It is good practice to keep up to date with the industry you are in regarding news story. For this reason, here are the latest topics of conversation within the world of pay per click advertising for February 2015. Not only are this stories interesting, they may also affect the future for PPC…
 

Tweets Included On Google Search

Since Twitter first started as a mainstream social media website, the tweets user share with the world have never been implemented into Google search results. However, this is about to change. Twitter are in the process of sharing data with Google so that tweets will be visible on Google search pages as soon as they are shared.
 
Verdict: This is a step in the right direction for Twitter since they want to spread their social media site as much as possible online – the integration of it with Google will definitely help this. However, is Google going to be spammed by 150 characters now? Yahoo and Bing are already implementing tweets into their search engines so for Google to do the same means this is something that could benefit both Google and Twitter.
 
 

Forget Google – Apple Search Engine Could Happen

In recent days, Apple posted a job opening for a ‘Engineering Project Manager – Apple Search’. Here is part of what the job has in store for the successful candidate:

Apple seeks a technical, driven and creative program manager to manage backend operations projects for a search platform supporting hundreds of millions of users. Play a part in revolutionizing how people use their computers and mobile devices. Manage operational projects that support groundbreaking technology and the most scalable big-data systems in existence.

This could suggest that Apple is potentially expanding into the search engine market to compete with the likes of Google, Yahoo and Bing, which, in itself, is a huge step forward for Apple.

Verdict: Let’s be clear about a few things. Apple has many job openings for new and innovating projects and the majority of these projects never make it to market. Considering Google make the majority of their money through PPC and search engines, it does make sense for Apple to compete since they can automatically make the default search engine on all of their millions of devices as Apple search. Saying this, it is going to take some will power to knock Google off top spot…
 
 

Bing’s Quality Score Has Been Updated

Bing has updated its score: not the value but the terminology behind the value. Bing’s quality score is now measured with resepct to three variables being:

• Expected click through rate
• Advert relevance
• Landing page experience (which is then split into landing page user experience, keyword relevance and landing page relevance).

It should be highlighted that the value Bing gives out to campaigns will not change. The idea behind the update is to make it more transparent to advertisers about their quality score.
 
Verdict: This is a good step for Bing. Not only have they moved how they report quality score to the industry standards, Bing have made advertiser’s lives that bit easier by enabling them to directly compare their adverts across a wide range of websites.