By Hillary Read, VP of Marketing
Facebook may still get the lion’s share of the headlines in paid social, but 2016 saw some big improvements from its competitors on the paid social scene.
A few key folks from the 3Q social team put their heads together to list the most important paid social developments from the past year – and what they mean to marketers.
Let’s break ’em down by platform – and, yeah, we’ll start with Facebook, which hasn’t exactly stopped innovating even as it deals with the fake-news fallout of the year.
Sr. Director of Social Brad O’Brien:
- Order ID & Attribution Checkup. Combines what your measurement tool sees with what Facebook ads reporting sees.
- Split-testing capability within the UI to do cleaner A/B testing of audiences and bid types.
- In-Store Measurement to help understand how Facebook interactions influence in-store actions.
- Advanced Matching on Facebook Pixel to send more conversion volume to Facebook for ad optimization.
- Expansion of Audience Network to reach more verified Facebook users, off the Facebook platform.
Sr. Social Account Manager Mike Stetzer:
- Canvas. Facebook is rolling this out to a bunch of other campaign objectives, including Mobile App Installs. Can't wait to test this for more of our clients.
Social Account Manager Molly Parker:
- App ads now allow us to optimize further down the funnel for acquisition rather than just installs.
- Engagement audiences: we can now build audiences based on engagement for video and lead gen.
- Additional oCPM optimization windows; before we could only see 1 day click, which only looked at conversions from the last day. Facebook opened that to 7-day and 28-day click conversions, which helps give us a much broader view of latency.
Sr. Director of Social Brad O’Brien:
- Vertical Ad Format takes up more screen space and generates "thumbstopping" creative.
- Shopping is coming to Instagram to make product ads more "shoppable".
- Dynamic Product Ads, a powerful retargeting ad unit, were introduced.
Sr. Social Account Manager Mike Stetzer:
- In general, it's a legitimate platform to spend dollars on now. For certain clients, we did some testing in 2016 and found that Instagram outperformed Facebook.
Sr. Director of Social Brad O’Brien:
- The Mobile App Install objective is now supported.
- The search feed only targets for keywords (rather than showing in both home and search feeds).
- The platform allows for monetary text overlays on pins (e.g. calling out price or free downloads).
Sr. Social Account Manager Mike Stetzer:
- This one’s simple: Lookalike Audiences.
Assistant Account Director Kendra Pennington:
- Interest targeting - this really just expanded the way that we can organize campaigns and target different audiences.
Snapchat
Sr. Director of Social Brad O’Brien:
- Introduction of snap ad extensions to send users off the Snapchat platform to an advertiser's website or app store.
Sr. Social Account Manager Mike Stetzer:
- Integration of ads within your friend's Stories. Snapchat is still within the very early stages as an advertising platform, but hopefully it follows a similar trajectory to Instagram in terms of ease of use/advertising.
Sr. Director of Social Brad O’Brien:
- Testing of sponsored content on sites beyond LinkedIn to reach more verified users off the platform.
- Lead Ads are currently in Beta; similar to Facebook lead ads, these will allow collection of leads within the platform.
Assistant Account Director Kendra Pennington:
- CONVERSION TRACKING - need I say more?!?
Sr. Director of Social Brad O’Brien:
- Website Conversion Objective, which was a lon- overdue objective to be broken out within Twitter Ads UI.
- Like Facebook and LinkedIn, Twitter launched the Twitter Audience Platform to reach Twitter users off the platform.
- Ad Groups introduction, providing an additional layer of optimization between Campaigns and Ads (also long overdue!).
Did we miss any of your favorite social advertising advancements from the past year? Drop a comment!
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