This week: Google reveals search term insights for PMax campaigns, the March Core Update causes major SERP volatility, and Meta launches AI-powered ad tools.
1. New Report for PMax Campaigns: Search Terms
Google released a new feature for Performance Max campaigns, bringing a new report to the forefront of its capabilities: Search Terms.
With this new feature advertisers have full visibility into the search terms and search queries are actually triggering their ads.
This gives advertisers a clearer look into keywords to target, negative keywords to add, and other ad placement options.
While this update isn’t available to all advertisers yet, marketers are excited – this new report is bringing PMax campaigns to the same level of control that advertisers have when running Search campaigns.
Expect your account to see this new result in the upcoming weeks.
2. Observations from Google’s March Core Update Rollout
It’s been a little over a week since Google started rolling out the March Core Update, and publishers are seeing some turbulence in their search results.
According to Local SEO Guide, the week of March 10th saw the highest SERP volatility in over a year. This tracks with Google starting the roll out on March 13th. Some of the biggest trends to note are:
- Yelp.com, Quora.com, and Reddit.com are seeing the biggest increase in visibility.
- Two forums, DIYChatroom and GarageJournal dropped, despite a 1,000% increase in the past year.
- Google is continuing to fight against programmatic content that is written with SEO in mind.
- There’s been a cross-sector impact, meaning it affected a wider more diverse set of sites
Additionally, some of Google’s tracking and visibility tools experienced issues midway through the update in the middle of last week. Marketers reported incomplete keyword data, which showed large traffic drops.