It’s the most important day of the year, my birthday. It’s also a great day to be writing The ONeil Edit, because this week there was plenty to cover. Not the least of which was the Zillow news. That news alone could be the entire contents of this newsletter but alas, other things also happened in the world of digital marketing for home builders this week. For example, GMB is no more, henceforth it shall be called Google Business Profile. Plus a whole lot more from the land of Google. Let’s dive in!
Zill-OWW!
Um so yeah, nearly $400 million in the hole, Zillow has closed its iBuying and is laying off a quarter of its workforce. That’s quite a loss. It’s almost like they don’t understand how the real estate market works. That’s a bit of an exaggeration but it doesn’t feel that far off the mark. Like how did it take them over $350 million in losses to realize that they’d made a serious error? At any rate, it doesn’t affect home builders directly, but it will certainly have ripple effects. And where does Zillow go from here?
GOOGLE GAGGLE
The rest of today is covering news in the Googleverse. It’s like the Metaverse but different. As mentioned above, GMB → GBP. Other than changing the name, Google has now also decided that you can claim, verify, and edit the profile from within search and maps. This should make that process a little easier on businesses. No big changes for those who have already gone through the process in the platform FKAGMB.
Speaking of the platform FKAGMB, it drives more local leads than organic search. This isn’t really that surprising since a GMB listing often looks more authentic and reliable than search results to users. We can also attest that GMB is a formidable source of leads for the clients that track clicks from their Google Business Profiles.
There are also some changes coming in Search Console for both its API and Page Speed Insights. The API is expanding to show data for both the Discover and News while also adding in regex capabilities. Both of these functionalities are available on the actual Search Console so this is a nice bonus for using the API when streamlining your data consumption. As for the Page Speed Insights, the revamp aims to make it easier to read, understand, and digest the information it provides while also modernizing the look and making it clear how the data is calculated. Yay for this!
On the other side of Google, they’re now offering conversion goals in Google Ads which groups goals into categories to help with bidding optimization.
“There are three types of conversion goals:
Standard goals — Conversion actions added by the advertiser, which are then automatically grouped into conversion goals based on their conversion category type (e.g., “Purchases,” “Contacts” or “Submit lead forms”).
Account-default goals — The standard conversion goals (above) that you have designated as your account default. When you create a new campaign, all account-default goals in your account are selected for optimization by default.
Custom goals — Goals that advertisers can create and add any combination of primary (used for bidding) and secondary conversion (not used for bidding) actions.”
In addition to conversion goals, Google Ads is now also offering advertisers the ability to take more advantage of the first party data they have collected by sharing it with Google through something they are calling PPID’s – Publisher Provided Identifiers. As we mentioned in HF&B a couple weeks ago, first party data is going to be more and more relevant, useful, and powerful in your digital marketing toolbox. This is just one example of how it can be used.
Woah that’s a whole lot of Google!
I’ll end on that note. I’m off to complete my to-do list before enjoying a homemade dinner of my favorite foods with my good friends this evening!
