Greg Sterling says, “This morning, Google held a meeting to provide updates about its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) publishing initiative. The project launched as an open-source effort with a range of publishers on October 7 this year. Some see AMP as Google’s answer to Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News. The primary objective of AMP is to deliver faster-loading mobile web pages and thereby improve the mobile web user experience (and the Google search experience). The company previously said that it will support AMP within Google search “early next year.” Today, it confirmed... [...]

Patricio Robles says, “Effectively marketing a mobile app might be one of the most difficult tasks a marketer can face. Research has shown that a quarter of mobile apps that are installed are never even used, and churn can exceed 50% for those that aren’t used twice within the first 12 hours after download. For marketers, this dynamic can be very costly. Significant amounts are spent driving app installs that don’t even produce use, and high churn among users that do use apps produces a never-ending need to invest in driving app installs. Sometimes, the economics of mobile apps... [...]

Barry Levine says, “As marketers wrap up their strategies for this holiday season, search engine optimization (SEO) is obviously at the top of their to-do lists. But site search, Swiftype co-founder and CEO Matt Riley told me, is a different thing. So we pinged him for a few pointers. “They are totally different universes,” he said, with “different use cases.” His company, one of a variety of providers and methods for site search, handles this function for several hundred thousand desktop/mobile sites and apps, including those of Qualcomm, Dr. Pepper and SurveyMonkey. In the world... [...]

Zak Stambor says, “One Google ad lets a shopper ‘test drive’ an app for up to 60 seconds, while the other lets a marketer integrate some of the app’s elements into an ad. Google Inc. is testing two new AdMob ad units that aim to help retailers and other developers persuade consumers to download their mobile apps. Google’s AdMob mobile ad network lets marketers place ads within mobile apps. One of the ads, called Interactive Interstitials, lets retailers showcase product galleries and  highlight elements within their apps. Rocket Internet-owned Southeast Asian and Australian retailer... [...]

Patricio Robles says, “If questions lingered about Google’s commitment to lead gen, the world’s most popular search engine answered them this week with the launch of Google Compare for mortgages. The service, which helps consumers shop for a mortgage from multiple lenders, was announced earlier this year and is now available in California. Google plans to launch in other states soon. With Google Compare for mortgages, mortgage lenders can market themselves to potential customers on a cost-per-lead (CPL) basis, not the cost-per-click (CPC) model that earns Google billions of... [...]

Dharmesh Shah says, “If you’re like me, you probably use Google many times a day. But chances are, unless you’re a technology geek, you probably still use Google in its simplest form. If your current use of Google is limited to typing in a few words and changing your query until you find what you’re looking for, then I’m here to tell you that there’s a better way — and it’s not hard to learn. On the other hand, even if you are a technology geek and can use Google like the best of them already, I still suggest you bookmark this article of advanced Google search tips. Then,... [...]

Jennifer Slegg says, “For many SEOs, a glimpse at the Google’s Search Quality Rater’s Guidelines is akin to looking into Google’s ranking algorithm. While they don’t give the secret sauce to rank number one on Google, they do offer some incredible insight into what Google views as quality – and not-so-quality – and the types of pages they want to serve at the top of their search results. Last week, Google made the unprecedented move of releasing the entire Search Quality Rater’s Guidelines, following an analysis of a leaked copy obtained by The SEM Post. While Google released... [...]

Gianluca Fiorelli says, “Whenever Google announces something as important as a new algorithm, I always try to hold off on writing about it immediately, to let the dust settle, digest the news and the posts that talk about it, investigate, and then, finally, draw conclusions. I did so in the case of Hummingbird. I do it now for RankBrain. In the case of RankBrain, this is even more correct, because — let’s be honest — we know next to nothing about how RankBrain works. The only things that Google has said publicly are in the video Bloomberg published and the few things unnamed Googlers... [...]

Danny Sullivan says, “Google plans to rollout fast-loading AMP pages into its mobile search results early next year — and now it says there are advertising partners set to help publishers earn off those pages. Accelerated Mobile Pages — known as AMP for short — is a project backed by Google and intended to make pages appear super-fast for those using mobile devices. Since AMP was announced in October, it has gained support from publishers, platforms like Twitter, analytics providers and now today, advertising networks and platforms. The latest news came in a post that Google made... [...]

Matt McGee says, “Google has rolled out a new feature called Calculated Metrics that extends the power of Google Analytics by letting users create new metrics/reports that are based on the existing set of traditional metrics. For example, with calculated metrics, an e-commerce company could create a Revenue Per User metric by combining the traditional Revenue and Users data from Google Analytics. A Currency Conversion metric can be created by using the Revenue metric and doing some simple math — i.e., multiplying it by the current conversion rate for the target country. There’s been... [...]