Paid Media News & Opinion #109

Google Ads rolls out Brand Report for unified reach & frequency insights

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> What’s happening

A new tool in Google Ads, called Brand Report, that unifies reach & frequency metrics across all brand campaigns, is being rolled out. Reach (unique user) and frequency (impressions per user) metrics will be available in a visual dashboard-style page with useful metrics such as avg. impression frequency per user and % of unique users.

Filters will allow results to be segmented by age, gender, and other targeted demographics, helping understand if accounts are under/over serving to particular audiences.

Search, Shopping and even Performance Max campaign data is not included, focusing more on awareness campaigns like Display and Video. To see data, 10K+ impressions per campaign are needed. This is currently only available for single accounts, not manager (MCC) accounts.

Head to Insights & Reports to find it.

> Why we care

Reach and frequency metrics have been available for some time now but only at the individual campaign level. The new tool, once available in your account, can show the deduplicated unique user and impressions per user across the whole account, which is very useful for understanding the intensity of your current upper-funnel activity on existing target audiences.

If frequency is too high, it can cause ad fatigue, reduce ad effectiveness, and even damage your brand. At campaign level, this can be hidden, so account-level data will provide the real frequency and reach of campaigns as a whole.

While other campaign types are not available, it’s unlikely they will due to the nature of reach & frequency with awareness activity, as well as privacy concerns. But never say never!

Reddit introduces AMA ads and business analytics tools

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> What’s happening

Reddit has announced two product updates, with the ability to promote Ask Me Anything sessions directly from Reddit Ads Manager, as well as an enhancement to their business analytics tools. AMAs are a hugely engaged part of Reddit, so the ability to promote those events with ads with give brands the ability to leverage their awareness and audience engagement within the platform.

The improvement in business analytics will allow businesses to track real-time conversations about their brand, as well as monitor discussions and visualise conversations volumes, amongst other things.

> Why we care

Whilst these updates aren’t likely to drive conversions, they are likely to give brands a clearer idea of their audience sentiment and provide a platform to engage a lot more closely with them. This can help form better decisions on how to market to your customer base and to discover any gaps or discussion points that you might not otherwise be aware of.

Budget reallocation experiments available for Performance Max

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> What’s happening

Google continues its ongoing enhancements to the Performance Max campaign type. Now Google Ads has introduced the ability to run experiments to test and evaluate the impact of reallocating budget away from Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) or Display campaigns to Performance Max. A tool that was already available for Search and Shopping now expanded to help unlock greater efficiency within DSA and Display.

> Why we care

One of the challenges with Performance Max campaigns can often be what exactly is driving performance. This update allows a controlled experiment to provide a clear insight of Performance Max compared to DSA or Display campaign types. Now, as well as testing against Search or Shopping, advertisers can allocate budgets more effectively.

With enhancements and updates to Performance Max campaigns coming at a rapid pace, it will be important for advertisers to continue to test traditional campaign types against Performance Max.

This new tool could help fine tune budgets and unlock additional performance leveraging Google’s AI driven solutions.

What else we've been talking about:

• Meta exempted top advertisers from standard content moderation process

• Google isn’t dropping ad scheduling for Smart Bidding campaigns

• Google testing audio version of Google Discover named Daily Listen

• Instacart expands foodservice advertising

• Google updates financial products policy for crypto ads