Digital Marketing Industry Updates – August

Google Ads to block ad targeting based on age, gender, or interests of people under 18

With the influx of virtual schooling and online children’s entertainment and enrichment, Google is taking some necessary steps to ensure that children’s data remains protected and secure. From an advertiser’s perspective, Google is blocking ad targeting based on age, gender or interest for those under 18. Google is also including more safeguards towards the prevention of age-sensitive ad categories from being shown to teens. Lastly, Google is also now introducing a new policy that enables anyone under 18, or their parent or guardian, to request the removal of their images from Google Images results. There’s no cause for concern for advertisers, although we should expect some audiences to potentially be removed from ad targeting.

 

Attribution models now support YouTube and Display ads

Google recently upgraded all their Google Ads data-driven attribution models such that they now support both YouTube and Display ads. The purpose of attribution models is to help give you a better understanding of a customer’s journey towards an online conversion. The benefit is that they can help you analyse the engagement and conversions you receive from your ad campaigns and further optimise them towards maximum efficiency. In YouTube’s case, the data-driven attribution model also measures “engaged views”. Another benefit of this new update is that you can now view your Search, YouTube, and Display ads all in one place and gain a better understanding of the impact they’re making on conversions.

 

Instagram Now Testing Ads in the Shop Tab

To step away from third-party cookies and tracking across multiple apps, Instagram is testing ad placements in the Shop tab of their platform. These placements are available to a handful of retailers for testing in the U.S. However, there are plans of rolling these placements out globally in the coming months. The ads can be displayed in either a single image or a carousel of images. This spells good news for retailers and advertisers as it helps them better keep track of all activities happening within the Instagram app.

 

Facebook to Add Privacy Enhanced Technologies to Ads

Facebook is taking steps to move forward and develop its advertising platform so that it can further protect users’ private data while still be able to deliver personalised ads. These Privacy Enhanced Technologies (PETs) pull in techniques from cryptography and statistics to minimise the amount of private data being processed while still preserve critical ad functions like measuring engagement and personalisation. These PETs use on-device learning, meaning that the algorithm processes information on your device rather than storing your data on a remote server or the cloud, potentially minimising data and privacy breaches.

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