OrderDynamics Monthly Google Updates Report – January 2013

After a few months of heavy changes across Google Platforms, December showed fewer changes and some useful improvements to Search, AdWords and Analytics to help improve the user experience with Google.

Google Search

Changes to Google Search in December were heavily focused on multi-language queries, and those related to simplifying travel plans.

On December 4, Google updated Knowledge Graph to support multi-language searches in Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian and Italian. This would enable queries in these languages to display same-language search results rather than that based on their search location (for example, an Italian search in Canada would yield both English and Italian results instead of just English results). Knowledge Graph was also optimized later in the month to display a Carousel with information and activities within a searched travel destination.

A day later, Google announced the redesign of Quick Answers search, which instantly displays at the top of SERPs information relevant to travel such as currency exchange rates, time difference, and the ability to check flight status by simply searching terms like “Euro exchange rate”, “time in country x” or the flight/airline number.  Later on December 19, Flight Explorer was launched to help plan vacations by displaying flight times and fares to multiple destinations on several dates, allowing users to plan extended trips across multiple stops. Flight Explorer also enables users to calculate total cost of a trip by including baggage fees, WiFi-enabled flights and price differences across seating classes; this function is available for flights to any destination that originate in Canada and the US.

The Hotel Finder feature also became more localized in France, Germany, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Italy and the UK that would display price, availability and Zagat rating.

Google tweeted on December 21 that they had rolled out the 23^rd update to Google Panda. The Update was estimated to affect 1.3% of English search queries, compared to 0.8% impact with the November Update. Some search engine optimization experts were surprised that there was an update at all in December when such changes could affect online retailers during the height of the holiday retail season.

Google Adwords

In December, Adwords introduced an additional column to the search term report that would display which keywords trigger an ad to show up when searched. This allows Adwords users to easily identify keywords that should be used to trigger their campaigns, queries that maybe irrelevant to the ad but trigger it anyway, and how counter-keywords can be used to prevent certain irrelevant terms from triggering an ad unnecessarily. 

Various updates to Double Click Search were launched on December 18:

• Offline conversions event API
• With this API, Adwords users can automatically upload conversions from in-store transactions and call centre orders, and edit conversions to account for returns, credits or fraud.
• Google Analytics website data
• This feature works with the recent Google Analytics Integration with the Adwords platform to help understand how click-throughs from search affect how customers interact with a website.
• Formula Columns
• These additional columns can be added to display customized data based on calculations preset by the Adwords user.
• Web Query
• This provides a URL that allows report data to be refreshed and downloaded to Excel so that reports do not need to be manually imported and downloaded.

Google Analytics

On December 6, Google Analytics updated Tag Manager, which was launched in October to provide built-in tag templates that automatically input the tag into a webpage’s code rather than having to copy and paste it manually. The update saw the introduction of new Vendor Tags to integrate solutions from various technology vendors for measurement in Analytics. The following Vendor Tags are currently available, with more to be added later:

• comScore Unified Digital Measurement Tag
• Turn Conversion Tracking & Data Collection Tags
• Media6Degrees Universal Tag
• Bizo Business Data Insight Tag
• Neustar Ad Advisor Tag