Google’s BERT Goes Global – Ignite Friday

This week: more good news from the recent holiday weekend. Facebook has some new ad reporting features, and wait until you hear about how Reddit grew this past year.

Here’s what happened this week in digital marketing.

Advertisers Increased Google Shopping Spend By Almost a Third This Cyber Weekend

According to a report by Tinuiti, advertisers spent 32% more on Google Shopping ads this year than last year during the Thanksgiving weekend through Cyber Monday.

Even better: the extra spend resulted in increased clicks while CPCs stayed flat. 

Text ad clicks increased by 25%. Shopping Ad clicks rose by almost a third.

Additionally, marketers increased ad spend by 50% on Amazon Product Ads.

Also, Amazon impression share on Google Shopping saw an 87% year-over-year increase on Black Friday.

Survey: Holiday Shoppers Look to Their Inboxes to Find Deals

According to new research from SubjectLine.com, 84% of consumers check email to look for holiday deals.

More than half of those folks (58%) said that brands offering relevant deals stand a better chance of earning a conversion.

Also, half of those surveyed said that receiving relevant emails regularly helps create a connection with the brand.

Almost two-thirds of those polled said they’re most likely to open emails during the holidays.

Google Rolls out Tool to Help Publishers Manage Google News Content

If you consistently produce news content, you’ll love the Google Publisher Center.

Google Publisher Center merges two old tools (News Producer and News Publisher Center) to help you submit and manage your news content.

It’s also got some new features. For starters, you can use it to better manage your identity online. As an example, the tool enables you to display a light or dark logo depending on the visitor’s platform.

Additionally, you can manage multiple publications more easily.

Finally, you no longer have to rely on RSS feeds to configure sections in Google News. You can just point directly to a URL.

Facebook Introduces Ad Reporting Updates

This past week, Facebook rolled out some enhancements to its ad reporting tools.

The features include cross-account reporting and a tool that allows you to create your own metrics.

The cross-account reporting component “serves as a one-stop-shop for a clear, concise report on your business’ performance and will allow you to save time that was previously spent manually building reports.”

The custom metrics tool enables you to calculate and save your own metrics. Then, you can apply those metrics to reports with the Ads Reporting manager.

Canva Will Launch Video Editing Capabilities

Next year, Canva will launch Canva Video, a video editing platform. Reportedly, it will function just like Canva’s easy-to-use photo editing solution.

“Our mission is to empower everyone to design anything without any complex software or having to go to a different sources for different elements,” said Cameron Adams, Chief Product Officer for Canva. “We’re bringing the same experience to our video editing tool.”

Canva appears to be moving towards a comprehensive graphic design solution.

Plans start at an affordable $9.95 monthly price.

Reddit See 30% Growth in MAUs

Reddit recently reported a 30% growth in monthly active users (MAUs).

Last year, the company reported 330 million MAUs. This year, that number stands at 430 million.

To put things in perspective, Reddit now claims more monthly users than either Twitter (321 million) or Pinterest (322 million).

Additionally, Reddit reported that 1.7 billion thread comments were created just this year. That’s an increase of 37% from the previous year.

Users created a total of 199 million posts as well.

Quora Is Testing Lead Generation Forms

Quora is offering yet another advertising solution. This one is a lead generation form.

Specifically, the new feature is a Zapier integration that enables you to bring leads into a CRM system.

Users can fill out the form without ever leaving the Quora website.

The form supports up to 12 fields, including:

• First name
• Last name
• Email
• Phone number
• Job title
• Address

Zapier integrates with more than 1,500 apps, including Salesforce and Marketo. Chances are pretty good that it plays nicely with your CRM solution as well.

Google’s BERT Algorithm Has Gone Global

This past week, Google announced that its BERT algorithm is rolling out worldwide.

If you’re unfamiliar with BERT, it’s an algorithm that helps Google understand search queries.

According to Google, BERT is rolling out in 72 languages. Also, the update will affect international search snippets. 

BERT initially rolled out back in October for U.S. English queries only.

Google Ads Will Explain Why Performance Changes Occurred

If you’re wondering why you saw a performance change in one of your Google Ads campaigns, you can now get an explanation.

The platform now provides a “See Explanations” button. Just click it to find out what happened.

Google Ads is offering the explanation in an attempt to save you time in diagnosing the issue. It will provide the reason for the change by comparing two time periods of equal length within the last three months.

You’ll likely only see an explanation for a campaign with significant performance variations.

The new feature is currently available for manual CPC or eCPC search campaigns.

Google Ads Expands Optimization Score to Include Display Campaigns

Google Ads is expanding its optimization score to include display ads.

The optimization score is a metric that ranges from 0% to 100%. A score of 100% means the campaign is perfectly optimized.

Google also offers specific recommendations to increase the optimization score. Recommendations for display ads include using targeting expansion, creating smart display campaigns, and using responsive display ads.

Weekly Homework

As the holidays approach, you still have some work to do. Here are some action items from this week’s news reports:

• Check the optimization score for your Google Display Ads. Make adjustments and follow the recommendations to increase the score.
• If you see that some of your Google Ads campaigns went through a significant performance change, view the explanation to find out what happened. Once again, make the necessary changes.
• Take a look at Quora’s lead generation forms and determine if your business can benefit from them.
• Is there anything in Facebook’s new ad reporting feature set that you can use? Perhaps you can create a custom metric that you’d like to track. If you’re using multiple accounts, take advantage of the multi-account reporting feature.
• If you publish news content, use Google’s new publishing tool to streamline your efforts.