Today in Digital Marketing - A Deep Dive Into Google's 'Performance Max' Campaigns

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal.

Starting point is 00:00:28 Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, welcome to the era of the six-week learning phase.

Starting point is 00:01:05 We'll break down everything Google had to announce today around its Performance Max campaigns. Plus, Facebook tries to claw that sweet, sweet first-party data back. A big ads platform gets tag manager integration. And it's another episode of Who's Copying Who? It's Tuesday, November 2nd, 2021. Happy Day of the Dead, Ecuador. Jesus. I'm Todd Maffin.

Starting point is 00:01:29 Here's what you missed today in Digital Marketing, episode 496. Well, it sure sounds like an enticing offer. Some e-commerce merchants opened their email today to a Facebook message that said this. Free shipping for you and your customers. This holiday season, offer your customers free shipping when they buy your products using checkout on Facebook or Instagram. We'll pay up to $15 to ship each order now through January 1st. So has Meta turned a new leaf and is becoming more philanthropic? Of course not.

Starting point is 00:02:01 This is all about them trying to claw back first-party data, of course, and it's a clever move. One that also benefits you, by the way. This has its ups and downs. Their payment platform is still not widely adopted by consumers, but it does mean that the Facebook platform will know for sure when there's been a conversion because it's happening on their platform. In the past, it said it would charge a 5% payment processing fee. The company's been waiving that fee this year for most merchants, which is a good thing considering 5% is a little, I don't know, gougy. Shopify's fees are under 3%. But would you pay that extra 2% if you knew you were getting accurate conversion data back instead of relying on its educated guesses? If this is something you're interested in, here's how it works.

Starting point is 00:02:43 First, upgrade your checkout to sell through Facebook or Instagram. Customers will then start seeing free shipping from Facebook on your eligible products now through January 1st. At checkout, they will get a shipping credit of up to $15. You will be reimbursed by Facebook in your payouts. Yes, Facebook itself will be responsible for crediting your account. I mean, you know, what could go wrong there? A big announcement from Google today. All advertisers who use Google Ads now have access to Performance Max campaigns. Performance Max makes it possible for performance advertisers to access all of their Google Ads inventory from one campaign.

Starting point is 00:03:29 The company says it's designed to complement your keyword-based search campaigns, not replace them. Next year, they will become the next generation of smart shopping and local campaigns, which will both upgrade to Performance Max. Some analysis coming in a moment, but first, Google says there are four main ways that Performance Max can help. Quoting the company, increasing conversions in value, automation optimizes your budget and bids across channels to help you capture new conversion

Starting point is 00:03:54 opportunities in real time. Two, finding new customers, unlock new audience segments by using Google's real-time understanding of user intent, behavior, and context to show up in the right moments with more relevant ads. Three, gaining richer insights. Performance Max campaigns are now part of the insights page to help you understand how automation is working and how you can improve your campaign using the combinations report. You can also see how your top performing assets are being combined to build creatives. More on that new insights panel in a moment. And four, working together with automation, they say steer automation by providing high quality creative assets and sharing your expertise about which audiences are most likely to convert, unquote.

Starting point is 00:04:37 Well, that's a lot of very pretty PR words. And to help us translate, our resident Google ads expert, Jill Saskengales, who spent six years at Google, joins me now. Hi, Jill. Hi there. So I noticed the announcement says this should run alongside search and not replace it. This seems like new language from Google. Am I right? Yes, we don't normally hear Google talk that way about new ads launches.

Starting point is 00:04:59 Usually they want us to upgrade to something new, change over to something new. But the announcement and the training online say very explicitly multiple times this should run alongside search. So what does that mean? Like you're going to have your regular campaigns, and then they want you to create this similar, like basically replicated on the Performance Max side of things? I guess so.

Starting point is 00:05:22 To be honest, I wasn't expecting this from the announcement. I thought Performance Max was going to say like, this is it. Maximize your performance with this one campaign type. But what I infer from this announcement, and I should say I haven't personally run a Performance Max campaign yet, is it's much more audience focused. Search is about keywords and intent. And of course, Performance Max will run on search, but it's focusing much more on the audience signals in order to determine its targeting. What else caught your eye here? They had some language around steering the automation by feeding it audiences to start with. That seemed a little weird to me given their, I mean, not just them, but everyone's

Starting point is 00:05:58 obsession with machine learning. Yes, I have never seen Google talking about steering the automation before. That was very strange, in my opinion. But I can understand why they said that. A lot of people don't trust machine learning and think they know better. And, you know, smart bidding, smart solutions are dumb to start. They get smart as they learn. So very surprising. Also reinforces the fact that this is a really audience-focused campaign type, given that they're letting you steer the automation with audience signals. We actually spoke at more length than this. Our full conversation went into detail on the new six-week learning phase. God help us all. Whether this spells the end to local campaigns?

Starting point is 00:06:46 The spoiler answer there is probably yeah. And the impressive metrics now available. That interview and transcript of the conversation is in today's premium newsletter, which you can subscribe to by tapping the link in today's episode notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. You can get a 14-day trial of the daily newsletter or sign up for free for the weekly one. From Google Ads to Microsoft Ads, Microsoft Today announcing new updates including their version of Smart Shopping Campaigns, integration with Google Tag Manager, and new ways to increase your brand reach. First, with Smart Shopping Campaigns, advertisers can use Microsoft's automation tools to target customers who are more likely to convert at a higher revenue value. Here are some tips for success, quoting Microsoft.

Starting point is 00:07:31 Start with a broad ROAS target. Setting a narrow ROAS target will reduce the volume available for a smart shopping campaign. With a broader range, there will be more data that the algorithm can learn from to increase performance. Also, ensure enough budget for learning. Upload a detailed product feed. Go beyond required columns and include optional information to help the system better understand your products. And combine products into as few campaigns as possible. Combining products into one campaign avoids fragmentation and aids with faster learning. The Microsoft Merchant Center interface has also been updated

Starting point is 00:08:07 to include inline appeals so you can get help understanding rejections. With the addition of automated universal event tracking, users can connect their Google Tag Manager account. For this feature to work, users must sign into Google and select the Tag Manager account and container via Microsoft Online. As for the new ways to increase your brand reach with the Microsoft Audience Network, Microsoft has added the following updates. Expanded targeting to 18 new markets available to all customers in mid-November. You can now choose between CPC or CPM pricing. Additional

Starting point is 00:08:41 video ad and import features. Advertisers will see a selection in the Google import workflow to pause audience groups that don't come over with supported audience targeting and Facebook import is now available to bring over your video ads. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches,

Starting point is 00:09:15 and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today, starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. The PearPop app, previously only available to TikTok creators, is now available for Instagram and it's proving to be popular. PearPop allows creators and brands to buy collaborations with celebrities and larger creators in less than a month. 10,000 Instagram creators have joined the platform. Instagram

Starting point is 00:09:44 availability was the most requested feature among PearPop users, given that over 90% of its creators are already active on Instagram. A few of the new Insta creators include Post Malone, Paris Hilton, and Tom Felton. Creator Cole Mason hopes to monetize all users, no matter if they're influencers or not. Quoting Mason, When you are posting something creative and getting viewership on it, there's no way to monetize that right now. We think if you have 100 followers or you have 50 million followers, you should be making money from your content, unquote. In addition to Instagram, the social collaboration marketplace will also become

Starting point is 00:10:19 available on Twitter later this month and on Twitch in December. Which brings us to another episode of Who's Copying Who? Who's Copying Who? Today's copier, and I know this will shock you, Instagram. Which has added the Add Yours sticker in Instagram Stories. This lets creators turn their stories into threads where other users can respond with their own content. If this sounds familiar, yes, it's basically TikTok's duet feature. What's the difference?

Starting point is 00:10:59 Instagram enables you to view everyone's additional posts in the chain in one place, while TikTok does not. When a story contains an add yours prompt, viewers can tap it, capture or select content related to the story, and share their own story, which will then appear both as their own story and in the sticker thread. The University of Facebook is growing. Meta is now offering a Facebook Marketing Analytics Certificate as part of its new career programs. Quoting the company, With the new Marketing Analytics Professional Certificate program, we're giving anyone who has a passion for data a way to build a career in this field, no experience necessary.

Starting point is 00:11:40 The six-course certificate program will walk learners through the skills needed to provide an overall view of how marketing campaigns are performing against goals through data and insights. The curriculum includes collecting, sorting, evaluating, and visualizing marketing data, using Facebook Ads Manager to test ad effectiveness and evaluate the results, using essential analytics tools like Python and SQL to analyze data, and visualizing data using Tableau. This holiday season, Walmart is rolling out new ways for brands to reach shoppers with shoppable content, including an augmented reality partnership with Meta, shoppable live streams, shoppable posts, and more. Walmart announced its campaign Joyfully, where shoppers can use an AR lens to select products that spark joy for them,

Starting point is 00:12:32 then visit Walmart's Gift Finder experience to make purchases. As part of the campaign, the company is also introducing the first large-scale launch of shoppable recipes on Pinterest. Customers can seamlessly add ingredients to their Walmart shopping carts for easy purchasing. As part of the live streams, Walmart plans to partner with a number of publishers, well-known influencers, and others, but did not disclose any more details. The announcement also highlighted the success of its partner brand experience. Quoting Walmart,

Starting point is 00:13:01 Brands who partner with Walmart Connect for their holiday campaigns can expect to experience incredible performance during the season. Quoting Walmart, Wow, that's an awfully broad category. Anyway, higher reach and achieved 20% higher ROAS compared to a non-holiday quarter. A brief story here for the nerds. WhatsApp today began testing a new cloud-based version of its business API. Until now, it's been a standalone SDK, which can mean more coding for the partner. The old API will still be supported. For now, Meta doesn't have any plans to force those third-party platforms to the new version. Both will be free to use, though of course not free to place ads or run message campaigns.

Starting point is 00:13:51 More than 175 million WhatsApp users message a business every day. And this is growing, especially in developing nations like India, Brazil, and Indonesia. Plans are for the new cloud-based API to be open more widely sometime next year. And finally, years ago, the satirical newspaper The Onion had a weekly TV show called The Onion News Network. They pretended to report on ridiculous things, including this story from about 10 years ago. Congress today reauthorized funding for Facebook, the massive online surveillance program run by the CIA. According to Department of Homeland Security reports, Facebook has replaced almost every

Starting point is 00:14:33 other CIA information gathering program since it was launched in 2004. After years of secretly monitoring the public, we were astounded. So many people would willingly publicize where they live, their religious and political views, an alphabetized list of all their friends, personal email addresses. And who could blame us for thinking that Facebook and the U.S. intelligence agencies weren't connected in some way? One terrifying stat, the company has more than a billion facial recognition templates on file. Let that sink in for a moment. Facebook has facial recognition data

Starting point is 00:15:08 on one in every eight people on the planet. But today, the company said, it will delete all of them. Earlier this year, Facebook was ordered to pay $550 million to residents in the American state of Illinois for using their photos without their consent. As for when the facial data will be deleted, Facebook said, quote, in the coming weeks.

Starting point is 00:15:41 So how's my nine millionth attempt to switch to decaf going? I'm glad you asked. Terrible, thank you very much. I missed two meetings today. Like what magic drug is caffeine anyway, where I could like my peripheral vision stops working. I can't see the notifications on my screen anymore. It's a disaster. And I'm switching back to regular caffeine as of, you know, I'm switching back as of now. Why? Because I'm a weak, weak man. Talk to you tomorrow. Much of the credit belongs to CIA agent Mark Zuckerberg, who runs the day-to-day Facebook operation for the agency.

Starting point is 00:16:24 The decorated agent, codenamed the Overlord, was recently awarded the prestigious Medal of Intelligence commendation for his work with the Facebook program, which he has called, quote, the single most powerful tool for population control ever created. Bye.

Today in Digital Marketing - A Deep Dive Into Google's 'Performance Max' Campaigns

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