Therefore, LinkedIn is about the do certain tests and launch series of adjustments to its Sponsored Content over the next months for the purpose of assisting the users for high-quality clicks generation for their ads while improving their ROI.

We can use the ads with longer intro copy as an example when mobile clicks on the “see more” callout are designed to expand the intro text and everything therecan be seen. In the previous systems, clicks on “see more” were constantly sending visitors to your landing page or opening any prepared form for lead generation. By the application of this change, clicks on “see more” will be now free as well. This new feature should come in November.

Nevertheless, this change should be useful because of a decline in campaign click-through rates as well as in a CPC increase when comparing it to historical averages. This will result in improved ROI from the campaigns you have run. It will be based on the fact that there will be a greater share of your paid clicks achieved generated by people planning to visit your website, engage with your content, or send you their contact info.

The post Now You can Improve the Quality of Clicks of Sponsored Content on LinkedIn appeared first on CHECKus Media Group.

Facebook as one of the top ad sellers is prepared to launch solution for browsers and its users to get rid of annoying third-party cookies. This new first-party cookie option for advertisers, publishers, and developers should be able to measure and optimize Facebook ads while capturing analytics data from browsers.

As Joe Osborne, the spokeperson of Facebook stated:

“We are offering a first-party cookie option for the Facebook pixel to help businesses continue understanding site activity and ad attribution across browsers. This change is in line with updates made by other online platforms, as use of first-party cookies for ads and analytics is becoming the preferred approach by some browsers. The controls people have over ads will not change.”

Last year, Apple launched the Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) in Safari, so any third-party trackers are blocked, thus avoid browsing data for ad targeting to be captured. Mozilla reacted as well, announcing that its Firefox browser will soon limit cookies and block storage access from third-party trackers.

These measures will focus on ad targeting mainly. For the purpose of maintaining the analytics, Apple’s guidance informs the users that they should not rely on third party cookies, but they should adjust their web analytics on their own. Moreover, Apple suggested link decoration to maintain cross-site analytics and ad attribution.

Google was the first of the top global companies to introduce a solution in response to ITP with a first-party Google Analytics cookie in September 2017. Microsoft introduced the Bing Ads solution in January through auto-tagging of the first-party Microsoft Click ID to advertisers’ landing page URLs. Therefore, Facebook could not stay behind.

So what is this Facebook solution like?

Whenever users click on any Facebook-served ad, respective URL of landing page gets a unique string gets appended. When there are opt-in pixels on the site, such URL parameter is going to be written into the browser as a first-party cookie. These pixels will include then the first-party cookie with all events, received by Facebook.

If nay advertiser wants to stay with the third-party pixel, Facebook may do some modeling to estimate conversions from Safari, but the real procedure is not know yet. It should be similar to Google’s approach in relation to advertisers, not linked to AdWords accounts to Google Analytics. Here, statistical modeling is applied to estimate and report website conversions that can’t be captured from Safari.

Advertisers will get the choice to set first- or third-party cookies for the Facebook Pixel. Settings of the Facebook’s first-party cookie is located in the Settings tab in Events Manager at the pixel level. Advertiser can find there the pixel level for his decision whether he wants to use first-party cookies with Facebook.

Since October 5, business clients will finally be allowed to sign into Events Manager. There, they can edit their Facebook Pixel cookie settings. In the event they don’t want to use the first-party excel, they need to opt out by October 24. If not, such pixel will become the default one for new pixels. Nevertheless, the option to change it will stay with them all the time.

Such businesses will be obliged to inform the users how their cookies are used and collected data shared with third parties.

The post Facebook to Follow Google and Microsoft, Releasing First-Party Cookie Option for Ads appeared first on CHECKus Media Group.

According to a survey, prepared by the Pew Research Center, with the results found here, number of Facebook users have shown changes in their interaction with the popular website in a year. As reported, 4,594 U.S. adults have been polled between May 29th and June 11^th while 54% admitted any change in their privacy settings.

Moreover, 42% of the users informed that they had stopped using the platform for some time (at least couple of weeks) and even 26% of them have deleted the Facebook app from their phone over the same period. When considering all these users, 74% of those polled had taken at least one of the above-mentioned actions over the last year, albeit there is still no relation between the issue of Facebook related to privacy.

There is also a generation difference confirmed by the statistics. It’s interesting to find that the younger generation reflected these issues more, when 44% of young Facebook users (18-29 years) confirmed that their app has been deleted on their phone, while the older generation saw only 12% of users doing the same (65+ years). Furthermore, the same applied to the change in privacy settings, when even 64% of younger group (18-49 years) has taken the action, while only 33% of 65+ users did the same.

As for the political orientation, Pew was unable to find any significant difference between Democrats and Republicans. Although number of social network platforms, including Facebook, have been accused of supporting liberal groups, there was no difference found between the supporters of Republican and Democratic parties in any of the categories.

The main reason for these privacy issues of Facebook was the Cambridge Analytica scandal when it was revealed that Facebook has gained information about 87 million Facebook users, not providing the company consent thereto. Therefore, Facebook and its privacy policies became the main focus of investigation. For this purpose, Facebook has to implement number of changes so its users could have better control over their data. This included also the possibility to download the data Facebook has already collected about them.

According to Pew, only 9% of polled had downloaded their data since this possibility was allowed to them, albeit acting more carefully when it comes to app. From the group of this 9%, we can see only (roughly) half of the with a deleted app on their phone, while 79% changed their privacy settings over the last 12 months.

The post Facebook users Showing Sings of Change in Social Habits in Relation to Privacy Concerns appeared first on CHECKus Media Group.

Product manager for Messenger, Andrea Vaccari informed in a Newsroom post that Instant Games for Messenger will roll out worldwide for iOS and Android “over the next few weeks.”

During F8 last month, engineering manager Calvin Grunewald described the rich gameplay features that are coming to Instant Games in a blog post:

“At F8, we introduced rich gameplay features to give developers more control of the gaming experiences they create. Developers can customize their own start and end screens and integrate new APIs (application-programming interfaces) that can help drive share and connected gameplay. Rich gameplay features are laying the groundwork to support a wider variety of games that extend beyond the lightweight, score-based games currently offered on the platform.”

Vaccari provided more details in her post Tuesday:

“Rich gameplay features such as turn-based games (our most requested feature) can also weave in leaderboards and tournaments and offer more visually engaging and customizable game messages during play. Game bots help re-engage players by calling out new game options and encouraging competition with updates on the leaderboards.”

Zynga’s Words With Friends is one of the first games to jump on board, and it is currently available in Messenger as a “feature-rich, turn-based game,” Vaccari added. Next up, according to Vaccari:

“People will begin to see new features as game developers start to incorporate the new capabilities with one of Instant Games on Messenger’s biggest hits, Blackstorm’s EverWing, being among the first to use game bots. Depending on what device you use and where you are located, there are now up to 50 games titles available on Messenger, with more being introduced almost every week. We’re also excited to be bringing the world’s No. 1 pool game—Miniclip’s 8 Ball Pool—to Instant Games very soon. “

Vice president of messaging products, David Marcus, published a Facebook post:

“Ever since we launched Instant Games on the platform late last year, I’ve loved playing my favorites with my friends. Today, games on Messenger are getting even better. We’re rolling out the ability to play turn-by-turn games, like Words With Friends or 8 Ball Pool, as well as enabling developers to build games bots that will make games even more social. Today, we’re also unveiling nearly 50 new games and making games available globally. Game on!”

The post Instant Games for All Facebook Messenger Users appeared first on CHECKus Media Group.

For example, someone who has been looking for red dresses across multiple retailers and also likes Facebook posts and pages about dresses could automatically be served an ad for a red dress. In the past, advertisers have only been able to single out folks who specifically looked at a product on their website or mobile app.

“The top feedback and most common type of feedback that we hear is, ‘Hey, can you help me drive sales beyond people visiting my website and app, including new customers?'” said Maz Sharafi, director of product marketing at Facebook. “What we can now do is say, ‘Who else is potentially in-market for these products?'”

Similar to how marketers already use dynamic ads, advertisers first upload a catalog of products that they would like to promote. They then select an audience of people they’d like to target—say, women in the United States. Facebook’s algorithms then look at traffic patterns on retailers’ mobile sites and apps as well as information on Facebook to automatically serve a targeted promo to users.

In theory, Facebook says that the new ad format is more akin to an acquisition tool than a retargeting tactic since brands can hone in on folks who may be interested in a product but have not necessarily looked at it online.

“It automates the process of who it can show products to—It takes out a lot of the trial and error and complexity of being able to do this in a manual way,” Sharafi added. “For example, to sell 1,000 products you have to create almost 1,000 different ads to reach those products to different people. With dynamic ads, you’re effectively creating one ad.”

Dynamic ads are initially open to retailers and ecommerce brands in the U.S. with plans to include other regions in the coming months. Online furniture retailer Wayfair has been testing the format and claims that the ads are 20 percent more effective than other types of acquisition advertising.

“We can automatically reach a huge audience with personalized recommendations from our catalog of more than seven million products,” said Wayfair’s director of marketing Jessica Jacobs in a statement.

“With dynamic ads, we are beating our customer acquisition efficiency target by more than 20 percent at a scale that is meaningful to our business.”

The post Facebook Advertisers Now Have More Ways to Create Retargeting Ads appeared first on CHECKus Media Group.

Testing started in the Q3 2015 with tech advertisers for both software and hardware, as well as for other industries like telecoms or financial services. As head of products at LinkedIn – Russell Glass stated, the service is part of a two- to three-year overhaul of the company’s ads business and its major aim is to make is easier and wider to advertise on the platform. He added that range of LinkedIn’s professional network together with a logged-in audience remains still attractive to B2B marketers.

“We don’t want to reinvent the wheel,” he said. “We want to build table stakes capabilities into our platform in a way that highlights our differences, but is kind of what marketers have come to expect.”

As a good example is the LinkedIn Account Targeting product from March, allowing marketers to run native ads and to use them to target user profiles based on which companies they are intending to hit. LinkedIn Q1 2015 earnings report showed that advertising through LinkedIn Marketing Solutions reached an increase of 29 % on a yearly basis to total $154 million. Sponsored content now reached even 56% of the total revenue.

While this information is the first time LinkedIn has offered programmatic for display ads, it has already been providing this service for sponsored content, what is an essential part in the company’s advertising business that jumped 80% over the year during the Q1. Comparably to its competition, mobile is now accounting for over 50% of total traffic and after the Q1 it reached exactly 55%.

And then there are also numerous possibilities of how LinkedIn could take advantage of Microsoft capabilities (as Microsoft has announced in June that it plans to acquire LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, what is one of the biggest tech industry agreements in history). Glass did not want to mention what products will be prepared. Besides being in a very competitive position due to this merge (like huge competitor Salesforce), there may occur also many advertising benefits too.

“If you think about Microsoft being the world’s leading professional productivity cloud and you think about LinkedIn being the world’s leading professional network, it doesn’t take much of a leap to think about the opportunities that are possible by bringing those two things together,” Glass added.

Albeit the revenue from advertising could be seen increasing, growth seems to provide more disappointment. As the eMarketer mentioned in his report from the beginning of 2016, LinkedIn with approximately 430 million users has reached one of the slowest growth rates, but ad revenues are seen to rise 20.5 % in 2016 and 17.8 % in 2017.

Twitter and Facebook, major social network competitors, seem to be growing much faster, with Twitter ad revenue seen to jump even 45 % in 2016 and Facebook with 31.5 %, according to eMarketer.

However, eMarketer pointed out in his report that LinkedIn saw one of the fastest mobile growth rates in the US during 2015, with the revenue hiking 170 %. This year, eMarketer sees it to be closer to the national average, reaching a growth of 35.4 % and getting behind Facebook and Twitter.

“The bigger you get, the harder it is to grow,” Glass added when asked about the slowdown.” And at the same time, we’re still growing at a hyper growth tick. I think that is really driven by the unique nature of this platform, and the differentiating nature of what we can deliver to marketers, particularly in our audience and our content.”

The post Programmatic Advertising for Display Ads Launched by LinkedIn appeared first on CHECKus Media Group.

Noah Pepper, a product engineering manager posted in June 28:

“For businesses, Twitter is a place to share news, tell stories, and have conversations that support, educate, and delight their customers. It’s a place for authentic interactions – but we know that creating these kinds of connections isn’t always easy for businesses that are time and resource-constrained. That’s why we built a brand new app to help the busy people behind these businesses.”

Social media managers are able to use Twitter Dashboard for the tweets to manage them, have specific timing and set up custom feeds to track what’s being told about any specific area of business. Furthermore, they can also track keywords and use the tools in the app to brainstorm ideas for tweets.

Pepper adds these examples:

“If you work at a restaurant, a tip like, ‘Your team is as unique as your business. Tweet a surprising fact about one of your team members,’ might remind you to share some recent recognition your chef received. Or, if you’re an interior designer, seeing, ‘Share the love. Like and Retweet kind words from your customers,’ might prompt you to Retweet a customer’s excited reaction to one of your recent projects.”

These new features could be seen as too simplified for some, or even cheesy. But they have to take into account, that there are users/businesses that are only at the beginning of their social media marketing and this app is the right one for them. They could reach needed confidence to start with Twitter and their marketing there, what is exactly what Twitter wants when engaging with these clients.

The post Twitter Introduced Dashboard App for Small and Medium Businesses appeared first on CHECKus Media Group.

Separate Ad Sets of Facebook and Instagram

Some you have already been thinking about it, but if not, please take this advice seriously as we believe you do not want to mix your performance reporting from Facebook and Instagram together. Also bids and budgets on Instagram should be performed separately on Instagram from Facebook Ads for the same reason. At last but not at least, all the creatives that could be used for Instagram should be adapted to this social network.

Naturally, it will take some more time at the beginning, but you will bear fruit of having patience later when your Instagram and Facebook Ads will be handled separately with their own statistics.

Creatives adapted to Instagram

All the creatives (image, video) should be adapted to Instagram from Facebook automatically but you should consider reading some of the basic guidelines for ad creatives, provided by Facebook to improve your efficiency on Instagram as well. The basic problem is the image size, which should be 1:1 (1080p : 1080p), while any landscape image should use the 1.9:1 ratio.

When adding caption text, take into account that any link or URL can’t be clickable there, so use the space more efficiently and text in image should obey the 20% text rule in image, used on Facebook (Facebook Advertising Guidelines set that high-quality content may not include more than 20% text in the image). Furthermore, check your ads on mobile device as Instagram ads are now running and shown only on them.

Reporting and Automatic Optimization

As we mentioned above, Instagram ads should be measured and reported separately. In this way you are able to track clicks and conversion on Instagram and adapt to behavior of visitors on this social network.

Focusing then only on Instagram ads, tag you URLs with respective tracking parameters and you will be able to monitor conversions and check them or compare them with mobile ads. In Google Analytics you can make report for specific hours during a day and specific days during the entire week, what can enhance your performance as well.

These reports should provide you with information about strong times during days of the week of hours of the day and you can adapt your budget and bids in an appropriate way. This is easier through AdStage as it enables you to set Automated Rules for your ads in Instagram and they will be optimized according to performance. Thus you are able to set campaigns for any specific hours of the day, any specific day of the week, taking advantage of the best performing part of the day or week as the case may be.

Moreover, if the CTR drops over any specific percentage you set, ads will be stopped and you won’t spend money in a pointless way. On the contrary, if CTR jumps markedly over any percentage points, set by you, you will be able to set that budgets could be increased automatically under such circumstances.

Take the advantage now, when traffic is cheap

This is a temporary advice, but you should consider it, as the lower price provides space for more testing. Instagram ads as a new feature provide you with an opportunity to test CPCs for a lower price as on Facebook. So many took advantage and started to test smaller budgets to try their targeted, potential customers for their purpose.

The post How to approach Instagram Ads appeared first on CHECKus Media Group.

Lead Ads

Lead Ads are here to simplify the process of filling out forms through their mobile devices within the News feed and this is an advantage for the companies, which are interested in the Facebook leads as well.

This feature, making the entire process easier, allows separation of leads through their native signup and having all-in-one app creates wider opportunity to collect more data, as visitors are not that reluctant with faster signing to provide details. Moreover, people in this feature can edit contact information any time they want so under the Facebook privacy policy, there is still fresh information.

What to do?

If you have ever had experiences with redirecting visitors/users to a landing page, which you preferred, you know that this can provide you with higher conversion rates. The reason is that such visitors/users still remain on the preferred stream.

How to do it? Such campaign could be set in the Power Editor. You need to log into Business Manager, click on ad account you would like to select and launch Power Editor. There click on the “Objective “ button and pick “Lead Generation”. There you go!

Set your campaign

If you are in, let’s set everything for a Facebook leads campaign. You should put there the page, your targeted audience and naturally your budget, you can spend on this campaign. For better campaign calibration, you should scroll down to pick Optimization & Pricing and set whatever you need there (e.g. the most leads at the best price, or set amount you want to pay for a lea).

As for the Delivery, you should think about the campaign, if you want it to run (and deliver leads to you) during the day or you want only a short-term campaign during a specific time. Besides basic creative settings (headline, text in the body, image of 1200×628 pixels, etc.), you are able to set the form for your leads. There you can pick various information for the form, they should be included in (first & last name, email, address details, date of birth, gender, company, etc.).

Everything naturally depends on the campaign you want to run and you consider it as appropriate for it. Our hint: do not use the many specifications, cause your conversion rate can decrease markedly due to “asking too much”.

After this process, you will only connect it with your privacy policy and preview the form before saving. Then as the last step, you should put a conversion code there to monitor process of lead-creation.

Facebook has created an integration of your Leads Ads and partners’ features, like Marketo, Sailthru, Oracle Marketing Cloud, Salesforce, Driftrock, Maropost. In this way you can easily approach your targeted audience, while the customer does not have to leave the app, what increases the possibility of reaching these leads.

The post Facebook Lead Ads appeared first on CHECKus Media Group.

CHECKus Media Group covers wide range of ad activities on social media and is prepared to provide helping hand on LinkedIn to help you with your campaigns or teach you how to solve all the issues needed to attract your potential customers or reach your set goals.

We will provide you with useful hints how to manage even hundreds of campaigns, how to optimize all the needed related issues to reach better performance. Moreover, all of this will help you to save your time, needed for other activity for your business.

CHECKus Media is here for you! Don’t hesitate to contact us via info@checkus.sk

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