ICYMI in May 2020: Paid Media & social roundup

New in the last month, in case you missed it.

GOOGLE FREE SHOPPING ADS:  *NEW* Showcase products for free

Now activated for the UK.

Google is allowing e-commerce businesses to advertise on its Shopping tab for free. While there are still benefits to paying for it, this is good news for businesses that don’t yet advertise, and also shoppers themselves.

Go to GMC and activate “Surfaces across Google” to enable.

We wrote a blog about this – perfect if you want to know more about what this opportunity to advertise for free on Google Shopping.

VERDICT: USEFUL

FACEBOOK DYNAMIC ADS: *NEW* Optimise creative for each person’s intent

Vary your ad creative based on each person’s likelihood to respond.

This option includes the following possible optimizations:

• Minor image enhancements to thumbnails or images
• Cropping your image
• Applying a template to your creative elements for Stories
• Creating a Stories carousel ad based on a single image, headline or product catalogue information
• Playback speed for videos without sound
• Creating videos from images

This feature looks like it has had a tweak, whether that is new wording (compared to the previous incarnation) or is now showing different creatives (video, slideshows, carousel, static based on previous preference of types of ads they liked to interact with).

Make sure you preview the optimisations as they can look quite poor, but I like the idea of it, showing video ads to people who like to watch videos to the end.

VERDICT: HAS POTENTIAL

GOOGLE SMART SHOPPING: *NEW BETA* Conversion goals

Set up a “new conversion goal” that purely focuses on new customer acquisition only (540 day lookback window).

Current smart shopping campaigns (SSC) are known for aggressive remarketing (cheap Gmail ads, responsive display on poor quality made for AdSense sites and click-bait apps) of your existing user base. New customer acquisition is usually a secondary goal.

New Conversion goal in SSC called “New customer acquisition” (NCA), which allows you to optimise you Smart Shopping campaigns towards new customers in addition to online sales. Just check the new customer conversion goal and set a new customer value.

You can even upload a customer list to help define what your definition of a new customer is to help with matching and bidding.

Here’s a possible first test: What about starting off bidding low (RM) and then adding a very high bid adjust for the new goal to attract new customers and using the customer list add-on to define what a new customer is?

First spotted by the awesome Manuel Vilella Salcedo at SPRINTER.

VERDICT: GO FOR IT

We’ve curated and updated the best snippets. To engage in the debate, see Steven’s profile on LinkedIn and follow #door4 so you don’t miss any updates. 

Alternatively, find out how Door4 can help grow your business with our Paid Search & Shopping services.

Photo by Eric Aiden on Unsplash.