ICYMI in May: Paid Media & social roundup

New this month, in case you missed it.

FACEBOOK ADS: Opportunities Tab

“Discover opportunities for your business” – the push for campaign budget optimisation has begun.

Money is distributed from a campaign-level budget to your best ad sets based on their real-time performance. You can control how much is spent by adding ad set minimums and maximums.

I’m cautious about messing with Facebook algorithms because trying something new could undo optimal learnings from the past 12 months! Our Facebook campaigns already have cheap conversions and are flying. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. I’ll be watching how other people are experimenting with this before considering it.

VERDICT: WAIT AND SEE

GOOGLE ADS: B2B Detailed Demographics BETA

Finally got access to this awesome new B2B targeting feature, going to spend the rest of today of thinking up some new strategies for my clients and some new pitches.

I heard about this feature through the grapevine and negotiated with our Google rep to get on the beta programme. Upon approval, I moved budget from LinkedIn ads to test it.

Google Ads demographics options.

Why was I so keen? This is Google taking its first steps into new territory. LinkedIn and Facebook own the demographic targeting space; Google makes it so hard for B2B advertising – you’re always guessing. Google Ads is clearly looking to make up some ground.

This feature isn’t amazing – it lacks complex, subtle layering when choosing your demographic – but it’s a positive start.

VERDICT: OPTIMISTIC OUTLOOK

GOOGLE ADS: Audience bid adjustment simulator, the big push to audience targeting continues!

Explore how your bid can impact your Search traffic, then apply any changes to your audience.

We’re used to keywords. Google has historically put a lot of focus on keywords. Now Google wants to help you target groups suitable for your products instead using a predictive slider for costs and conversions. This has never been done at audience level on Google before.

Googe Ads audience bid adjuster simulator

The hypothesis is that being less restrictive on keywords will lead to more sales. I haven’t tested the tool extensively yet, so I can’t comment on how fantastic or terrible it is. It’s certainly a potentially game-changing move to be aware of.

VERDICT: WAIT AND SEE

GOOGLE ADS: Conversion Action Sets

After getting totally confused with the official Google support page, you have to apply the conversion sets from settings > conversions and NOT campaign table > edit > change conversion setting as stated in the official Google guide.

Even Google makes mistakes. When it released an incorrect Google Setup Guide, the confusion initially deflected from a new cool feature – Conversion Action Sets. This is what happens when you rush things out – guides are suddenly outdated, people complain that it’s just not the kind of quality you’d expect! And on it goes.

This setting controls which conversion actions are reported in the conversions column for the campaign. If you use Smart Bidding, your bid strategies will optimise for these conversions.

Anyway, I’m not interested in testing this because the only possible suitable campaign isn’t suitable enough. I will if one comes along. I’ll be interested to hear if you’d had any success.

Google Ads Conversion Action Sets

Lastly, speaking of mistakes, there’s a rumour on Twitter that a single Google programmer made a mistake that reset everyone’s custom column setup on all accounts. Scandalous.

VERDICT: NOT RUSHING

We’ve curated and updated the best snippets. To engage in the debate, see Steven’s profile on LinkedIn.

Photo by Evgeni Tcherkasski on Unsplash.