Many advertisers woke up this morning and upon opening their Meta for Business accounts, found that ads were turned off late last night. Adding to injury, in many cases the ads turned off were some of the best performing assets.
Facebook turning all the best performing ads off!!
— Abdulqadir Hassan | Facebook Ads (@theabdulqadird) April 13, 2022
Good morning. Check your ad accounts. A couple of hours ago Facebook decided to randomly turn OFF your ads.
— Savannah Sanchez | UGC | TikTok Ads (@social_savannah) April 13, 2022
Meta has not issued a statement, but if you are running Facebook Ads it would be prudent to log into your accounts and check to see if any of your ads were inadvertently turned off on or around 7 p.m. PST Tuesday.
What to do. Rok Hladnik shared on Twitter an easy way to diagnose if the ads were running and subsequently turned off. To view, simply view ads in ad manager that have been serving, then view “ad delivery.’” Within the ad delivery selector, you will be able to choose the “off” button to showcase ads that are off.
For those of you who will wake up and see your ads turned OFF by Facebook overnight the easier way to figure out which ones to turn back on is:
Filter by Ad delivery = Off. And after that select Yesterday or This week to see which ads were turned OFF but had delivery. pic.twitter.com/s0Uq8AlyjZ
This will show you if ads were turned off after were running earlier in the day/week. It is also possible to see changes within the campaign history.
Why we care. Advertisers need their ads to run to be successful. It appears this issue did not fire notifications and is impacting quality ads that may significantly hinder the success of a campaign. While Facebook has not provided a statement yet, this is a major problem that a diligent marketer can fix quickly.
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Climbing the corporate ladder isn’t always the most straightforward process, especially for paid search marketers. Professionals seeking to grow their careers need to map out a path, accounting for their unique roles within their organizations.
“The most important thing is to look at your current position,” said Pascal Skropke, CMO of Design-Bestseller, at SMX Next. “Not everybody has the opportunity to work at a fast-growing e-commerce company or startup.”
He added, “Look at where you are and find out if it’s possible to take steps within your company — and understand what your company needs to succeed.”
Skropke says marketers seeking to climb this ladder should establish an “anchor point” within their company — the cross-section of their company’s needs and their career goals. One of these points is the issue of campaign advertising measurement — the lack of direction, accurate data models, and resources for many brands in the digital retail space.
Here are some of the key measurement challenges paid search marketers can help their companies with.
Address issues in advertising spend and ROI
“Performance advertising is killing it for most retailers,” said Andreas Reiffen, founder and CEO of Crealytics, in the same presentation. “At the same time, we see legacy retailers falling behind.”
Despite impressive increases in compound annual growth rate for online retailers such as Etsy, Boohoo, and Farfetch (44%, 55%, and 64%, respectively,), more traditional retailers are falling behind, even in the e-commerce sphere. Reiffen noted that although some of these legacy brands are meeting their KPIs, their slow overall growth could be a major issue down the road.
“The question we need to ask ourselves is, ‘Why am I seeing great results when the company isn’t growing?’” said Reiffen. “The issue we are all facing today is that the measurement is broken. The methodology that we use to track conversions and conversion values — one click, last click, or many clicks — is misleading us because people don’t necessarily buy when they click on ads.”
He added, “They might have happened to click on ads when they purchased, but there’s no direct correlation.”
Source: Andreas Reiffen
Inaccurate measurement models can disrupt return on ad spend (ROAS) projections, making it that much harder for legacy brands to stay competitive.
Paid search marketers and managers can help executives of legacy-style brands address these discrepancies by optimizing paid advertising spending — adopting more accurate tracking models and allocating spend more effectively. This can help marketers establish more authority within their brand and encourage executives to lean on them for their expertise in the future.
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“We’re seeing big companies like the Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey building departments for data analytics,” said Skropke. “This is a sign that analytics is not just something that the data nerd is working on, but something that’s now on C-level.”
Source: Pascal Skropke
Data matters, not just to search marketers, but to all those in brand leadership positions. The sooner search marketers can encourage their managers and company executives to consult paid media analytics when making business decisions, the more respect they’ll garner from those same decision-makers.
“If you work in a paid search manager role on an operation level, it’s rare that you would be asked to do these things,” said Reiffen. “But it’s a major problem that is present now on the C-level.”
He added, “Measurement is the most important thing to get right, so that’s where we see a good opportunity to step up and challenge the numbers.”
Create a growth strategy and align target market goals
Inaccurate measurement clearly causes issues in advertising ROI and data analytics. Unfortunately, it can also disrupt brand growth by derailing target market strategies.
“Wrong targeting leads to poor results,” said Skropke. “So, we should always ask what’s driving the value for the business. Is this the top-line revenue or is it the profitable acquisition of new customers?”
Source: Pascal Skropke
Whether it’s targeting a disproportionate amount of existing customers or pushing products that have lower than average profit margins, C-level executives will inevitably get parts of the targeting and growth strategy wrong. This is where paid search managers can share their expertise and help leadership set clear, actionable goals.
“So, where’s the opportunity here?” asked Reiffen. “It’s in taking the time to explain this, giving [leadership] examples.”
He added, “Start stepping up and explaining that it’s the targets themselves that are limiting performance.”
Interest Category targeting in Facebook may be up to 33% inaccurate, according to new study from North Carolina State University. The NC State researchers conducted two separate experiments, the first to find out which activities were associated with “interest” on Facebook and the second to analyze the accuracy of user interests from participants around the world. The results were far from comforting.
Experiment 1. The first experiment involved setup of 14 accounts, a small sample size, that merely viewed or scrolled through a page in order to see if those topics within the content consumed would be pulled into the “Interest Categories” accounts. The goal was to see what interests would then be associated with the newly formed account and to qualitatively infer how accurate the newly assigned interests were.
The findings show 33.22% of the inferred interests were either inaccurate or irrelevant. “The key finding here is that Facebook takes an aggressive approach to interest inference,” Aafaq Sabir, lead author of a paper on the work and a Ph.D. student at NC State, said.
Experiment 2. To get even deeper, the NC State team wanted to see if the findings would hold true for a more diverse group of users. The 146 study participants were selected by Amazon Mechanical Turk from “different parts of the world”. A browser extension would then extract data from the participants’ Facebook accounts and question the participant about the validity of the interest data.
This study found 29.3% of the interests that Facebook had listed for participants were not actually of interest. “That’s comparable to what we saw in our controlled experiments,” said Anupam Das, co-author of the paper and an assistant professor of computer science at NC State.
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What’s unclear. With samples sizes this small, we should take this study with a grain of salt. While the data is unflattering to Facebook’s targeting, much of the experiment is unclear on the parameters used to determine what is of interest and what is not of interest. Additionally, the second experiment in this study relies on user feedback that does not appear to have quantitative parameters in place for reporting, which may muddy results. Lastly, the participants selected in the survey were in different locations, but sourced similarly using a very specific platform – Amazon Mechanical Turk. By choosing participants tied to one source, it may not be a truly accurate representation of Facebook users as a whole.
Why we care. Most ad targeting isn’t perfect. For example, if logged in, you can see what Google targets your ads to and see what Facebook thinks that you are interested in. The reality is that no targeting is perfect, but the 30-33% inaccuracy found in the study is concerning. Before pulling ad spends to different platforms, it is worthwhile to assess the current account performance and make adjustments from that data instead of a study. Finally, the first portion of this study does show that basic content consumption can influence interests, so again check your results to ensure that your targeting is in fact working for you.
All of Meta’s automated ad products will exist together under the name of Meta Advantage, the company announced. Five of its existing ad products are getting a new name and will be joined by a sixth new-ish product – Shopping Campaigns – set to roll out to all advertisers sometime later this year.
According to Meta, the suite will actually consist of two types of Advantage products:
Advantage: This lets you automate a specific part of a manual campaign.
Advantage+: This lets you automate a campaign from beginning to end or part of a manual campaign (e.g., placements or creative).
Same tools, new names. Here’s a quick recap of what Meta announced is changing:
Lookalike Expansion becomes Advantage Lookalike. This tool helps advertisers reach a broader audience than what is defined in their Lookalike audience.
Detailed Targeting Expansion becomes Advantage Detailed Targeting. This tool finds additional audiences based on the advertiser’s targeting preferences (e.g., interests).
Automated App Ads become Advantage+ App Campaigns. This tool uses real-time data to adjust ads across audience, placement and creative.
Automatic Placements become Advantage+ Placements. This tool decides where your ad will show on Meta (e.g., Facebook Feed, Instagram Stories, Reels), with the goal of delivering better results.
Dynamic Experiences becomes Advantage+ Creative. This tool creates multiple variations of an ad using a single image or video.
Coming soon: Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. Currently known as Automated Shopping Ads, this is in beta testing. Meta said the goal of these ads is to help advertisers drive conversions by automating the optimization of ad creative, targeting, placements and budget.
Why we care. The push toward automating everything continues. Most of this is a simple rebrand and making clear which of its products are automated – somewhat reminiscent of Google’s attempts at simplifying its ad offerings when it rebranded as Google Ads in 2018. In particular, the Shopping campaign rollout later this year will be one to watch for marketers. Meta made sure to highlight that all of these products can improve conversions, increase return on ad spend (ROAS) and reduce costs. However, as always, test for yourself.
Russia’s actions in Ukraine have prompted ad suspensions from nearly every platform that search marketers rely on to reach Russian audiences. At first, companies such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook started by restricting ads from Russian state media, but as the conflict continued, many have expanded those suspensions to include all ads that would be served to users in Russia.
Below is a list of platforms and their current policies with regard to the conflict in Ukraine. We will update this resource as platforms update their policies.
Search engines. Google and Microsoft Bing, the two leading search engines globally, have both suspended all ad sales in Russia.
Google: On February 27, Google suspended ads from Russian state-owned media outlets. On March 3, the company expanded the suspension to include all ads serving to users in Russia.
Microsoft: On February 28, Microsoft banned ads from Russian state-owned media outlets. On March 4, the ban was expanded to include all new sales of Microsoft products and services (not just ads) in Russia.
Microsoft Advertising powers ads on Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo! and AOL, so brands currently cannot advertise to users in Russia on those platforms either. While Apple doesn’t operate a search engine, it has suspended Search Ads on the App Store in Russia.
An email sent by Apple to app developers notifying them that Search Ads in the Russian App Store have been paused.
Social media platforms. Most social media platforms have also rolled out ad suspensions similar to the ones mentioned above.
Meta: Facebook’s parent company paused ads targeting users in Russia on March 4. Several days prior, the Russian government announced that it would block its citizens from accessing Facebook, so ads may not have reached users anyhow. The company has not announced whether these changes will also apply to Instagram, but Meta has banned Russian state media from running ads or monetizing on any of its platforms.
LinkedIn: LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft and is therefore included in the company’s ban on sales of its products and services in Russia.
Twitter: On February 25, Twitter paused ads serving to users in Ukraine and Russia, citing the need to “ensure critical public safety information is elevated and ads don’t detract from it.”
Reddit: On March 2, Reddit announced that it is not accepting advertisements “that target Russia or originate from any Russia-based entity, government or private.” The platform has also blocked links from all domains ending in “.ru,” Russia’s country code top-level domain.
Snap Inc.: Snapchat’s parent company has stopped all advertising running in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, the company announced on March 1.
TikTok: TikTok has restricted access to Russian state-controlled media accounts, but it appears it has not stopped serving ads to users in Russia.
Why we care. Platforms are responding to the conflict in Ukraine by halting ads as a means to cut down on noise and misinformation, promote the right sources of information and avoid potential brand safety issues. Unfortunately for brands and their audiences in Russia, this also means that there are fewer channels they can use to reach those customers. Knowing which channels are still available to you can help mitigate the impact of these ad suspensions.
Google and Bing have expanded ad sales suspensions imposed on Russia due to its invasion of Ukraine. Google has temporarily halted ads from serving to Russia-based users, the company announced Thursday. Similarly, Microsoft announced that it will suspend all new sales of its products and services in Russia.
Why we care. The two leading search engines now prohibit ads targeting users located in Russia, cutting off the main channels western search marketers use to reach audiences there. This will affect brands advertising to Russian users, but Yandex (Russia’s second-biggest search engine by market share) remains an option.
These ad suspensions serve to protest Russia’s actions in Ukraine, but they also help search engines avoid brand safety debacles like misinformation campaigns making it through their automated systems and showing to users.
Escalating restrictions on Russian state-funded media. Last week, both search engines stopped running ads from Russian state-funded media outlets. In addition, Microsoft is “further de-ranking these sites’ search results on Bing so that it will only return RT and Sputnik links when a user clearly intends to navigate to those pages,” Brad Smith, president and vice chair of Microsoft, said in an announcement on February 28.
Perhaps this is what Russia wanted. Roskomnadzor, Russia’s communications regulator, has accused YouTube of running “advertising campaigns to misinform the Russian audience,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The Russian agency demanded that Google change its ad moderation policies and discontinue such ads.
The new ad suspensions are likely to primarily affect Russia-based businesses, but they may also put a temporary end to the ads Russia is complaining about.
Social media platforms halted ad sales in Russia, too. Snap Inc. and Twitter have both paused ads in Ukraine and Russia, with the former halting them in Belarus as well. Facebook has stopped serving ads from Russian state media, but (at the time of publication) is still showing ads to Russian users.
Facebook estimates that, in aggregate, it is now underreporting iOS web conversions by approximately 8%, down from the 15% in September 2021. The company cited increased adoption of best practices as the main reason for this improvement.
Why we care. While this figure can vary for individual advertisers, 8% is roughly half of 15%, meaning that iOS conversion reporting has gotten a lot better for Facebook advertisers. Still, it’s not completely accurate, which could mean that conversions may be higher than reported for some businesses.
In addition, Facebook expects some degree of underreporting to remain as part of its baseline.
Why Facebook is underreporting. The social media company has cited Apple’s iOS privacy changes as one reason for its diminished reporting capabilities. App Tracking Transparency enables iOS users to request that apps not track their activity, which limits Facebook’s (and other apps’) ability to track users for advertising purposes.
Facebook has been very vocal about its opposition to Apple’s privacy measures and has even ran full-page newspaper ads against the changes.
Recommendations for better web conversion campaign reporting. For more accurate conversion reporting, Facebook recommends that advertisers running web conversion campaigns:
Integrate with the Conversions API – This can create a direct connection between your marketing data (from your server, website platform or CRM) and Facebook.
Verify all domains – This can be especially important for conversions across multiple domains (i.e., websites that use redirectors or geo-redirects).
Allow enough time before analyzing campaign performance – Due to the nature of delayed data and modeled reporting, Facebook recommends waiting at least 72 hours (or the full length of the optimization window you’ve selected) before evaluating performance.
Align conversion events with campaign priorities – The order of your events in Event Manager should reflect your priorities (e.g., if purchases are your most valuable goal, ensure that purchases are in the number one position).
Recommendations for better app conversion campaign reporting. For those running app conversion campaigns, Facebook recommends:
Using a 24-hour conversion window – This helps Facebook’s systems optimize for faster and more predictable feedback cycles.
Optimizing for your business objective – Miscategorizing your objective can make it more difficult for Facebook to optimize for that objective.
Meta will remove certain targeting options relating to sensitive topics on January 19, 2022. “Health causes,” “sexual orientation,” “religious practices and groups,” and “political beliefs, social issues, causes, organizations and figures,” were among the examples of targeting options slated for deprecation.
Why we care. Facebook advertisers should ensure that they are not relying on the targeting options mentioned below or any other targeting options that may relate to sensitive topics, as those will likely be deprecated at some point as well.
Although the options mentioned below are going away on January 19, 2022, campaigns will continue to deliver for about eight weeks after that, until March 17, 2022, which should give advertisers some time to test out alternatives.
Sensitive targeting options. “We will be removing some Detailed Targeting options because they relate to topics people may perceive as sensitive, such as targeting options relating to causes, organizations, or public figures that relate to health, race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, or sexual orientation,” Meta said in the announcement. The company provided the following examples of targeting options that will be removed:
Health causes (e.g., “Lung cancer awareness”, “World Diabetes Day”, “Chemotherapy”).
Sexual orientation (e.g., “same-sex marriage” and “LGBT culture”).
Religious practices and groups (e.g., “Catholic Church” and “Jewish holidays”).
Political beliefs, social issues, causes, organizations and figures.
Campaigns can continue to deliver to impacted targeting options until March 17, 2022, “in the vast majority of cases,” Meta said. Until March 17, advertisers will be able to make most edits at the campaign level without affecting targeting. However, some changes at the ad set level may update your target audience (for example, changes to placements, targeting options, etc).
After March 17, edits for impacted campaigns will not be possible at the campaign, ad set or ad level.
Meta will also remove redundant targeting options. The company will also remove targeting options that haven’t been widely adopted, citing that they may be redundant with other options or be too granular, although it did not specify which options. Meta has done this before in previous updates as well.
In 2021, PPC professionals navigated changes in keyword match types and automated bidding, scratched their heads at the prospect of a future without third-party cookies and navigated their role in an increasingly automated industry.
Prompted by the vision that platforms, like Google, have for their services as well as increased concern over user privacy, these changes underscored adaptability as one of the traits that define successful marketers. Below, we’ve summarized the most impactful changes, announcements and developments that shaped PPC this past year and, in all likelihood, will continue to influence the years ahead as well.
“Broad match now looks at additional signals in your account to deliver more relevant searches,” Google also announced. These signals include landing pages and keywords in your ad group.
The PPC community’s reaction to this news was mixed: “With the recent changes that Google has made, it seems like a bit of a (very) thinly veiled attempt to take back control from advertisers,” said Amy Bishop, owner of Cultivative, “You can’t optimize against what you can’t see, and you certainly can’t optimize against controls that have been taken away.”
Kirk Williams, owner of ZATO Marketing, had a different opinion: “This is simply a logical progression in [Google’s] ever-changing match type behavior that mirrors changes in other areas, pointing towards a world in which Google uses the millions of signals under its control to make auction time decisions for which the limited, human advertiser is unable to make as technology and machine learning bidding solutions progress.”
In Q2 2021, the final nail in BMM’s coffin was hammered in when the platform announced a deprecation date for BMM keywords. To put an end to the saga (for now), Google also made it so that phrase match or broad match keywords that are identical to a query are now always preferred as long as they are eligible to match.
Microsoft Advertising made an important change in this area as well: Beginning in March 2021, it migrated all search, shopping and Dynamic Search Ads campaigns without an automated bidding strategy in place over to Enhanced CPC.
FLoC was heavily debated, but not rolled out
With the deprecation of third-party cookies slated for 2022 (which Google later pushed back to the latter half of 2023), it wasn’t much of a surprise when Google first announced that it was testing an alternative targeting technology in October 2020. Known as Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), the proposal was opened for advertiser testing in Q2 2021.
Despite being billed as more privacy-friendly for users, there were widespread concerns about techniques such as fingerprinting, which could be used to reverse engineer individuals from the cohort. The Electronic Frontier Foundation even published an article opposing the proposal. Marketers also shared concerns that Google was being opportunistic and using the deprecation of third-party cookies to create a “walled garden” for itself.
Chrome’s competitors have no plans to adopt FLoC, which will limit its functionality. There was even a proposal by WordPress to block FLoC by default. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority also engaged Google about the proposal and the search company agreed not to favor its own products or access personal user data.
The Privacy Sandbox timeline. Image: Google.
To keep the industry updated about its progress with FLoC, Google published a Privacy Sandbox timeline. As of December 2021, FLoC is scheduled to undergo testing from Q1 to Q3 2022, with adoption slated for Q4 of that year.
This was also the year that Performance Max campaigns, an automated campaign type that runs across all Google ad inventory, became available to all advertisers. Google bundled that news (as it seems to have done quite frequently in 2021) with another announcement: Smart Shopping and Local campaigns would be “upgraded” to Performance Max in 2022.
Consumer interest insights in the Insights page. Image: Google.
Performance Max campaigns are also part of the Google Ads Insights Page, which shows currently trending searches, auction insights and interest predictions tailored to the account. In November 2021, the company expanded on the Insights page by adding four features: consumer interest insights, audience insights, change history insights and auction insights, and demand forecasts.
In April 2021, instant match rates became available for Customer Match, which allows advertisers to use their first-party data to remarket to customers on Google Search, Shopping, Gmail and YouTube. Then, in November 2021, the platform rolled out some of Customer Match’s features to all policy-compliant advertisers, enabling them to observe their lists to see how well they perform against the general audience, among other capabilities.
Advertisers gained access to some new data when Google announced that it would show historical data for queries that received impressions but no clicks in the search terms report for Search and Dynamic Search Ads campaigns. This didn’t reverse the September 2020 change that initially limited search terms reporting, as the data is still only for “terms that were searched by a significant number of users,” but the data could reveal what’s failing to attract the right audience. If you haven’t exported your historical query data, make sure to do so before February 1, 2022 — that’s when Google plans to remove historical query data collected prior to September 1, 2020, from the search terms report.
In terms of other fresh capabilities and updates, Google Ads ditched campaign drafts in an updated experiments page, which eliminated a clunky part of the workflow for testing. There was also a new budget report, which shows a monthly spend forecast that advertisers can use to understand how editing their budget can affect the campaign’s spending limit.
The Google Partner Program changes that were initially slated to go into effect in June 2020 were pushed back to February 2022 due to the ongoing effects of the pandemic. In addition to the postponement, Google revisited some of the changes, namely enabling Partners to either dismiss or apply recommendations to achieve a 70% optimization score and keeping the 90-day spend threshold at $10,000 (instead of the proposed $20,000 every 90 days). After the delay announcement, Partners that already met the 2022 requirements before the deadline requested to receive their new badges — Google consented.
The company also began testing a new three-strikes program for accounts that repeatedly violate ad policies. The system starts with a warning and no penalties for an initial violation. From there, each violation has an increasingly stringent penalty until the account is finally suspended. PPC professionals were largely in agreement with the program, though they were very skeptical about policy application due to the frequency of incorrectly flagged ads.
Microsoft Advertising made waves of its own
One prominent pattern we observed this year was Microsoft’s investment in industry-specific ad products: it released features specifically for automotive, tour and leisure, credit card and health insurance businesses.
The company also integrated Microsoft Clarity, its free tool to help site owners better understand visitor behavior, with Microsoft Advertising, which may help marketers analyze post-click behavior to identify roadblocks on the path to conversion.
Advertisers in the U.S. might also be happy to know that Microsoft rolled out support for Spanish language ads this year as well.
Vertical-specific ad updates
Shopping. Since Google and Bing launched organic Shopping results, many of their commerce-related product offerings have been designed to serve both advertisers and non-advertisers. One running theme in 2021 was the proliferation of shopping integrations, which are typically plugin-type solutions that enable retailers to get their product listings into organic results or run paid ads directly from their CMS, making it easier for SMBs that don’t work with an agency.
Local. At its annual Marketing Livestream event, Google announced a number of new local campaign ad formats, including:
Auto Suggest ads, which show ads based on the searcher’s location. The example Google gave for this was that if you search for “oil change” in Maps, Google might show an ad for an auto garage that is near your current location.
Navigational ads, which are shown when a person is en route to a destination using Maps driving directions.
Similar Places ads (shown below), which can show when a user searches for a specific business that is closed at the time of the search.
Similar Places ads in Google Maps. Image: Google.
In addition, the company also launched an open beta for US-based advertisers to expand store pickup options by adding a “pickup later” label to their local inventory ads.
Yelp also broke new ground by launching Yelp Audiences, its first offering that enables both location-based and non-location-based advertisers to reach Yelp users across the web, based on their Yelp search activity.
Video and image. YouTube ad creation became simpler for SMBs this year — in June, the company announced a new workflow, enabling advertisers to launch a campaign by adding a video, selecting the audiences they want to reach and designating a budget.
Google also added the ability for brands to show browsable product images below their video ads for campaigns that have “Product and brand consideration” or “Brand awareness and reach” set as the goal. Prior to this update, Video action campaigns were the only campaign type that could be linked to product feeds from Google Merchant Center.
The new mobile YouTube ad creation workflow (left) and campaign metrics (right).
In Q3 2021, YouTube ads were the breakout star of Google’s earnings report, bringing in $7.2 billion in revenue, an increase of 43% quarter-over-quarter. With that kind of success, the company may decide to release more video-oriented features and products for advertisers in 2022.
Brand safety continued to be a concern for advertisers and platforms responded by introducing exclusion controls: Facebook expanded its test of topic exclusion controls, claiming that advertisers were able to avoid appearing next to excluded categories 94-99% of the time. And, Google began rolling out dynamic exclusion lists around April 2021.
Advertising and law
Google was at the center of a number of accusations and regulatory predicaments this year, which is typical in just about any given year. However, this year started out with an event unlike any other — the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. A week after the attack, Google paused all political ads through to the inauguration. Interestingly, five months later, researchers from the University of Michigan School of Information published a study that found that Google serves 48% of all ad traffic on “fake” news sites.
For ads served in India and Italy, Google passed on digital service taxes (levied on it by regulatory entities) to advertisers. It was already doing this to advertisers for ads served in Austria, Turkey, the UK, France and Spain. In March, Maryland became the first state to impose a tax on digital advertising — legislatures in other states, like New York, Connecticut, Washington, West Virginia, Montana, Nebraska and the District of Columbia are also considering imposing their own taxes on digitals ads or the sale of data. It’s not clear how this will pan out domestically, but advertisers should look to their European counterparts to learn how to deal with it (if the time comes).
In June, Google agreed to adjust its ad technology to provide more flexibility and transparency as well as improve the way its Ad Manager services works with rival ad servers and sales platforms, in addition to paying a $268 million fine to French regulators — the French Competition Authority claimed that Google Ad Manager provided AdX (where publishers sell space to advertisers in real-time) with exclusive data to improve its own chances.
And, details from “Jedi Blue,” an alleged arrangement between Facebook and Google in which the latter would charge the former lower fees and give Facebook other advantages in header bidding auctions in exchange for the social media platform’s support on Google’s header bidding alternative, were made public throughout the year.
The collusion aspect may carry heavy consequences for both entities, but it will be a long time before there’s a conclusion to this story. When asked about Jedi Blue, the marketers that spoke to us seemed indifferent, citing the lack of viable Google alternatives for advertising.
Looking ahead to 2022
We’re certain to hear more about FLoC and the deprecation of third-party cookies as we make our way through 2022 — timelines may shift as they have in years passed. While third-party cookies aren’t going away until 2023, ETAs will be sunsetted in July 2022, so advertisers should test out RSAs before they have no choice but to use them.
On February 1, 2022, Google will remove historical query data collected prior to September 1, 2020, so advertisers should export that data to reference later before that deadline. Smart Shopping and Local campaigns are also changing sometime in 2022 — they’ll be rolled into Performance Max campaigns.
And, agencies participating in the Google Partner Program should also mark their calendars for February 2022, when the program’s requirements are set to change.
Demographic audiences delivered nearly twice the reach (+99%) of interest audiences in campaigns with the same budget when the selected interest audiences were too narrow, according to a study of consumer packaged goods (CPG) campaigns published by Facebook. However, both types of targeting performed comparably when interest audiences were broad enough.
The analysis included 50 CPG campaigns in the EMEA region, measured using Facebook Brand Lift.
Why we care. The big takeaway from Facebook’s analysis is that some interest audiences are too small to generate scale when compared with demographic audiences. Advertisers should assess their interest audiences and decide whether the higher impact is worth potentially diminished reached and higher CPM.
If interest audiences are broad enough, they can perform comparably with demographic audiences. In that case, advertisers should select the strategy that best matches their campaign goals.
While these findings make sense, they’re also convenient for Facebook, since Apple’s App Tracking Transparency doesn’t affect demographic targeting.
Demographic outperforms interest audiences that are too narrow. Interest-based targeting is inherently more limited than demographic-based targeting. To overcome that difference, the campaign with the lower reach needs to compensate with greater efficiency. Interest targeting does deliver greater efficiency, but it’s unlikely to make up the difference.
Image: Facebook.
“Among the campaigns with significantly reduced reach due to interest targeting, the effectiveness was slightly higher compared to the demographic audiences (+22%),” Facebook said, “However, this increase was slightly below the required threshold and was unlikely to sufficiently compensate for the lower reach. As a result, demographic strategy was 1.6 times more likely to be the winning strategy and drove more cost-efficient brand outcomes compared to the interest strategy in these campaigns.” When interest audiences were too narrow, demographic audiences also delivered 99% more reach than interest audiences on the same budget.
Both demographic- and interest-based targeting can deliver reach. The two strategies achieved comparable reach with the same budget when interest audiences were broad enough to provide sufficient reach. When both could deliver comparable reach — within 20% of the other — for the same budget, Facebook’s analysis showed that they were equally likely to be the winning, cost-effective strategy.
Image: Facebook.
“This finding implies that some broader interest audiences can generate scale of reach comparable to demographic audiences and marketers can select either of the strategies while maximizing the alignment to the category buyers,” Facebook said.
Your objectives should dictate your strategy. Demographic targeting was the winning strategy 1.6x more often at the top of the funnel, while interest targeting was the winning strategy 2x more often at the bottom of the funnel, according to the analysis.
Image: Facebook.
This means that interest audiences may be better for lower-funnel objectives, like driving purchase intent and consideration, while demographic audiences might be more likely to drive upper-funnel objectives, such as brand awareness. Advertisers should select the strategy that best matches their campaign’s specific goals. Using both strategies appropriately can enable brands to drive both upper and lower funnel outcomes.
the easier way to figure out which ones to turn back on is:
pic.twitter.com/s0Uq8AlyjZ
