Tim Peterson says, “Traditionally, clicking on a brand’s ad on Facebook would open a dedicated microsite or product catalog hosted outside of Facebook. But Facebook continues to roll out mobile ad formats that bring those off-Facebook experiences inside the social network.On Thursday, Facebook unveiled a showy new shopping ad format called Collection, the latest addition to the line of immersive, mobile-only ad formats that it introduced with the iAd-like Canvas in September 2015. If Canvas was aimed at brands looking to attract attention, Collection is intended for marketers as concerned... [...]

Tim Peterson says, “With Twitter’s advertising business struggling, the company has begun looking at other means of making money.Twitter is exploring a paid subscription-based version of its Tweetdeck app, according to photos posted to Twitter (of course) of a survey the company is running to gauge people’s interest. The Verge first reported the news on Thursday.“We’re conducting this survey to assess the interest in a new, more enhanced version of Tweetdeck. We regularly conduct user research to gather feedback about people’s Twitter experience and to better inform our product... [...]

Tim Peterson says, “Long story short: Facebook’s ad network is challenging ad networks run by Google and others to see who can get publishers the best deals for their inventory by adopting a process called header bidding that levels the playing field for publisher’s programmatic ad sales.Long story long: There are a lot of parallels between programmatic advertising and online travel booking. For an advertiser or traveler, instead of checking prices with individual publishers or airlines one by one, you can check ad networks or travel search sites that aggregate ad slots or plane seats... [...]

Tim Peterson says, “It has been a year and a half since Instagram rolled out the welcome mat to all advertisers. Remember that as you read the next sentence.Instagram now has more than 1 million monthly active advertisers, the company announced on Wednesday. That’s five times as many advertisers as the Facebook-owned photo-and-video app claimed 13 months ago and twice as many as it had six months ago, though it’s only a quarter of Facebook’s 4 million advertisers.It probably helps that Instagram has been able to prove itself not only as an advertising channel, but also as a conduit... [...]

Tim Peterson says, “Some time this year, Facebook will max out the number of ads it can squeeze into people’s news feeds. But how many ads is Facebook already inserting?To get a better idea, I’ve built an extension for Google’s Chrome browser, called Facebook Ad Spotter, that tracks the number of ads and organic posts appearing in Facebook’s desktop news feed. You can use the extension to highlight the ads as you scroll through your feed, see the ratio of ads to organic posts and share your anonymous ad load stats to a database that I’ll be using to calculate Facebook’s average... [...]

Tom Kuhr says, “Your brand might be doing an excellent job of maintaining your main Facebook Page, but you may have overlooked the deeper, more personal interactions happening on your Local Facebook Pages. Due to the rising use of mobile phones, Local Pages have five times more reach than national Facebook pages and eight times more impressions.Today, there are more than 60 million active Business Pages on Facebook, and 78 percent of local mobile searches result in offline purchases. With the right tools, you can drive more sales by directing users to your in-store locations.Maximize the... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “A day after Matt Britton, Google’s EMEA head of operations, apologized for advertisers’ ads appearing adjacent to extremist content — after a stream of advertisers announced they were puling ad from Google’s ad networks — the internet giant’s chief business officer announced new brand safety controls.As Marketing Land has reported, the Google Display Network includes many extremist sites propagating right- and left-wing ideologies, hoaxes and misinformation. The company updated its policies to address mirepresentative sites in November but did not address... [...]

Tim Peterson says, “LinkedIn continues to cross off the checklist for assembling a modern digital advertising business after pressing reset a year ago.Later this year LinkedIn will once again let businesses target the people who visit their websites with ads on the Microsoft-owned, business-centric social network. On top of re-adding website retargeting — which is already offered by Facebook, Google, Twitter and Pinterest — LinkedIn will also enable business to target ads based on people’s email addresses, as its aforementioned rivals already do.LinkedIn’s plans are detailed in... [...]

Tom Kuhr says, “Your brand might be doing an excellent job of maintaining your main Facebook Page, but you may have overlooked the deeper, more personal interactions happening on your Local Facebook Pages. Due to the rising use of mobile phones, Local Pages have five times more reach than national Facebook pages and eight times more impressions.Today, there are more than 60 million active Business Pages on Facebook, and 78 percent of local mobile searches result in offline purchases. With the right tools, you can drive more sales by directing users to your in-store locations.Maximize the... [...]

Tim Peterson says, “Now more marketers can set up shop on Instagram without cutting the Facebook-owned photo-and-video app a share of the proceeds.After testing shoppable organic posts with 20 brands since November 2016, Instagram is opening up the feature so that more businesses in the US can augment their photos with product information and links to buy the items on their sites. The company is also introducing a self-serve tool to make putting a product up for sale as easy as tagging a friend in a photo.Starting today, any apparel, jewelry or beauty brand in the US that has uploaded... [...]