This month YouTube gave us hints of its 2022 roadmap, LinkedIn promised better post analytics, while Google Ads introduced a better offline conversion tracking method and changed the way automated ad extensions work.
YouTube reveals 2022 roadmap
In a blog post by Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan, YouTube has laid out its 2022 roadmap for shopping features, Shorts, and other updates for brands and creators. While, unfortunately, Mohan didn’t go into precise details, he did provide an overview of what to expect this year.
Short-form content is incredibly popular on social media right now. Therefore, one of YouTube’s main goals for 2022 is to keep improving and adding new features to its Shorts format (the platform’s answer to TikTok’s videos and Instagram’s Reels), like new video effects, editing tools, and more. And to help Shorts creators engage with their audience more personally, the company will also introduce the ability to reply to individual comments by creating a Short.
YouTube will also be focusing on more robust shopping experiences that tap into the trust creators have built with their communities to help them expand into the world of e-commerce. So it seems that shopping capabilities will develop further via shoppable videos, Live Shopping and via the user interface of the YouTube app. With shoppable videos, viewers will be able to shop tagged items in their favourite creators’ videos.
Better post analytics is coming to LinkedIn
Great news for all the content creators out there who want better insights into which types of content are performing best on LinkedIn: new content analytics on their individual posts and overall performance, across content & audience coming soon. Content creators on the platform will soon have more details on the people who read and engage with their content, such as job titles, industries, locations, and engagement patterns.
Google introduces Enhanced Conversions for Leads
Offline conversion tracking is an excellent method that allows Google better understand the value of each lead and help it prioritise more valuable leads. But despite its potential advantage, offline conversion tracking has not been widely adopted due to the difficulty of implementing it. But this is about to change.
Spotted as a beta test earlier this month, Enhanced Conversions for Leads offers an alternative to the existing Google Click ID-based offline conversion tracking method. The new feature can improve the accuracy of your conversion measurement, and since it can be configured from your Google Ads account instead of your CRM, it may be easier to adopt.
Enhanced conversions for leads supplement your existing conversion tags by sending hashed first-party conversion data, such as email addresses, from your website to Google in a privacy-safe way. This data will then be used to make better auction decisions, improve the reporting of the online conversions, and lead to more efficient campaigns and better conversions. You can set up enhanced conversions manually with Google Tag Manager, the global site tag, or using an API connection.
The way Google Ads automated extensions work is changing
Google Ad extensions give people more information about your business and make it easier to engage with your ads. According to Google, advertisers can see a 20% increase in click-through rate on average when four sitelinks show with their Search ads. There are two types of ad extensions: manual, which the advertiser creates, and automated. When you opt in to automated ad extensions, Google Ads will automatically create extensions on your behalf and show them with your ad if they’re predicted to improve your performance.
Up until now, dynamic sitelinks, dynamic callouts, and dynamic structured snippets weren’t eligible to show with your ad if you provided manually created sitelinks, callouts and structured snippets. These automated extensions will be eligible to show alongside their manually created counterpart starting mid-March. Advertisers will be able to view reporting for these automated extensions at an individual level in the Extensions page of Google Ads and even pause or remove them needed.
Additionally, starting in mid-March, sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets from higher levels in your account can serve with extensions of the same type from lower levels. Previously, if you had created ad extensions at a lower level, they would prevent higher level extensions of the same type from serving. For example, if you had created one sitelink at the ad group level, your campaign level sitelinks wouldn’t be eligible to serve. Now Google’s machine learning can select from the best extensions in your account and bring them together to help you show a more engaging ad to your audience.