Digital Marketing News 10/11/2022 – 10/17/2022

Social

TikTok Enhances Their Editing Tools and Releases New “Photo Mode”

The enhanced creation and editing tools give users more creative freedom to bring their content ideas to life using different formats.

TikTok has dropped improved editing tools and a new feature called Photo Mode, which are now available in the US and in most regions globally. In their announcement, TikTok revealed that the enhanced editing tools allow users to easily adjust clips, sounds, images, and text in a new editing environment. Here’s a detailed breakdown of what you can do:

• Edit clips: Stack, trim, and split video clips

• Edit sounds: Cut, trim, and set the duration for sounds

• Edit and position text: More easilyedit, position, and set the duration for text

• Add overlays: Add photo and video overlays for picture-in-picture or video-in-video stacking

• Adjust video speed: Speed up or slow down the pace of video clips

• Frame content: Rotate or zoom in and out of frame of individual clips

• Add sound effects

TikTok believes that an enhanced editing experience powers storytelling and makes video creation intuitive and more accessible. In line with this, they also announced an Instagram-like content format called Photo Mode. This new feature allows you to share high quality images on TikTok and it’s available on mobile.

With Photo Mode, you can share carousel posts of still images. You can also add music to soundtrack the images, which viewers can swipe through at their own pace. Similar to video descriptions, the character count for each Photo Mode post is 2,200. This gives more room to add context and to utilize SEO to increase your post’s reach and engagement.

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Instagram Ads Rolls Out 4 Updates to Help Businesses Reach More Customers

Instagram is launching new ad placements and creative tools to support brand storytelling and business growth.

Instagram has officially announced the ad optimizations that they’ve been rolling out over the last month. Here are the new things you can expect from the photo and video sharing app:

Music Optimization for Reels Ads With more people engaging with short-form videos, running Reels ads is a great way to reach new customers. Instagram provides advertisers with an opportunity to enhance their Reels ads with free, high-quality songs from the Meta Sound Collection library.

These can be added to Carousel Ads on Reels. You can manually select a song from Meta’s library or allow the app to automatically select the best music for an ad based on its content.

Ads in Explore Home and Profile Feed Instagram is giving ads more exposure in the Explore and profile feeds as well. Explore home, the grid that people see when they first arrive on the Explore tab, will now feature ads to reach people as they are discovering new content curated for them by the app’s algorithm.

Instagram is also beginning to test ads in the profile feed for non-teen, public profiles. Profile feed is what people can scroll through after visiting another account’s profile and tapping on a post.

Ads in profile feed give advertisers the opportunity to expand their reach using existing feed assets, while giving users a personalized ad experience.

AI-Powered Multi-Advertiser Ads Multi-advertiser ads allow businesses to be discovered by people who are in a shopping mindset and who have recently engaged with relevant business content in their feed. Instagram explained:

“When a person expresses commercial intent by engaging with an ad, we deliver more ads from other businesses that may be of interest, powered by machine learning.”

Augmented Reality (AR) Ads

Lastly, Instagram has recently launched an open beta test of AR Ads, offering an immersive augmented reality ad experience. It’s powered by Spark AR and available both in Feed and Stories. Through the AR experience, brands can encourage people to interact with an effect through their surroundings, such as testing furniture in their home or test driving a car.

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Meta Innovates Ads, AI, and Messaging to Provide Business Growth Solutions

Meta introduces new ways for advertisers to reach customers based on how they are spending their time.

When people go online, a lot of activities, apps, and websites compete for their attention. That’s why it’s essential to cut through the noise and connect with your target audience where they are. Meta also recognizes this need, so they build products that generate connection with customers, demand for products, and interest in brands.

To further their mission, Meta has announced their newest innovations, which will help advertisers reach their customers based on how they are spending their time. Here are the details:

Facebook Reels Ads Meta has reported in their Q2 earnings that there’s a more than 30% increase in the time people spend engaging with reels across Facebook and Instagram. To help businesses better connect with customers through Reels on Facebook, Meta is launching a test of post-loop ads, which are 4 to 10-second skippable and standalone video ads that play after a reel has ended. When the ad finishes playing, the original reel resumes and loops again.

Meta is also testing image carousel ads for Reels. These horizontally-scrollable ads can include anywhere from 2 to 10 image ads and will be shown at the bottom of Facebook Reels content.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Automation If you’re looking to improve your business’ performance with automation, Meta Advantage Suite is a helpful tool.

Meta is rolling out Advantage custom audience as well, a new targeting automation product that leverages an advertiser’s Custom Audience to reach new and existing customers.

This is similar to Lookalike audiences that find people who are likely to be interested in your business, except that Advantage custom audience goes beyond the 1%, 5%, or 10% similarity ranges you are used to, while also prioritizing delivery of ads to people in your Custom Audience. According to Meta, this entire process is guided by AI and machine learning to help improve advertiser campaign performance with less manual effort.

AI-Powered Messaging There’s a recently-launched conversion optimization for Click to Messenger ads. Meta typically shows this ad to people who are most likely to initiate a conversation with a business on WhatsApp, Messenger, or Instagram Direct. With this update, they’re introducing the ability for advertisers to run Click to Messenger ads which will reach the people who are most likely to make a purchase in a thread.

Meta has also introduced a new ad format for lead generation that funnels customers to either Messenger or a form, depending on which one the customer is most likely to interact with. This personalization helps lead generation advertisers acquire more leads, save time and, ultimately, reduce costs.

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Reddit Introduces 9 Ads Manager Updates

The new tools and features aim to improve the usability of Reddit ads and turn them into a more viable option for advertisers.

As Reddit continues to develop their advertising arm into a platform centered around their ad partners, the forum site has rolled out several upgrades to their Ads Manager. This way, advertisers can easily launch their campaigns, get support, and reach the right users. Here are the updates in detail:

1. Audience Manager: This tool saves advertisers time by enabling them to create, edit, delete, and reuse audiences across campaigns.

2. Estimates Tool: Reddit redesigned their Estimates tool to provide advertisers with impression and click estimates for their ad group, along with estimated audience reach. This forecasting tool helps you understand potential outcomes so you can make the right changes that will help you achieve your advertising goals.

3. Live Chat: Within Ads Manager, advertisers have access to a live chat support for ad-related concerns. This is available as well in the Reddit Ads Help center. It’s particularly useful for new advertisers, who can get direct guidance from the Reddit team when setting up campaigns.

4. Pixel Helper: This is a wizard-like tool in the Ads Manager that simplifies the integration of the Reddit Pixel so you can track, measure, and optimize your ad campaigns.

5. Post Library: This serves as a centralized repository for all your ads. It’s where you can create, view, manage, and reuse your ad content.

6. Advertising Credit: Reddit is offering free ad credit for first-time advertisers to set up campaigns and test their new tools and features. It’s a good way to determine if Reddit is a viable advertising channel for your business while learning more about what they have to offer. If you opt to use the credit, it will be directly applied to your billing page.

7. Edit Ads: You can now update your existing ads in the “Edit Ad” page, which makes it easier to change or update your campaigns anytime.

8. Expanded Community Targeting: Reddit has added over 1,000 new targetable communities to the Ads Manager as part of their ongoing effort to “open even more Reddit communities most relevant to a diverse set of advertisers.”

9. Improved User Interface (UI): The Ads Manager UI got a major revamp, which includes an updated navigation, a new sign-up page design, and a better metrics display that separates metrics from events.

Both new and longstanding Reddit ad partners can take advantage of the Ads Manager improvements to boost their advertising experience on the platform. To learn more about setting up your own account and campaigns in Reddit Ads, visit the Help center.

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Google Allows The Automatic Creation of Ad Assets

Automatically created assets are a campaign-level setting that’s currently in beta mode. 

Google has enabled a feature that allows advertisers to automatically generate additional assets (headers and descriptions). Automatically created assets are a campaign-level setting and they complement the assets you input for your ads by using relevant creative content from the following sources:

• Ad landing page

• Relevant web pages in the same domain as the ad landing page

• Existing text ads in the same ad group

• Keywords in the same ad group

The automatically created assets setting is currently in beta mode and is not available for all. It will appear in campaign level settings as accounts are added to the beta.

To make the most of this feature, ensure that your website content is accurate, not misleading, and not in violation of Google Ads policies or applicable laws. After enabling automatically created assets, Google advises to monitor your ad content for accuracy and turn off the setting as needed.

How It Works For responsive search ads within campaigns where you enable automatically created assets, you instruct Google to generate assets from eligible sources based on relevance and predicted performance. These assets can take the form of entire sentences, phrases, or paraphrasing while retaining the original meaning. 

The generated assets are added to the pool of eligible assets for your responsive search ad (RSA). When your ad is eligible to serve for a query, the system will look at the pool of eligible assets (both advertiser provided and automatically created) and select the assets that are predicted to perform best.

Here’s an example of how your ad works with automatically created assets enabled:

Advertiser provided header and description assets

• The new Smart Phone 7

• Our most innovative Smart Phone yet

• Safe and secure

• Order online and pick up today

• Contact-free delivery available today

Automatically created header and description assets

• Impressive from every angle

• Trade-in offers available

• Several colors to choose from

• Re-imagined camera to capture life’s moments

When you search using the keyword “the new smart phone 7,” below are the sample responsive search ads that might appear:

Benefits of Automatically Created Assets

They may improve ad relevance by:

• Including text from your landing page, domain, and other ads in headlines and descriptions

• Using text from your ad group’s keywords to customize headlines and descriptions to better match unique search queries

Automatically created assets can also save you time while increasing the number of headlines and descriptions available for your responsive search ads.

To learn more about automatically created assets, like how to view the reports and how to turn off the setting, visit the Google Ads Help Center.

What you can do next:

• TikTok and Instagram are more similar now, but your audience on these platforms may have differing preferences. Conduct A/B testing to determine how you can present relevant content to your audience in their app of choice.

• Deliver effective ads by tapping on your audience’s interests and connecting with them through their pain points.

• If you’re looking to start advertising on Reddit, take advantage of their ad credit offer to test the platform’s viability for your business.

• If you have access to the automatically created assets setting in your Google Ads account and you want to use it, test the new feature and monitor your ad content for accuracy. But if you aren’t interested in using it, make sure to turn off the setting.

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