Tag Archive for: social media advertising

Pinterest Adds A New Way To Bid On Ads

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Pinterest is continuing to bulk up its ad platform by allowing advertisers to now buy ads based on how much they want to pay for impressions, the company announced today. In the past, advertisers were only allowed to choose how much they wanted to pay for engagement.

Along with the new way to purchase ads, Pinterest has also added frequency capping to their ad services.

“Now you can bid on a CPM [cost-per-thousand impressions] basis and we’ll optimize how we deliver your ads to reach more people,” according to a Pinterest blog post. “You can also specify the maximum number of times someone sees your campaign. By using this new solution, you’ll get more impressions for your campaigns at more efficient rates and drive higher results.”

This latest move continues Pinterest’s trend of expanding their advertising offerings to bring in more businesses. Earlier this year, the company increased the number of targeting options for ads. They have also made Buyable Pins available to users on all devices, including desktop.

While advertisers have been able to bid for how much they are willing to pay for engagement, Pinterest’s CPM-based ads were only available at fixed prices until now. These prices typically ranged between $30 and $40. Those prices should go down as the new bidding process will increase competition.

The feature is just rolling out, but already JCPenney, The Home Depot, and General Mills are running tests with the new CPM-based ads. The new ads are already available for all business in the U.S, UK, and Canada. More countries are expected to come in the future.

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Facebook Blocks Ad Blockers While Giving Users More Control Over Ads

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Facebook operates one of the largest ad services on the internet and they claim they have finally figured out how to beat ad blockers with two new changes to their ad platform.

To start, the company has announced they have created a way to get past ad blocking extensions on desktop to show ads to everyone who visits their site – even if they don’t want to see them. The company was unwilling to say how they have accomplished this, but most likely they have created a way to ‘cloak’ their ads so they are not able to be targeted and blocked by popular ad blockers.

While Facebook is blocking ad blockers on desktop devices only, they are most likely working to do the same on mobile in the near future.

To compensate for this, Facebook is trying to make sure the ads users see are more relevant and useful to their lives by giving new control over what ads are shown in their news feeds.

The new ad control tool was released today and lets users add or remove interests from an “ad preferences” list to show what topics they are most interested in.

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“When they’re relevant and well-made, ads can be useful, by helping us find new products and services and introducing us to new experiences—like an ad that shows you your favorite band is coming to town or an amazing airline deal to a tropical vacation,” Andrew Bosworth, VP of ads and business platform for Facebook, wrote in a blog post. “But because ads don’t always work this way, many people have started avoiding certain websites or apps, or using ad blocking software, to stop seeing bad ads. These have been the best options to date.

To help refine their ad service, Facebook commissioned research firm Ipsos MORI to survey users from around the world to determine why users are ad blockers have become so popular. The majority of those surveyed said the main reason they started using ad blockers was because advertising often disrupted their browsing experience.

“While people want a personalized online experience, they dislike ads that are disruptive, however personalized,” wrote Adam Isaacson, research director of Ipsos Connect. “Those that block the content on the page, that pop up with sound and that slow the content on the page were all seen to be disruptive by our qualitative sample.”

The hope of the new changes to Facebook’s advertising service is that giving people more control will make users more interested in the ads their shown and provide a more seamless browsing experience. While many will complain about the move to thwart ad blocking software, the ability to choose what you’re shown will hopefully make the change easier to swallow.

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Twitter Struggles To Attract Advertisers Despite Increasing Revenue

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Source: Shawn Campbell

Source: Shawn Campbell

Twitter’s ad revenue and engagement may be going up, but Twitter’s advertising platform is struggling to maintain growth as they see fewer advertisers using their service to promote their content.

According to Twitter’s latest shareholder letter, ad revenue grew 18 percent year-over-year, reaching $535 million in Q2. Similarly, ad engagement shot up 226 percent and the cost per engagement dropped by 64 percent.

That’s the good news. The bad news is Twitter is “seeing a continuation of the trends discussed last quarter with less overall advertiser demand than expected. This is reflected in both our Q2 performance and Q3 outlook.

The social media giant says there are two reasons their number of advertisers is dwindling while earnings are growing:

First, there is increased competition for social marketing budgets, which requires us to continuously raise the quality bar on the advertising solutions we bring to market.

Second, while we have worked to drive higher ROI for advertisers (by leveraging our current user base, ad formats and innovations in targeting, creative and measurement), we’re still priced at a premium CPE relative to others. This has proven to be a headwind in growing Twitter’s share of overall social budgets and in our ability to grow faster in both video and performance advertising.

Ultimately, Twitter is going through growing pains and it is reflected by the loss of advertisers. While Twitter is charging more than most social platforms, it is struggling to maintain its active user base who have been largely unimpressed by newer features and changes to the interface on mobile and desktop.

Instead, advertisers are following users who are turning to platforms like Snapchat, which already has more active daily users than Twitter.

The company announced several new ideas to help recapture their audience’s attention and incentivize advertisers to use their service. Among them, it showed off a “new look and feel” to its marketing efforts that emphasize that Twitter is “where you go to see what’s happening everywhere in the world right now.”

Twitter is also heavily investing into live sports streaming with agreements to stream games from all the biggest sports leagues in the U.S., including the NFL, MLB, and NBA. The only question is if these decisions will reignite the spark that originally made Twitter one of the most popular social networks in the world.

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Pinterest Announces 3 New Ways For Brands To Connect With Users

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Pinterest may be one of the leading social platforms around, but its forays into advertising have been slow. The company took its time testing “Promoted Pins” to make sure they didn’t negatively impact users. When the ads finally were rolled out to all, they were also incredibly simple, with limited targeting and customization.

The company is finally expanding its ad platform with new targeting features that will give advertisers entirely new ways to connect with Pinterest’s more than 100 million monthly active users, according to a recent announcement.

Now, you can focus your ad efforts to make sure you are only targeting users who are likely to be interested in your brand and your products, improving the ad experience for both users and advertisers at the same time.

Customer List Targeting

Much like Facebook’s Custom Audiences, Pinterest’s custom list targeting is designed to help you connect with your existing customers on the social image board by targeting users from a list of your customers using email addresses or mobile ad IDs. Pinterest will then match your list with its own user database so you can serve them ads directly.

Visitor Retargeting

Retargeting is a great way to keep potentially interested visitors to your site engaged with your company even if they don’t initially make a purchase. With Pinterest’s visitor retargeting option, you can tag users that come to your site and serve them ads that are particularly suited to their interests and needs.

According to Pinterest, visitor retargeting has increased click-through rates (CTR) by as much as 3x for those who were granted early access to the option.

To use visitor retargeting, you will have to add Pinterest’s conversion tag to your site, which will allow you to tag or exclude users who have:

  • Landed on your homepage
  • Signed up for something
  • Added an item to their cart
  • Checked out

Lookalike Targeting

You might be familiar with this targeting option thanks to the version of it in use at Facebook called Lookalike Audiences. Lookalike targeting lets you reach out to groups of people based on their behaviors and interests specifically based on the activities of your customers.

Pinterest reports that this option increased CTRs for early-access users by up to 65% and increased reach for ads by nearly 30x.

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Facebook Tells Advertisers How To Make The Best Video Ads

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Facebook Video has quickly grown to rival YouTube, so it is unsurprising that video ads have also become a major part of Facebook’s advertising platform. But, as more and more companies share their ads on Facebook, it is becoming significantly more difficult to stand out.

To help companies make the best ads possible for their platform and best engage their audience, Facebook took it upon itself to test out their video ads to see what is best in the eyes of consumers.

Facebook showed 965 video ads targeted to the United States and Europe to a panel of consumers in a way that mimicked Facebook News Feed on mobile and asked the participants to evaluate each ad based on four factors: first impressions, branding, messaging, and video features.

Let’s break down the biggest findings of the report:

Engage Users Fast Without Audio

The majority of marketers aren’t taking how users watch videos into account when they create their ads, according to the report. Despite the fact that videos play silently in the News Feed by default and many users watch without sound entirely, only 24% of the ads were comprehensible without ads.

Additionally, only 23% of these ads included brand messaging that was easy to understand within the first 10 seconds of video and less than half (46%) featured recognizable brand links.

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Brands that ensured their ads quickly established their messaging and were understandable without sound were drastically more popular among respondents than those who didn’t.

Keep Your Messaging Clear To Spark Engagement

Videos that were intended to create a conversation and succinctly communicated a brands’ message were also more liked by participants in the study.

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For more insights from Facebook’s study, read the report here.

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What Social Network Is Right For Your Business? [Infographic]

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Social media has undeniably become one of the strongest channels businesses can use to reach out and engage with their audience. But making social media work for you means knowing which platform works best for your business.

You might think that all social media sites are essentially the same, but making that mistake can mean squandering marketing and ad budgets trying to connect with an audience that just plain isn’t interested.

The truth is every social media platform has a unique audience who interact with each other in ways specifically molded by the site they frequent. Trying to talk to Twitter users the same way you talk to Facebook users will make your message fall flat, while Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat users all have their own cultures built from the platform.

So which is right for you? It all depends on your business, your values, and who your audience is. The infographic below from Visage will walk you through the basic pros and cons of each of the most popular social media sites, along with some key stats about each social network.

Identifying the best social network for you will help you get the most out of your marketing efforts and find the most responsive audience for your brand.

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Pinterest Extends Self-Service Ad Tool To All U.S. Businesses

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Pinterest’s promoted pins and ads have made a huge splash in the 18 months of beta testing its small platform with select brands, and now it is set to become even bigger. The site is rolling out its ad tool, Promoted Pins Ad Manager, to all small and midsize brands in the United States.

The company also announced it would be increasing the number of interest-level targeting options from 30 to 420. In the past, advertisers could only choose from 30 broad interest groups such as food, beauty, and fashion. The new options are more specific, so marketers can target their audience much more accurately with categories like “healthy food,” “sustainable architecture,” and “street-style fashion.”

“Pinterest knows more about the interest of its users than any other platforms,” said Nipoon Malhotra, Pinterest’s ad products lead. “This is very different from a graph that represents something you browsed a month ago.”

Pinterest also noted that marketers who spend at least $1 per day advertising on Pinterest see a 20 percent increase in clicks on their posts.

Pinterest Pins function just like normal Pins on the site, however, they are shown to more people than a typical Pin. By using the Pinterest Ads Manager, you can target exactly who you want to see your Pins based on interest targeting, keywords, or customer database targeting using your customer list.

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How To Make The Perfect Facebook Ad [Infographic]

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While most users still think of Facebook as mostly a way to interact with their friends, post selfies, and share information, many businesses and marketers are starting to realize just how powerful Facebook’s advertising platform is.

While Facebook ads can be an incredibly powerful way to boost your content and your brand’s recognition, it can be hard to stand out among the over 3 million advertisers on the platform.

Creating the perfect ad to rise above the noise and grab the attention of your audience means balancing several different factors, including the optimal amount of text, creating images and videos with the perfect dimensions, and knowing where to best reach users on the page.

For a brand just getting started with Facebook ads, it can all be a little overwhelming. Thankfully, WebpageFX recently shared the infographic below, which details everything you need to know to make the perfect Facebook ad.

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Want to make the perfect Facebook ad for your business and guarantee you reach your audience? TMO can help. Contact us and we can review your advertising efforts and tell you how to optimize them to get the most out of your advertising.

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How To Get People To Share Your Brand’s Videos

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How do you get people to share your brand’s video? That’s the question posed by a recent survey from Wyzowl. The findings show people are very open to sharing, but you have to connect with them the right way.

An absolute majority (97%) of US consumers said they would be willing to share a video from a brand with their friends on social media, while 70% said they have already shared a brand’s video in the past.

The survey collected data from 150 consumers and 140 marketing professionals.

Source: Wyzowl / Marketing Profs

Source: Wyzowl / Marketing Profs

The best way to get people to start clicking the share button is by entertaining them, with 76% of respondents saying they would be open to sharing entertaining videos, but that’s not the only approach you can take.

Almost 70% of respondents say they would be willing to share a video if it is of interest to their followers, 65% were willing to share informative videos, and 55% said they might be open to sharing inspirational videos.

The findings make it clear the real trick to making branded videos that people want to share is by pleasing them first and advertising your brand second. If you can get their interest, pull at their heart strings, or make them feel like they’ve learned something, people are likely to start sharing.

For the full study from Wyzowl, click here.

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Pinterest Will Open Promoted Pins To All Advertisers In January

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Pinterest-logo

After months of waiting, advertisers will finally be able to start buying Promoted Pins, starting in January.

The company officially announced Promoted Pins, its first advertising unit, last January, however it has limited access to a small number of partner advertisers. It has gradually given access to the service to more businesses, including some small and medium businesses, but most have been left waiting for a widespread rollout.

Well the wait is nearly over, according to an announcement made yesterday by Tim Kendall, Pinterest’s monetization chief.

“The business is scaling very rapidly,” Kendall told USA Today.

The company also announced it has reached over one million active business accounts globally yesterday.

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