Platforms

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.”

The game of “take control, give control” continues, this time with Meta giving advertisers another lever to control their ad delivery

> Frequency controls help you control how often your ad is shown to a person. When creating your campaign, you’ll have two options to choose from for your frequency controls. These controls are target frequency and frequency cap.

Now you can better control frequency of awareness and engagement campaigns, at least for Reach and ThruPlay goals.

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.

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).