If you’re craving some juicy, get-your-blood-pumping, marketing analytics news — you’ve come to the right place! Here’s what you should know this week:
Paid Social
Instagram:
- Instagram photo, video and carousel ads can now be linked to brand’s Messenger accounts, and referral codes can be used to open a specific messaging thread. With this new seamless connection between these two platforms, businesses have a unique opportunity to use Instagram ads to further foster relationships with their target audience on Messenger. This opens a window for more personalized advertising, instant customer service and targeted news updates.
Pinterest:
- Our eyes are naturally attracted to moving objects, and Pinterest is strategically incorporating human instinct into its paid advertising game. Pinterest is rolling out Promoted Videos that will play automatically without sound and appear in user feeds, search results, and related Pin galleries. Advertisers are charged based on the number of impressions their ads receive, and not on link clicks. Good content = lower costs, a win-win situation for Pinterest and our fellow advertisers.
Facebook:
- Facebook’s ad overload problem has caused fear for many. According to Facebook’s latest projection, the platform will max out the number of ads it can squeeze into people’s news feeds in the middle of 2017. But fear not, the world isn’t ending! Facebook can still explore other paid social channels including Facebook Messenger and Instagram Stories. But at the end of the day, creating attractive and original content might be the real solution to advertising dilemmas.
- Facebook announced two new tools on Monday to help marketers more precisely target audiences. The first tool, Value Optimization, allows advertisers to optimize their Facebook ad campaign using data and purchase value from Facebook pixel, which estimates how much a person might spend with a specific business during a seven-day period. The second tool is an improvement on Facebook Lookalike Audience — the new version enables marketers to include a value column in their customer list which allows the tool to create an additional signal for people most likely to make a purchase after seeing an ad.
Snapchat:
- On June 12th, Snapchat introduced three new features for fellow digital marketing friends: Snap Publisher for creating vertical videos, Ad Manager for managing self-serve ads, and the Snapchat Certified Partners program for connecting advertisers to third-party ad tech tool providers. With these new tools, Snapchat advertisers can easily create Snapchat ad campaigns and monitor campaign statistics. As the most popular social media platform among millennials, Snapchat has been an important stage for marketers. We’re excited to see how these new features will inspire more creative ads on Snapchat!
SEM
Google Attribution:
- Google is launching the new free beta version of Google Attribution, a multi-channel attribution solution which integrates with Google Analytics, Google AdWords and Doubleclick Search. The powerful tool allows advertisers to track upper and mid-funnel interactions and see which generic keywords led to the final ad click. No more wondering where the magic happens — Google has it all.
Google Analytics:
- By the end of 2017, Google will release to all users the new Google AdWords experience. The new experience is designed to help advertisers create more focused campaigns and easily visualize campaign results. In fact, some of the new features have been available to select AdWords accounts in beta version. We can’t wait to explore the full gear very soon!
- More good news — Google is integrating Google Optimize and Google Surveys 360 with Google AdWords. This update enables advertisers to conduct A/B testing for landing pages and to easily create surveys for remarketing audiences.
Google Customer Match:
- IdentityLink, a people-based search service, announced on June 7th that its new feature allows users to add missing customer email addresses to the company’s CRM system. With access to a more complete customer email list, marketers can conduct more precise targeting using Google Customer Match.
Landing Page Experience
Accelerated Mobile Pages:
- One of the biggest obstructions causing people to drop off of a website visit is, unsurprisingly, the wait time. With 65% of digital media time now being spent on mobile phones, mobile optimization has become the key to landing page experience. Striving to create a better mobile experience for ad viewers, Google will be integrating AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), an open-standard created by Google to accelerate the loading speed of websites on mobile devices, with Google Adwords’ Display and Search Networks. Tests have shown that AMP-enabled landing pages receive improved user behavior and conversion outcomes. We’re thankful to Google for automating AMP for us AdWords users, but fellow web designer should take note: if you haven’t yet tapped into AMP, it’s time to get that upgrade.
Google Chrome:
- Hoping to enhance users’ landing page experience (while maintaining the rights of their advertisers), Google will soon introduce a pre-installed ad filter function on the Chrome browser. The filter will automatically block ads that interfere with a user’s viewing experience. The company’s ultimate goal is for users to either browse websites with high-quality ads for free, or pay a small fee to browse ad-free websites.
We hope this week’s Made for Paid updates have satisfied your craving for analytics news. Stay tuned for more next week!
