Top Developments in Paid Social in 2016
Published: December 21, 2016
Author: Hillary Read
Facebook may still get the lion’s share of the headlines in paid social, but 2016 saw some big improvements from its competitors on the paid social scene.
A few key folks from the 3Q social team put their heads together to list the most important paid social developments from the past year – and what they mean to marketers.
Let’s break ’em down by platform – and, yeah, we’ll start with Facebook, which hasn’t exactly stopped innovating even as it deals with the fake-news fallout of the year.
Sr. Director of Social Brad O’Brien:
- Order ID & Attribution Checkup. Combines what your measurement tool sees with what Facebook ads reporting sees.
- Split-testing capability within the UI to do cleaner A/B testing of audiences and bid types.
- In-Store Measurement to help understand how Facebook interactions influence in-store actions.
- Advanced Matching on Facebook Pixel to send more conversion volume to Facebook for ad optimization.
- Expansion of Audience Network to reach more verified Facebook users, off the Facebook platform.
Sr. Social Account Manager Mike Stetzer:
- Canvas. Facebook is rolling this out to a bunch of other campaign objectives, including Mobile App Installs. Can’t wait to test this for more of our clients.
Social Account Manager Molly Parker:
- App ads now allow us to optimize further down the funnel for acquisition rather than just installs.
- Engagement audiences: we can now build audiences based on engagement for video and lead gen.
- Additional oCPM optimization windows; before we could only see 1 day click, which only looked at conversions from the last day. Facebook opened that to 7-day and 28-day click conversions, which helps give us a much broader view of latency.
Sr. Director of Social Brad O’Brien:
- Vertical Ad Format takes up more screen space and generates “thumbstopping” creative.
- Shopping is coming to Instagram to make product ads more “shoppable”.
- Dynamic Product Ads, a powerful retargeting ad unit, were introduced.
Sr. Social Account Manager Mike Stetzer:
- In general, it’s a legitimate platform to spend dollars on now. For certain clients, we did some testing in 2016 and found that Instagram outperformed Facebook.
Sr. Director of Social Brad O’Brien:
- The Mobile App Install objective is now supported.
- The search feed only targets for keywords (rather than showing in both home and search feeds).
- The platform allows for monetary text overlays on pins (e.g. calling out price or free downloads).
Sr. Social Account Manager Mike Stetzer:
- This one’s simple: Lookalike Audiences.
Assistant Account Director Kendra Pennington:
- Interest targeting – this really just expanded the way that we can organize campaigns and target different audiences.
Snapchat
Sr. Director of Social Brad O’Brien:
- Introduction of snap ad extensions to send users off the Snapchat platform to an advertiser’s website or app store.
Sr. Social Account Manager Mike Stetzer:
- Integration of ads within your friend’s Stories. Snapchat is still within the very early stages as an advertising platform, but hopefully it follows a similar trajectory to Instagram in terms of ease of use/advertising.
Sr. Director of Social Brad O’Brien:
- Testing of sponsored content on sites beyond LinkedIn to reach more verified users off the platform.
- Lead Ads are currently in Beta; similar to Facebook lead ads, these will allow collection of leads within the platform.
Assistant Account Director Kendra Pennington:
- CONVERSION TRACKING – need I say more?!?
Sr. Director of Social Brad O’Brien:
- Website Conversion Objective, which was a lon- overdue objective to be broken out within Twitter Ads UI.
- Like Facebook and LinkedIn, Twitter launched the Twitter Audience Platform to reach Twitter users off the platform.
- Ad Groups introduction, providing an additional layer of optimization between Campaigns and Ads (also long overdue!).
Did we miss any of your favorite social advertising advancements from the past year? Drop a comment!
