Paid Media News & Opinion #99

🔎 Meta’s new ‘Automatic Adjustments’ feature 🔎 Performance Max on Google Ads gets some tasty updates 🔎 Google Ads Travel?

Today’s highlights:

🔎 Meta’s new ‘Automatic Adjustments’ feature

🔎 Performance Max on Google Ads gets some tasty updates

🔎 Google Ads Travel?

Meta’s new Automatic Adjustments’ feature

> What’s happening

Meta has rolled out "automatic adjustments" to many advertising accounts, giving its system the power to make major changes to ad campaigns without getting direct approval from advertisers. As these updates can happen without any notification, Meta advertisers have complained their budgets have been tampered with and even some ads turned off.

> Why we care

Automation can be beneficial, but when it comes to pausing or re-activating campaigns, it’s unhelpful and can be brand damaging. It is best to stay ahead of the game and review account set up in Meta Ads Manager. You can do this by navigating to All Tools > Automated Rules > See Automatic Adjustments, and check ‘Turn on automatic adjustments’ is turned off.

Performance Max on Google Ads gets some tasty updates

> What’s happening

Google has shared multiple updates for Performance Max campaigns which include: asset experiments, video enhancements, and asset generation from specific webpages.

Asset experiments will allow advertisers to run A/B tests, such as those already available elsewhere on the platform, but specifically for assets within PMax campaigns. This applies to text, image, and video assets, as well as the final landing page URL. The former is to be rolled out in November and the latter has already started becoming available.

Video enhancements consist of ‘flip video’ and ‘shorten video’ features to make optimisation and editing of assets easier. Flip video will use AI to rotate and crop a horizontal video for vertical formats, ensuring the aspect ratio is correct, with an option to manually enable or disable this to your preference. Shorten video will, again, use AI to chop the video down to key moments. The availability of these features varies by campaign type.

Asset generation from specific web pages allows you to enter multiple URLs from your website in order to generate assets for use in campaigns, available for Performance Max campaigns.

> Why we care

Asset experiments will be a super useful tool for properly testing assets, where the current option is non-existent without splitting your beloved (or not) Performance Max campaign in 2, which is rarely optimal. Asset groups do not currently have an option to rotate evenly, which means current testing within one campaign is often skewed.

Video enhancements are much welcomed, particularly as many smaller advertisers lack the resources and budget to take the industry-standard horizontal (16:9) assets and make them suitable for all ad formats. However, Google’s blog is confusing and doesn’t clearly specify which campaigns will have access and exactly from what date.

Finally, the asset generation update will likely be ignored by most but perhaps the improvement in accuracy will encourage more users to give it a go. After all, creating ad copy that is closely related to your website is often a good way of improving ad rank.

> What’s happening

Following successful testing, Google Ads is now making Travel Feeds in Search ads available for all advertisers with a hotel feed. This rich data will work similar to product listing ads (or Shopping ads) where a carousel of available options are shown to consumers.

Google has announced this yielded a 20% increase in CTR during beta testing, and is available as of 21st October.

Additionally, Google has also confirmed they are testing this format with other relevant verticals, including things to do, vehicle rental, and events.

> Why we care

Given that we usually see Shopping ads perform much better than their comparative Search equivalent, the same format applied to the travel vertical is very exciting and offers users a more engaging, visual experience when in-market for accommodation.

Moreover, the tease of further verticals is incredibly exciting. It’s easy to see how a feed of events or activities in the local area could easily be displayed in a carousel-like feed format. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this development and testing where possible.

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