Platforms
- Image and video (from a URL) generation
- In-video product links
- Voice and audio generation
- Virtual try-on
- Licensed templates
Interesting to see Google continue to shift features into the third-party realm. This time, it’s ad creation tools for YouTube and Display.
Google will sunset Ads Creative Studio by the end of March 2025, shifting its focus to new growth areas and enhancing partnerships with creative agencies to deliver tailored campaigns at scale.
For YouTube-specific customizations, advertisers are encouraged to engage third-party partners.
Reddit traffic is exploding thanks to its recent licensing deal with Google.
And some of those visitors are turning into users, adding 31 million daily actives in the last year.
“Reddit also says that its Weekly Active Unique user count (WAUq) averaged 365.4 million in the third quarter, an increase of 53% year-over-year. The amount of daily to weekly usage here is unusual for social apps, which usually see about 2.3x usage between daily and monthly actives. Reddit seemingly sees a lot more than this, which could point to the less consistent way in which visitors use the app.”
Google Analytics 4 adds benchmarking data
reference metrics that help you compare your business performance against the performance of other businesses in your industry.
in percentiles (median, 25th, and 75th) based on peer groups of businesses for a wide range of industry categories. The businesses that form the peer groups are determined by an industry category assigned to each property. This industry category is determined by a combination of factors including the broad industry category provided in setup and signals from things like a property’s URLs and App attributes.
Google’s getting ready for shopping szn
Google Lens
Google Lens can quickly show you product insights tailored to the store you’re in. Just snap a photo to find product information, similar products in-stock, whether a store’s price is competitive and shopper reviews.
Shop Via Maps
search for products in Maps and find nearby stores selling them
As the moat around Google’s Knowledge Graph erodes in a post-AI world, the “Shopping Graph” may be the next fulcrum for revenue growth.
Pinterest Pushing Further Into Social Commerce
Talked with my Pinterest Ads rep today and got some more insight on a couple commerce features in beta.
ROAS Bidding
This is a tweak to Performance+ bidding to focus on conversion value, adjusting the bid based on the expected return.
It works best for those with a wide spread of price points. And, as always with algorithmic features, requires consistent signal of decent volume (current benchmark is 30 conversions a week).
Promotions
Mentioned this in the October platform updates roundup, but now have some more info.
It adds promos / offers to ads in campaigns geared to on-site actions using a selection of template options across 3 categories: discount, shipping, and conditional (spend $x, get $y off, etc).
Shopify integration available, including automatically applying promo codes at checkout. Not sure how it functions without Shopify, guessing there will be a Promotions section in the catalog area where you can manually add a template.
Bonus Best Practice
Pause ads that have been running for ~2 weeks with low/0% CTR and replace with a new one. The inflection point CTR is somewhere around 1% , I think.
CapCut has launched Commerce Pro, an AI-powered rapid asset creation studio.
The TikTok ban still lingers. Is ByteDance diversifying or entrenching? Or just a cash grab?
It seems Google is testing adding if there was a change to that score because of "competitive pressure" and might even list the competitor that is causing such pressure.
Might we be getting more helpful info from Google to help with ads management?
More context, more better.