The WordStream Blog

Hey, everyone! Welcome back to the blog for another online advertising news round-up. We’ve got seven stories for you this week: Google changing the way it interprets nofollow links, Facebook testing in-app checkout, and more! Let’s dive in.

1. Google announces changes to nofollow links

You know those people who say, “Oh, man—I just cannot function before I’ve had my morning coffee.”

It's an unoriginal take on coffee and being a person, but it serves as the perfect analogy for the relationship between Google Merchant Center and Google Shopping.

Google...

Local businesses are up against it. With Amazon dominating ecommerce and Walmart dominating brick-and-mortar, many local businesses are struggling to compete.

Let's face it: These aisles aren’t going anywhere.

Effective local lead generation strategies can help you do so.  While other digital marketing strategies put you in touch with the...

Although it’s always been billed as a platform that’s very approachable to every small business owner, Google Ads can be very intimidating to use. On top of that, Google Ads isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it solution. It takes constant attention and optimizations to make sure it’s always performing as well as it can. For someone like me, whose full-time job is managing campaigns, the time...

According to a recent study by the Karpor Center for Social Impact and Harris Poll, LGBTQ+ employees are more likely to experience bullying in the workplace than their non-LGBTQ+ colleagues, and this bullying often contributes to leaving the company or tech in general. Another key finding of the study: 67% of LGBTQ+...

Making a compelling and high-converting landing page might sound simple, but every marketer knows far too well how challenging this can be. WordStream found that 80% of traffic goes to just the top 10% of landing pages.

So now you introduce the element that your company is a startup, and now you...

For the first time since I was four years old, September doesn’t mean back-to-school season for yours truly. Gone (for now) are my days of pens, pencils, notebooks, and fluffernutters.

(Well, I guess there’s nothing really stopping me from continuing to eat fluffernutters for lunch—concerns about my “outward appearance” and “life expectancy” notwithstanding.)

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Facebook has one of the most advanced ads managers we have access to in the self-serve PPC space. There are lots of campaign objectives, each with their own set of best practices to follow. This allows for an incredible level of specificity. But to a new marketer, or even for those who don’t visit Facebook's...

Sometimes a successful paid media campaign requires the “less is more” approach. Negative audiences can help guide just the right users down the funnel. Negative audiences can also help keep the completely unwanted traffic from seeing your ads. The perfect combination of targeting plus exclusions may give you both the cost per...

The percentage of total retail sales attributed to ecommerce has been growing with each passing quarter for years. That healthy market is good news, but on the down side it points to increasing competition. For each individual ecommerce business, it can be harder (...