Click Through Reads #70: New Nextdoor Ads, Twitter "For You"

It’s news time Click Through Readers! 

This week, Twitter has adopted and expanded their display formats, even releasing a “For You” page. Google also has news on display formats: Responsive Display Ads will soon be able to show vertically, allowing for full-screen mobile ad inventory.

Nextdoor lends a helping hand to small and medium businesses, announcing new Nextdoor Ads - and Meta announced several new tools for lead generation forms, also aimed to help small businesses thrive.

Let’s get reading!

Nextdoor Launches New Ads Geared Towards Small to Medium Businesses

Last month, Nextdoor expanded their self-serve campaign management platform to now include Nextdoor Ads (in addition to Neighborhood Ad Center). Nextdoor Ads features three new ad types that were created with small to medium size businesses in mind. The ads in Nextdoor Ads are noticeably different from Neighborhood Ad Center in that these ad types can only show to users within a 30 mile radius of your business address.

• "Website visits" allows you to share a picture, short text description, and a link to your website or Nextdoor business page.
• "Sale or discount promotions" is the new version of Local Deals, where you can share a discount/promotion with a picture, a short text description, and a call-to-action button.
• "Messages from leads" is a text-focused ad where you can choose from pre-made prompts, create your own prompts or do a mix of both.

Follow The Leader: Twitter Expanding TikTok-Like View

Twitter is the latest social media platform to adopt and expand TikTok-like layout. The newly expanded and updated feature has a similar design to TikTok, including a “For You” page highlighting relevant matches to users based on popularity. Users are able to toggle between their “For You” and “Trending” pages, and further filter a personalized or top-trending feed or video content.

A challenge Twitter faces in comparison to TikTok is the loss of data on actions taken that are indicative or relative interests: there are multiple tweets on the screen at any given time, while TiKTok has a full-screen display of one piece of content. 

Twitter has announced the expansion to more users, along with a slightly updated layout after launching testing in December, 2021. This feature is not available for all users. 

Example

Meta to Expand Lead Generation and Customer Acquisition Tools

Meta has announced several new tools aimed to help small businesses thrive. These new features include some exciting additions to their successful lead generation forms. 

Advertisers focused on generating leads should be very familiar with Facebook and Instagram’s native lead generation forms, which have been around since 2015. In an effort to improve end-to-end management of lead generation, Meta has announced some new features that advertisers can expect to see roll out in the coming months.

Quote Request on Instagram

This feature will provide Instagram business pages with free tools, encouraging followers to fill out a brief form with fielding questions that help build a quote before a conversation starts. 

• This button can live on their profile page (similar to where the message button is now) and can also be used as a sticker on stories. 
• This should ultimately help with qualifying organic leads as they come in.
• This feature is still in beta testing with select business accounts.

Lead Filtering with Instant Forms

With lead filtering in Lead Ads Instant Forms, businesses will soon be able to prioritize the most promising leads.

Creative Flexibility

Meta is experimenting with a more flexible and customizable Instant Form that allows businesses to add more images and text to the form. 

This will enable businesses to share more visual information about their business and nurture people's interest.

Gated Content

Business pages will soon be able to provide exclusive, downloadable content to users that fill out a lead form.

This strategy is commonly used on a landing page experience for e-books, brochures, guides and more; but businesses will now have the ability to test this strategy directly within the platform while still capturing leads.

Partner Integrations

Meta has had the ability to connect lead forms directly to some CRMs for a while, but they have expanded their partnership to include even more CRM connections.

Google Responsive Display Ads Will Show Vertically

In the second-half of 2022, responsive display ads will be updated to accommodate any portrait image or video asset to allow for full-screen mobile ad inventory. This opens the door for more advertisers to lean into mobile-first advertising experiences. 

Up until this point, RDAs required a landscape or square image that Google used machine learning to adjust on mobile displays. With this orientation update, Google will also be able to create auto-generated vertical videos using existing assets. 

Also in this update: Google is introducing machine-learning, uncropping technology within RDAs to prevent excess white space in cases where all ad sizes are not uploaded. 

Initial testing shows that advertisers see 2x more conversions, on average, when adding a responsive display ad to an ad group with a static display ad.