Google has confirmed a bug with the most recent version of Google Ads Editor. The issue seems to be with the bulk image ad uploads process. Google is aware of the issue and said the team is working on resolving it.

Confirmation. Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, replied on Twitter saying “The team is aware of a recent issue that may be impacting image ad uploads in Editor and is working to address it. Changing versions won’t help in this case. I’ve passed this along and will let you know if I learn anything new.”

No work around. Google said that reverting to an older version of Google Ads Editor won’t resolve the issue. Google said it has to fix the issue for it to be resolved. So hang tight and be patient or if you really need to upload image ads, then you can try to do so through the web interface or maybe the API.

Google Ads Editor. Google Ads Editor is a desktop program for Windows or Mac that makes managing your Google Ads more efficient. Google Ads Editor is a free, downloadable application for managing your Google Ads campaigns. It allows you to download one or more accounts, make changes offline, then upload the changes to back into Google Ads. Google Ads Editor can help you save time and make it easier to make changes in bulk.

But when things do not work, it can be frustrating.

The complaint. Here is the complain from Josh B. on Twitter:

Here is Google’s response:

So far, I do not see an update that this has been fixed yet.

Why we care. If you are having issues with Google Ads Editor’s ad image uploader, you are not alone. Google is working on a fix, so maybe avoid using it if you can work on other areas of your Google Ads campaigns.

The post Google confirms a bug with Google Ads Editor image uploads appeared first on Search Engine Land.

The latest earnings announcements from Alphabet and Facebook have made it abundantly clear that the consumer privacy movement is creating a competitive advantage for Google. It’s important that businesses understand this reality as Big Tech firms enact tougher privacy controls.

Since January 2020, both Apple and Google have made some big moves in the name of protecting consumer privacy. These changes are affecting businesses everywhere:

• In January 2020, Google said that the company would phase out third-party cookies on Chrome, the world’s most popular browser. As a result, advertisers would lose the ability to serve up highly targeted ads based on tracking consumer activity on Chrome. Google later postponed its timetable for doing this after regulators stepped in and insisted on having oversight with the process.
• In 2021, Apple enacted the Application Tracking Transparency (ATT) privacy control as part of an update to its operating system for Apple devices. ATT requires apps to get the user’s permission before tracking their data across apps or websites owned by other companies for advertising, or sharing their data with data brokers. As much as 96% of users in the United States are opting out of having their behavior tracked.

These changes are doing something else, too: they’re making Google stronger.

The impact of Google’s privacy controls

Phasing out third-party cookies in Chrome helps Google in two important ways and makes its ecosystem stronger. The demise of third-party cookies is quite convenient for Google sites such as Google Maps and YouTube. That’s because they use first-party cookies to track user behavior. Therefore, those sites become more appealing to advertisers that wish to continue serving up targeted ads working with Google. As Alphabet reported, YouTube’s advertising revenue for the third-quarter 2021 was $7.2 billion, up from $5.04 billion a year ago.

Meanwhile, Google is building its own open-source program that is intended to help businesses serve up targeted ads without using third-party data. This program is known as FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts). FLoC will make it possible for businesses to group people based on their common browsing behavior instead of using third-party cookies. According to a Google blog post, “Our tests of FLoC to reach in-market and affinity Google Audiences show that advertisers can expect to see at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent when compared to cookie-based advertising. The specific result depends on the strength of the clustering algorithm that FLoC uses and the type of audience being reached.”

I cannot overstate how important it is for Google to grow its ad revenues, which were $53 billion for the third quarter. Google is clearly succeeding. But a number of players, notably Amazon Advertising and Facebook, present a threat. Google will do everything in its power to fend off its competition and grow its cash cow.

But, why bother to do all this? Because Google is reading the room: Consumer privacy has been a hot-button issue in recent years. Legislators all over the world have been pressuring Big Tech to protect consumer privacy more carefully. And, you have to give Google credit for how adroitly the company is acting here. The company is making its own sites more attractive while giving advertisers the means to continue working with Google Advertising using its own open-source program.

The impact of Apple’s privacy controls

Apple’s ATT is already having an impact in some interesting ways. First off, as users opt-out of having their privacy tracked, social media sites such as Facebook, which track user behavior to serve up targeted ads, are taking a $10 billion revenue hit (and counting). This also affects Google’s ad rival Facebook — thus helping Google. In addition, some advertisers are taking their business to the Google Android operating system, creating another boon for Google. As The Wall Street Journal noted, “ . . . many brands have shifted their ad spending to Google because its flagship search-ad business relies on customer intent—users’ search terms immediately reveal what they are interested in—rather than data collected from app and web tracking.”

What businesses should do

It’s important that businesses continue to watch and react. Even though Google’s war on third-party cookies was slowed down by regulators, the writing is on the wall: advertisers need to be prepared to tap into their first-party data to create more relevant content. This means, among other things, monitoring the tools that Google is developing to help advertisers do that.

Advertisers should also keep a close eye on how retailers such as Amazon and Walmart are successfully mining their own first-party data to offer targeted ad products. Google is not the only game in town. Retailer-based advertising gives businesses the means to reach people who are shopping with an intent to buy. After all, Amazon is the most popular platform for product search. But, more importantly, it’s time for businesses to lean on their own data to build relationships.

The post Why consumer privacy is Google’s ace in the hole appeared first on Search Engine Land.

The holiday shopping season is typically a boon for online retailers, but this year, supply chain issues coupled with heightened consumer demand have put merchants, and the PPC professionals that work with them, in a difficult position. After all, if there’s no inventory to sell, advertising those products will only lead to wasted budget and disappointed customers.

While demand is likely to level off as we move past the holidays, supply chain issues may linger. For example, furniture retailer IKEA said it expects supply chain-related shortages to last until mid-2022. Without a clear end in sight, retailers may consider halting their paid campaigns or even suspending their partnerships with PPC agencies, which may also have experienced similar client churn at the outset of the pandemic as well.

Fortunately, there are alternatives to going dark with your paid campaigns that can not only help you weather the storm but also put your brand ahead of competitors that do pull the plug on their ads.

Shutting down campaigns may cost more than it saves

“I would challenge advertisers to think creatively about their customer’s journey and avoid going completely dark, especially during Q4,” Nancy-lee McLaughlin, senior director, search & enterprise services at Tinuiti said, “A strong Q4 helps set up for a successful Q1 when you have a full-funnel strategy in place.”

Halting your campaigns altogether might result in loss of market share or brand awareness. “This might be an excellent time to reallocate some spending toward more upper-funnel projects and away from performance-based programs that are more susceptible to present issues,” Christena Garduno, CEO at Media Culture told Search Engine Land.

There are also considerations regarding the machine learning that powers many campaigns: “Campaigns that go dark for extended periods of time (7+ days) may see a new learning period when ads are turned back on,” said Fred Vallaeys, CEO at Optmyzr and one of Search Engine Land’s 2021 Search Marketers of the Year. “If that is a concern, a better approach is to reduce budgets so ads continue to run at some level while prospects are directed to buy an alternative, join a waitlist or place an order that will be fulfilled at a future date,” he added.

Whether to shut down your ads depends on your visibility in the search results and your goals. Vallaeys provided the following criteria to help guide your decision:

• An advertiser who dominated a SERP risks opening the door to competition if they simply turn off ads and cede the business to others. With the usual top player gone, competitors can move in and steal your business. Many advertisers have seen how hard it can be to unseat a competitor from the top spot, so advertisers who already own the top spot may prefer to not rock the boat and substitute another landing page or product rather than go dark.
• Advertisers who were not previously dominant may find it less important to keep ads running when products become unavailable. While their temporary absence reduces auction pressure and hence lowers the CPC for advertisers in higher positions, consumers won’t see as much of a difference because the choices offered by the top ads won’t change as much.

Regarding the second point, Vallaeys provided the following analogy: “If I went to the mall to buy a pair of pants, I might have started my visit at an anchor tenant like Macy’s. But, if I found Macy’s was closed, I’d probably try out one of the smaller specialty retailers and maybe find that Lululemon has really good men’s pants. On my next visit, even if Macy’s was back, I might still go to Lululemon. But, if Lululemon had been closed that first time, I wouldn’t have noticed the difference and simply made my purchase as intended from Macy’s.”

Avoiding the pause

There are a number of alternatives to pausing ad campaigns that can set you up to rebound faster when supply chains stabilize.

For one, focus on the upper funnel. “Now’s the time to highlight your brand value and focus on what sets you apart from the competition,” Shelby Gagnon, product marketing manager at Microsoft Advertising wrote. “Use search and native messaging to focus on brand values and stability so you don’t lose share of mind or customers. Keeping your brand front and center while others pull back works to your advantage in gaining a share of voice and wallet in the future,” she added.

You can also shift media to promote “tier 2” products that you may have in higher supply. When assessing whether to do so, McLaughlin suggests considering the following:

• Is there a challenger ASIN/SKU that has stock and may become a tier 1 product in the future with some extra support? 
• Is this product a replacement or enhancement for the tier 1 product [that you’re having trouble keeping in supply] and how does this impact strategy?
• Is this shift to a “tier 2” product going to drive a different ROAS and how does this impact the total media plan? 

You can also promote digital goods, like gift cards, or other virtual products.

Another option is to simply tweak your campaigns. “Instead of spreading your budgets too thin, tighten geo-targeting and bid strategies, or spend more in locations that may be less impacted by supply shortages,”  Gagnon recommended.

You can also schedule your ads to achieve greater efficiency: “Keep ads on part-time with the use of ad scheduling to focus budget on the most profitable hours,” Geetanjali Tyagi, COO at Optymzr, said.

“Removing back-ordered, low-inventory, and high sell-through products from feeds can help maximize investment,” Marion Gendron, senior manager at Merkle, recommended, “Promoting higher average order value/luxury products with a longer click-to-purchase timeline will increase ad effectiveness.”

Lastly, adjust your messaging. Expectations can make or break the customer experience, and framing the right expectations for your audience can help you increase their customer lifetime value. “Be transparent with your customer about shipping wait times, when consumers are used to getting items in two days or less, every hour over that is painful so get ahead of this communication when you can,” McLaughlin said.

“If supply constraints are severe enough where you need to throttle driving traffic to a purchase page, ensure you have strategies set up to retarget those customers when you are able to meet those demands,” she added.

Finally, if you must cut back, comparing sales performance by channel may reveal products that are doing well enough organically that you can shift budget to in-stock items that need more exposure to compete against other retailers.

Despite pandemic-era disruption, customers have shown that they’re still looking to spend and support our brands. Maintaining a paid media presence can help you show those customers that, despite these challenges, your brand still seeks to serve them, even if you don’t have the products they’re searching for exactly when they’re searching for them.

The post Advertisers can adapt to supply chain issues without pausing campaigns appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Facebook will soon expand its test of topic exclusion controls for ads in the News Feed to a limited number of advertisers that run ads in English, the company announced Thursday. First announced as a test in January 2021, topic exclusion controls allow advertisers to exclude ad delivery to users who have engaged with any of the following topics: “News and Politics,” “Social Issues” and “Crime & Tragedy.”

Why we care. If these controls roll out more widely, advertisers might feel more confident about brand safety on Facebook. The platform has been at the center of numerous controversies over its handling of misinformation and hate speech and may be falling out of favor, particularly with teenage users, which are projected to decrease by 45% over the next two years.

Creating a more brand-safe environment may help Facebook maintain revenue from ads. But, if it’s not able to modernize itself and compete with newer platforms, like TikTok, advertisers may eventually move to whichever social media platforms their audiences migrate to.

Early testing has been promising, according to Facebook. In Facebook’s early topic exclusion controls tests, it found that advertisers that:

• Excluded the News and Politics categories were able to avoid News and Political adjacency 94% of the time.
• Excluded the Tragedy and Conflict categories were able to avoid Tragedy and Conflict adjacency 99% of the time.
• Excluded the Debated Social Issues categories were able to avoid Debated Social Issues adjacency 95% of the time.

More granular News Feed controls for users. Users are able to dictate whether they’re included in the three topic exclusion categories from their ad preferences menu.

The company is also testing new controls that enable users to adjust their News Feed ranking preferences. The customizations would enable users to increase or reduce the amount of content they see from their friends, family, Groups and Pages.

Looking into the future. “We see this product as a bridge between what we can offer today and where we hope to go — content-based controls,” Facebook said in the announcement, “We will soon begin exploring and testing a new content-based suitability control that will aim to address concerns advertisers have of their ads appearing in Facebook and Instagram feeds next to certain topics based on their brand suitability preferences.”

By the end of the year, the company also plans to work with third-party brand safety partners to develop a solution to verify whether content adjacent to an ad in News Feed aligns with a brand’s suitability preferences.

The post Facebook’s topic exclusion controls test rolls out to more advertisers appeared first on Search Engine Land.