PING — Top Digital Marketing Stories — September 2018
The month of September brought in few updates from social media space. Let’s have a look at some of the key updates which we thought might be most relevant to digital marketers.
Facebook features to improve marketer ads
Facebook, as an advertising platform, has launched features that can hugely impact your business advertising. These features would not only save precious financial resources but would also provide substantial ROI. Some of the features are listed below:
- Audience Insights
Audience insights help marketers in ad targeting. Marketers can assess the audience insights panel and choose the income category that you want to target with their ads. Facebook provides analyses its data and provides a list of likes common to the people in this category. Marketers can save these audience categories and use it in their campaigns without having to rely on a third-party data supplier.
- Facebook graph search
This feature enables you to search for pages that people, who liked your product page, liked. This feature allows you to narrow down your search and come up with the target audience that you would want to focus on
- Expanded Interests
This feature you to increase the clicks to your link if it could be done at a lower cost of conversion. Select this option once you have some conversion data and then allow the Facebook algorithm to self-optimize and target more accurately.
- Delivery Insights
This feature helps you keep track of the success or failure of your ads. It provides you with information on the number of people who have seen your ad, the potential reach of the ad and most importantly if there is an overlap in the audience for different sets of ads.
Facebook features enable seasonal hires for businesses
New job tools released by Facebook would make it easier for businesses to hire temporary employees to meet the rush during the holiday season.
According to available statistics, more than 525000 were hired by US retailers last year. An online survey also showed that one out of every four adults used Facebook to find a job.
These new tools have now enabled businesses to advertise and promote vacancies on Facebook.
Some of the features enabled by the new tools are listed below:
Share jobs in groups: Job listings now can be shared in groups apart from appearing on an organization’s page, the Jobs bookmark, and Marketplace.
Track job applications in the “Manage Jobs” tab: Businesses can now track, sort, select and tag preferred candidates.
Assign a role of Jobs Manager: Interested businesses can now assign individuals, other than the page administrator, to update jobs and handle job applications.
Google Introduces tools to boost YouTube Advertisers’ earnings
Google has introduced a series of features that would help advertisers to convert their ads in greater numbers. The features are a result of the combination of Youtube’s creative solutions, and Google’s machine learning and measurement solutions.
Ad Extensions
A host of video ad extensions would help in the greater conversion of videos. Ad extensions would lead to app downloads and trip bookings.
All the extensions would be included in the existing location and they would serve as extensions for TrueView in-stream ads.
Google has also introduced new metrics solutions that would help advertisers to measure and act on the advertising metrics. It would also help marketers to understand in real-time, the impact of the videos on the viewers.
There are also plans to include two new metrics:
Lifted users: That defines the number of viewers impacted by an ad.
Cost-per-lifted-users: This metric would allow advertisers to drive their campaigns more effectively and in a cost-effective manner.
A new desktop interface for Twitter
News has it that Twitter is all set to redesign its desktop web interface. “Explore” and “Bookmarks”, which is now only available on the mobile app, would now also move to the desktop version.
Also, features such as night mode and data saver mode would also be available on the desktop website. The “Trends” section has been shifted to the right-hand side of the page.
An opt-in option has been activated for a limited number of users who form the test group for this new version. An opt-in option allows the user to revert to the previous or the legacy version of Twitter at any point.
The changes are not drastic, but the inclusion of these new features would certainly make for a feature-rich and user-friendly interface.
Instagram to launch its own shopping app
Instagram is planning to launch its own shopping app.
According to sources, the app might be named IG Shopping. It would enable users to access and buy products from brands that they follow on Instagram.
Even now, tagging photos with links to product pages does allow brands to sell their products through Instagram. Users need to click the product tag to open a new page in Instagram’s in-app browser where the purchase can be made.
Instagram had also introduced a feature that allows brands to sell products in stories. But the proposed app would mean that a single account would enable users to buy from multiple brands, which is not the case now.
In all Instagram seems to be aiming at a better e-commerce experience for the users as well as greater sales for the brands.
With over 25 million businesses with Instagram accounts and four in five users following at least one business, Instagram has the user base to turn this app into a success.
It would be interesting to see what October brings in to the digital marketing world. We will be back next month with the latest happenings in the digital world. Stay tuned!
