Facebook now reaches 2 billion monthly users..Youtube next with 1.5 billion for June 2017

A comparison of monthly users for each social media app/site

Two billion makes Facebook the largest social app in terms of logged-in users, above YouTube’s 1.5 billion, WeChat’s 889 million, Twitter’s 328 million and Snapchat’s estimated 255 million (extrapolated from its December 2015 ratio when it had 110 million daily and 170 million monthly users). Beyond YouTube, only Facebook’s other apps have more than 1 billion, including WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, with 1.2 billion each. Instagram might soon join that club as it recently rocketed past 700 million. @techcrunch

Youtube's new monetization policy change - demonetizes "advertiser un-friendly" videos

Content that is considered inappropriate for advertising

Content that is considered "not advertiser-friendly" includes, but is not limited to:

1. Sexually suggestive content, including partial nudity and sexual humor
2. Violence, including display of serious injury and events related to violent extremism
3. Inappropriate language, including harassment, profanity and vulgar language
4. Promotion of drugs and regulated substances, including selling, use and abuse of such items
5. Controversial or sensitive subjects and events, including subjects related to war, political conflicts, natural disasters and tragedies, even if graphic imagery is not shown

If any of the above describes any portion of your video, then the video may not be approved for monetization. If monetization is approved, your video may not be eligible for all available ad formats. YouTube reserves the right to not monetize a video, as well as suspend monetization features on channels that repeatedly submit videos violating our policies.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278?vid=0-920040517880-1480833784726

According to YouTube, the company started rolling out improved notifications in Video Manager in an effort to make it fairer and clarify confusion in the creator community around its longstanding advertiser-friendly guidelines. The improved notifications are aimed at making it clearer to creators when a video is demonetized due to advertiser-friendly content concerns and making it easy for them to appeal.

Mobile | Google New Update - “Expanded Text Ads” (ETA)

Google has made a historic change to its creative format with the introduction of a mobile optimized format called “Expanded Text Ads” (ETA)

What Are Expanded Text Ads?

Expanded Text Ads are a mobile-optimized ad-format designed to maximize an advertiser’s performance in mobile search results. This is accomplished by providing the advertiser significantly more ad copy to highlight their product or service. Expanded Text Ads also apply to desktop search results.

This change is a big deal because it’s a fundamental shift away from the legacy AdWords text ad format that’s existed for well over a decade. As such, this change will require every AdWords advertiser to rewrite their ads to be ETA-compatible. To learn how to automatically do this, skip ahead to the end of this post.

What’s Changing, Exactly?


Advertisers now have two headlines instead of one, and these headlines are joined with a hyphen. The good news – this copy expansion allows ads to occupy 50% more space on the search results page. Early results indicate that this increased presence improves CTR, which makes sense when you compare the old format (left) to the new format (right):

Here are the nitty-gritty details:

• Headline 1 and headline 2 are 30 characters each. This is a 240% increase over legacy text ads, which historically had just one headline and a 25-character maximum.
• 
  
• For the description line, the character count is also increasing. Instead of two 35-character description lines, there’s just one that’s 80 characters.
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• The display URL will now be automatically extracted from your destination URL. You can set up to two path fields like “golf” and “shoes” 

A Positive Change, for Multiple Reasons

Why is this change a net-positive for advertisers?

• You gain a new, second headline.
• More characters for longer messaging increase the odds of connecting with your target audience.
• We’re seeing better overall performance in our early results.

Why is Google Making This Change?

A couple of obvious questions are: Why is Google making this change? And why now?

The short answer: Consumers have shifted to mobile as their primary method of accessing the Internet. And, advertising dollars are following in rapid succession. eMarketer estimates that in 2016, over 60% of all digital advertising spend will go to mobile. It’s also expected that mobile will continue to gobble up market share through 2020.

Google is staying ahead of this trend by shifting to mobile-optimized ads, which is consistent with the elimination of right-hand ads back in February. In the next 12-24 months, we should see more mobile-centric changes from all major publishers, as they train their attention on perfecting mobile monetization.

Marin Software has Boot Media that automatically rewrite your ads to be ETA-compatible. Clients on the original beta were able to see improvements of +100% CTR and +70% reduction in CPC.  Only early movers to ETA's will be able to ride this wave,

*Info taken from Marin and Google

OLD NOTES - SEM reporting channels' PRO v.s. CON - MSN Adcenter, Google Adwords, Marin

Reporting:

Here is a list of the different reporting systems we use on a day to day basis and some of the pros/cons (what they can provide and can’t).  Happy to review this today or tomorrow.

1. Hourly Report and IntraDay Report in LDS
1. Pros:  
1. Hourly by channel (SEM, Media, etc)
2. Shows landing page flow: GC -> rEC – rlead -> ulead -> umlead.  Another way to say it is: click from google (GC) -> user gives zip (rEC) -> user fills lead (ulead) -> lead gets sold (umlead).
3. Intraday is same.  Breaks out account level.
4. First indicator something isn’t right.
2. Cons: 
1. No revenue.
2. Account/channel level only.
3. No costs.
2. CMP Report in LDS
1. Pros:
1. Revenue for any date range. All sources, accounts, and adids.
2. Adds bounce rate and multiplier added.
3. Overall and Marketplace Margin.
4. Good for identifying tracking issues.
2. Cons:
1. Account/adid level only.
2. By day only.
3. Delayed Costs (1 day).
3. Publishers (Google Adwords and MSN Adcenter)
1. Pros:
1. Keyword level.
2. Sometimes has Conversions.
3. Hourly breakouts (with 2-4 hour delays)
4. True traffic (won’t see bots).
2. Cons:
1. Can’t see revenue
2. Slow to look at all sources or isolate drops.
4. Marin
1. Pros:
1. Cost and Revenue
2. Keyword Level
3. Any Time Frame
4. Makes Bid Recommendations
2. Cons:
1. 1 Day Delay in Data
2. Can’t do intraday or hourly