Digital Recap: Search, Social and Beyond!

Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash

Location3 Weighs in on the Google Ads Search Terms Report Update 

The update removes low volume keywords from the report, and Google cites privacy standards and protecting user data as the primary reasons for the change.  Advertisers are concerned about losing visibility into their ad spend and the ability to strategize using negative keyword management. Location3’s Paid Search Strategist, Justin Salazar, explains: “Given that we live in a Google-centric world, we as search marketers must adapt to this new environment, and that might mean that we have to trade in our optimization scalpel for a battle axe.” 

Learn more about the update. 

Facebook Pages to Impose Ad Limits in February 

With the goal to lower costs and improve campaign performance, Facebook has announced it will begin imposing limits on ads in February. As David Cohen writes in his article for AdWeek, when too many ads are run at the same time, each ad is delivered less frequently, lessening the likelihood that the ads will exit the ‘learning phase.’ This typically results in costlier campaigns with fewer returns. The limits augment the importance of quality creative, Facebook’s advertising tools, and their machine learning products. Read Cohen’s article for more specifics, “Ad Limits for Facebook Pages Will Begin Taking Effect Next February.” 

Google’s Responsive Search Ads  

Google recently made their responsive search ads (RSAs) the default option for ad formats. With RSAs, the advertiser provides multiple headlines and descriptions, and Google’s algorithms learn to predict when to serve the different combinations. Search Engine Land’s Ginny Marvin asked marketers for their analysis of the ad format, and here are a few key takeaways: 

• Comparing RSA performance to that of expanded text ads (ETAs) is not straightforward, because RSA reporting is limited and there’s no easy way to correlate a query to an ad or RSA combination. 
• Follow ad copy best practices for better results. 
• RSA account structure and ad group organization are important. 
• Pinning headlines is a useful strategy. 
• Continue to test RSAs to better understand when and how to use them. 

Read Marvin’s article for further analysis: “RSAs: Are they living up to the promise? It depends.” 

Your Guide to the Social Media Universe  

Visual Capitalist crafted an interesting infographic that sees the social media landscape as planets. Each planet, or social network, is scaled in size to represent its number of Monthly Active Users. It’s a fun way to view the growing media options. Social Media Today highlighted the visual on its site – check it out here.