Sean describes how to optimize ad extensions using SEM best practices. He said that analyzing the performance can teach marketers what's appealing to customers. He explains how to optimize campaigns based on sitelinks. Look at the performance of each to determine what's driving the highest engagement. The system will choose the most valuable to users. If something isn't serving, marketers should consider rewriting or exchanging it for another message.

How can marketers reduce their cost per acquisition without reducing bids? Google tackles the question in a weekly video series. It's important to maintain a high quality score. Two big factors Google considers when serving a paid search ad are bid and quality score. The more relevant the content, the higher the quality score. Shanna and Patrick explain.

Douglas Downey, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Brent Hecht, a University of Minnesota assistant professor, have teamed up to launch a beta version of Atlasify, a new search engine that invites users to explore new concepts by generating cartographic atlases about subjects of interest. Downey created Archie, one of the first attempt to search the Internet for information. 

Google My Business, the company's ecommerce spinoff, has a new ad for a Missouri gym that welcomes transgender men. The ad takes us through the process by which one little girl, turned woman, made to transition into a man. Google is the latest company striving to relate to all. 

Google made an update to Sheets on the Web, offering even more ways to visualize and analyze data. Marketers can now use data labels to display the exact values of bars and points in charts, choose different shapes and symbols for data points in both line and scatter charts, and move and resize charts more easily. The platform also lets marketers use Google Sheets without Internet access. People can now insert images into Sheets even when they’re not online, provided they’re working in Chrome and have turned on offline access. 

Former Apple CEO John Sculley calls Tesla's Elon Musk, Google's Larry Page, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg three examples of "adaptive innovators." He calls Zuckerberg brilliant for acquiring Whatsapp, a four-year old startup with 560 million users and no revenue, for $19 billion. It was part of a "brilliant" strategy to pivot toward mobile. Sculley points out that Facebook almost missed the mobile evolution, and calls what happened at Facebook during the past three years an example of a "remarkable adaptive innovator" story of a public company.

What's the link between external linking and search engine query ranking? A study examines the top 50 Google search results for approximately 15,000 keywords to determine if links matter in Google search query rankings. It allowed researchers to examine not only what factors correlate with higher search rankings, but also how frequently those characteristics are seen.  

Josh McCoy runs down what he calls four "silly" SEO mistakes such as title element negligence, and open graph tagging. He also tells marketers how to fix the blunders. For example, open graph tagging requires marketers to remember the piece may post to a social site. Many of the tags include titles not read well in social sites. He suggests using a tool to review a sample of the page and how it will appear.

Pinterest said Tuesday that it is releasing a minor update to its search engine on mobile designed to make the interface easier to use. Streamlined search suggestions allow Pinterest to automatically start recommending searches as the user types in a search query, and provides an option to filter out pins in their search results based on parameters such as identifying pinners or boards. Sarah Tavel explains.

Google will pay up to $40,000 to security researchers who find bugs in Android devices. The program aims to monitor security of third-party software on Android OS by telling developers to stop using programming libraries known to be out of date in their applications. The rewards are given on a sliding scale. Developers who want to claim Google's bounty must show vulnerabilities affecting the company's Nexus 6 and Nexus 9.