Last week saw a brand new batch of holiday updates from Meta to kick start your advertising game this silly season and Instagram’s official announcement of “Teen Accounts” with much stricter rules in place to keep teens safe. Find out all about these updates, how they might affect your business and much, much more in this week’s round of digital updates!

What’s new with Meta?

Advertise to Tourists with Meta’s Location Targeting Update!

Meta’s recent update to location targeting has both positive and negative implications for advertisers, particularly those in the travel and tourism industry.

Key Features:

• Expanded audience: Advertisers can now reach people who are interested in a location, not just those who live there or have recently visited.
• Improved performance: Meta’s experiments suggest that this update can lead to lower costs per result.
• Vertical-specific benefits: Industries like travel, entertainment, retail, and professional services are likely to see the most significant advantages.
• Cannot remove locals: this targeting cannot exclude current residents yet

Our take: Overall, while the update represents a step in the right direction, it doesn’t fully address the needs of all advertisers. For those in the travel and tourism industries, the updated targeting options will definitely be beneficial, but the limitations may still pose challenges.

Meta’s Holiday Updates!

Meta’s got some new tricks up their sleeve to help businesses rake in the dough this holiday season. They’ve made it easier for customers to use promo codes, send out more reminders about sales, and even added a way to target people who are planning a trip to your city.

Key features:

• Prominent promo code highlighting: Making it easier for customers to apply discounts.
• Enhanced reminder ads: Increasing the frequency of notifications to drive sales.
• Site links: Allowing businesses to add multiple landing pages to a single ad.
• In-store targeting: Helping businesses reach customers likely to shop in-store.

As per Meta about SIte Links:

“With site links, people can go directly to a specific landing page for various categories with just one click from the ad”

Recommendations for Businesses: These new features offer so many possibilities for your holiday campaigns and while some are more tourism-specific, the ability to include more reminders and guide customers to specific pages could be a valuable asset for many businesses

📔 Other noteworthy updates from Meta this week:

Meta has added a new metric to Ads Manager! Average Purchases Conversion Value calculates the average value of purchases made through your ad campaigns. This metric calculates the average value of purchases made through your ad campaigns. It can be found in the Performance section of Ads Manager and is calculated by dividing the total purchase conversion value by the number of total purchases. This metric provides additional context to the Conversion Value metric and can be used alongside Return on Ad Spend to evaluate the revenue-based performance of your e-commerce ads.

👀 Tests Spotted on Meta this week:

A new feature called “Event Details” has been noticed in some ad accounts when creating Sales campaigns with the Website conversion location. This feature allows you to include event details in your ads, such as a title, start or end time, and a reminder button

If you’re a business owner or marketing team that wants to solidify your point of difference, win customers and grow your market share — enquire now to meet your dream team.

What’s new with Instagram?

Instagram’s Teen Lockdown: What You Need to Know

It’s official, Instagram is introducing Teen Accounts! To address concerns about social media and online safety, a new experience for teens is being introduced with built-in protections. Teen Accounts will automatically place teens under 16 into the strictest settings, and parents can approve or deny changes to these settings. These changes are being carried out within 60 days in the US, UK, Canada Australia, and the EU. So here is everything we know so far!

Key features:

• Supervision Feature: Teens must accept a supervision invitation sent my their parent before the parent gain supervision access. Supervision abilities include seeing who your teen has been chatting to in the past 7 days (but not the messages), setting time limits and seeing browsed topics .
• Private accounts by default: All teen Instagram users will have private accounts by default. Teens under 16 need their parents’ permission to make their account public
• Messaging & Tagging Restrictions: Only users that teens follow will be able to send messages, tag or mention a teen account.
• Explore Preference: Teens will have more control over the content they see in Explore and recommendations.

Recommendations for Businesses: If your business doesn’t target teens, these changes probably won’t affect you much. We’ll keep an eye on how it goes and see if it changes anything. But if your business relies on teen customers, make sure your content is teen-friendly to avoid getting flagged and monitor your social media results to see if these updates impact your Instagram performance. If your engagement drops significantly, it might be time to adjust your social media strategy.

👀 Tests spotted on Instagram this week:

• Some users have noticed you can now add the Instagram camera to your lock screen on iOS devices!
• Instagram may soon let creators attach links to Reels 🔗
• Instagram added a new “Text-to-speech” feature for Reels on Android!
• Instagram will now let creators control the size of their broadcast channels. If a channel reaches its limit, new subscribers will be added to a waiting list until someone unsubscribes.

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What’s new with Google?

👀 Tests spotted on Google this week:

• Google Ads unveiled new AI-powered features aimed at enhancing advertising performance and ROI. Key updates include expanded generative AI tools for creative asset generation, improved performance insights, and greater campaign control. These innovations are designed to empower advertisers with more flexibility and insights, ultimately driving better results.
• Google Search is testing a new feature called “Recent Posts”! This search results carousel will display YouTube videos, TikTok videos, Reddit posts, or other “hidden gems”. This carousel is different from the existing “latest posts” carousel and has been spotted by multiple users on their searches.

What’s new with TikTok?

👀 Tests spotted on TikTok this week:

TikTok is testing a new feature that allows users to undo all edits made to their uploaded videos within the app. This will be especially helpful for those who create their entire video from start to finish within TikTok.

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📔 Other noteworthy updates or tests:

• Snapchat is testing several new features! These include AI-powered recommendations, expanded creator opportunities, new chat features, AR enhancements, and improved My AI capabilities. These updates aim to improve user engagement, facilitate brand partnerships, and enhance the overall Snapchat experience.
• Australia’s privacy laws are becoming stricter, requiring businesses to be more transparent about data collection and usage. Marketers must adapt their practices to comply with these regulations and avoid fines and reputational damage. By prioritizing data protection and building trust with customers, businesses can navigate the new privacy landscape successfully.

With Instagram making some big changes with teen-users, it will be interesting to see how this affects their platform. We definitely will keep an eye out to see if other platforms will follow suit! Feel free to sign up for our weekly updates here (plus so much more hot goss) so you never miss the best updates. AND don’t forget, if you do miss out you can always go back to last weeks blog posts here.

XOXO

Oh My Digital Team