Level Up Digital Blog
Changes coming to Google and Facebook Ads in 2019
Google and Facebook are constantly making updates and changes to their platforms. We’ve summarized a few of the more important one’s in this week’s blog post:
Google makes it Easier to Opt Out of Ad Personalization
As privacy and trust in advertising continue to be in the spotlight, the major players are taking proactive steps to allow people some choice in how they are advertised to on the web.
Google is making it easier to change the ad personalization settings for their users via Google My Account.
If you’re a Google user and are interested in seeing if ad personalization is turned on for you go to your own ad personalization settings. You can also see who Google thinks you are, based on personal info you've added to your Google Account, data from advertisers that partner with Google, and Google's estimation of your interests. This is the kind of data that advertisers use to target you with Google Ads.
New metric!
Google recently rolled out the click share metric, which tells you an estimate of “the estimated share of all achievable clicks that you have received, and is available only for Search and Shopping campaigns.”
In the past, we’ve only had impression share metrics (your share of impressions on the Google search results page).
We love competitive metrics like this because they are great for macro account optimization. You can use it to evaluate your share of clicks for your best keywords and increase budget on your most profitable ones. Say that you were tracking a 3:1 ROAS on a keyword, and found that you only have a 10% click share. Why not increase your bid and budget for that keyword?
AMPHTML Ads
Google is going to start serving AMPHTML ads across all websites.
AMPHTML ads are a new, better way of building, delivering and measuring ads that are faster, lighter and more secure.
Why do you care?
Accelerated Mobile Pages (Google’s response to Facebook Instant Articles) are becoming more commonplace on the web. These new ads are well… better. More here if you’re interested.
Campaign budget optimization will be the default
Facebook’s campaign budget optimization automatically distributes your budget across your audiences based on performance. So if one audience in a campaign has a higher conversion rate, Facebook will automatically give that audience more budget than other audiences in the campaign.
Facebook rolled out campaign budget optimization a while ago, and we have been using it since. It’s much more effective than trying to manually redistribute budgets based on results. An algorithm is able to do this much faster than a human.
Now that it’s being rolled out as a default it means potentially better ad performance for all advertisers.
The caveat is that without segmenting your audiences appropriately, it can favor the larger audiences and you won’t end up seeing performance improvements.
There are a few ways around this:
You should make sure to group your audiences based on their stage in the buying funnel.
Depending on your budget this could mean a lot more campaigns than you currently have.
For example, make sure to keep retargeting and prospecting audiences in completely separate campaigns.
Facebook will reveal who uploaded your contact info for ad targeting
In Q3 of 2018, Facebook added new requirements around using custom audiences. Now Facebook is going to reveal who uploaded your contact information for ad targeting. If you are following the rules and collected your data appropriately, this isn’t going to be an issue. However, if you purchased or collected data like email addresses from a 3rd party and do not have consent from your list - this could potentially backfire as consumers can see how you’ve uploaded your list.
Square image sizes
Facebook changed the image aspect ratio requirements and rolled out square image sizes that can be used instead of landscape images.
This change was largely from feedback from advertisers who found the landscape images too restrictive. Facebook said the change is “to help advertisers like yourself have more creative flexibility and drive better performance.”