Daily Minute Master Series – October 22, 2019
Social Media
Instagram Tests New Following List Categories to Help Manage Your Content Feed
Instagram is testing out a new process which would categorize your ‘Following’ list into both topic categories and listings based on your engagement with each, in order to help users better manage what content appears in their main feed. Instagram would essentially be recommending profiles to unfollow, as you clearly haven’t shown much interest in them. That would then better enable Instagram’s algorithm to understand what you want to see on the platform, improving the user experience – but it also seems to go somewhat against the past social media ethos of getting users to follow as many people and profiles as possible, in order to keep their content stream flowing. The shift away from content volume, and towards relevance, is actually part of what’s fueled Instagram’s rise, and seen it become the fastest-growing social platform, now with over a billion active users. There’s no word on whether this test will ever go live. But it seems like a positive addition – so long as users are aware of its utility.
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Advertising
Google Launches ‘Adaptive Anchor Banner’ Ads to Better Cater to Varying Screens
Google is launching a new banner ad type which is able to adapt to varying screen size, helping to maximize performance in line with evolving consumption behaviors. The new option, Google says, will mean that your banner ads look better, while also alleviating the need for custom coding to handle different devices. The option is currently in beta, and is only available for anchored placements (banners locked to the top or bottom of the screen), with Google still working on full implementation. But it may provide another consideration for your Google ad placement options, more aligned with varying device usage.
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Google Ads now showing cart metrics for Shopping campaigns
Merchants running Google Ads Shopping campaigns can now see e-commerce cart data in the UI to gain a clearer sense of which products are driving profitable cart transactions. We are just over a month out from the holiday shopping surge that kicks off with Black Friday. With this data available in Google Ads, merchants can get a better sense of the profitability of their Shopping campaigns and how to optimize for greater gross profit. erchants capturing cart data with Google Ads conversion tracking will be able to see additional revenue and profitability data attributed down to the product level. The new metrics, currently in beta, take cross-device conversions into account.
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Capture leads with Google Ads latest ad extension test
Google is beta testing a new ad extension for advertisers looking to capture leads from their text ad campaigns. Searchers can submit their information to request or download information from Google Search ads through the new lead form extension. The lead extensions look similar to promotion extensions, displaying in a call-out box with an icon, in this case a clipboard. After you select the campaigns, you choose the call-to-action and enter extension text which can be up to 30 characters. The ease of using lead extensions could help advertisers generate more leads from their search ads. Advertisers will want to closely monitor the quality of these leads, however. Some advertisers may balk at the limited amount of data that can be captured in the latest version of the leads form extension, but the integration of webhooks should help reduce the friction of transferring lead data to sales systems, and the new option is designed for mobile experiences.
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