Using Google Ads to Target Your Competitors' Customers

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Today's News:

• GOOGLE • How to Target Your Competitors’ Customers

• LINKEDIN • Company Page Messaging Rolling Out

• YOUTUBE • For You Shelf a Little Less Personalized

• MICROSOFT • Head of Ads Division Leaves Role

• ECONOMY • Ad Market Keeps Climbing Up and Up

GOOGLE • How to Target Your Competitors’ Customers

Every other Wednesday, our Google ads correspondent Jyll Saskin Gales walks us through the latest platform changes. Jyll spent six years at Google in a senior ad role, and today runs the Inside Google Ads training program.¹

This week, Tod and Jyll discuss targeting your competitors’ customers in Google Ads. It is allowed, as long as you don't mislead consumers or pretend to be another brand.

In this conversation, we chat about:

• how to stay on the “right” side of Google policy

• whether “fair comment” can give you more wiggle room

• how to structure competitor-sniping campaigns in your Ads Manager

Be sure to check out Jyll’s Inside Google Ads training program¹

LINKEDIN • Company Page Messaging Rolling Out

LinkedIn is rolling out a welcome addition to its Company Pages — a better messaging system.

This has been in testing since last summer, but this week the company confirmed it is turning the new system on across all businesses.

The new system adds a “Message” button to a company’s profile page, much in the same way it appears on personal profiles. This acts the same way a Message button on a Facebook brand page does, and lets people start a conversation with whoever is managing your LinkedIn page.

You can turn this option on or off via the Inbox settings, and administrators will be able to see incoming messages in the same place their personal messages show up. And you can add labels to make it easier to keep track of common topics.

For now, though (as is often the case) the API appears to lag a bit behind the native site. So far, six platforms have been given the backdoor keys: Bird CRM, Brandwatch, Hootsuite, Oktopost, Sprinklr, and Zoho.

YOUTUBE • For You Shelf a Little Less Personalized

A strange decision by YouTube will give brand managers more control over their channel — but this might be control you don’t want to use.

As you may know, YouTube recently added a shelf on channels called For You. Unlike other shelves, like the Playlists shelf, you can’t really control what appears in the For You section. YouTube’s algorithm will show a different set of videos for each visitor.

But YouTube now is letting channel managers lock specific videos to that For You shelf.

This is good for control freaks, but comes at a risk, because the content you’re jamming there may very well not be something every visitor would be interested in.

Also, YouTube is now offering notifications when your upload pre-check is complete. To set this up, visit Studio mobile, tap your profile picture, tap “Settings”, tap “Push Notifications”, and select the “Policy” toggle button. Now, you can step away, and when the pre-check process is complete, you’ll be notified via Studio.

This is only an option, apparently, for monetized channels.

MICROSOFT • Head of Ads Division Leaves Role

Mikhail Parakhin, the head of Microsoft’s advertising division, is leaving the post to “explore new roles."

ECONOMY • Ad Market Keeps Climbing Up and Up

The U.S. advertising market surged by 10.4% last month over the same month last year, marking its strongest growth in nearly two years.

And despite the doom and gloom you may have heard about the state of marketing budgets, February represented the 11th consecutive month of growth for the sector.

The last time the market saw double-digit growth was two years ago, just before a decline led to a recession that lasted until about one year ago.

Now, that downtrend appears to be reversing, and analysts expect a strong year ahead, especially with political ad spending and major events like the Paris Olympic Games on the horizon.

Last month’s leap in ad spending is attributed not just to the top 10 ad categories, which saw a 7% increase, but significantly to the smaller categories, which grew by nearly 15%.