Inventory shifts. The Web site content changes. Queries evolve. Reaching consumers with relevant ads as they search for products can become challenging. Google steps through how to use Dynamic search ads as a real-time tool to overcome the challenges. it allows marketers to reach consumers without maintaining a keyword list and taking advantage of customized ads.

Google will test a feature beginning Thursday that allows the presidential candidates of both parties to produce content that will appear in a window on the results page when a user conducts a relevant search. USA Today reports that text, images and video will appear in a carousel of eight cards that the campaigns control. The cards update as new ones come into the carousel, but the older cards will not disappear from the Internet. If one goes viral, it will show up on a Google search on its own, according to the report.

Despite all the excitement from online sales, 95% of U.S. consumer spending occurred offline in local markets during the 2015 holiday season. On smartphones, it increasingly occurs via voice calls. In fact BIA/Kelsey points to numbers from Marchex that pegs call-influenced consumer spending at $1 trillion in the U.S. The majority of these calls originate in mobile search. Here's an update on what SMBs need to know.

Google has launched a free course explaining the machine learning technique that underpins so many of its services. The course is available on Udacity, a nonprofit educational site, and is estimated to take about three months to complete at a rate of six hours of work a week, according to The Verge. The class isn't for beginners, but is rather intended to help engineers and data scientists get to grips with deep learning as well as TensorFlow — the in-house machine-learning software that Google open-sourced last November.

Microsoft in December removed its financial support from FairsSearch, an organization behind multiple legal threats to Google, Re/code reports. The Redmond, Washington company joined FairSearch shortly after its founding in 2010. Mark Bergen provides some analysis to explain why this step is important.

Some Google job posts appear to indicate the company is looking to expand its hardware virtual reality offerings. TechCrunch explains that until now Google's VR offering has been confined to Cardboard, which allows consumers to experience rudimentary virtual reality with cheap headsets attached to smartphones. Now it appears Google is working on hardware devices that do more.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has created a lexicon of descriptions and methodologies to simplifying data segments and techniques that includes search engines. The updated version offers a "uniform" language beyond a glossary of terms to help marketers better understand the components of data. It defines data-generation systems such as devices, delivery systems, analysis, as well as definition and description of data segments and techniques.

Hanapin Marketing has published a infographic and white paper on the top five things marketers should do in their Google AdWords accounts. They include separating network to adding negative keywords. A link to a white paper in the post provides details on tracking conversions, and checking mobile performance.

It's always a challenge to create the perfect marketing mix, from display ads to search engine optimization, paid search and shopping ads. Aside from telling you whether someone visited the brand's Web site from a new piece of content or a search engine, Rand Fishkin serves up advice on how and why it's important to audit the media mix to ensure balance and harmony.

Christopher Ratcliff serves up 22 basic tips to optimize Web sites. This post isn't for everyone, but if you're lacking the basic skills to optimize a Web site, Ratcliff provides the answers, from the quality of content to internal linking tips, schema markup techniques, and ways to properly tag images.