A Digital Marketing Round up. Including, TikTok Search Ads & a (Sur)really good campaign

It's been a little while... but here's your edition of the Monday Marketing Memo.

• Date - Monday 13th March
• To - All my patient subscribers that were promised a weekly (ish) newsletter...
• Subject - TikTok Search is Coming & a Surreal Campaign

This newsletter will cover some digital marketing updates, a marketing win of the week from Surreal and a quick tip of the week.

What's going on in the marketing world?

Performance Max Changes

There was a welcomed update for PPC’ers recently as Google announced some updates to improve Performance Max Campaigns, in which have been very limited in how much control and what you can do with them. 

The summary of changes are:

• Campaign level brand exclusions for brand queries on search & shopping inventory. 
• Google will roll out page feeds to PMAX to help advertisers send traffic to specific landing pages. 
• Asset group level reporting will soon include cost and conversion value metrics. 
• Budget pacing insights will be introduced to allow advertisers to see budget optimisation opportunities. 
• Video creation tools will be integrated directly into PMAX campaign setup to allow for easier video creation. 

More details found here - https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/performance-max-new-features/

TikTok To Launch Search Ads

An exciting update; TikTok is preparing to launch its own search ads platform, which will allow advertisers to bid on specific keywords and phrases related to their products or services.

Reason why this is a big opportunity for PPC specialists: 

• Gen Z often use TikTok as a search engine like Google & Microsoft
• More marketing spend is being shifted into TikTok 
• Chance to drive incremental traffic and conversions 

With this in mind, it’s important now to bridge the gap between TikTok Search and Google Search, and the following steps can help that process: 

• Collaborate with social teams to leverage their experience & knowledge of creatives 
• Use search term data from Google to guide your TikTok search ads strategy 
• Use search term data from TikTok to optimise your Google search ads strategy 

Bulk Exports in Google Search Console

TikTok Update: New Ad Insights Tool: Top Products

TikTok have added a new ad insight tool called ‘top products’ which will make it easier to discover best performing products by region or category. 

The ‘explore’ overview shows the following: 

• Product popularity: see the number of ad creatives featuring the product or subcategory and also see the difference in number of ad creatives featuring the product or subcategory over time
• CTR, Conversion Rate and CPA 

The product category details also show performance analytics and audience insights: 

• Ad spend & impressions 
• 6s view rate: people who watched at least 6 seconds
• Likes, shares & comments 
• Related videos 
• Related hashtags 
• Related interests

Marketing Win of the Week

Surreal is a brand that's been a talking point this week with their marketing campaign.

The ads and videos they're using of people with the same names of celebrities are generating real cut through. Giving them real potential to leverage a great offline campaign with a multi channeled digital approach to build on ads like the below which are running on meta, with multi variations & messages to people at differing levels in the funnel.

Quick Marketing Tip of the Week

If you're in the marketing & analytics world, then you'd have to be living under a rock to not have heard about the move to GA4 over Google Analytics Universal. Universal doesn't officially sunset until July 2023, but Google are starting auto migrations this month if you haven't set up your new GA4 profile. If that's you, it's recommended to turn off the auto upgrade from Google and do yourself via Google Tag Manager or manually.

Do it ASAP! The sooner you can get GA4 set up, understanding the data / platform, set up all events & configurations and back up your historic data with something like BigQuery / Supermetrics - the better.

That's all from me. Have a good week all :-)