Less “low-quality content.” Any posts that explicitly ask for or encourage engagement, such as comments or reactions, will have less visibility in the feed. LinkedIn said users find these types of posts that exist solely to boost reach “misleading and frustrating.”
Fewer polls. You had to know this one was coming. If you regularly browse LinkedIn, it’s become common to see multiple polls in your feed every day. Many of these are from people you don’t know. LinkedIn said it has better filtering and promises to show only “helpful and relevant” polls, from people in your network.
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Less irrelevant updates. Ever seen a connection congratulate someone you’ve never met about a recent job change? LinkedIn says it will reduce how often users see this and try to show “more targeted activity” from your network.
“I don’t want to see this.” In addition to algorithmic feed changes, LinkedIn is giving users a way to tell LinkedIn what they don’t want to say. All individual posts will include an “I don’t want to see this” option. You can limit content by authors or topic – plus you can choose to not see any political content.
Why we care. These are positive and needed changes that LinkedIn hopes will result in a feed full of relevant, reliable, credible and authentic content. Hopefully, you haven’t been using engagement-baiting tactics on LinkedIn for your clients or brands (or yourself). If you have, expect engagement and reach to decline as LinkedIn’s algorithm will no longer reward these tactics with greater visibility.
A handful of new Interactive Add-Ons have arrived within TikTok’s For Your Page. These new additions are available globally for In-Feed Ads and will be unique creative additions that will allow for more customized, engaging ads.
These new features come in two different flavors, Standard or Premium. According to TikTok, standard Add-Ons are made to “reach lower-funnel marketing goals, like driving clicks and conversions” while Premium Ads move up the funnel to aid in “brand awareness and community building”.
The new Interactive Add-Ons are compatible with App installs, Conversion, and Reach & Frequency (Traffic, Video Views) campaigns.
Premium Add-Ons. The new elements to target the lower funnel include:
Pop-out Showcase. This image element will lay over the ad with the ability to drive product clicks that can be accompanied by text.
Gesture. With a tap or swipe, a user can interact to obtain reward credits in the ‘Gesture reward card’.
Super Like 2.0. This is coming soon but will allow for an even more visuals after a user likes an ad, including a pop up card after the like.
Standard Add-Ons. The new elements to target the mid/upper funnel include:
Display Card. Visually showcase brand messaging or offers via Display Card that transcends the standard card format.
Gift Code Sticker. Contrary to the TikTok release, these arguably target the lower funnel as viewers can click for a code and copy it before heading to purchase.
Voting Sticker. Leverage the community for their input with a traditional looking voting sticker.
Countdown Sticker. Slap additional information over an ad for upcoming releases or important dates.
Why we care: These creative new ad enhancers are a great way to add interactivity for more ad engagement. According to TikTok “viewers who have shared, liked, or commented on a TikTok brand video are 150% more likely to buy a product or service” and these new elements will surely help with that interaction.
Privacy-focused search engine Brave Search is adding conversations from forums to its results with a new feature called Discussions. It is now available for desktop and mobile.
Why Brave Search created Discussions. Brave said the goal is to provide more conversations around topics. Whereas websites have one point of view, a site like Reddit offers multiple points of view. Reddit also has a built-in way to measure the quality of an answer (upvotes or likes).
“Discussions are the first step to making search more diverse in content, increasing points of view in results, and ultimately helping people find the most useful, relevant info,” Brave said in a statement to Search Engine Land. “People want easy access to a variety of authentic search results. With Discussions, Brave Search is meeting that demand.”
What Discussions look like. Here’s a screenshot of a Discussion on a search for [lcd vs oled monitor]:
How Discussions work. Discussions can be triggered in search by questions about products, current events, travel, computer programming and coding, as well as “highly unique or specific questions.”
Brave Search said its ranking algorithm can detect queries where a discussion forum might give an alternative or complementary viewpoint to the search results. Brave creates a “discussion worthiness” score based on a variety of signals, including:
Freshness (or recency) of the topic.
The popularity of the topic on a given forum.
The quality of the conversation (as measured by user engagement, such as upvotes or responses).
The search quality score (which measures how relevant the discussion is to a query).
Where Discussions come from. Brave Search now includes conversations from Reddit and StackExchange. However, Brave said it plans to add more sources soon.
New milestone. Brave Search is not a major player in search and probably isn’t even given any thought as part of your search strategy. However, Brave Search does continue to grow. It has passed 12 million queries per day, or roughly 4.2 billion per year. (For comparison, DuckDuckGo serves 97 million searches per day, while estimates put Google at more than 5 billion per day).
Why we care. This is a particularly interesting feature in light of recent criticisms of Google around a lack of diversity in search results. There was just a long thread going on Reddit yesterday filled with complaints about Google’s search quality. What Brave Search is doing could be a model that will end up helping Google solve some of these problems. Interestingly, Google seems to be testing a similar feature called What people are saying that highlights discussions from Reddit and other communities.
Ultimately, a discussion or conversation feature could be coming to Google, which means even more competition in the SERPs. So it may be worth looking at a platform like Reddit to see if there is an opportunity to get your brand or business mentioned in relevant discussions for queries that include this SERP feature.
Conversions are the key KPI when defining the success of direct response campaigns for both B2B and B2C.
These days, conversions are so top priority that many companies don’t even spend money on brand awareness campaigns in their paid social strategies.
When marketers get way into the weeds with conversions, they often forget about the benefits, and long-term impact, of micro-conversions.
What are micro-conversions?
Micro-conversions signal high intent and a strong likelihood that someone will convert on our primary conversion goal, resulting in a significant improvement in conversion metrics when put to use.
Think of a micro-conversion as one small task completion, or a secondary action a website visitor takes, that indicates they will convert.
For paid social, we consider any incremental step a user takes when showing initial interest in a brand as a micro-conversion. That could be:
Engagement with ads.
Opening lead gen forms.
Watching videos XX% of the time.
Liking/following your brand pages.
A significant benefit of micro-conversions on social platforms: many are automatically tracked within platforms. All marketers have to do is leverage them.
What can you do with micro-conversions?
I’ve observed the following results using several micro-conversion strategies across social platforms:
60% decrease in cost-per-landing page view
71% decrease in cost-per-lead
65% increase in conversion rate
If you have the potential to significantly decrease costs and improve conversion rates with these micro-conversion strategies, why wouldn’t you test them?
Ready to learn how quick and easy micro-conversion strategies can drive results?
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Here are three micro-conversion strategies to consider to drive impact on your next campaign:
1. Optimize top-of-funnel campaigns for website engagements rather than clicks
Decrease your cost-per-landing page view by optimizing for website engagements. Website engagements signal higher intent compared to link clicks. Optimizing toward users who are likely to take action on your website ultimately brings in better quality users with a higher chance of converting than those who just click. To illustrate this strategy, let’s focus on Facebook.
Here’s how to do it:
Identify landing page actions you want to track
A few actions to consider are social icon button clicks, CTA button clicks and clicks to watch videos on your website. You can also consider visits to resource pages, blog posts and case studies.
Use Facebook’s Event Setup Tool for the easiest and quickest way to set up engagement events
If you’re interested in tracking these events for other social platforms, such as LinkedIn or Twitter, place tracking tags on each action within your tag manager or directly within your website’s developer code.
You can find Facebook’s Event Setup Tool under the Events Manager in the All Tools menu. From here, you will select Add Events and then click From the Pixel.
Note: To use Facebook’s Event Setup Tool, you must have the pixel already placed across your website.
Click Open Event Setup Tool, type your website address in and click Open Website. Once you’ve done this, your landing page will open, and there will be a box to the left of your page that shows the options for using the tool.
Select Track New Button, which will allow you to start tracking those specific actions. In this example, we have selected the Contact Us button and instructed Facebook to track that under an event called “Contact.” You can continue with these steps to track and sort conversions you want to track and optimize.
Once you’ve finished tracking all the actions, just wait for the data to populate within Facebook’s Event Manager, and you’re all set to start optimizing for these events!
2. Build High-Intent Retargeting Audiences
Decrease your cost-per-lead by building high-intent retargeting audiences. You can create audiences based on specific micro-conversion actions to improve bottom-funnel conversion metrics. Instead of retargeting based on just website traffic, try retargeting based on a user’s time on specific landing pages.
Here’s how to do it:
Select Audiences under All Tools in Facebook’s Ad Manager
Create a website audience based on Time Spent
Select Custom Audience under the Create Audience drop-down menu. Next, you will select Website as your source.
Note: Take time exploring the other Customer Audience Sources. This section has tons of hidden gems useful for building high-intent audience segments based on micro-conversion actions. For example, you can implement retargeting based on users who have viewed or added specific products from your product catalog.
Under the Events drop-down menu, select Visitors by Time Spent
This option will give you a secondary choice to pick a select group of users based on the percentile of the average time spent on site. I recommend starting with 25% since that will give you the most sizable audience. If 25% works well, you may consider testing the other options.
Test and optimize your audience
Once your audience has populated, add it to an Ad Set to begin testing against conversion tactics. Test against a lookalike or an interest-based prospecting segment to compare performance.
3. Capture missed leads
Increase conversion rates by capturing missed leads. Using micro-conversions, you can track users who opened a lead gen form ad or began to fill out a form on your website. We can then take them back a step and offer more resources and brand education to help them convert at the bottom of the funnel.
To illustrate this strategy, we’ll focus on LinkedIn and Facebook.
Here’s how to do it:
Find your lead gen micro-conversions within the ad account.
LinkedIn and Facebook both have Lead Gen ad formats that automatically track users who open or submit forms, making it easier to track and retarget them. Navigate to the Audience section within the Ad Manager accounts on both platforms.
On Facebook, you will select Custom Audience and use the Meta Source Lead Form. You will choose Lead Gen Form on LinkedIn under the Create Audience dropdown menu.
Note: You can also use the same method in strategy #2 above to track form actions on your website via Facebook’s Event Setup Tool or by placing tags directly on your website’s forms.
Build your micro-conversion audience segments.
You can choose to create your audience based on users who opened or users who submitted the form. We want to focus on users who opened a form but didn’t submit for this micro-conversion.
On Facebook, we can only target form opens; however, on LinkedIn, you will have to create an audience specific to people who submitted the form and exclude that from your audience of form opens.
Test and learn from your segments
Once you’ve created your form open segments, just wait for them to populate in each platform, and then you can begin testing.
Try serving these segments with educational content, such as case studies, blog posts and other resources from your website that will push them closer to converting.
While they seem like minuscule actions, micro-conversions give us meaningful data to drive better results. Implementing these long-term enables micro-conversions to become more powerful and valuable in your optimization efforts.
Test micro-conversions for yourself
With social advertising becoming increasingly competitive, it’s so important to take advantage of available capabilities and data to maximize performance. Micro-conversions are a small but powerful piece of solving those efficiency gaps.
But don’t take my word for it. Test. Big wins await!
Many brands are just now discovering TikTok. If you’re struggling to understand how it works and how your brand can make the most of it, TikTok has some video tips.
TikTok has shared the following four video best practices for brands.
1. Go full-screen. TikTok advises using a 9:16 aspect ratio for videos. In the past, TikTok has said vertical videos perform best on TikTok.
2. Tell a short story. TikTok recommends a length of 21 to 24 seconds. The company also advises never to publish a video that is shorter than 10 seconds. (TikTok videos can be up to 10 minutes.) Another past tip from TikTok: use video captions. These can help add context to the story in your video.
3. Use high-resolution video. The minimum should be 720p.
4. Audio is essential. TikTok says it can be any kind of audio. But the more relevant, the better.
Best practices aren’t everything. Says TikTok: “While there are endless ways to create a ‘good’ TikTok video, finding your brand’s unique voice and direction will ultimately set you apart, and the rules are just tips and tricks to get you there.”
TikTok says its users pay attention to brands that provide fun, entertaining or culturally-relevant experiences. So when formulating your strategy, make sure you keep all these things in mind.
To help brands or creators who are just getting started, TikTok has just unveiled the TikTok Creative Sandbox. It provides additional tools and resources.
Why we care. TikTok is a social platform that most brands and businesses should no longer ignore. It isn’t Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram, so you can’t simply recycle the same creative. Because TikTok is video-first, you need to create a TikTok marketing strategy. Knowing the basics will help you get started. From here, it’s up to you to make sure your audience can find and engage with your brand’s videos.
YouTube Search Insights, which was previewed as an experimental feature in November, will become available to all creators and brands by the end of this month, the company announced.
The tool shows you data based on searches across all of YouTube, as well as just your viewers’ searches. There is also a content gap filter, which shows you searches for which searchers were unable to find a video. These are bucketed by search volume (high, medium and low).
Where to find the tool. Head to YouTube Studio. After you click on Analytics, the search insights will be available under the Research tab. Because this doesn’t launch fully until the end of April, you might not see it yet.
YouTube’s Research Tab lets you explore what viewers are searching for on YouTube.
Data the tool provides It will only provide aggregated data from the past 28 days on English language search terms from the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia and India. The company plans to roll this out to more languages and regions as soon as possible. That’s according to this video published on the Creator Insider YouTube channel.
Why we care. This tool should be helpful for brands and creators. You can use it to help inform and improve your content planning and make sure you’re creating videos that are relevant to your audience, as well as what YouTube users are searching for. While Google generally has taken away data, it’s nice to see them provide search query data to help brands and creators create more relevant content.
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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Search advertising revenue continues to grow. In 2021, according to the IAB, search accounted for $78.3 billion of all U.S. digital advertising revenue, which came in at a whopping $189 billion.
However, the IAB noted in their Internet Advertising Revenue Report: Full Year 2021 report that the growth of search wasn’t as strong as other formats, such as digital video, which was up 50 percent year on year (YoY). As a result, search lost 0.8 percentage points in total revenue share.
Paid search remains king. With 41.4% of all digital ad revenue in 2021, paid search is still the leading format. Mobile accounted for $54.7 billion (up from $39.7 billion in 2020), while desktop accounted for $23.5 billion (up from $19.3 billion in 2020).
Top advertising format by share/Internet Advertising Revenue Report: Full Year 2021
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Social media advertising rebounds. Social media advertising plateaued at the start of the pandemic. In 2021, revenue from social platforms (including Meta-owned networks, Twitter, Snapchat and TikTok) hit $57.7 billion, up from $41.4 billion in 2020. What helped fuel this growth? In particular, the IAB noted that 80% of brands now work with influencers and content creators, which began during COVID-19.
The state of digital advertising. It’s strong. Of note from the IAB report:
Total U.S. digital ad revenue increased by $50 billion in 2021.
YoY growth was 35.4%, the highest increase since 2006.
YoY growth was strong in each quarter of 2021. (And that is expected to continue in 2022.)
Q4 2021 digital ad revenue hit a new record: $55 billion. That’s up nearly $10 billion from the same 2020 holiday season.
Why we care. At the start of the pandemic, there was a lot of uncertainty about whether we’d continue to see online advertising continue to grow. In 2020, we wondered whether we’d only see single-digit growth heading forward. Thankfully, that hasn’t happened. Search – like all other digital channels and formats – shows strong growth.
The IAB predicts digital ad growth to continue across all channels. However, the IAB notes some potential challenges, including privacy regulation, the deprecation of third-party cookies and measurement. What else could impact digital marketing this year: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, ongoing supply chain issues in the U.S. and other economic issues. That said, as the IAB notes, “brands have spoken, and digital is where they are putting their dollars.” That will again be true in 2022. You can view the entire report here (note: the report is free, but you must log in or create an account to download it).
It’s a shocking number. During what has become known as the “Great Reshuffle,” 618,000 marketers left their jobs in 2021. That figure is 31% higher than in 2020.
You should expect more reshuffling for the remainder of 2022. In the U.S. alone, 24% of marketers are actively looking for a new job, and 62% are considering changing jobs this year. That’s all according to LinkedIn’s 2022 Marketing Jobs Report.
Remote work growing. LinkedIn also noted that there was a 121% year-over-year increase in remote marketing job share.
In a separate report, LinkedIn reported that remote jobs accounted for the majority of applications on LinkedIn for the first time in February. Despite making up less than 20 percent of all paid job listings, applications for remote jobs received more than 50% of all applications.
Hot jobs. Social Media Marketing Specialist was the most in-demand job within marketing, followed by Marketing Strategist and Marketing Manager. While search marketing wasn’t directly mentioned, SEO and PPC live under the great umbrella of marketing – and all marketing influences or is impacted by search to some extent.
How hot are digital marketing and social media jobs? Half of the top 10 jobs posted on LinkedIn were in the digital or media space, LinkedIn said in a February blog post.
The report listed the top 10 fastest growing occupations:
Where are marketers going? Not surprisingly, many marketers on the move are relocating to big cities. In the U.S., the top five most popular places for marketers to move to were: New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, D.C./Baltimore and Phoenix.
Marketers are willing to move to get a better salary. The places with the top marketing salaries in the U.S. are Seattle, San Francisco, Atlanta, Fayetteville, and Minneapolis-St.Paul. (Although the cost of living is also incredibly high in Seattle and San Francisco.)
Why we care. Brands and agencies are finding hiring challenging right now. The pandemic has reshaped work – and how employees think about it. There were many successful remote-only companies, even more after COVID-19. So if you’re thinking of going back to an office-only model, you may need to rethink your plans. Maybe consider a hybrid model. Marketers got a taste of remote work – and the data shows that many clearly liked it. Also, to attract talent, you may have to offer higher salaries and a greater benefits package.
For job seekers, one thing that was made clear: marketers can thrive in a fully-remote environment. It’s a job seeker’s market right now. So if you’re among those looking for a new role, best of luck in your search. I hope you find a role that fulfills you and makes you feel valued (and pays you what you’re worth).
Twitter is rolling out a feature to let you leave a conversation on Twitter with what the company calls “Unmentioning.” The company announced this on Twitter saying “we’re experimenting with Unmentioning—a way to help you protect your peace and remove yourself from conversations—available on Web for some of you now.”
What is unmentioning. Unmentioning is a way to remove yourself from an ongoing Twitter conversation without communicating to the people on that conversation that you left. We are all stuck on these threads on Twitter that may not be relevant to us or might just be something you don’t want to be associated with. Twitter is addressing this annoyance with a feature to unmention yourself.
This feature removes the tag of your Twitter handle from any tweet and in the future prevents you from being tagged in any replies or receiving further notifications from that tweet. This does not stop you from viewing the Twitter thread. It does change your Twitter name to a gray color. And no, you cannot undo this, so if you leave a Twitter conversation, you cannot join it again right now.
What it looks like. Here is a screenshot showing how you can click on “leave this conversation” on a Twitter thread that mentions you to leave that conversation.
When will I see it. Twitter said this feature is currently available for some users on the web platform. It should roll out slowly to more users and on other platforms.
Why we care. On the brand side, removing your brand from a conversation that may be perceived as negative, when your brand has nothing to do with the conversation might make sense. From a consumer perspective, sometimes you just don’t want to be part of a conversation, for a number of reasons and now you have that option.
the easier way to figure out which ones to turn back on is:
