1. Insights On How Older Users Engage On TikTok – So what products are parents looking for on the platform? “Compared to TikTok users who are in the same age group but don’t have children, TikTok parents are more likely to post about home appliances, snack products, business, cars and grocery products.”
2. LinkedIn Launches New Ad Guides for Marketers – Planning campaigns on LinkedIn is becoming a simpler and easier task, thanks to LinkedIn’s new overview that includes image size info, call-to-action options, technical requirements, and more, for each ad type. All the details on this guide are based on the 4 different categories of LinkedIn ads – “Sponsored Content, Sponsored Messaging, Lead Gen Forms, and Text and Dynamic Ads, as well as the various ad formats available within each.” You can access the new LinkedIn Ads Guide here.
3. Facebook Upgrades: Scheduling For Stories and Business Discovery Options – This new option in the Business Suite will help many advertisers and content creators plan their content ahead of time – not just for posts but now also for stories! Business Suite users will also be able to save their Facebook and Instagram posts as drafts. Additionally, a new business discovery element will be added, which will highlight relevant content, based on interests, from Facebook pages underneath posts when users take the time to check out certain updates within their feed.
4. The New Insights Page on Google Ads is Now Available – After months of testing, advertisers globally can now see the finished product. The new Insights page makes it easy to explore insights and emerging trends. Here is what Google gave as an example: “Let’s say you’re a pet store looking to reach more customers. With the Insights page, you can see rising demand for “dog subscription boxes” and “dog toys”. You can then act on these trends by creating campaigns to reach new pet owners, or even explore selling dog care packages.”
5. Dynamic Exclusion Lists: Google Advertisers Have More Control On Where Their Ads Run – This is a move towards increasing online brand safety and helping advertisers manage negative placements. These new placement exclusion lists will also allow advertisers to opt into third-party lists and keep their exclusions updated automatically for ongoing brand protection. However, an account can have a limit of up to 20 shared exclusion lists with thousands of URLs and domains per list.
Example from Google:
- A travel agency has an ad group that features ads about various types of tours. They decide to target the topic Travel which has lots of relevant sub-topics like Adventure Travel and Regional Parks & Gardens, but exclude sub-topics that are less relevant to their offerings like Air Travel.
6. Google Ads Updates Its Smart Bidding: Moving Target CPA and Target ROAS – The change for advertisers will mainly be that from April 2021, they will switch to a different bidding strategy, with very little impact on performance. Instead, these bid strategies will be replaced by a new field to add a target CPA when using the ‘Maximize Conversions’ strategy and a new field for target ROAS when using the ‘Maximize Conversion Value’ strategy.
7. 17 Auto-Applied Recommendations Are Now Available On Google Ads – According to Google, they can “improve your account performance and save time”. However, if you’ve listened to our #TWIMshow before or watched some of our IGTV videos, then you’d know how we feel about recommendations by Google – a big NO. If you’re looking to learn how to create ads from scratch, we have the perfect resource for you that you can find from here – https://marketandgrow.com/google-ads-training/.
8. Organic Video A/B Testing For Users of Facebook’s Creator Studio – Very similarly to video experiments In YouTube Ads, that were covered on last week’s episode #51 of the #TWIMshow – A/B testing to find out which video will work better for you. This is an older update, which Facebook reminded of us by a new overview on how to make best use of the new tool to maximize your Facebook video performance. You can create a maximum of 4 variations of your video, which will then be tested with a portion of your audience, and the “winner” will then be distributed beyond its initial test audience.
Things that were not covered in the show but you may want to know:
Google sets a 1st-party cookie through the Global Site Tag
It looks like Google is serious about protecting privacy, and they are taking the necessary steps towards this goal. Starting in May, a first-party cookie with a new identifier will be set through the global site tag and Google Tag Manager (GTM).
Google aims to enable more accurate attribution of conversions, for example, when a user might engage with more than one of your ads before they convert. Google recommends advertisers to implement sitewide tagging with the global site tag or GTM, even if they’re not currently using the Google Ads tag for conversion tracking.
While it’s too early to predict the benefits, it is clear that Google works on helping advertisers deepen their first-party data sets, and it seems like the global site tag and GTM tags will be the basis for future innovations, such as FLoC.
Google adds conversion changes for GMP users in Europe
Additionally, conversion changes are happening for Google Marketing Platform (GMP) users in Europe. Since last year, having “Consent Mode” as a beta feature has helped advertisers remain compliant with European regulations. For those who don’t know, Consent Mode would automatically ensure that Google tags do not read or write cookies for advertising or analytics purposes when a user did not consent.
The new update for Consent Mode is that Google will now recover more than 70% of ad-click-to-conversion journeys that were lost due to the users’ consent choices. Google aims to fix the measurement gap that advertisers have due to the loss of data.
The reports for search, shopping, display, and video campaigns will be updated with modelled conversion data in the conversions, all conversions, and conversion value columns. Modelled conversions will be able to leverage Google’s bidding tools since they will be integrated into Google Ads the same way as regular conversions.
If you’re already using Consent Mode, you will start seeing gradual improvements as conversions are captured through modelling. Advertisers in the EEA or the UK that want to start implementing Consent Mode and are using Google Ads conversion tracking can get started from HERE.
