January 2021 SEM and PPC News and Updates

Microsoft Advertising (Bing Ads)

In-market Audience segments now available in new markets

Another wise move in their best efforts to compete with Google Ads: Microsoft Advertising in-market audiences are now available in open beta to the UK and all other European markets (except for Belgium). Select and apply your relevant in-market audiences to reach individuals ready to buy.

The open beta of customer match audiences has also been expanded, however this first-party data targeting audience is yet to be available in the EU, UK and China. Hopefully, the customer match open beta will be expanded to the UK in the next few months!

Last update – Microsoft has improved their capabilities with Google Import to in-market audiences, remarketing and custom combination lists from Google ads can seamlessly be imported. Customer match is set to be added to be importable soon.

» Read more here.

YouTube Advertising

New YouTube music audio ads – sounds great!

Google/YouTube are trying to drive their fairly new product: music audio ads. They measured a 75% increase in brand recall and awareness by using this audio ad format in their alpha tests.

Promising results continue:

One of our early testers, Shutterfly, used audio ads to influence purchase consideration among interested shoppers, driving above benchmark lifts of 14 percent lift in ad recall and 2 percent lift in favorability among their target audience.

» Read more here.

Google Ads (Google AdWords)

New data exclusion tools for Google Ads Smart Bidding campaigns

Prevent technical blips such as tagging issues and website outages from impacting Smart Bidding with new data exclusions controls for Search, Shopping and Display campaigns.

» Read more here.

Google Analytics

Predicted revenue – new metric – in Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

Another reason to become an early adopter of Google Analytics 4 (GA4): their latest predictive metric ‘predicted revenue’ highlights the revenue expected from all sales conversions within the next 28 days from a user who was active in the last 28 days.

This, and other predictive metrics, aim to automatically enrich data by using Google machine-learning to predict the future behavior of website users. Analytics users will be able learn more about their customers and take actions accordingly.

» Read more here.