🔍 More automated insights, campaigns types are coming

Oct 07, 2020

Good morning Search Marketer, it's the final days of Advertising Week…

For its Ad Week announcements yesterday, Google Ads introduced more features that expand on its years-long focus on automation and recent updates made in response to COVID.

Performance Max is the company's latest fully-automated, machine learning-powered campaign type. It's in early testing now and serves ads across every Google owned and operated property with Search inventory covered via dynamic search ads. There will be some manual inputs with Value Rules and audience specifications.

A new Insights page in the UI will show tailored Google Trends and Rising Retail Categories data along with recommendations. More features including forecasting are coming.

Video action campaigns are coming out of beta. The performance-focused campaign type runs across YouTube and video partners. Google is also working on performance ad formats for TV screens as YouTube viewing on televisions has reached 100 million monthly viewers.

The ole "simplified" red herring strikes again. Over the last month, Google has rolled out "simplified" locations reporting for advertisers. At first glance, it is easier to go to one main report to see location target performance. The problem is you can't see user location data for the users who either show interest in or are regularly in your targeted locations. For that, you'll need to build a custom report. We walk through the changes and custom reporting needs.

Read on for your daily Search Shorts and to find out what Instagram's birthday plans are.

Ginny Marvin,
Editor-In-Chief

Social Short

Instagram turns 10

"Right now, we're witnessing enormous shifts in how people create and enjoy culture. One of the most profound is the shift of power from the organization to the individual," Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in a 10th birthday blog post yesterday. In looking to the future, he wrote, "Over the coming months, you'll see some major changes from us, like tabs for Reels and shopping, and some big improvements to messaging [with Messenger integrations]. We'll look to accelerate ways for creators to make a living and for small businesses to sell their products [with Checkout enabled on IGTV and Reels]."

Instagram also launched some new features, including the ability for users to get a map and calendar of their past Stories to save to their highlights.

Why we care. Instagram has more than a billion users and is arguably Facebook's shiniest product for brands and creators, but it's also not immune to bullying, harassment and toxicity as it has grown beyond a place for pretty, filtered pictures. Mosseri noted the company is building "new features that fight bullying, improve equity, address fairness, and help people feel supported," including automatically hiding reported comments and expanding comment warnings. The company says more than 35 million Instagram accounts are using or have used the Restrict option since it launched last October.

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Search Shorts

Google indexing issues being worked on still.

Indexing issues progress. We've been continuously updating our story on Google's indexing issues. Google said it has "now restored about 25% of the URLs impacted by the canonical issue and about 50% of those impacted by the mobile-indexing issue."

Search Console to be annotated. Gary Illyes from Google said due to those indexing bugs, the Google Search Console "team is working hard on estimating the impact and potentially annotating the reports affected."

Hreflang and same language. John Mueller of Google said on Twitter, "If they're both in English (ca the same content), that would be expected (rel=canonical or not). We'll index one, but still apply the hreflang when it comes to showing / linking from search. Super-confusing, but usually it works out."

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