Digital marketing is a very quickly-changing sphere, which sometimes makes it a tad difficult to stay “up-to-date” with all the news. Don’t despair, we are here for you to give you a quick overview of the most recent changes and bring some Clarity to what those changes mean for your business.
1. Facebook has retired its 20% text rule on ads.
If you have ever tried to run advertising on Facebook, most likely you are familiar with the “20% text rule”. For a very long time, Facebook was actively discouraging advertisers to add text to the image in their ads. At first, the images where text took up more than 20% of all available space were immediately disapproved. Later, Facebook got a little more “permissive” with this rule, not disapproving the ads with more text over its images, but significantly lowering the number of impressions that such ads were able to get.
Now Facebook has announced the official removal of the 20% text rule. This is good news for most of the advertisers, as you can make your ad visuals much more informative. But here’s a little piece of advice from Clarity – always put the interest of your target audience first. The removal of the 20% text rule does not mean that you need to start packing your visuals with as much information (text) as you can; it simply gives you more freedom to experiment with text in your creatives. Start small and slow, and test out how your audience reacts to ads with more text vs. ads with less text. If you see that adding text really helps you drive more conversions, then definitely go for it.
2. Google Ads has started the early testing of a new type of automated campaign. The new campaign is going to be called Max performance and will be an automated one. The biggest difference in this campaign will be that its ads will be able to run across all of Google’s inventory at the same time (Display Network, Gmail, YouTube, Discover, and, of course, Search).
The campaign will not be keywords-based and will run dynamic ads that the system will be creating by itself in an automated way. The only thing that advertisers will need to do is to provide text, image, and video assets for future ads and decide on the daily budget. The rest – creating the ads, deciding in which auctions to compete and on the ad placement – the campaign, i.e. Google, will do automatically.
The only manual controls that will be available to advertisers will be the audience settings, and the ability to assign different values to different conversion actions, to show the system which conversions are more important for the business’ goals.
Google Ads is moving more and more towards automatisation and machine learning. Whether that is a good or a bad thing, each advertiser must decide for himself, perhaps by simply judging the “before and after” results, especially when it comes to costs.
In our opinion, the fact that Google Ads algorithm is becoming more and more sophisticated is definitely a good thing – AI can make decisions based on hundreds of real-time factors in a way that a human being simply can’t, as we are unable to process all that information. But it is important that Google Ads also keeps the “manual controls” and works on perfecting them too, as they do with the automatisation tools.
Why? Because machines are still just machines, and they still do not understand all the little nuances and details of your business. It is thus important to have access to as much data as you can, but also to be able to add your own “corrections” if necessary. After all, even though nowadays modern planes are almost constantly flying on auto-pilot, there are always human pilots in the cabin to control it!
And that is why the drastically reduced amount of available data and controls in the new automated Google Ads campaigns, make us worry a little that Google Ads will eventually evolve to a “black box” system that you just feed your budget into, and trust that it will really work in your best interest and make the most out of your money. Knowing that growing the advertisers' spending on the platform is one of Google’s main business objectives, we will leave this question of “trust” for each one to decide on their own.
For more information, bespoke strategies and efficient digital marketing solutions, just contact the Clarity’s girls through info@yourdigitalclarity.com or visit our website at yourdigitalclarity.com.
