Updates we caught in our internal industry news slack room over the month of March.
Meta updates
Video ads add ‘audio descriptions’
Videos on Meta can now add audio descriptions to describe what’s happening in a video for people who use assistive technology. Audio descriptions can be added in ads manager under the ‘Acessibility’ options.
Ad account settings are moving
Settings for ad accounts are now available in a new consolidated ‘Advertising settings’ page, where account settings to manage ads can be edited in one place. The original settings for ad account setup, page and notifications will still be available in the original places, and the new page simply consolidates them into one view.
Advantage+ campaigns now have a new ‘Engaged Customers’ audience
Segments have been available for analysing new and existing customers. There’s now a third segment for ‘engaged customers’ which isolates people who have interacted with your product or service, but not made a purchase. Think of this as a layer between the ‘new’ and ‘existing’ segments. These segments are only applies to Advantage+ campaigns. As an added bonus, you can also define unique URL parameters for this segment for GA4, which allows deeper analysis in website reporting for these different segments – for example, conversion rates by segment.
New metrics galore in Meta
New metrics are in development on Meta. While they are currently available, Meta has positioned these as effectively being in beta mode, and may change how they define each metric. There’s a range including duration of call and number of messages exchanged after an ad, but the two we’re most excited about:
- 3, 5 and 7 second dwell time. This reports the times your ad is either completely visible or covers 50% of someone’s screen.
- Unique attention impressions. This reports the number or people who paid more attention to your ad than others they saw
Google updates
Google testing WhatsApp message extensions
Clicking this upcoming ad extension will open a WhatsApp conversation, wehre you can trigger a welcome message. This might be useful with a WhatsApp business account where respondees could be breadcast notifications en masse. The feature is unavailable at the moment but could be a good alternative to relying exclusively on email registrations for capturing leads, and would pair nicely with a similar style of lead capture via messaging ads on Meta.
New open source MMM model from Google
Google already had an open source MMM tool called LightweightMMM. This new model called Meridian is available for early access. It’s an advanced modelling tool to assess the contribution of ad spend from any channel offline or online, though requires a lot of segmented data points from a long period. The key takeaway is that Google (like Meta with its similar Robyn framework) is taking alternative marketing measurement seriously while the world reduces dependance on pure attribution measurement that we’ve gotten used to in the last decade.
More UTM parameters available in GA4
New parameters for link tracking can help links on non-google platforms send extra data and context to campaigns. The list includes:
- Source platform/placement
- Creative format (e.g. carousel, still, video)
- Marketing tactic (e.g. retargeting)
Social Media posts to appear on your Google Business Profile
If you’ve added your social media URLs to your Google Business profile, you might start to see your organic social posts appearing against your company profile in search results.
TikTok
TikTok finally allows marketing by region in Europe
TikTok originally limited targeting to the country level. It now allows targeting by sub-region within a country. THese are still broad regions but allow some granularity in TikTok targeting.
