Daily Minute Master Series – June 26, 2019
Social Media
Facebook Expands Political Ad Transparency Tools to All Regions
Facebook has announced that it’s now bringing its political issues ad transparency tools to all regions, after initially rolling them out in fifty nations systematically, based on when each region had been running a local election. Facebook first introduced its ‘Issues Ads’ tags last May, and as noted, it’s been rolling them out to more regions over time. The system means that all advertisers looking to run ads in relation to political issues will need to go through an authorization process, and that all related ads will be kept in Facebook’s publicly available Ad Archive for seven years, which also includes information on who saw each ad and how much was spent on promoting it. Anything that can be implemented on this front is a bonus, and Facebook’s ad archive could prove to be a valuable tool in the fight against political misinformation.
For the full article click here
Marketing
LinkedIn Has Outlined its Recent Algorithm Updates, Which Focus on Broadening Engagement
LinkedIn has this week outlined some of the specific changes that it’s made to its feed distribution algorithm in order to maximize member response, and boost activity among users. LinkedIn has built in an element which rewards content creators (‘audience builders’) on the platform, as opposed to merely showing users the most engaging content to maximize response. The idea of this is to encourage more activity from across the board, and make LinkedIn, in general, a more engaging and active place of discussion. That, ideally, will keep members coming back more often – more users seeing more response equates to them posting more often, essentially re-distributing all that top-level engagement that was going to the top 1% and spreading it more evenly to foster broader participation.
For the full article click here
Yelp offering more paid profile upgrades for business owners
Yelp is introducing a range of new paid-promotional tools for business owners to give them more control over how they appear to users. They are also non-advertising, revenue-generating products for Yelp. The new products are intended primarily to help business owners but also bring more value and utility to consumers as well. The first of the Yelp offerings, Yelp Verified License, was actually introduced in March. Yelp manually checks whether companies are licensed in their respective categories and in good standing. Listings with a verified license carry a prominent blue badge, which appears on their profiles. The other two new profile features being introduced are “Business Highlights” and “Portfolio”. Business Highlights enable owners to pick from roughly 30 icons that describe or help promote their businesses. The idea here is to help the business differentiate and enable newer businesses without many reviews stand out and gain consideration. The third new product is Portfolio, which allows business owners to showcase projects they’ve done, such as home remodeling or landscape design. Google and Yelp are both enabling more customization for business owners. As more business owners opt for paid customization to stand out, it will put pressure on their competitors to do so as well.
For the full article click here
Advertising
Parallel tracking, more custom parameters coming to Microsoft Advertising for improved tracking
Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads) is going to be making several updates in the coming months to improve page load for users and provide better tracking for advertisers. When parallel tracking is enabled, a user is taken directly to the landing page after clicking an ad, while the ad click measurement process happen separately in the background. Microsoft Advertising currently has it available as an option in some accounts, and the company says it expects to make it available to all advertisers soon. If you want to participate in the beta, reach out to your ad rep. Soon to be located in the “Campaign URL options” section of campaign settings, a Final URL suffix field will enable you to specify the parameters you want attached to your landing page URL for tracking. Now you can set up to eight pairs of custom parameters for URL tracking. The character limit has also been expanded to 250 characters. This will be available at the campaign, ad group and keyword levels, and support for additional levels is coming soon.
For the full article click here
