Today In SEO & Search News: January 24, 2017

It's been an interesting past 24 hours in search. Here are the top stories we've been following: How Google's Q4 Search Growth Got There Ginny Marvin over at Search Engine Land analyzes Merkle's latest Digital Marketing Report and explains where the continued growth from Google comes from. CPC was down 0.5% so how is Google continuing to increase their profits? Voice-First Device Growth On The Rising Quickly VoiceLabs.ca has released a report on the growth of voice-first devices and it's staggering. These always-on, intelligent Personal Assistants are set to be in over 30 million homes by the end of the year. That's more than tripling their current presence. The report covers a lot of the ins-and-outs and challenges facing the devices. Google Testing New Ad Label Over on Search Engine Land Ginny Marvin (sound familiar?) is reporting on a new ad label that Google is testing out to label their AdWords ads in results. The indicator is now green text surrounded by a green box. A picture is worth a thousand words so here's what is being tested. Bing Ads Syncs With AdWords I like to give credit where it's due but I almost don't want to in this case as it's getting redundant but ... Ginny Marvin over at Search Engine Land reported earlier today of a new feature in Bing Ads that let's advertisers simply sync their campaigns with Google AdWords. While the engine's are different (as are the users) and you still need to give each the personal touch this will help advertisers low on time to advertise on Bing. Automated Tests For Google Tag Manager’s dataLayer A timely article as I'm dealing with a scenario like this presently Google Tag Manager guru Simo Ahava just published a great piece on testing for Google Tag Manager's dataLayer and the inevitable issues you will face when deploying a new site. Sadly I'm not working presently in an environment where I can deploy his solution but it would (and it's too late now) but this is one for the bookmarks. YouTube Getting More Advertiser-Friendly Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal reported yesterday after publishing our last Today In Search of a recent Google announcement on their efforts to aid advertisers as more of their video views are on mobile devices. One of the biggest changes is the use of user account information (demographics, past searches, etc.) to influence ad targeting. There's a lot in it so if you're interested in video ads it's a recommended read. Google Using It's Dominance To Flog It's Own Wares A Wall Street Journal study reported on by Search Engine Journal reveals that 91% of the time Google is advertising it's own products at the top of the search results. Google argues that they're winning based on ad quality and what they're willing to pay for the ads. Of course to me that sounds a bit like me being willing to take money out of one account and give it to my other account account and call the first process a loss of some kind. Google Update Coming? Barry Schwartz over on Search Engine Roundtable reported today on rumblings over on the WebmasterWorld forum of significant fluctuations in the results. Some of the major tools seem to confirm this so it appears we may be about to watch an update roll out. Find Today's Events On Google Maps Also over on Search Engine Roundtable comes the discovery that Google appears to now be labeling today's events on Google Map results. So if you have events going on, be sure to use the Markup that let's Google know. And that's it for the day. If you know of any additional top news stories