Digital Marketing News 11/01/2022 – 11/07/2022

PPC

Meta Launches Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns

This gives advertisers a new way to simplify and improve campaigns through automation and optimization.

Meta has announced that they are rolling out Advantage+ shopping campaigns, an end-to-end automation solution for eCommerce and retail advertisers. It’s designed to be “the most efficient solution” for performance-focused advertisers looking to drive online sales. For now, this feature is only available to select advertisers and it’s accessible through the desktop version of Ads Manager.

In comparison to manual shopping ads, Advantage+ shopping campaigns require fewer inputs during campaign creation. It also simplifies audience options and streamlines the creative management process.

Using Advantage+ shopping campaigns you can:

• Combine prospecting and existing customer audiences under one campaign and show them personalized products from your catalog in a privacy-safe way.

• Use machine learning to identify and aim for your highest value customers across all of Meta’s family of apps and services, with minimal input.

• Simplify campaign set up and management by running fewer campaigns without the need to adjust or refresh.

• Automatically create and test up to 150 creative combinations at once, and serve the highest performing ads just by setting up a single Advantage+ shopping campaign.

• Deliver your highest performing ad variation to the highest value shoppers.

To learn how to set up an Advantage+ shopping campaign, visit the Meta Business Help Center or download their guide.

PPC

Google Ads Announces 3 New Performance Max Features

The new features aim to to help Performance Max meet your business goals in three key areas: planning, customization, and evaluation.

Performance Max campaigns have been around for almost a year and since then, they’ve been helping advertisers increase conversions across Google’s full range of ad channels and inventory. This time, Google has launched three additional Performance Max features to help you:

• Plan your campaigns more efficiently

• Customize your asset strategy

• Evaluate your results

Performance Planner

Now you can forecast the impact of Performance Max using the new Performance Planner. With this tool, you can create plans and understand how you can invest your budgets to maximize ROI. Performance Max in Performance Planner is rolling out now and will become available to all advertisers in the coming weeks.

As mentioned, this tool allows you to forecast how your campaign may perform in the future and simulate what could happen when you adjust elements like your campaign budget and return on ad spend (ROAS) or cost per acquisition (CPA) targets.

Asset Group Scheduling

Plan and organize your campaigns with asset group scheduling. This is another tool that rolled out earlier this month and it lets you add automated rules to your Performance Max asset groups. In turn, these rules allow you to schedule asset groups so that they are paused and enabled as needed.

Use these rules to run ads at specific times of day, or to create and schedule asset groups ahead of time. This is especially helpful to make sure your creative assets are approved in advance, which you can do while an asset group is paused.

Google also announced that towards the end of the year, the number of text headlines you can upload to your Performance Max asset groups will be increasing from 5 to 15. According to them, by adding more headlines you can “take advantage of machine learning’s ability to create and test even more combinations to find the best-performing variations.”

Explanations

The Explanations feature quickly identifies what’s driving performance fluctuations and allows you to diagnose issues and view recommendations. It’s also easily viewable in the explanations panels. Explanations are available for all Performance Max campaigns.

To take advantage of the new Performance Max features during the holiday season, Google recommends to keep these three best practices top-of-mind as you plan your holiday strategies:

• A few days leading up to peak holiday periods, make sure to adjust your Performance Max campaign budgets and ROAS or CPA targets to maximize your visibility when consumers are shopping.

• Consider using seasonality adjustments if you have a promotion, sale, or event where you expect to see drastic changes in conversion rates or values over a short period of time. You should only use seasonality adjustments for brief, infrequent events where you expect a temporary, but significant change (e.g. greater than 30%) that will last less than 7 days.

• If you want to prioritize certain products this holiday season, you can create a separate Performance Max campaign with its own target and budget to promote these products. However, if you just want to highlight new holiday creative assets, you can create a new asset group for these in your existing Performance Max campaigns and pause your evergreen asset groups, if needed.

To get more tips on how to optimize your Performance Max campaigns, check out Google’s complete best practices guide and their holiday best practices.

PPC

The Trim Video Tool Is Now Available Globally in Google Ads

This helpful tool converts long videos into 6-second bumper ads.

Google Ads has announced that trim video, the tool that converts long videos into 6-second videos, is now available globally. Trim video is powered by a machine learning model that identifies important scenes and brand elements from the original video and adapts them for shorter formats. It was introduced in beta in 2019 as Bumper Machine, and since then it’s been used by brands to create bumper ads.

According to Google, adding a bumper ad to a Video reach campaign unlocks many benefits, like increased efficiency, reach, and conversions, and improved ad recall. Bumper ads are especially useful on YouTube, where brands can use different video formats to tell stories and deepen connections with their audiences.

The trim video tool is easily accessible from the Asset Library in Google Ads. To learn more about how to trim videos in Google Ads, visit the Google Help Center.

Social

Meta Introduces New Tools for Intellectual Property and Brand Rights Protection

The newly-launched IP reporting API and Brand Rights Protection features make it easier to report potential IP rights violations, such as impersonations and misuses.

As part of their efforts to help businesses protect their intellectual property rights across Facebook and Instagram, Meta has introduced a new Intellectual Property (IP) Reporting application programming interface (API). The IP Reporting API allows rights holders to efficiently report content they believe violates their intellectual property rights.

Meta also announced that new features are available in their Brand Rights Protection tool, which helps businesses who own IP search for and report potential violations.

IP Reporting API

With the new IP Reporting API, rights holders can automate the reporting of content they believe infringes on their intellectual property rights. The tool integrates with Meta’s Graph API, which is the primary way for apps to read and write to the Facebook social graph.

This integration allows authorized API users to fill out the same fields that exist in the IP reporting forms in a secure and streamlined way, bringing more efficiency to this process by allowing users to report content at scale.

New Brand Rights Protection Features

Brand Rights Protection allows brands to identify and report content for counterfeit products, trademark violations, copyright infringement, and impersonation. The tool is accessible within Business Manager. It can be used to search for content that misuses a brand’s intellectual property or impersonates them, send Meta a request for content removal, track the status of these requests, and add reference images to help automatically detect potentially infringing content.

Meta shared the new features and improvements they’ve made to Brand Rights Protection over the last few months:

• Automated takedowns for eligible brands

• Allow list of Facebook Pages and Instagram accounts that rights holders own or have authorized

• Automated recommendations

• The ability to search by image for more types of content, including posts on Facebook and Instagram

• The ability to search using Facebook and Instagram URLs and IDs

• The ability to search and report Facebook Groups, Facebook Pages, Facebook profiles, Instagram accounts, and posts on Facebook and Instagram

• Impersonation reporting

• Insights dashboard

You can learn more about Brand Rights Protection in Meta’s Help Center, and you can apply for access here.

Social

YouTube Unveils A More Modern Look and Updated Features

The video sharing platform, which celebrated its 17th birthday this year, is rolling out new design elements and product features.

In an announcement made through their official blog, YouTube has revealed the design and feature upgrades that users can expect in the platform.

Ambient Mode

Using dynamic color sampling, ambient mode introduces a subtle effect so the app background color adapts to match the video. This feature will be available on web and mobile in dark theme.

Dark Theme Update

YouTube has also updated dark theme to be even darker so the colors truly pop on your screen. This will roll out on web, mobile, and Smart TVs.

Video Playlist Update

Video playlists will adopt the same color treatment and now show more details about each playlist so viewers can easily jump right in.

Video Player Updates

YouTube is making the watch page easier on the eyes: YouTube links in video descriptions will change to buttons, and frequent actions such as like, share, and download are now formatted to minimize distractions.

The subscribe button is also getting a touch up: the new shape and high contrast make it really stand out, and while it’s no longer red, it's easier to find and is more accessible to everyone on both watch pages and channel pages.

All users can now enjoy the pinch to zoom and precise seeking features in the video player as well. Pinch to zoom allows you to easily zoom in and out of a video while on your iOS or Android phone. And when you let go, the video stays zoomed in so you can enjoy the rest of the video in greater detail.

On the other hand, precise seeking provides a convenient way to find a specific part in a video. Whether you’re on desktop or your mobile device, simply drag or swipe up while seeking to display a row of thumbnails in the video player and you’ll be able to get to the exact part in each video.

If you aren’t already doing so, you’ll be able to enjoy these changes soon as they gradually roll out to all users over the next few weeks.

What you can do next:

• Test out automation solutions such as Meta’s Advantage+ shopping campaigns to enhance your efficiency in setting up campaigns and to improve the reach, personalization, and performance of your ad campaigns.

• Get a headstart on your Performance Max campaigns to drive more conversions leading up to the holiday season.

• Use the trim video tool from Google Ads when you don’t have a 6-second bumper ad for your campaign, when you want to run an experiment that compares different versions, or when you’re looking for new ideas for future ads.

• To avoid any problem arising from intellectual property rights violations, diligently monitor your brand’s representation online and be proactive in flagging potential violations.

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