Three new digital advertising formats to try in Q4
Digital advertising giants continue to release new products and features to keep marketers engaged and support the brands investing on their platforms. Before marketers finalize their end-of-year plans, many should consider the newer releases from Google, Meta, and LinkedIn.
As the final months of 2023 approach, advertising strategies can take shape in many ways. Marketers may have found the right campaign mix throughout the year that is effectively pacing toward business goals, but if you are still looking for new ad types and campaign formats to help boost campaign performance, there are a few new offerings worth considering. Here are three new offerings from Google, Meta, and LinkedIn to help bring advertisers closer to their performance goals.
Google Demand Gen campaigns
Released in June, Google’s newest campaign offering, Demand Gen, is designed to help grow a brand’s influence and generate demand. The AI-powered campaign type will leverage YouTube, Discover, and Gmail inventory to position the brand in front of new audiences in awareness and consideration stages. Unlike Performance Max campaigns, which have similar inventory overlap, Demand Gen campaigns aim to improve a brand’s reach to consumers higher in the marketing funnel. If your brand is keen on ways to grow its reach and amplify messaging, Demand Gen is a natural fit to consider in your media mix.
It’s also worth noting that all Discovery campaigns will soon be forced to transition to Demand Gen campaigns. As of October 2023, advertisers can contact their Google Account team to upgrade their Discovery campaigns to Demand Gen; however, any campaigns that aren’t manually upgraded by January 2024 will be done so automatically in the initial months of 2024.
Meta Advantage+ shopping campaigns
The word “advantage” is everywhere across Meta’s advertising language. There are Advantage+ app campaigns and Advantage+ creative, but heading into Q4, the most relevant product in this mix is the Advantage+ shopping campaign (ASC). Focused on online sales, ASCs leverage machine-learning to optimize not only the campaign creation process but also the ad delivery. By giving advertisers the ability to combine prospecting and existing customer targeting within one campaign, they can determine the percentage of spend they want allocated to targeting existing customers in their ad account settings. This functionality proves situationally beneficial for advertisers consolidating their tactical approach for the purpose of more revenue efficiency. Advantage+ campaigns represent an attempt for Meta to build up some internal audience targeting tools following the general loss of targeting capability that has followed the platform throughout the decade. While marketers will lose control of targeting parameters by using ASCs, they will gain enhanced sales performance from their Meta campaigns given the greater scale these campaigns can achieve when leaning into automation. For brands with holiday seasonality, this is a new ad type that you’ll want to consider.
LinkedIn document ads
LinkedIn has long been a primary advertising destination for detailed and direct B2B audience targeting. Iterating on the popular lead gen ad experiences is the newer ad type, document ads. The ad experience looks quite similar to lead gen ads, but the key value of document ads lies in their ability to embed documents as gated content within the form experience of the ad. How does this work? Upon form submission, the individual can download the document right from LinkedIn rather than leaving the platform to access the content. This relatively low-friction experience will support brands that have thought leadership content to share and hope to use LinkedIn’s valuable audience targets to increase engagement with their content.
What marketers need to know
A core ethos of digital marketing is the constant experimentation of new product types and the quest for incrementality of key performance goals. Whether marketing objectives are emphasizing top-of-funnel activity or reengaging previous prospects, these newer campaign offerings open new avenues for testing and positioning your brand in front of target audiences. As with any new product offered by an advertising platform, approach the tests with an incrementality mindset, learning how the new elements perform in the short term and, if performance shows promise, lean into it more in the long run.
