A few days back, search engine giant, Google rolled out a new feature “Add a Pitstop” within their Google Maps. This feature is presently available for iOS devices in the countries where navigation is offered. Earlier, for viewing the direction of the location outside the route, one needs to leave the navigation mode. But, with this new update, individuals can now add a detour, or ‘pit-stop’ to their route, while still staying within the navigation mode.

This feature was launched in October 2015 for Android devices, and now it is has finally made a way to iOS. This amazing feature can only be accessed in the navigation mode. In the navigation mode, individuals have to tap the top left magnifying glass option, and search for the next destination where they like to stop at.

On tapping the magnifying glass option, a number of locations, like gas stations, restaurants, grocery stores, coffee shops and many others, are displayed that individuals can choose as per their requirements. Users can even search the name or address of the location they exactly know where to go.

In the search results, individuals can even see review stars for the locations and the estimated time for which the pit stop will add to your trip. While driving, users can even use voice commands to add detours to their routes. Users need to update their Google Maps app from the App store to enjoy the benefits of this feature.

Google App Streaming is now showing up in the Android Google App search results. Individuals can now preview the apps before downloading them, directly from the search results.

Last year in November 2015, search engine giant, Google prototyped app streaming on a few selected apps. But, now it appears like the app streaming feature is available for most of the apps in the Google mobile search results.

The requirements for utilizing this feature apply: Individuals must be running Android L or greater and should be on Wi-Fi when searching within the Google Search App. The app that comes up may have a button “Try Now” adjacent to the green “Install” button. On clicking the “Try Now” button, the app streaming starts right on your device – in real time.

The ability of app streaming is that it allows individuals to try the app before installing it on the device.

The picture below represents the results for a search on [word search]:

When the button “Try Now” is clicked, an app streamer is launched that allows users to utilize the app for a limited time duration:

Users can easily see a text message appearing at the bottom that reads, “App streamed by Google (beta).” On clicking the banner present at the bottom, users will see options like to install the app, learn more about app streaming, go back to the Google search results or close out the window.

The user interface looks similar to the examples from November, but now it looks like it is working for many apps under the conditions mentioned above.

Search engine giant’s AdWords Automated Bidding gets an overhaul and has added with portfolio bidding strategies. This will help the advertisers in setting different CPA targets at the ad group level within the same bid strategy.

Recently, Google has announced that they are now revamping AdWords automated bidding. Some of these changes will be semantic, but the workflow is also getting an update

Here are the naming changes:

• The flexible strategies will now be called “portfolio” bid strategies. This change indicates that in some cases a single strategy can be fully applied across multiple campaigns, ad groups and keywords.
• Strategy for a single campaign will now be known as a “standard” bid strategy.
• Target CPA is the new name for Conversion Optimizer that will be used for all the new bid strategies for simplifying the nomenclature. The Target CPA can still be applied as a “standard” or a “portfolio” bid strategy.

Following are the functionality updates of the Google AdWords:

• Advertisers will now be able to create or add the bidding strategies from their Campaign Setting tab without diving into Shared Library.
• Portfolio bid strategies for Target CPA will now have different CPA goals for separate ad groups. One of the examples of this update is, “If you’re a clothing retailer with multiple ‘Accessories’ ad groups in a bidding portfolio, you may want to set a lower CPA target for ‘Socks’ compared to other product categories with higher average order value.”

These portfolio bid strategies can’t be applied to video or universal app campaigns.

Back in December, search engine giant, Google introduced new reporting features for automated bidding. All these updates will be reflected in the users’ accounts in the upcoming few weeks.

Social Media Giant, Facebook, recently introduced a new audience optimization tool that allows advertisers to target organic posts to their specific audiences. This tool has the ability to make posts more relevant in people’s news feeds that are being displayed to Facebook users may keep them engaged.

While making a Facebook post, users will soon get an option to add interest tags. Through these tags, Facebook will then prioritize the content in the news feeds of the people who share same interests and tastes.

Social media giant stated that there is a slight difference between this new audience optimization tool and the existing Interest Targeting feature, which doesn’t restrict the post’s reach unless stopped by the user.

Talking more about this new development, one of the Facebook’s staff members stated, “You can exclude sub-sections of your audience from seeing certain posts if that’s how you want to target them. For example, if you’re going to publish something that would only be relevant to your local area, you can exclude non-locals from seeing it. In addition to location, you can also restrict posts based on language, age, or gender.”

This feature comes along with new audience insight capabilities and allows advertisers to check the performance of the post with breakdowns of total reach by interest tag. The data received from the reach and engagement metrics for each interest tag can help advertisers in targeting the right audience for their future posts. Plus, it can also help in knowing the segments of the audience that one might have not ever thought to engage with.

Adding to the statement, the representative stated, “The variety and amount of content available to people is growing, so having more information about who is likely to be interested in your content helps us get your posts to the people who will care about them most.”

Here the following steps that can help individuals in enabling the tool before accessing it.

• Go to your Page.
• Click ‘Settings’ in the top right hand corner.
• Click ‘General’ in the tab column on the left side of the page.
• Find the row labeled ‘Audience Optimization for Posts’ in the middle of the page and click ‘Edit.’.
• Check off the box that allows you to begin using the feature.

The Audience Optimization tool will be available for English language pages pretty soon through the page post composer, graph API, third-party publishing tools, and Instant Articles.

Google’s non-paid modules are only available for candidates appearing for the 2016 elections

Search Engine Giant, Google is currently giving the Republican and Democratic candidates a special place in 2016 searches. As per their saying, the company has recently launched an experimental feature that will generate a prominent place in the horizontal carousel in search results for the candidate’s messages and contents.

However, it is not an ad unit. The results will appear in a similar fashion as the Twitter posts presently appear for candidate-related results. But, the module is more flexible. The features of this latest add-on are:

• Candidates will be able to publish the text with lengths up to 14,400 characters
• Candidates will be able to add up to 10 images or videos per post

Talking more about the upcoming Republican debate, Google stated in their official BlogSpot that, “Political search interest spikes 440 percent on average during live televised debates as people turn to the web to learn more about the candidates and their platforms.” Through this new candidate card, candidates will get access to speak a mouth of words directly to the voters and control some of the content in search about them.

As shown in the picture, candidates can incorporate text, images and videos for directly communicating with their voters. This feature will be live for the upcoming televised Republican debate on January 28 and will continue throughout the election in November.

The above picture shows that the changes appearing in mobile. Presently, there are no corresponding pictures showing the desktop view, but for sure they will also appear in PC search results.

Search engine giant is planning to show the new ranking cards based on what their ranking algorithms figure out whether a searcher wants to know about the candidate or wants to directly hear him or her. This will work on the same methodology as Google determines how and when to show Knowledge Graph results.

With this feature of Google, the present Democratic and Republican presidential candidates will get access to share & supply content and use the module. Moreover, Google has also indicated that the result of these cards will not replace Twitter in search results.

However, Google has yet no plans to expand this feature beyond politics to commerce or other content areas.

Bing recently dropped two features from its own Bing Ads Intelligence, but they will be present in the web based user interface.

Recently, Bing made an announcement that they are eradicating two features from Bing Ads Intelligence. The two features that advertisers will not be noticing from the New Year are Auction Insights and the Opportunities tabs.

Though being dropped from Bing’s Ads Intelligence, these features will still be present and available within the Bing Ads web user interface.

Advertisers can track Auction Insights feature in the “Details” drop-down menu in the Campaigns, Ad Groups and Keywords tabs. They can also export them. Here is the picture showing Auction Insights in Details menu.

While Broad Match Opportunities can be found in the “Opportunities” in Bing Ads web based user interface.

For those looking for more information about these changes can visit Bing’s official blog.

Google is currently testing the new schema to markup local business data for updating the local information of any business.

Search engine giant, Google recently announced that they are adding a new structured markup page that will help businesses in providing local business data to Google.

Google presented the document about these changes and wrote “We are currently piloting this feature with a restricted set of initial data providers. We hope to soon open up the feature so any provider who implements spec-compliant markup is eligible to participate.”

Though being in testing phase, the benefit of this new schema is that now businesses can easily markup their web pages and can efficiently communicate these updates to their local business data to Google. These changes by search engine giant can make the process simpler for both Google as well as local businesses in showing more accurate and real-time data in the Google local knowledge panel that shows up in the search results.

What’s more interesting is that Google released the Google My Business API last week that aimed at making the task simpler for the businesses to send updated local business information in a programmatic manner to Google.

This new schema is far different as in this the markup is added directly to the website. When Googlebot crawls the site and notices the markup, the latest data found can be used by Google to update the local business data.

Although the update is yet not out for public, but you can likely start adding this markup to your own site.

Still in the process, AMP pages are all set to see their public debut in Google search in early 2016.

Google has recently announced that “soon in the upcoming year” it is planning to support fast-loading AMP within Google search.

AMP implies Accelerated Mobile Pages, which is a project that is backed by Google and has gained huge support from publishers, platforms like Twitter, analytics tools and  even from advertising networks and platforms.

Google has recently introduced a specialized version of Google search to check how AMP pages work. But, now Google is saying that the main thing  would be coming to regular Google searches soon in the year 2016. From a post that the company made today:

Google will be starting to send traffic to your AMP pages in Google Search in the start of the coming year 2016 and they are also planning to share more details related to timings very soon.

Meanwhile, the AMP Project invites everyone from all over the globe to take part in the discussion on GitHub, and also inspires you to begin experimenting with building AMP pages as soon as possible.

Google AdWords brings cross-device conversions into conversions column. Now, they are no longer separated from single-device and single-browser conversion counts used for reporting and bid automation.

Search engine giant, Google has recently included cross-device conversions into their Conversions column in AdWords. Now the cross-device conversion data will be available at the keyword level, which can be used for informing conversion-based bid strategies. These conversions are used for measuring transactions started on one device or browser and terminated on another.

A reminder: From the middle of this month, the Conversions column will only include conversion actions that digital marketers have selected for optimization.  With Google’s previous update, the “estimated” was dropped from cross-device conversions. The previous as well as current changes show that Google is widely accepting and has confidence in the numbers behind cross-device conversions since they first launched it in 2013.

Steps for setting-up cross-device conversions for automated bidding

For seeing cross-device conversions as a conversion signal in automated bidding strategies, users need to enable it in Google AdWords.

The first step involves navigating to Conversions under the Tools tab of AdWords UI and clicking on settings. Make sure that the Conversion bid metric is set to “Conversions”, instead of “Converted Clicks”. Setting up conversions is essential, since cross-device conversions are not counted with Converted Clicks metric.

In the next step, simply check the box below the conversion bid metric setting for including cross-device conversions in the Conversions column. This will enable the cross-device conversion data and will inform about any conversion-based bid strategy.

Cross-device conversions are available in Search, Display as well as Shopping campaigns. This update is live and can be seen by the advertisers in their Google AdWords account.

Every digital marketer is aware how Google functions and provides rankings to websites. But what about the queries that have never been searched before?

In order to satisfy first-time queries, the search engine giant, Google does not fully rely on their existing search algorithms. As per the report from Bloomberg, Google uses an AI known as RankBrain to provide results for first-time search queries.

As per an estimate, 15% of search queries entered in Google each day are unique and RankBrain is used for finding the optimum answers to these queries.

One of the spokespersons of Google talked more about RankBrain, “For the past few months, a “very large fraction” of the millions of queries a second that people type into the company’s search engine have been interpreted by an artificial intelligence system, nicknamed RankBrain.”

What makes RankBrain different from the existing algorithm is its learning ability and efficacy at answering more ambiguous queries.

Elaborating on RankBrain’s abilities, the spokesperson stated, “If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly, making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries.”

RankBrain is only one out of the hundreds of signals that are used for determining how search results appear, but being in continuous use, it has become the third-most important signal for displaying search engine ranking results.

According to a Bloomberg report that showcases the quote of an engineer, “Google’s RankBrain AI has become so integral to search that turning it off would be like de-indexing half of Wikipedia.”

Senior Vice President of Google search, Mr. Amit Singhal gave the green signal earlier this year to roll out RankBrain across all the search queries. While RankBrain operates autonomously, it is still being continuously monitored and updated with new data.

Search engine giant, Google stated that their voice search is getting better and faster. Last week, Google announced the addition of its new computational models to its app. As per Google, these models are more accurate, have improved voice accuracy and are faster to respond to search query models.

An anonymous spokesperson stated that the Google Voice search in Google app has increasingly become 300 milliseconds faster. Depending on their device, for some folks, this new featured app will feel as much as 500 milliseconds faster.

The Google’s blog post has all the specific details regarding the efficiency of voice search becoming faster and more accurate. Talking about the new add-on features, Google stated that they used Connectionist Temporal Classification and sequence discriminative training techniques for improving the “neural network acoustic models.” Further briefing, Google stated, “They are extensions to the recurrent neural networks that make voice search on Google more accurate, especially in noisy environments, and they are blazingly fast!”

Though Google didn’t represent the metrics on the accuracy enhancements, but according to them the Google app is much more accurate and faster, based on the above described models.

Last week, Google rolled out its new feature, the Drag-And-Drop Report Editor for AdWords that will be incorporated over the next few months into all AdWords accounts.

This new feature is welcomed by all those promoters who like to have pivot tables in Excel, instead of repeatedly extracting data even to make a small tweak in a report.

But for those who are less familiar about Excel and its features, the pivot tables can prove to be a powerful method of organizing the rows of the data. Once this Drag-And-Drop Reporter Editor is added to your account, Google will guide you through the procedure of creating your first report, the first time you click on the Reports tab.

The three great features of this reporting update as shared by Jason Tabeling, partners at Rosetta, are as follows:

1. The Ability to Change Data Inputs Quickly

Once you pull a report into the Excel and you realize that the data doesn’t match the answer to your question, you go back and pull a different set. But each time you pull down a report, you need to recreate the pivot table, but with this feature you can alter data inputs, date ranges, and so on easily and very quickly.

2. Filter Functionality

Quite often when you need to view the report layer by layer, through filter feature you can pull specific keywords or ad group level details and then dive in.

3. Graphs

Data has no value until it is not sketched into a pretty graph. But Drag-And-Drop Report Editor feature does a nice job by representing data on basic charts as well as graphs. It allows you to visualize the data easily and quickly, besides allowing you to pull data into the presentation that includes schedules and email reports.

Three things to be expected from Google in its future releases:

1. The Ability to Create Formulas

Having the ability of creating custom metrics can be valuable for the individuals. Just like, to evaluate true ad effectiveness, one can measure the CTR conversion rate.

2. Report Editor Functionality Across Accounts in the My Client Center (MCC)

To meet varying demands of the clients, individuals need to create a benchmark report. But for preparing the report one needs to pull the data from multiple clients. This process can be facilitated by using some of the features from the Report Editor in the MCC.

3. Groupings

Great way to quickly pull altogether different dates and branded terms versus non-branded terms. If individual only wants to see quarters, then they can expand the data into different sets of quarters and can see the monthly views.