Facebook has created a new policy which effectively bans ads for cryptocurrency, as well as other financial products.
The reason for this policy change, Facebook says, is to honor one of its core advertising principles that ads should be safe. Ads for cryptocurrency are frequently tied to misleading and deceptive practices, the company believes.
Facebook’s new policy reads as follows:
”Ads must not promote financial products and services that are frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices, such as binary options, initial coin offerings, or cryptocurrency.”
Examples of prohibited ads include:
“Start binary options trading now and receive a 10-risk free trades bonus!”
“Click here to learn more about our no-risk cryptocurrency that enables instant payments to anyone in the world.”
“New ICO! Buy tokens at a 15% discount NOW!”
“Use your retirement funds to buy Bitcoin!”
If Facebook’s new policy sounds too broad, that’s intentional. As the company ramps up enforcement it will work to detect more specific types of deceptive and misleading ad practices. The policy will also extend to ads on Facebook-owned Instagram.
The underlying goal is to make it harder for scammers to thrive on the world’s biggest social network. However, this is not a guarantee that everyone will be caught. Facebook encourages users to continue reporting ads that violate its policies.
Instagram is finally introducing a way for users to schedule posts in advance. Specifically, tools that utilize the Instagram Graph API now have the ability to schedule posts.
Hootsuite is one such tool, and the company says the scheduling and publishing of Instagram content is the number one request from its customers. Tools with the Instagram Graph API can allow multiple team members to manage large volumes of content across multiple instagram accounts.
This is not a perfect solution, but hopefully it’s the start of something that will be offered more widely. Scheduling posts natively within the Instagram app would be the most accessible solution, as would giving free apps like Buffer the ability to schedule posts.
It appears that Instagram is gearing this feature toward business and enterprise clients. In addition to scheduling posts, the Instagram Graph API can now show users which posts they’ve been tagged in. Lastly, other business profiles can now be viewed using tools with the Instagram Graph API.
Developers using the old Instagram API will need to migrate to the Instagram Graph API in order to work with these new features. Instagram will end support for the Instagram API Platform, giving developers plenty of time to migrate.
How location data accuracy leads to stronger personalization
Jan 31, 2018 by Amy King
Inaccurate location data can be a headache for marketers. Contributor Amy King explains how you can ensure precise data, resulting in more personalized location data-based marketing campaigns.
6 hot trends travel brands should watch in 2018
Jan 31, 2018 by Christi Olson
Contributor Christi Olson shares six trends travel brands can keep an eye on to help build their advertising outreach strategies in 2018.
Big companies are treating Amazon like a branding channel
Jan 31, 2018 by Andrew Waber
Big brands are taking a page from smaller upstarts and looking to better understand their customers. Columnist Andrew Waber says the upshot is a shift in ad dollars to Amazon Marketing Services and similar ad products.
Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media’s General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs.com, SoftwareCEO.com, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.
Artificial Intelligence is a hot topic in PPC, but until the machines fully take over day-to-day account management, there are a few key areas where human PPC pros can still add a lot of value. Use business data for bid management Bid management can be one of the most repetitive and boring tasks of managing […]
SMX London takes place May 22-23, 2018, at etc.venues, 155 Bishopsgate, Liverpool St., London EC2M 3YD. To increase the odds of being selected, be sure to read the agenda. Understand what the sessions are about. Ensure that your pitch is on target to the show’s audience and the session. Please also be very specific about […]
Greg Finn – The Search Community Honors You
This is part of the say something nice about an SEO/SEM series – feel free to nominate someone over here. Greg Finn, 36 years old, lives in Western New York with his wife and three year old twins – oh, and a very hairy 8 year old dog named
How Do Ride A Google Bike
So we’ve seen many pictures of Google bikes over the years but now I spotted the official and acceptable way to actually ride one of these Google bikes. Michaela Monaghan, who I think is a Noogler, w
Location intelligence reveals a great deal about who we are. By observing the stores consumers visit, their areas of residence, where they work and how far they commute, marketers gather valuable insights into consumer preferences and interests.
Ultimately, this observed, real-world location data is the bridge that links a person’s online activities with their online behavior.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
About The Author
Amy King leads product marketing at Valassis Digital, where she enjoys communicating the value of the data, activation, and measurement tools available to modern marketers.
Google announced three updates to Google Flights that are all centered around keeping searchers more informed.
Google Flights will now inform searchers about even cheaper flights than what were surfaced before, and will start providing details about flight delays.
Basic Economy Air Fares
Now that more airlines are starting to offer “basic economy” fares, Google Flights will start to include those fares in search results. Google Flights will return basic economy fares from American, Delta, and United.
Flight Delays
Perhaps the only thing more aggravating than a flight delay is not knowing the reason why you’re now going to be running several hours late. Google Flights will start providing details about flight delays. That won’t make the flight delay any less inconvenient, but at least you’ll know what’s going on.
Delay Predictions
With Google Flights, travelers can potentially avoid delays altogether. It will now predict when a specific flight being searched for is likely to encounter a delay. Google says flight delays are predicted with 80% certainty, and are based on a combination of historical flight data and machine learning.
These updates are now available to everyone using flights.google.com.
Paid search marketers look to technology to provide them with a competitive advantage.
AdWords is host to a range of increasingly sophisticated features, but there are also numerous third-party tools that add extra insight. Below, we review some of the essential tools to achieve PPC success.
The paid search industry is set to develop significantly through 2018, both in its array of options for advertisers and in its level of sophistication as a marketing channel. The pace of innovation is only accelerating, and technology is freeing search specialists to spend more time on strategy, rather than repetitive tasks.
Google continues to add new machine learning algorithms to AdWords that improve the efficacy of paid search efforts, which is undoubtedly a welcome development. This technology ultimately becomes something of an equalizer, however, given that everyone has access to these same tools.
It is at the intersection of people and technology that brands can thrive in PPC marketing. Better training and more enlightened strategy can help get the most out of Google’s AdWords and AdWords Editor, but there are further tools that can add a competitive edge.
The below are technologies that can save time, uncover insights, add scale to data analysis, or a combination of all three.
Keyword research tools
Identifying the right keywords to add to your paid search account is, of course, a fundamental component of a successful campaign.
Google will suggest a number of relevant queries within the Keyword Planner tool, but it does have some inherent limitations. The list of keywords provided within this tool is far from comprehensive and, given the potential rewards on offer, sophisticated marketers would be well advised to look for a third-party solution.
A recent post by Wil Reynolds at Seer Interactive brought to light just how important it is to build an extensive list of target keywords, as consumers are searching in multifaceted ways, across devices and territories. According to Ahrefs, 85% of all searches contain three or more words and although the shorter keywords tend to have higher search volumes, the long tail contains a huge amount of value too.
Add in growing trends like the adoption of voice search and the picture becomes more complex still. In essence, it is necessary to research beyond Google Keyword Planner to uncover these opportunities.
Keywordtool.io takes an initial keyword suggestion as its stimulus and uses this to come up up to 750 suggested queries to target. This is achieved in part through the use of Google Autocomplete to pull in a range of related terms that customers typically search for. A Pro licence for this tool starts at $48 per month.
Ubersuggest is another long-standing keyword tool that search marketers use to find new, sometimes unexpected, opportunities to communicate with customers via search. It groups together suggested keywords based on their lexical similarity and they can be exported to Excel.
This tool also allows marketers to add in negative keywords to increase the relevance of their results.
We have written about the benefits of Google Trends for SEO, but the same logic applies to PPC. Google Trends can be a fantastic resource for paid search, as it allows marketers to identify peaks in demand. This insight can be used to target terms as their popularity rises, allowing brands to attract clicks for a lower cost.
Google Trends has been updated recently and includes a host of new features, so it is worth revisiting for marketers that may not have found it robust enough in its past iterations.
Answer the Public is another great tool for understanding longer, informational queries that relate to a brand’s products or services. It creates a visual representation of the most common questions related to a head term, such as ‘flights to paris’ in the example below:
As the role of paid search evolves into more of a full-funnel channel that covers informational queries as well as transactional terms, tools like this one will prove invaluable. The insights it reveals can be used to tailor ad copy, and the list of questions can be exported and uploaded to AdWords to see if there is a sizeable opportunity to target these questions directly.
For marketers that want to investigate linguistic trends within their keyword set, it’s a great idea to use an Ngram viewer. There are plenty of options available, but this tool is free and effective.
Competitor analysis tools
AdWords Auction Insights is an essential tool for competitor analysis, as it reveals the impression share for different sites across keyword sets, along with average positions and the rate of overlap between rival sites.
This should be viewed as the starting point for competitor analysis, however. There are other technologies that provide a wider range of metrics for this task, including Spyfu and SEMrush.
Spyfu’s AdWords History provides a very helpful view of competitor strategies over time. This reveals what their ad strategies have been, but also how frequently they are changed. As such, it is a helpful blend of qualitative and quantitative research that shows not just how brands are positioning their offering, but also how much they have been willing to pay to get it in front of their audience.
A basic licence for Spyfu starts at $33 per month.
SEMrush is a great tool for competitor analysis, both for paid search and its organic counterpart. This software shows the keywords that a domain ranks against for paid search and calculates the estimated traffic the site has received as a result.
The Product Listing Ads features are particularly useful, as they provide insight into a competitor’s best-performing ads and their core areas of focus for Google Shopping.
It is also easy to compare desktop data to mobile data through SEMrush, a feature that has become increasingly powerful as the shift towards mobile traffic continues.
A licence for SEMrush starts at $99.95 per month.
Used in tandem with AdWords Auction Insights, these tools create a fuller picture of competitor activities.
Landing page optimization tools
It is essential to optimize the full search experience, from ad copy and keyword targeting, right through to conversion. It is therefore the responsibility of PPC managers to ensure that the on-site experience matches up to the consumer’s expectations.
A variety of tools can help achieve this aim, requiring minimal changes to a page’s source code to run split tests on landing page content and layout. In fact, most of these require no coding skills and allow PPC marketers to make changes that affect only their channel’s customers. The main site experience remains untouched, but paid search visitors will see a tailored landing page based on their intent.
Unbounce has over 100 responsive templates and the dynamic keyword insertion feature is incredibly useful. The latter adapts the content on a page based on the ad a user clicked, helping to tie together the user journey based on user expectations.
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Brand monitoring tools
Branded keywords should be a consistent revenue driver for any company. Although there is no room to be complacent, even when people are already searching for your brand’s name, these queries tend to provide a sustainable and cost-effective source of PPC traffic.
Unless, of course, the competition tries to steal some of that traffic. Google does have some legislation to protect brands, but this has proved insufficient to stop companies bidding on their rivals’ brand terms. When this does occur, it also drives up the cost-per-click for branded keywords.
Brandverity provides some further protection for advertisers through automated alerts that are triggered when a competitor encroaches on their branded terms.
This coverage includes Shopping ads, mobile apps, and global search engines.
Custom AdWords scripts
Although not a specific tool, it is worth mentioning the additional benefits that custom scripts can bring to AdWords performance. These scripts provide extra functionality for everything from more flexible bidding schedules, to stock price-based bid adjustments and third-party data integrations.
This fantastic list from Koozai is a comprehensive resource, as is this one from Free Adwords Scripts. PPC agency Brainlabs also provides a useful list of scripts on their website that is typically updated with a new addition every few months.
Using the tools listed above can add an extra dimension to PPC campaigns and lead to the essential competitive edge that drives growth. As the industry continues to evolve at a rapid rate, these tools should prove more valuable than ever.
Clark Boyd is a digital marketing consultant and a contributor to Search Engine Watch.
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Reaching new customers has become significantly more complex. With new platforms and channels still emerging, consumers have more and more choices and are demanding greater attention from brands trying to reach them. Here’s how you can ramp up your multi-channel strategy in 2018 to meet that demand.
Whether you’re a newbie or a seasoned vet, determining if you should use search advertising or display advertising for your marketing campaign is tough. Use the wrong channel, and you risk ruining the maximum success of your whole campaign. Thankfully, there are ways to decide which is the best for your business and which will generate the most conversions.
Businesses tend to have a huge marketing push right before, and often during, the holidays, but often times these marketing campaigns fizzle out after the new year. Here’s how you can keep up the momentum on your marketing efforts in 2018.
If you’ve ever made the switch from B2C or ecommerce to B2B marketing, you know there’s a world of difference.
From off-the-beaten-path locales to memorable experiences, travelers’ needs and wants are evolving, opening the door to new opportunities for savvy brands and impacting the way travel advertisers approach their marketing efforts.
In an effort to discover how marketers can best influence travelers’ purchase decisions online, the Bing Ads research team partnered with Phocuswright to conduct a search trends analysis, the results of which I’ll be sharing in this column.
Since nine out of 10 travelers turn to an online source when planning, comparing or booking a trip, here are six trends travel brands can watch to help build their marketing and advertising strategies in 2018.
Exotic new destinations
Ever thought about traveling to Maldives, Iceland or Rwanda? As it turns out, these three locales have made the list of top 25 trending destinations, based on year-over-year search volume growth.
Reasons may be increased airline capacity or the addition of new non-stop routes. Also, the proliferation of social media has helped boost the popularity of more non-traditional locations.
Keeping tabs on trending locales allows travel brands to monetize these destinations before competitors. Watch the airlines for route announcements. Data-mine hashtags on social media to see which new destinations might be gaining in popularity. Finally, take advantage of AI-enabled dynamic ad creative to match your offerings to travelers’ evolving preferences via search queries.
International jetsetters choosing Bing
With a 10 percent year-over-year (YOY) increase in overall search volume and an 11 percent increase in clicks, Bing continues to grow its global reach.
In particular, Bing saw major lifts in travel search volume in key markets like Canada and Europe, with especially high growth in Belgium, France and Switzerland. This is good news for travel advertisers looking for high-value customers.
Alternative accommodations are becoming mainstream
According to research published in April 2017 by Phocuswright, private accommodation sites like VRBO and Airbnb are growing twice as fast as the overall travel market. And 70 percent of this audience are frequent travelers who spend more and are more likely to plan long trips.
But this group does not book rentals exclusively; they often consider hotels as well, depending upon services and amenities. This research resonates with me in part because I’m planning an 18-day international trip, and I’ve been researching both Airbnb and hoteliers for accommodations through different segments of my trip to maximize my travel budget.
Boutique hotels are also gaining in popularity, especially among millennials looking for unique, upscale experiences. The net of this for travel advertisers is that travelers are more open than ever to a variety of accommodations.
Search ads still influence purchase decisions
The number of bookings via online travel aggregators (OTAs) surpassed direct bookings in 2016. But travel advertisers can still influence these purchases using search ads.
In a Bing Ads research study designed to help three hotel brands correlate the value of search to purchases made on OTAs, researchers examined the booking activity of two groups of online searchers that ended up on OTAs.
Group A was exposed to a hotel brand’s search ads on Bing, and Group B was not. It turns out searchers who were exposed to a hotel’s ads were more likely to visit the hotel brand’s property page on the OTA. For one brand in the test, people were 10 percent more likely to visit the brand’s page after seeing search ads and, for another brand, they were 50 percent more likely to do so.
Loyalty members shop around
According to the joint Future of Travel study from Microsoft and Phocuswright, 93 percent of US travelers are enrolled in airline loyalty programs, and 64 percent are enrolled in hotel programs. However, that doesn’t mean they aren’t shopping around. Data indicates that even loyalty program members comparison shop across multiple travel sites, especially during peak months.
Fortunately, loyalty members are more likely to engage with online search ads. Up to 71 percent of travelers using general search are more likely to engage with an ad.
The key is to keep giving loyalty members reasons to choose your brand. Tempt active members through highly personalized offers, and re-engage inactive members through free incentives or points.
Travelers seeking memorable experiences
More and more travelers are searching for and booking memorable experiences online. In fact, Phocuswright reveals the fastest-growing travel segment, activities, comprised 10 percent of the travel market share in 2016. Gross bookings for online tours and activities are expected to grow from $12 billion in 2015 to $27 billion in 2020. That is substantial!
Additionally, activities suppliers using third-party reservation systems like TripAdvisor and Ctrip have quadrupled since 2011. Remarketing is a great opportunity to target travelers searching for things to do at their destination. Think about using in-market audiences in tangential categories to reach travel consumers.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
About The Author
Christi Olson is a Search Evangelist at Microsoft in Seattle, Washington. For over a decade Christi has been a student and practitioner of SEM. Prior to joining the Bing Ads team within Microsoft, Christi worked in marketing both in-house and at agencies at Point It, Expedia, Harry & David, and Microsoft (MSN, Bing, Windows). When she’s not geeking out about search and digital marketing she can be found with her husband at ACUO crossfit and running races across the PacificNW, brewing and trying to find the perfect beer, and going for lots of walks with their two schnauzers and pug.
The VAST video ad format is used widely, but it lacks some features that marketers crave. Key among them: It doesn’t readily support third-party measurement or interactive features, such as hotspots where users can request more info or a related video.
A variety of efforts to correct this situation are underway. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), for instance, is working toward standardization of these capabilities for VAST, while some verification firms and advertising providers are implementing their own solutions.
This week, New York City-based video ad platform Innovid announced it was taking a next step toward making VAST more useful for in-app video ads. It is working with three providers of mobile app inventory — Fyber, InMobi and MoPub — to launch and utilize VAST tags that are compatible with the IAB’s and others’ efforts.
Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.
The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas each January has become the kickoff event for the advertising industry’s year. Following this year’s show — and a year of lows for the company — Twitter was riding high.
“There was some interest and revived excitement around Twitter coming out of CES. There was the expectation that this might be a rebirth year,” said Mike Dossett, associate director of digital strategy at RPA.
Then last week, Twitter announced that its COO and revenue boss, Anthony Noto, was stepping down to become CEO of financial tech firm SoFi.
“Everyone was a bit shocked because he was very active at CES representing Twitter, which wasn’t that long ago,” said Katherine Patton, director of paid social at Dentsu Aegis Network’s iProspect.
Noto is widely credited with whatever bright spots Twitter has enjoyed over the past year, such as its push toward premium live and on-demand video. That push had helped to reaccelerate the company’s audience growth in 2017 and was supposed to revive its sagging ad revenue in 2018, having stabilized its standing among ad buyers.
His departure could be seen as casting a shadow over that potentially bright future. But agency executives don’t see it that way.
Tim Peterson, Third Door Media’s Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles. He has broken stories on Snapchat’s ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar’s attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon’s ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube’s programming strategy, Facebook’s ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking’s rise; and documented digital video’s biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed’s branded video production process and Snapchat Discover’s ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands’ early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo’s and Google’s search designs and examine the NFL’s YouTube and Facebook video strategies.
Big brands have been talking for an awfully long time about “acting nimbly” and instilling a “startup culture.” There’s a recognition that being data-focused and able to act quickly will help spur short- and long-term success.
But one of the most remarkable things about 2017 was that it was the year big companies — particularly CPG (consumer packaged goods) brands — actually started to act like small companies when it came to certain aspects of their marketing strategy and decision-making.
A recent eMarketer report outlined this in detail. CPG brands have started inserting themselves at more points throughout the buyer journey, rather than focusing their efforts almost solely on brand awareness or retailer-led promotions. This has manifested itself particularly in the form of targeted advertising, social media strategies and a restructuring in how e-commerce product pages are managed.
Smaller brands have attracted loyal customers using these techniques over the past several years, and larger competitors are taking notice. What these smaller upstarts keyed in on was that consumers attach a tremendous amount of value to a brand that personalizes its content to speak more to them, and doing so creatively won’t break the bank. Their inroads have spurred bigger competitors to act.
What’s the end result? We’re seeing ad dollars from these big brands shifting toward Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) and other retailer-oriented, direct-response type advertising.
Large grocery brands, which may have relied on loyalty card data for high-level targeting in the past, are now migrating to a combination of first- and third-party data to better understand their customers at a granular level and provide them relevant messages — e.g., targeting consumers with different product types based on the weather.
A move from mass marketing to personalization
This shift in thinking, from a single mass market to a fragmented personalized one, shows brands’ recognition that the buyer journey for even everyday things like groceries has fundamentally shifted.
eMarketer estimates that roughly 90 percent of US grocery sales are still made in the store, but also that 90 percent of US internet users are “researching CPG products at least some of the time before making purchases, whether online or in-store.” This is a trend that’s only going to get more urgent for brands to address.
With consumers very comfortable researching grocery products online, regardless of how they ultimately buy, larger brands are also taking a page from smaller players by making their product pages marketing vehicles, rather than sales vehicles.
This has meant greater investments in product imagery and keeping marketing copy fresh and relevant. As one example, Coca-Cola’s Zico coconut water page on Amazon is full of vibrant photos, almost philosophical written copy and a lot of focus put on “when to buy” coconut water.
Ad dollars moving to AMS and similar ad products
That’s why we’re seeing advertising budgets moving toward AMS and similar retailer-oriented, direct-response kinds of advertising. According to an L2 analysis of Procter & Gamble online advertising impressions, the percentage of P&G ads going to ad products directly tied to retailers rose 29.7 percent year over year — that’s out of a marketing budget of around $2.4 billion.
These are ads that, by their nature, are brand-safe, and thanks to linking directly to product listings, they are easier to map to return on ad spend than awareness-focused buys or traditional RTB (real-time bidding)-style units.
What’s ahead for large CPG brands?
So, what’s next for these larger CPG brands? At a high level, expect AMS and similar ad products to continue their significant rates of growth.
Every CPG manufacturer that sells online should be trying out retailer-run ad products. Allocating resources to these campaigns will help brands better optimize channels and associated ads and identify which kinds of products perform well within a target market.
Additionally, brands will commit additional resources to data collection and associated analytics technologies to make insights on e-commerce and other online platforms actionable.
The concept of what makes a great product page or product experience is inherently fickle based on trends, industry, price point and myriad other factors. The market only stands to get more sophisticated, and big brands will be under pressure to be as informed as possible as they speed up their decision-making.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
About The Author
Andrew Waber is the Manager of Data Insights and Media Relations at product experience management (PXM) platform provider Salsify. In his current role, Andrew manages the analysis, editorial direction, and strategy for Salsify’s public facing reporting on the online retail marketplace. Prior to his time at Salsify, Andrew served as the Manager of Market Insights and Media Relations for advertising automation software provider Nanigans, and as the Market Analyst and lead author of reports for Chitika Insights, the research arm of the Chitika online ad network. Andrew’s commentary on online trends has been quoted by the New York Times, Re/Code, and The Guardian, among other outlets.
Location intelligence reveals a great deal about who we are. By observing the stores consumers visit, their areas of residence, where they work and how far they commute, marketers gather valuable insights into consumer preferences and interests.
From off-the-beaten-path locales to memorable experiences, travelers’ needs and wants are evolving, opening the door to new opportunities for savvy brands and impacting the way travel advertisers approach their marketing efforts.
