Midweek Media Breakdown #18

We’re back with another weekly breakdown of the latest social media news, through a digital marketing lens. Get up to speed on the latest industry changes and trends. 

Here’s what we are covering this week: 

📈 LinkedIn Engagement Reaches ‘Record Levels’

🍪 Cookies Enabled for TikTok Pixel 

💥 Google Announces New Performance Max Features

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📈 LinkedIn Engagement Reaches ‘Record Levels’ 📈

Whether you know it as the Great Resignation or the Great Reshuffle, it’s really doing wonders for LinkedIn. 

In Microsoft’s latest performance update, they revealed just how much the platform is growing in the post-COVID job market. 

Key takeaways on the growth of LinkedIn: 

• 34% YoY increase in revenue, reaching $3.44 billion
• ‘Record levels’ of user engagement have been reported 
• The average LinkedIn session grew by 22% 

With 810 million LinkedIn members, spanning 200 countries and regions worldwide, it’s no wonder the platform is seeing record levels of engagement. Following the pandemic, the WFH movement and increasing remote work opportunities have made creating an online network more important than ever. Professionals and employers are seeking to become more connected and LinkedIn is becoming a sort of HR hub, no matter your industry.

So, how can we expect this exponential growth to impact the platform? 

We aren’t the first to say this, but we’re anticipating this to be the year of the #LinkedInfluencer. Personal branding, shouting about huge network growth and a daily fight to make viral LinkedIn content will take over your newsfeed. Whether this will increase the quality of the content you see is yet to be revealed. 

We can also expect to see more paid-for content on LinkedIn. Where the users go, advertisers follow. A clear way for LinkedIn to boost its already booming revenue will be to maximise its marketing capabilities. 

And last but not least, we’re anticipating that all of this competition will drive innovation. Gone will be the days of boring updates and stale professional content. LinkedIn creators will look for ways to boost in-app engagement, including more live-stream events, newsletters and additional subscription elements. 

More companies are already seeing the benefits of maintaining an active presence on LinkedIn. Do you think LinkedIn has the capability to become the place to be for both B2B and B2C companies?  

🍪 Cookies Enabled for TikTok Pixel 🍪

Me want cookie!

Starting from April 28th, TikTok has enabled cookies for all standard and developer mode pixels that were created before March 10, 2022.

By activating the use of first and third-party cookies, TikTok is pledging to improve both the quality and dependability of the data collected through their Pixel, supplemented by existing event data advertisers already share with TikTok. 

Cookies will let marketers further improve and supplement the matching of website visitors with users on TikTok. 

Other benefits include: 

• Expanding reach by building bigger audiences to reach both website and app customers on TikTok
• Boosting campaign optimisation with power campaign bidding models to improve conversion events 
• Measure full-funnel events by capturing more data with complete cross-device and cross-session matching 

What to do next:

• Update your site’s cookie and pixel controls and consent management to comply with relevant data collection requirements
• Provide users with clear and comprehensive notice about the collection and use of information for advertising purposes, including the use of TikToks’s cookies
• Check with your legal representative to determine how best to comply with your legal obligations 

💥 Google Announces New Performance Max Features 💥

By the end of September, Google’s forced migration to Performance Max campaigns will be almost complete. 

In an effort to help advertisers adjust to the change, Google has announced a new group of features designed to make the change a little easier to swallow. 

These three new features include:

• A new customer acquisition goal type 
• Consumer interest insights 
• One-click upgrade tool 

The new goal type will allow: 

• Bidding for more new customers that are similar to existing customers 
• Focus on optimisations on new customers only, while maintaining cost-efficiency 

While these changes aren’t new to Google Ads, it’s nice to see them being integrated into Performance Max. 

Consumer interest insights will allow advertisers to see search themes that are driving conversions. This is a bit of a big deal because: 

• Currently, there are no such insights in Performance Max campaigns. It’s been a struggle to see what’s driving conversions with such little detail provided, so this new feature sounds promising. 
• Google is also launching asset audience insights. This will tell you how specific copy, images or video assets are resonating with specific audience segments.

The one-click upgrade tool is another update designed to make this new campaign type easier to use. There will now be two options for upgrading your campaigns to performance max: 

• Bulk upgrading all your campaigns at once 
• Select specific campaigns to upgrade

This update will have a staggered rollout and you should receive a notification in your Google Ads accounts when the one-click tool is available for your account

So, are you looking forward to these updates? Or perhaps apprehensive about tracking insights? Let us know your thoughts below!  

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Thanks again for tuning into another weekly roundup with The Graygency. Check out our blog for more Midweek Media Breakdown posts.

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