Paid and organic search work together like peanut butter and jelly: on their own they are okay, but together they make magic! When it comes to PPC vs. SEO, there is only one strategy winner: integrating both. The key to any optimization strategy lies in the data. In this post, we will quickly take you through linking your Google Ads and Search Console accounts and accessing the right reports to access the insights of both, to optimize your organic and paid search strategy for peak performance. In short, following these three short steps will give you additional organic data in your AdWords reports, which you can then use to improve your organic reach as well as your search ad performance.

While shopping ads are arguably the most important form of Google advertising for e-commerce accounts, you're missing an opportunity if you ignore regular search ads. Text ads for specific product searches still take up a lot of real estate and can help drive more sales. When I'm preparing to write text ads, I like to see what's currently in the landscape. You know what makes me really happy? Why am I happy with those search results?

Most common PPC campaign mistakes can be easily rectified. With extra awareness, time and effort, you can adjust your optimization strategy to focus on ROI instead of CPA and get better results. With some changes to the way you approach your PPC activities as a whole, you can fine-tune your funnel and get higher-quality conversions. PPC marketers are only human, after all, but by avoiding some common campaign mistakes, you can become a number-crunching PPC machine. Want to know if you make the PPC grade?

Earlier this month, the Intercept broke the news that Google was building a secret program called Dragonfly, a censored search engine the company was potentially hoping to bring to China. Unlike the Google search that's used in the rest of the world, this search engine would block websites that are banned by the Chinese government and would not answer certain questions that the Chinese government has blacklisted. To learn more about Dragonfly, I recently spoke with Ryan Gallagher, a U.K.-based investigative journalist who reports on digital security and state surveillance issues for the Intercept. In our conversation, part of this week's episode of Slate's technology podcast If Then, we discussed why Google wants so desperately to enter China, why many of its employees oppose the plan, and how even a co-founder of the company may have been kept in the dark as Dragonfly was developed. Gallagher detailed how Google CEO Sundar Pichai has had several highly secretive meetings with the Chinese government about bringing Google to China over the past year--and the timeline of Google's plans to deploy the project once Beijing gave the green light.

The component parts of a successful search engine optimization (SEO) strategy may have remained relatively constant, but their definition and purpose have changed entirely. Driven by trends like visual search and voice search, the industry's scope has expanded and evolved into something more dynamic. This delivers on a genuine consumer need. According to a report from Slyce.it, 74 percent of shoppers report that text-only search is insufficient for finding the products they want. It is unsurprising that Gartner research predicts that by 2021, early adopter brands that redesign their websites to support visual and voice search will increase digital commerce revenue by as much as 30 percent.

The rise of the machine has freed ICIJ members globally to pore over millions of documents in a custom-built search engine. But even this next-level research has posed substantial challenges: for example, what to do when certain phrases return an indigestible 150,000 results? Clearly, the next step to speeding up our research was to intelligently filter information relevant to each investigation. Here's how we streamlined the previously daunting process, giving us both unprecedented flexibility and the required search success rate. In leaks like the Paradise Papers, we dealt with millions of documents (including PDFs, photos, and emails) that traditional platforms like Excel can't process.

IMAGE: Brian Davison, Associate Professor of Computer Science Engineering at Lehigh University, is principal investigator of an NSF-backed project to develop a search engine intended to help scientists and others locate... view more There was a time--not that long ago--when the phrases "Google it" or "check Yahoo" would have been interpreted as sneezes, or a perhaps symptoms of an oncoming seizure, rather than as coherent thoughts. Today, these are key to answering all of life's questions. It's one thing to use the Web to keep up with a Kardashian, shop for ironic T-shirts, argue with our in-laws about politics, or any of the other myriad ways we use the Web in today's world. But if you are a serious researcher looking for real data that can help you advance your ideas, how useful are the underlying technologies that support the search engines we've all come to take for granted? "Not very," says Brian Davison, associate professor of computer science at Lehigh University.

In 2015, Microsoft's Bing search engine achieved something it had never had before: relevancy. By notching a 20-percent share of U.S. search, according to comScore, it managed to impact Google, the brand that was literally synonymous with search. In 2018, it seems like Bing's willing to hand some of that success right back. Why? Because, as a habitual Bing user, I've noticed a deterioration in quality. In the past I've argued that there were four good reasons to switch from Google to Bing.

Hundreds of Google employees have signed a protest letter over the company's reported work on a censor-friendly search engine to get back into China, The New York Times said Thursday. The employees are demanding more transparency so they can understand the moral implications of their work, said the Times, which obtained a copy of the letter. It has been signed by 1,400 employees and is circulating on the company's internal communications system, the newspaper said, quoting three people who are familiar with the document. While China is home to the world's largest number of internet users, a 2015 report by US think tank Freedom House found that the country had the most restrictive online use policies of 65 nations it studied, ranking below Iran and Syria. But China has maintained that its various forms of web censorship are necessary for protecting its national security.

Google executives on Thursday addressed the company's plans to reintroduce a search service in China, following an employee backlash over concerns about complying with Beijing's censorship laws, according to reports of an all-hands company meeting. Chief executive Sundar Pichai told staff that Google is in the "early stages" of considering a return to China, Bloomberg reported, but that the company is not close to finalizing a search product. Pichai pledged transparency as the development process advances and cast the potential for business in China as a boost to Google's mission. "I genuinely do believe we have a positive impact when we engage around the world, and I don't see any reason why that would be different in China," Pichai said, according to Bloomberg. Google did not respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post.