Facebook Reveals New Advertising Features and Tools for the Holiday Season

The holidays are fast approaching, with only 45 days till Christmas, Facebook has recently rolled out new advertising features which are beneficial for e-commerce retailers and brands to help and make out the most this holiday season.

Leaders in Digital wants to keep you updated on important social media trends and topics beneficial to growing your business. Here are the new ad tools Facebook has just announced and what you need to know about them:

• Instagram Ads with Product Tags

• Shopping Engagement to Custom and Lookalike Audiences

• SMB Training

• #BuyBlack Friday

Instagram ads with product tags – After more than a year of testing product tags for organic Shopping posts on Instagram, Facebook published that this new feature will now allow all businesses to be able to make ads with product tags directly using Ads Manager. Product tags are determined by the white dots and when a user clicks the dot, product information, which includes the product name and the price, will show.

This feature will engage more Instagram users into the new normal shopping trend and the immediate information given by the product tags will benefit both shoppers and retailers.

Shopping engagement to custom and lookalike audiences – This is a new type of targeting audiences that is directed to help marketers expand their reach for shoppers. Engagement for custom audiences is a way to “reach people who’ve already shown interest in their product or brand by doing things like saving a product, viewing a shop or initiating a purchase.” Lookalike audiences from Facebook and Instagram will help focus on shoppers with similar interests align with those who’ve already purchased from you.

SMB Training – Facebook will be launching a new Season of Support initiative, which offers training and discounts from several martech partners including Intuit, Vimeo, ChatFuel, MobileMonkey, BigCommerce, and Canva, to help small businesses be ready for the holiday season.

#BuyBlack Friday – This is Facebook’s drive to help Black-owned businesses which have been hit hard by the pandemic. 41% of U.S. Black-owned businesses have shut down due to COVID-19. Every Friday from October 30 to November 27, 2020, Facebook will be promoting #BuyBlack Friday on their platforms. Along with this effort, Facebook will also be publishing a gift guide and business directory in support of Black-owned businesses.

The new features, ad formats, and tools highlights Facebook’s intentional aim in making Instagram and Facebook as mobile shopping drivers. With the new normal way of shopping, the company says that 76% of online purchases are happening on mobile and this number is expected to increase during the coming holidays.

These ad tools are definitely worth looking into because they will not only impact marketers but shoppers as well. Want to learn more ways to improve your digital marketing campaigns and gain more sales? Contact us today and we will help you create the perfect ads to increase your business presence.

7 Useful Social Media Tools For Your Online Marketing Strategy

Social media has undeniably been playing a big influence in people’s lives nowadays. Facebook and Instagram which initially started as platforms for personal use, expanded as outlets even for businesses. Right now, it’s one of the most efficient ways to gain and attract more customers.

At Leaders in Digital, we wanted to share how much further you can utilize social media and increase your brand reach and ROI. We've previously held an online course that discussed effective ways to get your organic social media noticed.

A social media management essential is knowing several tools that can help in executing a good online marketing strategy. There are a lot of tools being offered in the market these days, but you need to pick the ones that will allow you to save time, be able to boost your brand awareness and are easy to use. It’s also good to have a social media tool which is affordable and organized.

Remember that choosing for the right social media tools will make a huge difference as to how your brand is performing online. It’s quite a challenge to find the perfect balance between quality, automation, and affordability. So, here’s our top picks of a few beneficial social media tools – including its features and their price points.

1. Sendible

2. Canva

3. Loomly

4. Quuu

5. Later

6. SocialPilot

7. Design Wizard

Sendible: Lets you track results and engage your followers. Allows you to post, schedule and monitor over 20 platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Tracks fan follower growth, clicks, reach, shares, comments and more. This can also measure the effectiveness and engagement levels of your social profiles.

Price: Starts at $19/month

Canva: Offers several social media graphic designs and even professional layouts, prints, presentation and more. It has a lot of templates, for your Facebook banners or Instagram stories and it’s easy-to-use with its drag-and-drop functionality.

Price: Free, or starts at $9.95/month

Loomly: Helps you manage multiple social media content, both organic posts and ads, in one platform. Sets automated publishing for sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google My Business. Measures your posts’ performance as soon as they have been published.

Price: Starts at $25/month

Quuu: Helps you accomplish strikingly engaging social media contents. It does the job of automating the time-consuming process of making professional, interesting multimedia assets for your campaign.

Price: Free, or starts at $19/month

Later: Another social media tool that plans and schedules your posts. It has a drag-and-drop calendar that makes mapping out your future posts easy and gives a sneak peek of how your feed will look like.

Price: Free, or starts at $7.50/month

SocialPilot: Publishes contents across all major social networks from one platform. It helps you visualize and optimize your content schedule for all accounts. You’ll be able to discover popular contents and schedule it directly to your account, based on content categories, keywords, influencers, and recency. It also allows you to reply to comments and messages in real-time.

Price: Starts at $41.66/month

Design Wizard: A visual content tool that lets you create different types of photos and videos and doesn’t require professional editing experience. This is best for people with limited budget and time on their hands. Its library contains a great deal of multimedia graphics for inspiration and use. These images are licensed so if you use one from the site, you won’t run into copyright issues.

Price: Free, or starts at $9.99/month

Social media landscape keeps evolving and so, too, have the services around it. Keep in mind to choose social media tools that can help you to carefully craft, measure, and manage your strategy and will give you the best results. Leaders in Digital provides social media strategy and management all from an analytics perspective. So it will greatly benefit your campaigns while maximizing your budget. Feel free to be in touch with us for more information!

Understanding the Impact of Landing Pages on your Google Ads’ Quality Score

Pay-per-click marketing is a powerful tool to grow your online visibility, drive traffic or generate leads. If you are engaged in the world of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, it’s important to know the significance of landing pages on your ads. Customers' first touch point with a brand relies on these landing pages.

Quality Score plays a crucial role in the success of a PPC Google Ads campaign. Although we still have little insights on how Quality Score is being calculated, it is known that landing pages is an important factor to boost your Quality Score. Note that “Quality Score” is the most used term in ad platforms, but others also use “Ad Relevance”.

Leaders in Digital has been implementing successful campaigns through paid media, Google ads for years. We know pay-per-click advertising can be a bit confusing at the start. You may also have heard some of the misconceptions relating to the effects of landing pages to Quality Score. So we’re here to help you better understand landing pages and its mark on Quality Score so you can fully utilize your budget and reach your business goals.

Defining Quality Score and its importance to PPC Advertisers

Quality score is the rating of your keywords’ and ads’ relevance to your intended audience. The score is usually assigned between the numbers 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. This number helps advertisers know if they have picked the right keywords, wrote good ads and drove users to helpful landing pages. This metric is the basis for deciding which ads to show and how much to charge advertisers on search engines and social media platforms.

Your Quality Score depends on different factors. Some of them are:

• Ad Click-Through Rate (CTR)

• Ad Relevance

• Landing page quality and relevance

• Post-Click Conversion Rate

• Recency of your ads

The following are the known core components that “weigh” in the Quality Score algorithm with the Click-Through Rate being the most important component. Having more people click your ad, it becomes a firm indication to Google that your ads are relevant and helpful to these customers. Correspondingly, Google rewards you with higher ad rankings and lower costs. You must remember, having a high Quality Score is Google’s way of saying your PPC ads meet your potential customer’s demand.

The Impact of Landing Pages in Quality Score on Different Platforms

One of the aspects we’re sure of that Google considers when calculating Quality Score is landing page quality and relevance. It is also the easiest feature in the PPC campaign to control. You need to remember that the “Landing Page Experience” affects the Quality Score. This includes giving a good site exposure, responding to visitors with relevant and useful content and making sure that your site is accessible in all devices and looks good on all screens.

Having a good landing page could result in a positive impact on Google Ads Quality Score. A good Quality Score means lower cost per click and higher conversion rates. Therefore, marketers should not overlook the improvement in visitor experience and their positive impression with your brand.

Google Ads Quality Score – With Google, the thing you have to remember is that aside from focusing on landing page relevance, meaning your ad matches your visitor’s search terms, it is also important to Google that your landing page is secure, easy to navigate and loads quickly.

Microsoft Advertising Quality Score – Microsoft distinctly mentioned that their landing page experience factor is “based on how many times customers leave your ad’s landing page shortly after arriving.” So, the goal here is to lower your landing page’s bounce rate.

Facebook Advertising Ad Relevance – There are three components that Facebook considers as a metric for Ad Relevance: Quality Ranking, Engagement Rate Ranking and Conversion Rate Ranking. Quality Ranking is measured using feedback on your ads and the post-click experience. Meanwhile, Engagement Rate includes all clicks, likes, comments and shares. Lastly, Conversion Rate is based on our ad’s expected conversion rate ranking.

Be Mindful of Quality Score but Don’t Stress Over it

Your landing pages will determine your Quality Score, but remember that its algorithm isn’t that transparent, so it’s impossible to know exactly what’s working and what’s not. Most of the successful methods are directed with upgrading visitor’s landing page experience.

We encourage you to think about landing pages as a delayed meter of your efforts. So, make sure you check on your landing page experience once per month or once per quarter and search for improvements.

Still finding a hard time to grasp paid media advertising? Get in touch with us to know more about various digital marketing strategies. Let’s start building your brand’s online presence and create successful campaigns together!