Your Online Ad Updates

This week finds Facebook cracking down on Clickbait and “dodgy” political adverts whilst launching a war room to combat negative content, Bing has launched a new BingBot technology to help crawl more efficiently, Google Ads unveils new reporting tools to help marketers understand landing page reach, and more …

Facebook to “Out” Political Advertising Funders as “War Room” is Launched

Facebook’s post-Cambridge Analytica woes have caused major consternation to their own policy and guidelines team. The drive for transparency, as outlined by Mark Zuckerberg, has forced the social network’s hand. This latest push towards advertising transparency will affect anyone who funds political-based ads on Facebook.

According to Facebook, the move is designed to help counter the challenges posed by actors involved in election tampering and disruption – as evidenced during the Brexit and Trump elections. In the run up to the Brazilian and US elections this fall, Facebook have launched a real-time war room to help combat negative content and ads on Facebook.

The company stated: “The work we are doing in the war room builds on almost two years of hard work and significant investments, in both people and technology, to improve security on Facebook, including during elections. Our machine learning and artificial intelligence technology is now able to block or disable fake accounts more effectively – the root cause of so many issues. We’ve increased transparency and accountability in our advertising. And we continue to make progress in fighting false news and misinformation. That said, security remains an arms race and staying ahead of these adversaries will take continued improvement over time. We’re committed to the challenge.”

Google Unveils New “Predefined” Landing Page Reporting System

Google Ads reporting functions have been bolstered by the creation of two new landing page reporting tools. The new landing page reports are fully expanded and show the usual landing page metrics but the expanded date includes additional metric-based feedback.

According to Google, the new landing pages will include URL data and metrics with new column display outputs showcasing the following metrics:

Mobile speed score
Mobile-friendly click rate
Valid AMP click rate (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

Google believes: “The expanded landing pages report includes all the same columns as the landing pages report, but also shows the URL users reach after contextual substitutions have been made and custom parameters have been added.

You’ll be able to easily engage with all of your landing page performance data through multi-dimensional tables and charts. For example, you can create a pie chart for conversions segmented by expanded landing pages or landing pages.”

This is the latest in a series of updates for Google Ads that has seen Google’s prime income source undergo a fully comprehensive makeover with re-brand and new tools. This latest drive is to help improve the reporting functionality of Google Ads – to help make the customer experience more informative.

AdEspresso Guide to Video Marketing on Instagram

The geniuses at Hootsuite’s AdEspresso have published a useful guide to help marketers use the power of Instagram – by helping marketing pros understand how newsfeeds and stories can help drive campaigns and how video is at the centre of Instagram marketing success.

AdEspresso outline the steps that get results. They start by advising would-be video marketing newbies to focus on the “type” of video they want to share. Understanding the dynamics of the type of video they wish to share can enable marketers to better understand how they can create viral campaigns.

The Top Three “Must Dos” Include:

1. Always Brand Your Videos – Your brand helps to convey part of your video narrative and this is a useful storytelling vehicle that can help drive sales
2. Focus on Product (or Service) Videos and always focus on a small number (like 1 or 2 products) and then tell your audience why they need to buy it and how it will change their lives forever.
3. The third way is to focus on developing Educational or Tutorial Videos – These types of video can help give immeasurable value to your Instagram and social media brand

To find out more about AdEspresso’s guide why not read it today? The sooner marketers use the power of Instagram the sooner they tap into a thriving audience pool of unique consumers looking for the unique. Be yourself, tell a story and put your product and brand front and centre whilst always giving value to your would-be customers.

Facebook to Clamp Down on “Clickbait” Headlines

Facebook is set to change the way content marketers and advertisers will use the social network’s platform by reducing the impact of “engagement bait” styles of digital advertising and by clamping down on “sensationalist” language and headlines that entice users to click links.

You’ve seen these ads daily. They are the “You’ll be shocked by how this woman lost this much weight by doing this…”. By failing to provide sufficient information (i.e. a conclusion) this advert will now breach Facebook’s terms and will be delisted.

This means the good guys using the power of sensation and the positives of clickbait need to re-evaluate their approach.

MarketingLand argues the changes will impact the sector:

“Facebook says this heightened enforcement applies to all advertisers, but media, entertainment, political and issue ads may be impacted more as these are ad categories more likely to use such methods.Advertisers with multiple ads flagged for low quality content may see all of their campaigns impacted — meaning if Facebook identifies an advertiser habitually trying to post low quality ads, all of that advertiser’s campaigns may be penalized.”

This now means campaign co-ordinators need to think about how “high-value” their content campaign will score with Facebook’s new approach.

Bing’s Crawler to Expand Operations to Help Improve Efficiency

Bing, the Microsoft-owned search engine, has unveiled new improvements to the search crawler technology that underpins Bing. The development of the “Bingbot” web crawler will change the way Bing searches for information online. This improvement, and new technology, the company argues, will help make Bing the most searchable search engine on the planet – even outcrawling Google.

The new developments mean Bing’s new “BingBot” will use a new algorithm that will:

“… determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site. The goal is to minimize bingbot crawl footprint on your web sites while ensuring that the freshest content is available. How do we do that? The algorithmic process selects URLs to be crawled by prioritizing relevant known URLs that may not be indexed yet, and URLs that have already been indexed that we are checking for updates to ensure that the content is still valid (example not a dead link) and that it has not changed. We also crawl content specifically to discovery links to new URLs that have yet to be discovered. Sitemaps and RSS/Atom feeds are examples of URLs fetched primarily to discovery new links.”

The company understands that Webmasters have long grumbled about Bing’s crawlers being slow and that this new technological shift will be part of the journey required to help overcome this problem. But Crawler Efficiency, as it is being called, will help drive Bing’s wider search crawler efficiency thus helping Webmasters and search engine users alike.