Click Through Reads #68: WhatsApp Business, Microsoft Ad ETA Deadline

Hello our dedicated Click Through Readers,

This week, Microsoft announced they're pushing the sunsetting of ETAs back until the end of August. Although this news may be exciting for those who aren’t ready to say goodbye, Microsoft has reported some impressive RSA performance. 

Meta is making it easier for businesses to connect and build relationships with their customers with WhatsApp Business. Create a business portfolio, automated responses and streamline communication through this new update. 

I hope you’re all starting to get used to Performance Max campaigns, because this new update shows they are here to stay. Use new Performance Max tools to optimize for prospecting audiences and pull insight reports. Lastly, don’t forget to look into Google’s nine new policies advertisers must abide to! 

Your Starter Pack to Growing Your Business With WhatsApp

WhatsApp Business is a Meta service available for iOS and Android devices. It can highlight a business' products through a catalog and can streamline communication with customers during the shopping experience. It also allows users to leverage Facebook Ads to run ads that can start a direct chat with the company on WhatsApp.

First, you’ll need to set up an account by creating a WhatsApp Business Profile that includes important business information such as business hours, contact information and website. If you link the WhatsApp Business Account with a Facebook Business Page, any updates will be synchronized in both places. After linking, you can place a call-to-action button on your Facebook shop that opens a WhatsApp chat.

After building a catalog that serves as a mobile storefront, you can leverage tools that can streamline account management. The tools available allow businesses to add labels to keep messages organized, and to set up automated messages to ensure responsiveness. This can include friendly greetings,  first time messages or quick replies to FAQs. 

You can leverage a WhatsApp Business Profile through your Facebook Ads by boosting a Facebook post and selecting WhatsApp as the message destination. Alternatively, you can build an ad from an item in the WhatsApp catalog. The ad would highlight the product selected and include a WhatsApp chat call-to-action button. You can manage the business account and tools through the WhatsApp Web portal or in the WhatsApp Business App.

Microsoft Advertising Extends ETA Deadline

Great news for our ETA fans out there: The complete move over to RSA’s has been extended on Bing to August 29th, 2022. Starting on that date, RSA’s will be the only search ad type available for advertisers to create. 

Advertisers who’ve preemptively switched over to RSAs on Microsoft Advertising report an average increase in clicks of 17%, and of CVRs nearly 11%. These are some impressive metrics, especially at scale.

Once the big switch happens, ETA’s will remain live in your account but advertisers will no longer be able to create new ones. This soon-to-be legacy ad type will likely suffer from poorer performance as both Google and Bing permanently break away from this style. 

Performance Max Offers New Features and Insights

Performance Max is here to stay. Google has consistently invested and added new features to the campaign type as advertisers continue to test and provide feedback. 

The most recent update includes features to help advertisers optimize for prospecting instead of potentially retargeting converters.

• Customer Match Lists: Advertisers are able to upload first-party data and add them to campaigns as an audience signal, giving the platform data of who would be an ideal person to serve ads to.
• Conversion Tag: Advertisers can exclude converters based on their conversion tags so these users will not see ads from Performance Max campaigns.
• Google’s Auto-Detection Method: This method will have “built [a] new machine learning modeling to predict how likely a user is to be a new vs. existing customer for an advertiser to make up for low match rates.”

Two new insight reports are also now available for advertisers:

• Asset Audience Insights: This will help advertisers see what creatives (i.e. text, images, video assets) “resonate with specific customer segments.”
• Diagnostics Tool: This will alert advertisers to set up issues that might be hindering an optimized Performance Max campaign setup, and provide steps on how to fix ads not showing.

Lastly, a one-click upgrade tool is rolling out over the coming weeks so advertisers will be able to easily upgrade their Smart Shopping and Local campaigns once these are sunsetted.

Google Adds Nine New Policies to Their Three-Strike Ads System

Google announced a three-strike system to discipline advertisers who don’t follow the rules in July 2021, and began testing this system in September. Well, they just announced nine new policies for this rule, taking effect June 21, 2022. 

Advertisers can earn strikes for running advertisements that go against the following:

1. Compensated sexual acts
2. Mail-order brides
3. Clickbait
4. Misleading ad design
5. Bail bond services
6. Call Directories, forwarding services
7. Credit repair services
8. Binary options
9. Personal loans

As a reminder, here is what happens if your ads get flagged:

• Warning - The first time an ad violates one of Google’s policies, you get a warning and your ad is removed.

• First Strike - If you violate the same policy that you received a warning for within 90 days, the account will be placed on a three-day hold and no ads are eligible to run.

• Second Strike - If you violate that same policy, again, within 90 days, the account will be placed on a seven-day hold and no ads are eligible to run.

• Third Strike  - Violating that same policy, for which you received a second strike, within 90 days, the account will be placed on suspension.

If you don’t violate Google Ads policies for 90 days, the strikes will expire.