New Toys From Meta & Pinterest

AD PLATFORMS DROP NEW TOYS FOR THE HOLIDAYS

We’ve barely packed away the beach gear and flip flops, and I’ve already seen the first holiday merchandise ominously poking its shiny head out of a retail stock room.

The big platforms are also in their feature-release modes, rolling out all of the toys that they’ll use to attract as much of our Black Friday/Cyber Monday activity as possible.

As in years past, most of the news features for BFCM 2023 focus on online retail, and some may be gone as quickly as they’ve arrived, but this time of year is also where we’ve seen major developments that stuck around for years, like Facebook Business Manager, and Google Shopping.

Here’s what we can look forward to this season:

Meta

1. Improvements to the AI tools in Advantage+
   So far, their AI targeting and testing tools have already shown that they can make some pretty significant performance improvements to campaigns. Expect to see several more tweaks, many of which won’t be obvious from the front end, but will show up in your campaign results.

2. Promotional ads that automatically apply promo codes
   I was a bit surprised that this one doesn’t already exist, but now you’ll be able to send people directly from your Facebook/Instagram ads to a loaded shopping cart that already has a promo code applied. (Example below)

3. Reminder ads
   These allow advertisers to give people the option to set a reminder for things like product drops, flash sales, and events.

4. Shop ads now come with more integrations
   The promise of Shop ads is that people can click and checkout without ever leaving Facebook or Instagram. Until now, that had been limited to websites using Shopify, BigCommerce, Feedonomics, ProductsUp, GoDataFeed, and ChannelAdvisor, and now they’re adding in Adobe Commerce, Magento Open Source, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Read more about Meta’s new updates

Pinterest

• Premiere Spotlight on search and home feed
  The very popular new ad unit, where a brand can guarantee that it’s the only ad that appears on screen, is expanding where and how it can be deployed

• Showcase ads
  An interactive unit that allows users to swipe through cards, and watch a series of content from a single ad

• Quiz ads
  Just what it sounds like – similar to the popular Polls on Instagram, but goes a step further to allow brands to show content depending on which answers a user gives

• Business Manager for agencies
  Finally, a place where one media buyer can manage multiple accounts without logging out/in

• Creative Studio
  This one is still in testing, and it’s a Canva-like tool that’s built specifically to help create Pinterest posts

• eCommerce integrations
  It seems that the partnership teams at Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Adobe Commerce have been busy, because they’re also being added into Pinterest

Read more about Pinterest’s new updates

HATE SMS MARKETING? THIS CAMPAIGN WANTS TO CHANGE YOUR MIND

AGENCY RELEASES TEMPLATES AND PLANNING TOOLS AHEAD OF BFCM

Note: If you’re a B2B marketer, you’ll want to pay attention to this one

When used in the same sentence, the words “SMS” and “marketing” conjure up some powerful feelings, but there’s more here than just text-spam.

What makes this campaign so interesting is actually the intense objection that so many of us have to what it’s selling. I’m sure Attentive — the agency that created it — has heard it all when it comes to SMS marketing objections, so ahead of this holiday season, instead of simply encouraging people to sign up for a free trial or sharing why they’re the best provider, they built a suite of tools that are legitimately useful for those of us who may be curious about text-based tactics.

Attentive created a web page that operates like an advent calendar, and behind each door is an asset that has been specifically built to make marketers’ lives easier, inspire us, or educate us. If you’ve been interested and could use more information about SMS as a part of your BFCM strategy, here are a few things to check out on the page:

• BFCM Strategy Planning Template

• SMS Examples

• Expert Q&A

• AI Guide

And, if you’re a B2B marketer, then I recommend that you click through and take some inspiration for your next content marketing campaign or lead magnet, because this is a good one.

Check out Attentive’s BFCM Planner here

THE 15 MOST COMMON SEO ISSUES

1 MILLION WEBSITES CAN’T BE WRONG

Ahrefs (a big SEO software company) analyzed over 1 million websites and found the 15 most common SEO issues.

The good news? Most of the issues are very simple to fix.

The even better news? Basically every website on the internet suffers from a few of these, so if you’re able to fix yours, you’re ahead of the game.

The list can seem a bit technical at first, but the descriptions are written in plain language that should help you to figure out if it’s something you should be looking at on your own site. Ahrefs also has a free site checker that you can use to determine exactly how your site is doing.

To save you a click, we’ve summarized those 15 issues into four categories that may/may not apply to your website:

1. Bad redirects — either from old pages, or from HTTP to HTTPS

2. Missing information — four in five websites are missing alt tags on their images, meta descriptions, or both

3. Missing or poorly written titles/headings — about two thirds of websites have missing H1 tags, too-long page titles, or conflicts between them

4. Slow pages — this one is a killer, both for SEO and user experience, and it affects 72% of sites, according to the study

A FEW MORE STORIES WORTH A CLICK

STUFF THAT WILL MAKE YOU JUST A BIT SMARTER THIS WEEK

• CapCut (ByteDance’s video editing app) added an image editor that looks suspiciously similar to Canva

• Hootsuite published a Social Media Career report that includes average pay, happiness, role titles, and burn out

• Meta is expanding its verified account program to include Business Pages

• Linkedin added the ability to search for brand partnerships with content creators

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Written by Conner Galway, Junction Consulting