasingly, people are using voice search on their smartphones, tablets or voice assistants (like the Amazon Echo or Google Home devices) to search for information on the internet. Siri is your best friend if you’re using an Apple device, Google voice search is popular on Android devices and Microsoft’s Cortana is useful on your PC and smartphone using their app:

According to Hitwise, nearly 60 percent of searches are now performed on a mobile device. With more and more people using mobile devices to search, people often find it’s easier to use their voice to search instead of typing on tiny screens.

This means SEO professionals need to start thinking about content and SEO differently.

Searching by voice is a hot topic among forward-thinking SEO professionals. At SMX West 2017 last month, Benu Aggarwal had a popular session on the subject, “Optimizing Content for Voice Search and Virtual Assistants.” During that session, she gave some great tips on how SEOs can start thinking and planning for a different type of search strategy for voice searches.

A new world for search

Mobile devices, smartphones and smart home devices featuring digital assistants like Siri, Cortana, Alexa and Google Assistant are invading our lives.

These new voice devices and technology make it easier than ever for people to simply ask a question and get information from their device. This allows for a more natural way to interact with machines using a conversational voice. Using your voice, you can now play music, turn on your lights, search for a local pizza restaurant, order products and get information on everything from breaking news to the weather.

And interconnectivity between various devices is an interesting part of voice search technology. For instance, a Google Home tip can even show up on your desktop, giving you advice on how you can best use your Google Home voice assistant:

During her SMX West presentation, Aggarwal shared the follow stats:

This slide shows the importance of mobile and local search. But how might voice search factor in?

According to the 2016 Internet Trends Report, voice search is rapidly gaining market share:

In 2015, 1.7 million voice-first devices were shipped. In 2016, that number increased to 6.5 million devices. VoiceLabs predicts that in 2017, 24.5 million voice-first devices will be shipped.

The big question for SEO professionals is: How do you create a content and SEO strategy for this new way to search?

How to optimize for voice search

Since search engines were first introduced to the mainstream in the mid-1990s, users have learned how to succinctly enter keyword phrases to find information on the internet using a PC. Unlike search keyword phrases that you type into your computer, voice search is more conversational and natural in tone. Voice search is also typically mobile and often locally focused.

For example, when I traveled to San Jose for SMX West, my smartphone knew where I was physically located. So when I searched for a restaurant, my phone anticipated where I was (not in Cedar Rapids, Iowa), and the search results for restaurants were all in San Jose.

Because they’re more conversational, voice search queries are also usually longer than typical text keyword search queries.

Image Credit: Purna Virji, citing Bing data

It’s important to remember that the whole purpose of these new technologies is for the device to provide the best results for on-the-go searchers. To do this, the devices try to find easily identifiable, short and relevant pieces of content to serve back to the searcher. Here are some tips that can help you optimize for voice search.

What are people searching for?

According to the Internet Trends Report 2016, people are using voice search for a variety of searches. With an estimated 22 percent searching for local content and information, local businesses (and agencies that do local SEO) need to start strategizing for local voice search.

Claim your Google My Business listing

If you haven’t claimed your Google My Business listing yet, what are you waiting for? It’s time! Claiming and optimizing Google My Business is a great way for Google to find out more information about your business, like the category of business you’re in, your address, phone number, business hours and more.

Since many voice searches are local in nature, having your Google My Business listing claimed and up-to-date can help increase your chances of showing up when a voice search is done pertaining to your local business, location or business category.

Conversational keywords

Now keywords are no longer just keywords. Keywords in the voice search world are long-tail+. The “plus” refers to the conversational phrases that you need to add when optimizing for conversational voice search.

Your keyword strategy must now be more conversational in nature and mimic how real people talk and ask questions verbally. Start thinking about the types of questions you get when customers call you on the phone to ask questions about your business, then start documenting and recording the exact words they use when they talk to your customer service representatives.

Once you have a list of questions and statements your customers give you over the phone, you can then start creating content pages that focus on those longer, more conversational search terms.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages

A great way to use the aforementioned customer data is to create FAQ pages that focus on those long-tail+ conversational keyword phrases. Try to group common questions on the same page. Go for natural-sounding questions and phrases instead of the old SEO-keyword phrases you’re probably used to using. If you need to create several different pages so that the voice search technologies have a better chance of pulling information from your site, go for it!

Also, anticipate more direct questions from searchers. Searches like “best digital camera” will start to disappear, and hyper-specific searches will become more popular. Example: “Alexa, where can I find a waterproof video camera that works with Facebook Live?” Offer quick, succinct answers to questions that voice searchers are asking.

It can seem like a daunting task, but creating these individual pages and snippets of content centered around specific semantic questions that people are asking can not only help your site show up in voice search results, it can also increase your chances of appearing in a Google “Featured Snippet.”

Structured data markup

Use structured data markup (applying the correct schemas) to give these voice search devices even more information about your site and content. Structured data markup from schema.org is crucial for your site, as it defines more specific information and makes it easier for search engines to accurately parse your content and understand its context.

It’s a new world for SEO!

Voice search is not going away. It’s time SEOs start optimizing their sites for this brave new world of voice search — so they’re not left behind.

View Benu Aggarwal’s full presentation from SMX West here:

Optimizing Content for Voice Search and Virtual Assistants By Benu Aggarwal from Search Marketing Expo – SMX

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