In Today's Issue

• How Google’s Ad Layoffs Will Affect Your Campaigns

• Google’s New ‘Sales Event Friendly’ Ad Additions

• WhatsApp Adding Voice Updates, Polls, and More

• Instagram Now Lets You Cancel Uploads

• YouTube Site Delays Are Not Part of a Sales Push

  • YouTube Layoffs

• How Did that Snoop Dogg Campaign Go? Meh.

How Google’s Ad Layoffs Will Affect Your Campaigns

Every other week, 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 (affiliate link).

In this conversation, Tod and Jyll Saskin-Gales discuss the recent layoffs in Google's Ads Sales Organization and how it affects marketers.

Jyll provides insights into the difference between Large Customer Sales and Google Customer Solutions, as well as the shift from one to the other. She also explains the role of Google Customer Solutions and the impact on service levels for different types of advertisers.

Jyll also shares her observations on the post-January 1st ad market on Google.

• 00:00: Introduction and Background

• 01:25: Difference between Large Customer Sales and Google Customer Solutions

• 02:31: Shift from Large Customer Sales to Google Customer Solutions

• 03:36: Role of Google Customer Solutions

• 04:26: Impact on Marketers and Service Levels

• 05:20: Post January 1st View of Google Ads

Be sure to check out Jyll’s walks Inside Google Ads training program (affiliate link).

Google’s New ‘Sales Event Friendly’ Ad Additions

Google Ads is rolling out a helpful way to quickly schedule changes to your Responsive Search Ads to account for sales or other events.

Three campaign-level headlines and two campaign-level descriptions can be scheduled if you have assets that you want to show during a specific time period. These can be pinned to certain positions and will be applied to all enabled RSAs within the campaign.

To see if it’s been activated on your account, look under Assets, and you should see Headline and Description with a little green NEW tag. Some people have actually had this in their account for a month, but it’s only now being really mentioned by Google.

The new interface will let you add a headline to a specific campaign, set a start date and, optionally, an end date.

One person on a LinkedIn post about this mentioned that they’re seeing more data on those assets than they’d have expected, including how many conversions are brought in by those specific headlines and descriptions. 😁

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WhatsApp Adding Voice Updates, Polls, and More

WhatsApp channel owners now have the ability to share voice updates with followers, a move likely to benefit podcasters who might want to offer episode previews.

Already, about seven billion voice messages are exchanged daily.

Polls have also been added to Channels, offering a new way for brands to interact with their audience beyond the previous emoji reactions.

Also, channel updates can now be shared on your personal WhatsApp Status, similar to Instagram's feature allowing users' posts from Channels to be added to Stories.

WhatsApp Channels were initially launched in Singapore and Columbia in June last year, and then rolled out globally in September. At first, they permitted only one admin. Now, up to 16 admins can manage each channel. Owners can invite others to become admins via the “Invite admins” option on the channel description page.

Meta says WhatsApp Channels have more than 500 million monthly users.

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Instagram Now Lets You Cancel Uploads

Instagram now has an Undo button. This week, the app added the ability to pause the upload of Stories mid-process. This, of course, good for catching errors or issues before the story becomes visible on the app.

It’s in the form of a button that will stop the publishing of a Story after a user has pressed "Share." 

This is a nice addition for both social media managers and regular users, who — let’s face it — sometimes make little mistakes like forgetting to tag profiles.

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YouTube Site Delays Are Not Part of a Sales Push

YouTube has been under fire for seemingly slowing down their web site for people who try to watch videos with an ad blocker on. The site itself even hinted it was doing it, with a message telling people to expect reduced performance.

Many people found the site to be nearly unusable — with long buffering times, errors, and incomplete page loads.

But now, it seems the problem comes not from YouTube but from the ad blockers themselves — specifically, the popular extensions Adblock Plus and AdBlock.

The bug has since been fixed in updates for both apps, so updating should restore smooth streaming. Interestingly, this isn't the first time these extensions have been criticized for resource hogging, with another free option, uBlock Origin, often cited as a lighter alternative.

Always good to remember that sometimes the real culprit might be lurking within your own browser extensions.

YouTube Layoffs

Not related to this technical issue, YouTube today confirming it is laying 100 people off. All told, that’s more than 1,000 workers laid off at Google in the last week alone.

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How Did that Snoop Dogg Campaign Go? Meh.

Rapper and cannabis enthusiast Snoop Dogg recently took part in a marketing campaign for Solo Stove, a company specializing in smokeless fire pits.

In November, Snoop announced he was "giving up the smoke," which later was revealed as a promotional stunt for the company. It was seen as a clever campaign, and was even ranked as the 18th best ad campaign of the year by Ad Age.

So, the sales must have been bigger than Snoop’s bong collection, right?

Actually, no. Apparently the collaboration — which must have cost a small fortune to get Snoop involved — did not really boost sales.

And so, the CEO is out, being replaced this week by another executive.

Though the partnership with Snoop Dogg didn't significantly increase sales, it wasn't without some success. The campaign did raise Solo Stove's profile, gaining 60,000 new social media followers the day after the ad release.

snoopdogg

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