Click Through Reads #71: LinkedIn Feed, Google My Ad Center

No one wants to waste time looking at posts or ads they aren’t interested in while scrolling on social platforms or the web. This week, we have updates from LinkedIn and Google in the ever-changing quest to keep users engaged.

LinkedIn has been making updates to improve the quality of the feed for users. By devaluing lower quality posts and letting users hide content they don’t want to see, feeds should become more relevant.

Giving users more control and improving feed relevance also benefits advertisers through better insights and targeting. Google also announced updates in this area with the introduction of My Ad Center. This strategic tool allows users to select topics they’re interested or disinterested in, resulting in stronger inputs for driving targeted ads.

If these updates have piqued your interest, dive into the details below.

LinkedIn Algorithm Will Start Devaluing Polls

Due to user feedback, LinkedIn has announced it is now reducing the visibility of several types of content in its feed, including polls and engagement bait. LinkedIn said users find these types of posts that exist solely to boost reach to be “misleading and frustrating.”

The types of content that LinkedIn is reducing consists of: 

• Low Quality Content - Any posts that explicitly ask for or encourage engagement, such as comments or reactions, will have less visibility in feed. 
• Polls - LinkedIn has improved its filtering, and promises to show only “helpful and relevant” polls from people in your network. 
• Irrelevant Updates - Linkedin will reduce how often users see a connection congratulate someone on “recent job change” posts and try to show “more targeted activity” from your network. 

In addition to algorithm feed changes, LinkedIn is giving users a way to hide what they don't want to see. All individual posts will include an “I don't want to see this” option. You can limit content by author or topic, or choose not to see any political content. 

LinkedIn hopes these changes will result in a feed full of relevant, reliable, credible, and authentic content. 

Google Introduces My Ad Center 

Google introduced My Ad Center at the Google I/O event this year. This is a strategic tool that allows users to make selections in terms of the ads they are interested or disinterested in. This feature will give advertisers more control over their target audience, specifically when Google moves away from cookie tracking next summer. 

Google users will be able to dictate which brands and topics they like, as well as the amount of personalization they are comfortable with for their ad customization.

My Ad Center will launch later this year, replacing Ad Settings and About this Ad. This is much different than the Topics targeting within the Privacy Sandbox now being tested, as the inputs are dictated directly by the user. The key difference is that the user would be directly providing Google with the inputs to help drive targeted ads.

Google Ads Rolls Out a New Script Experience

To make Google scripts easier to work with, Google is rolling out a new script experience. New features and performance improvements include:

Entities

Google has removed the limitation on entity processing, and you can now process more entities in the same amount of time, helping advertisers work at greater scale. 

Validation

Script validation checks if your script is working without errors and ensures that the output is what you expect before it runs.

Google has improved the validation process to ensure that account and campaign limits are respected, keyword bids don’t exceed their campaign budget, URLs are properly formatted, and more.

Support for Bidding Strategies

As a reminder, legacy scripts will be going away on October 31st, 2022.