Paid advertising usually makes up a big percentage of a marketing campaign’s budget, whether that’s to target direct enquiries and sales, or to test and build an effective SEO strategy.
2022 saw a good number of changes to options on both new and existing channels, so, to help you keep up with everything that’s been happening, I’ve put together a list of the top 5 newish PPC features you might have missed.
1. New Tools for Facebook Ads
Despite the consumer-facing challenges Meta has faced over the past year or so, they do continue to create new options for advertisers that integrate seamlessly across Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp including messaging and conversion features.
Meta has identified that more than 70% of people want the ability to talk with a business in a conversational way and so their Ad format, which can be published across Facebook and Instagram from the Whatsapp Business app, has been launched.
Meta has also released new acquisition and lead gen options including:
Gated content
Partner integrations
Lead filtering
Quote requests on Instagram
The most effective feature, in my opinion, is the ability to use gated content to capture crucial user information such as their email address to be able to continue the conversation later.
2. Video Ads for Microsoft
Microsoft just won’t give up on increasing its share of the digital advertising revenue and with the growth of their Audience Network, at the end of last year they officially launched their Video Ads.
If you’re an Advertiser in the UK, USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Germany or France, you can now reach your target market where you might not have been able to before and, of course, you won’t need to start from scratch – you should be able to re-use any Youtube Ads you’ve already created.
Microsoft has released some data to suggest that about 40% of people watch videos on MSN but not Youtube and nearly 60% of people watch MSN videos but not Facebook.
Personally, I’d question those stats but it does give food for thought.
3. No more expanded text ads for Google
Google is probably the only network taking options away from advertisers, the latest being expanded text ads. Although it was 2021 when Google first announced they were taking this feature away, it was June last year when they officially disappeared. Search Ads are overwhelmingly dominated by the Responsive Search Ads format.
For businesses using Google Ads, this was a big change, especially since many advertisers saw their expanded ads perform way better than their new responsive counterparts, but, trying to find a positive out of all of this, it has meant that advertisers and agencies have been forced to rethink their messaging.
Although it’s easy to feel you’ve lost some control over your Ads, the new headlines and descriptions on responsive ads does mean that, subject to believing Google knows the audience best, they’re well placed to mix and match your text to service the best message at the right time.
4. Tiktok’s New Search Ad Placements
Although it’s not fully released yet, and Tiktok haven’t given a timeline for it to be available for all advertisers, last year people started to notice ‘sponsored’ listings appearing in their search results.
Research is starting to show that users of this relatively new platform utilise the network for more and more general search terms – phrases that would have once been used in Google.
Hopefully, very soon, advertisers will be able to target users around specific search terms which, for many, would be game-changing.
5. LinkedIn gets an enhanced campaign manager
For years people have complained about how difficult and convoluted it is to LinkedIn’s Ad campaign dashboard and it looks like, finally, they’ve taken notice.
At first glance it would seem they’ve taken on board the layout of other networks such as Google Ads, giving 5 main menu options – Plan, Advertise, Test, Analyse and Assets.
If that wasn’t enough of a change, you can now also flick between different advertising accounts much easier.
So that’s a round-up of our top 5 newish Paid Ad features, but, no doubt there’s going to be a ton more on their way, so, to stay up to date, make sure you like, subscribe or follow us on social
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