1. TikTok Shared Holiday Marketing Guide to Assist with Strategic Planning - This week, TikTok has published part one of its 2021 Holiday Marketing guide, which outlines some key usage stats, important shopping dates to note, and even provides a calendar overview for planning your outreach.

TikTok will provide more tips next week – you can check out the full overview here, or the infographic summary below.

2. LinkedIn Launches Updated Lead Gen Forms Integration - LinkedIn has made collecting audience data a little easier with the launch of a new Event Registration trigger in the Lead Generation Forms integration for Zapier, enabling you to connect your gathered lead gen forms info with third-party tools and apps.

For example, using the Zapier/LinkedIn lead gen integration, you could create an automation flow that automatically adds a webinar registrant in Zoom every time someone signs up for your event, or you could add all Lead Gen Forms responses to a Google Sheet for easy sorting and retargeting.

3. Microsoft Advertising launches Marketing with Purpose Business attributes - New attributes from Microsoft Advertising allow businesses to indicate their dedication to “responsibility, how your brand values align with the values of your customers, and how your brand is being inclusive,” said an announcement from Microsoft Advertising.

“Marketing with Purpose Business Attributes allow you to communicate quickly and easily how your brand is ‘for someone like me.’ They allow you to be authentic, which is the key attribute to building trust with customers,” said the blog.

Marketing with Purpose. This initiative is exclusive to Microsoft Advertising and follows the lead the company has taken with its Marketing with Purpose playbook and course. The idea behind the initiative is to “build a brand that’s welcomed into people’s lives by earning genuine trust, upholding their values, and inclusively advertising.”

Attributes included. The attributes advertisers can choose from fall under four main categories: inclusion, environmental, community/social responsibility, and accessibility. Within those categories, there are 32 attributes that a business can choose.

4. Facebook Shared Its Content Distribution Guidelines - On Sep 23, Facebook published Content Distribution Guidelines to share more detail on how content is distributed on Facebook. While the Community Standards make it clear what content is removed from Facebook because they don’t allow it on the platform, the Content Distribution Guidelines make it clear what content receives reduced distribution on News Feed because it’s problematic or low quality. Many of these guidelines have been shared in various announcements, but in efforts to provide clarity and make them more accessible, they brought them together in one easy-to-navigate space in their Transparency Center. 

There are three principal reasons why they might reduce the distribution of a content:

5. Facebook Testing 'Community Awards' to Encourage Engagement in Groups - Facebook’s trying out another way to boost positive contributions in groups, with a new feature called ‘Community Awards’ now in live testing. 

The idea is that by rewarding more engaging, more beneficial interactions, that you can encourage individual users to interact more often, while the awards will also highlight to other group members what types of comments you want to see, which could help to improve overall interaction.

Facebook’s tried similar group engagement markers in the past, with ‘Top Fan’ and other badge types to recognize key contributors.

6. Facebook Updates Business Ad Options in Reaction to iOS Update - Apple’s recent privacy changes messed up Facebook’s Ad business so much so that the company warned that the impact of Apple’s privacy changes will more severely impact its Q3 earnings. Vice president of product marketing Graham Mudd said in the blog post that Facebook estimates that in aggregate, it has been underreporting iOS web conversions by approximately 15%; with individual advertisers falling into a broad range. Mudd said the company believes real-world conversions, such as application installs and sales, are higher than what is being reported to advertisers, writing, “We’ve heard from many of you that the impact on your advertising investment has been greater than you expected. The cost of achieving your business outcome may have increased and it’s also gotten harder to measure your campaigns on our platform.” 

Now to counter this issue, Facebook has rolled out new features that include expanded click-to-chat options from ads where “businesses can choose all the messaging platforms where they’re available to chat, and we’ll default the chat app in your ad based on where a conversation is most likely to happen,” according to the announcement.

You can also start a WhatsApp chat from an Instagram profile, and the company will “begin testing paid and organic tools to help small businesses find and qualify leads directly within the Instagram app,” said Facebook. New communication options include a test to allow “businesses to manage emails through Inbox and send remarketing emails from Facebook Business Suite,” as well.

“We’re also introducing File Manager, a new feature that allows businesses to easily create, manage and post content within Facebook Business Suite. Lastly, we’re making post testing available in Facebook Business Suite to let businesses test and compare multiple versions of a post to see which one people are more likely to engage with,” said the announcement from Facebook.

7. Google Launches “Things to Do” Free Listing & Paid Ads. Plus Eco-certification Badge for Hotels - Google is introducing new organic and paid features for travel and leisure businesses, including ticket booking links and pricing in search results, new “Things to do” ads and an eco-certified badge for hotel listings

In addition to showing general information when users search for attractions, such as the Statue of Liberty or Tokyo Tower, for example, Google will now also show booking links for basic admission and other ticketing options (when available). 

The company also has plans for a wider rollout of this feature: “In the months ahead, we’ll also begin showing information and booking links for experiences in a destination, like wine tasting in Paris or bike tours in California,” the search engine said.

Google is also introducing a new paid product for travel and leisure businesses: Things to do ads (shown below).

These ads will appear above the search results when users search for tours, activities and local attractions on Google Search. They show details such as images, reviews, pricing and include a booking link for the activity, and are shown to users based on their search terms, location and other related details.

Things to do ads are an automated format that use data from your inventory feed based on the ad group label. Advertisers can designate a budget and target users based on their country of residence and device type. Except for target impression share, all bidding strategies available for Search campaigns are also available for Things to do campaigns. Google’s Help Center has more details on how to get started with this new offering.

Lastly, beginning this week, hotels that are certified for high standards of sustainability from certain independent organizations, such as EarthCheck or Green Key, will have an eco-certified badge next to their name, in the search results.

8. Google Ads Advertiser Page Focuses on Transparency - “To give users of our products even more transparency, we are enhancing ad disclosures with new advertiser pages. Users can access these disclosures in our new ‘About this ad’ menu to see the ads a specific verified advertiser has run over the past 30 days,” said Google in an announcement on Sep 22, 2021

As part of the company’s advertiser transparency initiative, Google Ads introduced their advertiser identity verification program as well as their “About this ad” information this past year. The new Advertiser Page program takes that transparency for searchers to the next level.

“This transparency helps users learn more about the company behind a specific ad. It also helps differentiate credible advertisers in the ecosystem, while limiting the ability of bad actors to misrepresent themselves,” according to the announcement blog. Searchers can report any ad policy violations they believe an ad is breaching. From there a Google team member reviews it and takes the ad down if the violations are found to be true.

“[The advertiser page] will be generated based on the approved ads running and the information in their account. In terms of information about the advertiser, we will continue to show the advertiser’s name and location,” according to Google representative.

9. Google Publishes New, Practical Guide on Key Ad Creative Best Practices and Tips - If you’re looking to optimize your Google marketing approach, then this will help – this week, Google has published a new, 30-page guide to its various ad tools and options, which provides a range of valuable insights and pointers to assist in your holiday marketing strategy.

You can download the full guide here, but here is my key take away.

10. Google Ads Phrase & Broad Match Keyword Preferability - A phrase match or broad match keyword that is identical to a query is now always preferred as long as it is eligible to match, Google announced on Thursday. In addition, the company has provided new details on how keyword matching works when a search is identical to a given keyword as well as when a search is not identical to any of an advertiser’s keywords. 

Here’s an example provided by Google: “Let’s say someone searches for ‘sushi delivery near me’, and you have the broad match keywords sushi delivery and sushi delivery near me. Before this update, both of these keywords would be eligible to serve. Now, the keyword sushi delivery near me is preferred because it is identical to the search term. Note that if you have an eligible exact match keyword that is identical to the query, it will still be preferred over the phrase and broad match keyword.”

Now that broad and phrase match keywords that are identical to a search term also receive priority, according to Google, there is no benefit to using the same keyword in multiple match types as broad match already covers the same queries. However, depending on your structure and setup, this may not apply so test before making any changes.

When a search isn’t identical to any of your keywords. Ad Rank used to determine which keyword was served when multiple keywords matched, but none were identical to the search. Now, in addition to Ad Rank, Google is taking relevance signals into account. Relevance is determined by assessing the meaning of the search term, the meaning of all the keywords in the ad group and the landing pages within the ad group.