Each year, Google rolls out several new features ahead of the holidays for retail advertisers. This year’s updates have started coming out.

The company introduced a new metric and new reporting for Shopping campaign advertisers — only in the new AdWords interface.

The new metric, called absolute top impression share, reports how often Shopping ads and Local Inventory ads appear in the first spot on mobile and desktop. Google says that during Q4 last year, the first Shopping ad on mobile saw up to three times more engagement than the other spots.

On the Products page, a new diagnostics report lets advertisers dig deeper into product status issues in AdWords.

These features can be added to the list of features exclusive to the new AdWords interface — what Google calls the new AdWords experience — that’s rolling out to advertisers through this year.

Previously, we discussed how to find good PPC candidates for your particular company, but now it’s time to evaluate those candidates.

It comes down to this: You’ve held dozens of interviews with candidates almost impossible to tell apart. They all have similar credentials. They’ve worked in the right industry or environment, have used similar tools to what your paid media team uses and didn’t hesitate to answer your questions. But what’s next?

The technical assessment of your PPC hire may be the thing you’ve most overlooked, and it can often lead to a complete disaster.

How do we evaluate PPC talent?

You cannot properly assess how someone will fit into your team and impact your business simply by reviewing resumes and asking them a few questions to make sure they speak the language.

Unfortunately, there is also no one-size-fits-all assessment your team can find online and use. You have to start by taking an honest look at your work environment and understanding the person who will be required for the job. What tasks would this person be expected to complete daily, weekly or monthly?

If you’re a SaaS (software as a service) startup in need of speed and growth, you simply cannot afford to hire someone who hasn’t been through that; bringing on PPC manager from a local digital agency won’t get the job done. Your hire will need to understand how to deliver a plan of upcoming experiments at scale and execute on them quickly. There can’t be a learning curve.

If you’re an agency, your hire might need to be a better public speaker and salesperson in addition to having technical PPC knowledge, and they will need be able to create (and explain) reports.

By understanding the specifics of the position and crafting a test around them, you are off to the right start. And while there is no one-size-fits-all, I can share three tests I highly recommend.

Test #1: The fake report

The fake report test might be my favorite, wherein you deliver an interviewee a fake dataset for analysis. Present a sample report and ask for recommendations based on the data. Hopefully, they will dig into topics like the following:

• Suggestions on how to re-allocate budget for efficiency.
  • For search, this might mean indicating search impression share.
  • For social, this might mean indicating audience size and daily budget.
• What channels should be tested, given the business goals?
  • Also, did they ask you about the primary KPIs for your ad campaigns? If not, it’s likely not the right fit.
• Is there an appropriate mix of prospecting and retargeting?
• Are campaigns organized in a way that makes sense? Should structural changes be made?

The suggestions above are not exhaustive, but the perfect candidate has these types of questions and thoughts from looking at your data. Let them show you how they think and make decisions.

If you use this test, consider throwing in something really strange. Give your potential hires something to question, and see what they come up with. I recommend something subtle, like duplicating click numbers several times, or having the total spend not add up — small details that would be important to capture if they were incorrect. After all, a few lines of data could seriously throw off your day, or even your month.

Here’s an example of a fake dataset you might present to your candidates for analysis, with inconsistencies highlighted in red. (Obviously, don’t highlight your inconsistencies for the candidates!)

Of course, not catching these inconsistencies shouldn’t keep you from hiring someone who is otherwise an absolutely perfect fit. But when each candidate seems to be almost identical, small details like this can be great differentiators. You want the person who digs most deeply into the data and sees inconsistencies. Incorrect data leads to incorrect analyses — and possibly incorrect actions. Incorrect data can mean pixels and tracking codes are firing improperly.

Test #2: A competitive analysis

There are several things that advertisers like to do, and checking out the competition is one of them. If you’re hiring for a position where they will have to touch Facebook Ads, the candidate who knows to follow competitor brands, engage with posts, or even go to their site and get into retargeting pool is the one to pursue.

One of the best weapons advertisers have in Facebook is to see how ads are being targeted. If a candidate is seeing prospecting ads from your competitors and has the foresight to check if it’s lookalike targeting or something more complex, hire them.

In AdWords, a hire should be able to not only have an understanding of keywords competitors might be using, but start to develop a feel for how each brand positions themselves in search. Ask candidates to evaluate the search landscape and come to you with estimated CPCs, top keywords, ad extensions and copy competitors are using, to begin building a complete picture of what your competitors are doing. With this information gathered, what opportunities do they see, and what recommendations can they make?

This test has several benefits: Candidates will have a better understanding of what first steps to make if hired, and you are provided with some much-needed outside perspective that can further inform your decision. Again, the key here is to find tests that would be applicable to the daily work your new hire will be doing, and checking out the competition will surely fall into that category.

Test #3: Next month’s budget

This test requires a willingness to share your current spend and results, but it will likely be worth it. Have the final candidates sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement), then grant read-only Google Analytics access and share your most recent budget. Budget planning, especially for channel owners who will not have a direct supervisor managing this for them, is a 100 percent essential skill and cannot be overlooked.

Now, you won’t be able to judge from this exercise how well these candidates can stick to a budget, but a candidate who can identify areas where you are overspending or underspending — as well as new opportunities for test spend and a plan to execute — is one worth being excited about.

If you’re a high-growth organization that isn’t asking for someone to just conduct daily maintenance, but needs someone to optimize and then scale quickly, you need to evaluate more than just a potential hire’s PPC knowledge. General business skills, like budget allocation, are crucial to the position.

Customize your test for your business

Feel free to tweak any of the above tests to best fit your hiring needs. Again, I can’t stress enough that the most important step in creating a test for potential candidates is doing a thorough evaluation of what your new hire will be doing on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Identify all the skills they will need, and start testing for relevant skills.

Hiring PPC talent isn’t easy. But when you’ve made sure your job listing accurately details your expectations and crafted tests to make sure candidates are the right fit, you’re going to make the process a lot simpler.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

The question of whether or not to utilize microsites is an interesting topic of discussion for SEO.

On the one hand, microsites allow organizations to segment information and focus a site clearly on one topic. For instance, it’s not uncommon for an organization or association that hosts conferences to have a separate conference-focused website for registration and information aside from the main organization website (as Search Engine Land does with the SMX conference site). Or, if you own several car dealerships, you may want or need to have a separate website for each dealership location.

There are definitely times when having separate sites makes sense from a brand perspective. But there are also several reasons you may want to reconsider splitting your website into multiple microsites. Following are some potential SEO issues that can result from implementing microsites.

Inbound links

Since the original Google algorithm patent, inbound links have been an important ranking factor. So, how can they be affected by microsites?

Imagine you own a restaurant and have several locations. For example, we have a local restaurant in Charlottesville named Guadalajara with four locations. Each restaurant has the same menu. Do you need a separate website for each location, such as Guadalajara Pantops and Guadalajara Downtown?

In situations like these, I advise clients against using separate websites if possible because it can split and dilute the inbound link value. Just as the quantity and quality of links to an individual page is important, overall quantity and quality of links to the domain is also important.

If the sites are separated, they are working as two separate websites, essentially competing with one another in Google search results. If they are on one website, they are working together in Google search results.

With a single site, there are more inbound links pointed to the one domain, as opposed to splitting those links across multiple domains. In this scenario, ultimately the single site works better for SEO.

Site authority

It’s tough to really know what Google’s perceived authority for a site on a particular subject is. But what we do know is that Google values and looks for content along a similar vein as part of determining authority.

For example, if I have a blog and write almost exclusively about cats, but then one day have a random post about traveling to Paris, it can be assumed that Google would likely see my website as an authority on cats before it would consider my site an authority on Paris.

In this case, the Paris content and the cat content are very different — not even related to one another. The audiences may even be different. So, if I were planning to add more Paris content, it might make sense to have two different blogs: one that is a travel blog about Paris and a separate one about cats. Each can become its own authority on its own subject.

But what if the topic is closely related? For example, let’s say that I have a blog that features posts about cat nutrition and dog nutrition. The site could be considered by Google authoritative as a resource for overall pet nutrition because these are similar topics. In a case like this one, I wouldn’t recommend necessarily splitting the site into two separate sites because the categories/topics are related and can still likely be an authority in Google’s view.

Still, don’t think that just because one site has two very different topics, it can’t be an authority on each. A site doesn’t have to be an authority on only one topic. Before you decide to split your site into multiple sites, consider the ramifications of both site authority overall and what your future goals are. If you’re trying to show Google that your site should be an authority in a new space or new topic, you’ve got to build that authority over time.

Duplicate content

Let’s say your organization owns several dental offices, each with its own website. One of the office websites posts a blog post about tips for good dental health, and you’d like to share that post on the other offices’ website blogs. Great! Unfortunately, it’s easy to accidentally create duplicate content this way, especially if the webmasters for those office websites aren’t coordinating efforts well.

If you choose to use multiple sites, be diligent in using the canonical tag when sharing content between your websites to ensure that the content creator gets full SEO credit and that the other sites don’t inadvertently create duplicate content.

Analytics tracking

While technically, you can track traffic across multiple domains, it’s less than ideal and can be complicated to set up in Google Analytics. I have a client that has annual charity events, and each event is hosted on its own specific event domain rather than on the main charity website.

When a visitor navigated from the main charity website to the event microsite, source data for that visitor became “referral” rather than the source that brought the visitor to the charity site originally, such as Google.

This scenario leads to a great deal of lost information as a visitor moves from one site to another. In the view of Google Analytics, it’s as if this visitor moved from one whole company/website to another, and the background information for that visitor does not follow to the new site.

Maintenance

As Google Webmaster Trend Analyst John Mueller recently mentioned, and as SEO expert Jennifer Slegg reported, maintenance can be a major problem when you have many smaller websites. If you have two different sites, that means two different XML sitemaps to maintain. It means ensuring that two separate sites are mobile-friendly and optimized for page load speed. Having two separate sites can mean a lot of extra maintenance that is avoided with just one website.

Having multiple websites also introduces greater potential for errors. For example, let’s say you want to add Google Tag Manager (GTM) to each site. First, you may need to create separate GTM accounts and then create the specific containers for each site. Then, you’ll have to add the correct GTM code to each of the sites in the correct location. The more sites you have, the more likely you might accidentally introduce an error.

All in all, it’s likely best to avoid separate domain microsites for SEO. If the content is truly a separate entity, you may want to consider subdomains rather than microsites on separate domains, which keeps the content on the same domain but provides some level of separation.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.