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In This Issue:

💔 Google Ads removing Enhanced CPC from Shopping Campaigns

📱 TikTok says traditional attribution models undervalue its ad impact by 73%

💸 Advertiser loses thousands in Google Ads experiment due to unrequested tests

📌 Pinterest introduces new ad formats and upgrades to Business Manager

🐦 Twitter competitor Bluesky reaches 1 million active users

🎥 Google introduces “Creative Guidance” AI tool to optimize video ads.

📦 Amazon launches AI tools to assist sellers in crafting product descriptions.

🎨 Adobe's Firefly AI models for creative tasks now available in Creative Cloud

📊 New report highlights changing consumer expectations in social media marketing.

This Week’s Changes to Google’s Ad Platform [✨ Premium Exclusive]

Every Wednesday, exclusively in the Premium Newsletter, our Google ads correspondent Jyll Saskin Gales walks us through the latest platform changes. (Jyll runs the Inside Google Ads training program.)

This week:

Why is Google removing Enhanced CPC from Shopping Campaigns

Now, your only conversion-focused option is fully automated Target ROAS

Details on YouTube’s “creative guidance” tools

Brand restrictions for Broad match and Brand exclusions for PMax, giving advertisers a little more control to entice them into more automated solutions

TikTok Says the Attribution Model You’re Using Isn’t Giving It Enough Credit

TikTok says it’s not getting enough credit for the work it’s doing in your ad campaigns.

The company this week said that last-click attribution models significantly underreport TikTok’s role because users are so enthralled by the video content — so immersed in the experience — that they’re less likely to click.

It’s not that they don’t search advertisers’ brands out, it’s that they do it later. And because of that, what you see in your campaign attribution reports aren’t an accurate sense of the customer’s journey to your product.

Attribution — the process of figuring out which marketing tactic led to a sale — has always been a little tricky to nail down.

Even back in the infomercial days, all they could do was to say “Call and ask for operator 101.” There was no operator 101, of course. The consumer saw ad number 101. If they called and repeated back a specific number, like a fake operator number, the brand could tell what ad led to that sale.

Since then, attribution’s gotten even more complicated.

Take my own experience in buying a car last year.

My wife uses a manual wheelchair, and so we need an SUV with an automated sliding driver-side passenger door, and back seats we can remove. There aren’t a lot of vehicles like that, so we’re kind of limited.

TikTok one day served me an organic post of a guy reviewing a Kia Carnival. It seemed to have everything we wanted.

So I flipped over to Google and searched around for it.

I went to Twitter and did a cursory search for people talking about it.

I went to Kia’s web site and checked out their accessibility page.

I’m pretty sure I started getting retargeted by Kia with ads on Facebook.

Eventually, we walked into a dealership and bought one.

So, which platform gets credit for the sale?

TikTok because I saw it there first?

Facebook because I saw it there just before the actual purchase?

This is what people mean when they say multi-touch attribution — the consumer was driven by lots of touch-points.

But many attribution models only take into account the very last thing that consumer touched, prior to purchase: a simple model called “last-click attribution.”

So you can see why TikTok’s a bit pissed.

It hired an outside research firm and found that when advertisers use last-click attribution, that undervalues TikTok conversions by 73%.

It also says that 79% of purchases that are driven by TikTok are not captured through common attribution methods.

Then how do you get more accurate reporting?

TikTok says you should be using both view-through and click-through attribution. Not only will you get what TikTok says is more accurate data, it’ll also help get your campaigns through the learning phase faster.

They also say you should be using longer attribution windows, and to stop making changes to your active campaigns before sufficient measurement time has elapsed.

Social Media Today has some smart analysis on this:

So, if you’re still using last-click attribution on your TikTok campaigns — or for that matter, any platform where consumption patterns are similar, consider switching things around.

You can read TikTok’s full attribution rundown here.

Read more at socialmediatoday.com

Google Ads “Test” Costs Advertiser Thousands of Unrefundable Dollars

As you know, the major platforms are always testing things.

Meta’s checking how good its new AI-generated audiences are

TikTok’s trying new discovery algorithm code

Snapchat’s tweaking some of its most popular filters

As part of that testing, of course, they need real-world data — and that comes from brand accounts like yours and mine.

Sometimes we’re told we’re in a test group, but usually we’re not.
Sometimes our results are better, sometimes they’re not.

But it’s pretty unusual for a test to go spectacularly wrong — so wrong that it costs the brand real money. Lots of it.

That’s what one advertiser says happened when Google opted them into expanded targeting.

Melissa Mackey, director of Paid Search at Compound Growth Marketing, posted on social media:

Client's ads started showing in “expanded targeting” despite being opted out of that setting. 2/8

— Melissa L Mackey (@beyondthepaid)
Sep 11, 2023

Expanded targeting is a setting which gives Google permission to reach people outside of your defined audience if it thinks there’s a good chance those people will convert. Most platforms have this enabled by default these days, but in Google’s case, you can disable it.

Melissa says she contacted Google Ads support, they apologized, told her it was a bug, and they’d refund her.

Then, it happened again. Her clients’ ads were opted back into expanded targeting, even though she’d toggled that off.

But this time when she reached out to support, they told her:

Now we're being told “From time to time the Google Ads team runs incremental experiments on campaigns to test the impact of a proposed change… Team confirmed that for this issue we might not provide any credit or refund.” 5/8

— Melissa L Mackey (@beyondthepaid)
Sep 11, 2023

These “tests” cost our client literally thousands of dollars. And we're just supposed to absorb that so Google can “experiment”?? 7/8

— Melissa L Mackey (@beyondthepaid)
Sep 11, 2023

Google's Ad Liaison, Ginny Marvin, replied saying she would look into it.

There’s nothing to say this is any kind of widespread issue, but it is yet another important reminder that the days of set-it-and-forget-it are long gone.

Check your ad campaigns daily, and if you’re not already using them, set up some alerts to let you know if something starts going haywire.

Read more at seroundtable.com

Pinterest Reveals New Slate of Ad Formats and Business Manager Updates

Pinterest today announced a slate of updated ad formats and tools for advertisers and agencies.

New and Expanded Ad Formats

First, they’re extending Premiere Spotlight from search to the home feed to help advertisers reach users from the moment they open Pinterest.

Premiere Spotlight is a premium placement that provides some degree of exclusivity. It is now available in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, Australia, Japan, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Brazil and Mexico.

They’re also adding:

Showcase ads, a new interactive ad format that lets users preview and explore a brand's content by swiping through branded images. Brands can create interactive experiences within the format.
 

Quiz ads, where brands can include up to three questions per quiz to increase engagement and show consumers more personalized content — ideally helping them to move deeper into decisions and toward a purchase.

Showcase ads and Quiz ads are now available in most of those other countries I mentioned earlier with more coming later in the year.

Business Manager Updates

Pinterest also announced improvements to its Business Manager. Like other platforms, this is where you can manage employees, partners, accounts and so on. They’re adding some new data dashboards and new audience sharing features. Business Manager will be available in all countries with Pinterest ads later this fall.

Creative Studio

Today they also shared a first look at Creative Studio.

This is sold as a way to let brands quickly generate lifestyle imagery for product Pins. You’ll add your Pin link, select the prompts that match your need, and Creative Studio will then generate a selection of custom background images.

Creative Studio will be available for testing with select US advertisers later this year. If you’re interested in being one of those, the company says to reach out to your Pinterest ad rep.

Commerce

Finally, Pinterest is expanding its integration ecosystem with two new integrations for Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Adobe Commerce to all monetized markets. These allow merchants to manage their Pinterest product catalogs and set up directly within the applications they already use for Salesforce or Adobe.

Bluesky Reaches 1 Million User Mark

One of the new apps competing for the hole left by Twitter reached an important milestone yesterday — Bluesky reported one million users.

1M users!!! 🦋

— @rose.bsky.team 🌹🦋 (@iamrosewang)
Sep 12, 2023

That is, of course, a drop in the proverbial bucket compared to Twitter which has about 350 million monthly actives right now, and is expected to drop about 5% by next year.

Still, it’s a number that at least gives Bluesky a kind of out-of-the-bush-league status.

You might recall we previously reported that Bluesky had passed a million app downloads. Bluesky is scaling very slowly, and so far that’s been done by invite codes given to its existing users. So there were a lot of people who downloaded it, only to find they lacked the code to actually create an account.

Threads, that’s Meta’s Twitter competitor, sort of did the opposite. They opened the floodgates on day one. Within five days, 100 million people had signed up. But many of them poked around and left, with daily engagement dropping dramatically in the following weeks.

One thing Threads has going for it is brand friendliness. Brands trust Meta — as much as you can trust any of the platforms. Once Threads starts running ads, it’ll just be a placement in the ads manager we’re all familiar with. We more or less know what kinds of ads they remove, what policies they have, and their reps will — we assume — also help with Threads issues.

But Bluesky is its own unique space.

Also notable: Bluesky’s founder is Jack Dorsey. Yes, the co-founder of Twitter. Bluesky started, in fact, as a Twitter project that got spun off.

And unlike the current trend of independent federated social media platforms, like Mastodon is and Threads says it plans to be, Bluesky—like Twitter— is a closed platform that has not embraced the wider fediverse.

Follow us on Bluesky or Threads

On Bluesky, our username is @todayindigital.bsky.social, and on Threads it’s @TodayInDigitalMarketing

Or follow me personally on either — on Bluesky I’m @todmaffin.bsky.social, and on Threads I’m @todmaffin

Read more at techcrunch.com

Marketing AI Tools from Three Big Platforms

Google, Amazon, and Adobe have all unveiled new AI-driven tools for marketers this week. Here’s a rundown.

Google

Google launched “Creative Guidance” for YouTube — an AI tool integrated into the Google Ads platform. It evaluates video ads, offering feedback based on Google's best practices. It can suggesting improvements like optimal video duration, effective voice-overs, and correct aspect ratios. Read more 

Amazon

Meanwhile, Amazon has some AI that can write product descriptions, titles, and product details. There’s also a way to enhance existing descriptions. Amazon reminded marketers that AI can sometimes “hallucinate” or produce inaccurate information, so it recommends making sure you still check what it writes. Read more

Adobe

And Adobe's Firefly, after a half-year beta phase, is now available in its Creative Cloud, Adobe Express, and Adobe Experience Cloud. Firefly's generative AI capabilities include “generative fill” in Photoshop. Pricing is, well, very Adobe-like — you get a set number of credits per month. Unless you’re on Firefly or Express Premium, when you’ll only get two generations per day, but then those reset… unless they don’t, in which case you’ll be able to buy additional subscription packs. Read more

Report Highlights Social Media Marketing Shifts

Sprout Social this week released its annual report into the state of social media marketing, and it’s mostly good news for marketers.

68% of people they polled said the main reason they follow a brand on social media is to stay up to date about that brand’s offerings

46% say they follow in the hopes that it’ll give them access to exclusive deals or promotions

45% follow because they find the content posted by the brand to be entertaining

Paradoxically, consumers also say they want to see more authentic and non-promotional content — things like behind-the-scenes videos, interviews with people making the product, and day-in-the-life type content.

When asked what a brand can do to be most memorable — more than half said respond to customers on social media.

How fast does this mean? Maybe not as fast as you’d think. More people said they expected a response within the same day as said within 1-2 hours.

In fact, when you add up the same-day responses, 69% of consumers said they wanted that speed. But last year, when asked the same question, 77% expected a response within the same day.

This year, Sprout Social also asked consumers how they feel about brands using AI in social media interactions — more than three-quarters are either ambivalent or apprehensive about it.

The survey polled more than 1,800 social media users and 900 marketers across the U.S. and the U.K.

Full disclosure: Our agency uses Sprout Social, and our primary work is in social media engagement and moderation. Our median first reply time for responding to our clients’ customers on social media is 4 minutes.

Read more at socialmediatoday.com

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