[Ep129] - Google Ad Recommendations Can Now Be Applied As Experiments

Get up to speed with the Digital Marketing News and Updates from the week of Oct 3-7, 2022
1. Facebook Ad Policies Renamed To Meta Ad Standards - Meta has renamed their Facebook Advertising Policies to Meta Advertising Standards to make them “as useful, transparent and clear as possible. We’re not making any changes to the scope of these policies or how we enforce them, nor are we announcing any new policies. Instead, our goal with this update is to make it easier for people and businesses to access and understand our policies.”


2. Meta Announces Facebook Communities Summit 2022 - Per Meta, “the Facebook Communities Summit is back. Join us virtually to celebrate inspiring community builders, hear from Facebook leaders, and learn about a number of new products and features to help you build, grow, and support your groups.”

The event is scheduled for October 20, 2022. Previous Communities Summit events have seen the launch of various new tools and updates, so it could well be worth tuning in if you’re looking to stay up with the latest group moderation options that could help to maximize your Facebook community. You can learn more about 2022 Facebook’s Communities Summit, and sign-up to attend, here.


3. Meta Shutting Down ‘Bulletin’ Newsletter Platform - Meta launched Bulletin in April 2021, as part of an effort to take a piece of the growing newsletter market and compete with Substack (btw, Twimshow is hosted on substack). Now Meta says that it will shut down Bulletin by early next year. 

Per Meta, “Bulletin has allowed us to learn about the relationship between Creators and their audiences and how to better support them in building their community on Facebook. While this off-platform product itself is ending, we remain committed to supporting these and other Creators’ success and growth on our platform.”


4. Meta Rolls Out ‘Advantage Custom Audience’ - Per Meta, “... rolling out Advantage custom audience, a new targeting automation product that leverages an advertiser’s Custom Audience to reach new and existing customers. This is similar to Lookalike audiences that find people who are likely to be interested in your business, except that Advantage custom audience goes beyond the 1%, 5% or 10% similarity ranges you are used to, while also prioritizing delivery of ads to people in your Custom Audience. This entire process is guided by AI and machine learning to help improve advertiser campaign performance with less manual effort.”


5. Instagram : Multi-advertiser, Explore And Profile Feed Ads - Multi-advertiser ads allow businesses to be discovered by people who are in a shopping mindset and have recently engaged with relevant business content in feed. When a person expresses commercial intent by engaging with an ad, Instagram will deliver more ads from other businesses that may be of interest, powered by machine learning. Through a large-scale back end study, they observed that adding multi-advertiser ads to ad campaigns drove improved efficiency in incremental conversions per dollar spent.

Explore home, the grid that people see when they first arrive on the Explore tab, will now feature ads to reach people in the earliest stages of discovering new content they care about.

Instagram is also testing  ads in profile feed for non-teen, public profiles, which is the feed experience that people can scroll through after visiting another account’s profile and tapping on a post. Ads in profile feed give advertisers the opportunity to expand their reach easily using existing feed assets, while giving people the same personalized ad experience they enjoy in their main Instagram feed. As a part of this test, we will experiment with a monetization opportunity that will allow eligible creators to earn extra income from ads displayed in their profile feeds, beginning with select U.S. creators.


6. Google Analytics Stops Reporting Store Visits - Store Visits in Google Analytics provides an estimated count of the number of store visits from users who visit your website and then visit your physical store within 30 days. Store visits are estimates based on data from users who have turned on Location History. Only aggregated and anonymized data is reported to advertisers, and they aren’t able to see any store visits from individual website sessions, ad clicks, viewable impressions, or people.

Now Google states that, “on 10/31/2022, Store Visits reporting will be discontinued. As of this date, new Store Visits reporting will not be generated. Historical Store Visits reporting will remain available.”



7. Google Announces ‘Tag Coverage Summary’ - Sitewide tags are the building blocks of a strong measurement foundation. They help advertisers understand how customers are interacting with their website and ads. 

But, it’s historically been difficult to set up and manage tags without technical expertise or a tag management platform like Google Tag Manager. To address this, Google rolled out a single, reusable Google tag so you can do more across different Google products and accounts without changing your website code. We covered this in more detail in Episode#120.

Now, with the new Tag coverage summary, you can quickly determine whether your Google tag has been implemented on all of your website pages. You can access this summary from the Google tag sections of both Google Ads and Google Analytics, and through Google Tag Manager.


8. Google Ads: Target Users Who Are More Likely To Click On In-App Ads - Through this update, Google Ads’ app campaigns allow you to target people with an affinity for clicking on ads within apps. The new targeting option is target return on ad spend for ad revenue or tROAS for ad revenue for short. Per Google, “this is an update to the Target Return on Ad Spend, or tROAS bid strategy, which is recommended if you are seeking a specific Return on Ad Spend from your App campaigns..

To use tROAS for ad revenue, your develope will need to send all AdMob or third-party ad revenue data to Google Analytics for bidding. Because third-party ad revenue in Google Analytics enables revenue import from any monetization platform into Google Analytics for tROAS bidding. In addition, you’re required to link your Google Analytics property to Google Ads and send your Google Analytics ad_impression event to Google Ads. With those requirements met, you can implement this new targeting capability by setting up a tROAS for ad revenue App campaign and selecting the ‘ad_impression’ event to optimize toward ad revenue. 


9. Google Ads Testing ‘Automatically Created Assets’ - Automatically created assets are a campaign-level setting that helps you generate additional assets (headers and descriptions) to complement the assets you input for your ads by using relevant creative content from your landing page, website, existing ads, and keywords in your ad group. Note that automatically created assets setting is currently in beta and not available for all. Automatically created assets will appear in campaign level settings as accounts are added to the beta. 

You can see which assets are being used in the RSAs by navigating to “Asset report” from the Ad level to “View asset details” and viewing all of the assets used. 
  • You can use the “source” column to distinguish between automatically created assets vs advertiser-created assets 
  • Automatically created assets will show impressions and performance ratings 
  • On the channel-level asset report, auto-created assets are visible like advertiser-provided assets
If you have access to this new feature, you’ll instruct Google to generate the assets from eligible sources based on relevance and predicted performance. You can choose to opt-out of automatically generated assets by going into your Google Ads account, navigating to Settings, then clicking Automatically created assets, then selecting Off: Use only assets I provide directly for my ads.



10. Google Ad Recommendations Can Now Be Applied As Experiments - Google Ads announced that you can now apply a recommendation as an experiment in the Experiments page. This allows you to more efficiently "in as few as two clicks, you can set up an experiment where you compare your base campaign to a trial campaign which will have the recommendation applied," Google said. Currently, this functionality is available for broad match and target return on advertising spend recommendations. Google said it will continue to roll out support for more recommendation types on the Experiments page in the coming months.

Google said this was done because many advertisers felt that it can be hard to understand the impact of applying a recommendation to your account.

Google recommends you monitor your results within the Google Ads Experiments page for 4-6 weeks. Once the experiment has concluded, you can apply the results by either converting your trial campaign into a new campaign or by transferring the learnings to your original campaign.