PPC Roundup (Week 27)

The PPC News project is a collaborative effort to help everyone contribute their knowledge or skillet, so they're recognized for it! With this weekly roundup in paid advertising, you can now spend less time wondering what's happening, and more of it on your own business.

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PPC News

4th to 10th of July 2022

Analytics

Google Analytics

Google Analytics 4 web data reporting is now supported through links established to Google Ad Manager publisher networks. Publishers will be able to report on Google Ad Manager web and app ad monetization, and will be able to report on Google Analytics 4 behavioral data across web and app in Google Ad Manager Analytics reports. (source)

Charles Farina shared a first overview of the new "Google Tag" in GA4

Content worth sharing

Artem Korneev shared a guide on how GA4 cross-domain for JavaScript redirects, supported by Simo Ahava's post.

Google Search Console

You can now access Search Console Insights using your GA4 property. (Barry Schwartz)

Paid Search

Google Ads

Google Ads Editor 2.1 is now available (Boris Beceric)

• More visible recommendations (recommendations cards, set Target CPA/ROAS etc.)
• More warnings (e.g. no more references to account-specific data, using a shared budget but not its associated portfolio bid strategy, or vice versa)
• Video-Drive conversions campaigns with shopping
• ?"Final URL expansion" setting in Performance Max campaigns
• Lead form, including custom questions and age question
• 3 possible budgets when making suggestions in the edit pane, including potential stats improvements.?
• The "Include Display Network" option is no longer available for standard shopping campaigns. It's always set to “Disabled”.

Diagnostic insights will help you automatically identify issues?once you've launched your campaign. Some checks include account status, billing status, policy review, conversion tracking, campaign budget, bid strategy target, campaign status & ad strength.

Content worth sharing

Petya Yildizgoren also confirmed that the best-performing converting search terms within audience segments are a nice have to support Performance Max.

Mike Ryan and ?Stefan Stopper spotting out a New Customer's Lifetime Value, and It started an exciting debate on how best to calculate CLV.

Adriaan Dekker shared a new "Highly rated carousel"

Warnings

We recently heard that some Google account managers say manual CPC, not eCPC will be removed by the end of this year. This has yet to go official with a release from their team, so we'll keep you updated on what happens!

Google Ads (Performance Max)

Dhara Patel shared how Insights show the search term categorized by "close-variants" or similar terms. Only "week over week" and "month over month" are available yet.

Kasim Aslam shared how Location targeting is now available in Performance Max

Content worth sharing

Cory Lindholm shared +25 tips on how to check why a Performance Max campaign would not have any improvements. Here's the official documentation.

Some great tips from Alycia Semedo on how to optimize video assets.

Merchant Center

Free listings accounts with the “Website needs improvement” issue status are now still active, but their products have limited visibility on Google.?(source)

You can now use?auto-tagging?to view conversions for all free listings and free local listings experiences on Google. Previously, auto-tagging was only available for listings in the Shopping tab. (source)

Kirk Williams?shared, "Time to kill all those annoying sag manual UTMs!"

Amazon Ads

Adam Mellott noticed we can now expand targeting to products that are closely related to the original product targeted.

Hamza Ali shared you have more options to choose from creatives for your display campaigns.

Content worth sharing

If you want to go deeper into Amazon Ads, feel free to sign up for the free newsletter from Jeffrey Cohen. He shares tips on how you can get better at designing ads, managing campaigns and analyzing results in his latest piece "Special Edition - Prime Day 2022"!

Microsoft Ads

Microsoft resumed last month's updates:

• Cash back promotions?
• Auto-generated remarketing lists
• 11 new markets have access to customer match lists
• Shopping campaigns became available in 7 new countries in Asia
• Automatic item update (price & availability)
• Automated coupons through Merchant Promotions

There are two new announcements:

• Ad customizers will become generally available for RSA this month
• Microsoft Clarity insights' second phase will start today

Warning

Dynamic descriptions will be on by default unless you change them. (Lawrence Chasse)

Paid Social

TikTok

Want to learn more about TikTok, here's a must-read. (economist)

"It has been the world’s most downloaded mobile app since early 2020. And whereas young audiences are lukewarm about Facebook, TikTok has them hooked. Some 44% of its American users are under 25, believes eMarketer, a data company, compared with 16% of Facebook’s."

"But as it has grown, so has the breadth of its output. About a third of TikTokers treat it as a source of news, according to the Reuters Institute at Oxford University.?"

Twitter

Twitter is testing CoTweets!

Pinterest

Pinterest introduces 4 new features:

Pinterest API for Shopping?

Product Tagging on Pins

Video in Catalog

Shop Tab on Business Profiles

Marketing Industry

Post-GDPR & cookies-less world

• In the EU, "The Commission welcomes the adoption by the European Parliament of the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act" (Cory Underwood - press release)
• In the UK, Ofcom expects the Online Safety Bill to pass by early 2023 at the latest, with our powers coming into force two months later. (source)
• "Europeans risk seeing social media services Facebook and Instagram shut down this summer, as Ireland's privacy regulator doubled down on its order to stop the firm's data flows to the United States." Only a month to decide! (Cory Underwood)
• Starting next month, people no longer will need a Facebook account to use the company’s VR devices,?Meta said, a rule that?users and potential customers have criticized. Augustine Fou: "hmmm. ok."

Advertising news

• TikTok is giving up on its expansion plans with ‘TikTok Shop’ after the UK project failed to meet targets and influencers dropped out of the scheme. (source)
• Meta AI has built a single AI model,?NLLB-200, that is the first to translate across 200 different languages with state-of-the-art quality.
• Google will allow advertisers to promote medication abortions or abortion pills, but only those who do not dispense them to customers at their own facilities, and are qualified to receive the “Provides abortion” disclosure. (source)
• "Apple has also established a new category within the Apple Security Bounty program to reward researchers who find Lockdown Mode bypasses and help improve its protections. Bounties are doubled for qualifying findings in Lockdown Mode, up to a maximum of $2,000,000 — the highest maximum bounty payout in the industry." (Mitchell Cohen)
• Spotify is testing new tools that will allow you to record, edit and publish podcasts directly from the company’s main app. (TechCrunch)
• Finally, Elon Musk has sent Twitter a letter saying he’s terminating their merger agreement (Matt Navarra)
• Google might split up some of its ad business and move it to Google's parent company, Alphabet. The goal of "splitting up" the ad division isn't necessarily to make the whole ad division separate from Google, but to weaken Google's end-to-end ownership of the ad business. (WSJ)

Thoughts of the week

Zia Daniell Wigder shared a new forecast of the US?e-commerce market. We're expected to surpass $1 trillion this year, and by 2026, over 21% of all retail sales will be online.

In your opinion, who will be the winning ad platforms?

We hope you enjoy this content ???We’re always looking for ways to improve?#ppcnews, and we’d love your feedback. Please let us know if there are any other ways we could help!