PPC Roundup (Week 28)

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 accounts.

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PPC News

11th to 17th of July 2022

Analytics

Google Analytics 4

In Explorations and Reporting Customization, you can now report on the:

• Bounce rate is the inverse of?Engagement rate, which is the number of engaged sessions divided by the total number of sessions in a specified time period.
• utm_content?and?utm_term?parameter values?(also available in Audience Builder)
• ?conversion rate for any conversion event (user or session conv. rate)

Just be aware that Bounce rate is calculated differently between UA and GA4 (source)

Search Console

To help us understand the performance of your videos on Google, and identify possible areas of improvement, Search Console is launching a new report called Video indexing. (source)

Paid Search

Google Ads

Google launched Ads Creative Studio to Increase relevance with customized ads:

Shraddha Prajapati & Alex van de Pol shared how you can now add voiceovers to your videos. Have you tried this feature yet? Good results?

Google is testing a new format for destination queries that not only shows????????????? ???? ???? but now showed this "short videos" format in the ???????????????? section.? (Rudolph Dekker)

Content worth sharing

Prabhakar Raghavan, who runs Google’s Knowledge & Information organization, said that “In our studies, something like almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search,” he continued. “They go to TikTok or Instagram.” (source)

Young people are often looking for an answer or solution in the form of a quick fix or "unbiased crowdsourced reviews" as Timothy Armoo mentioned.

Bram Van der Hallen showed us how it looks when planning my next trip to New York and searching for a hamburger restaurant.

Tiago shared 2 useful formulas to be used as custom columns:

Trending cost:

Budget pacing:

Frederik Boysen shared how enhanced conversions help to achieve a greater uplift in their sales for e-commerce. That's a great point. It definitely clarifies that it is not for B2B/Lead generation purposes only!

Performance Max

Performance Max has some new features:

• Seasonality adjustments for short periods and events, usually ranging from 1-7 days, such as a week-long promotion or sale.?
• Data exclusion to prevent unintended issues with a conversion tracking from affecting your Performance Max bid strategy.?
• Advanced location options (already announced last week)
• Explanations that offer analysis of your product status and your top-moving products, listing groups, and product types.

Benjamin Wenner warned that "Exclude App Placements"?is still worth doing in Pmax.

He also shared how you can now set up a rule-based email in Google Ads, if a Performance Max migration happens.

Hotel ads

Google Hotel Center?will give you new insights into travel behavior:

• High intent users: does the traveler interact with the filters (date and/or the number of persons) in the booking module?
• Booking window days: for how many days in advance is the traveler searching for the availability of the property?
• Length of stay: for what number of nights is the traveler searching for availability of the property?

(credit Rudolph Dekker)

Google Ads policy

In August 2022, the?Google Ads Political Content policy?will be updated to clarify the disclosure requirements for election advertising using ad formats and features available across Google where the advertiser is responsible for including a “Paid for by” disclosure directly in the ad, as follows:???

For visual formats, the disclosure must be visible at all times and be of sufficient size to be visible to an average viewer. For audio-only formats, the disclosure must be substantially similar in pitch, tone and speed to the rest of the ad.?

Concurrent with this update, in August 2022, US Election Ads serving in the US will be eligible to run as?Audio Ads on YouTube. (source)

Amazon Ads

?Sponsored Display?can now customize their creatives by adding a headline, logo and lifestyle image together, or individually. (8th of July)

Guru Hariharan shared how Amazon is giving more importance to Amazon Live, shoppable videos across multiple categories.

Mina Elias advised using more of the backend keyword feature. It provides sellers with an alternative to the index for valuable keywords that could not be targeted on the PDP and while not visible to the buyer, they still have a significant impact on improving visibility and driving conversions

Programmatic

Alexis Nicolas shared how YouTube audience-level reporting in Campaign Manager hasn't been fun as to get granular data, lots of manual campaign architecture is needed within DV360 (specific line items per YT audience within an IO).

Paid Social

Meta Ads

It is now possible to enable music for static image ads showing on Reels. (Dario Zannoni)

Content worth sharing

Bram Van der Hallen shared 2 tips:

• You can search for specific text present in an image (e.g. Filter > Media Type > Images) in the Facebook Ads Library
• You can automatically add 'Product Tags' to items from your Instagram Shopping catalogue.

eMarketer shared how Messenger is still the leading messaging platform in the US.

Matt Navarra shared how the average Instagram feed post engagement rate has dropped by 44% since 2019. A critical point to understand why your engagement could have changed.

Twitter

Twitter announced a new "Unmentioning" feature. (source)

TikTok

A new tool to customize content

Automatically filter out videos with words or hashtags they don't want to see from their For You or Following feeds?

Introducing Content Levels to help further safeguard the viewing experience.

When we detect that a video contains mature or complex themes, a maturity score will be allocated to it to help prevent those under 18 from viewing it.?(source)

TikTok Inventory Filter will then assess which videos to exclude from a given tier. As a result, the maturity of the themes present in each tier will vary accordingly, as follows:

-?Full Inventory:?Excludes any "Floor" content removed by robust moderation against TikTok's Community Guidelines and some "High Risk" content. In this tier, ads may appear next to some content featuring mature themes.

-?Standard Inventory:?Excludes "Floor" and "High Risk" content. Ads will appear next to content that is appropriate for most brands but may contain some mature themes.

-?Limited Inventory:?Excludes all risk levels (from "Floor" to "Low Risk"). Ads will appear next to content that does not contain mature themes. (source)

Marketing Industry

GDPR & cookies-less world

• The Italian watchdog has also informed Ireland's Data Protection Commission over TikTok's policy alleged breaches of EU data rules by not requesting consent for using data stored in users' devices. TikTok could face fines of up to 4% of global revenue for privacy breaches. (Cory Underwood - source)

Advertising news

• Nadine Zylstra, previously Global Head of YouTube Originals, is joining Pinterest in the newly created role of Global Head of Programming and Originals. (source)
• Netflix announced that they have selected Microsoft as their global advertising technology and sales partner for their new consumer subscription plan. (source)
• Disney struck an advertising agreement with The Trade Desk, making it possible for brands to target automated ads across Disney’s linear and streaming properties — Hulu, ESPN+, ABC, Freeform, ESPN, National Geographic and FX.?(Sam Martin-Ross - source)
• Facebook is cutting back on hiring and turning up the heat on its employees, hiring?6,000 to 7,000 new engineers in 2022—a stark drop from its initial plan to hire more than 10,000. It still has 28% more full-time employees than it had a year earlier.? (source)

Thoughts of the week

From Jyll Saskin Gales, what would a Google Ads platform look like without keywords?

Cory Lindholm already wrote a similar post, worth reading!

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!