Click Through Reads #75: TikTok Branded Mission, LinkedIn Business Manager

We’re back with another week of Click Through Reads! 

This week, TikTok announced a new ad product to connect brands and creators without an agency. The product aims to create a new way to crowdsource branded content.

It was a big week for LinkedIn with the announcements of Business Manager, a comprehensive dashboard designed to simplify the marketing efforts of B2B professionals, and Cost Cap Bidding.

It’s time to start preparing for new conversion tracking in Google Ads, as Google announced that “imported leads” will be replaced starting in July 2022.

Let’s dive in!

TikTok Launches Branded Mission, A New Way To Crowdsource Creatives

TikTok recently announced the launch of a new ad product called “Branded Mission” to connect brands with creators directly without going through an agency. With the new ad product, advertisers can crowdsource content from creators and turn top-performing videos into ads. 

For digital marketers, Branded Mission enables brands to invite creators to contribute to a campaign. For example, brands can: 

• Attract creators to participate in branded campaigns: Within the creator community, brands will develop Mission briefs for the community to participate in.
• Let creators tell an authentic, relatable brand story: Creators can pick and choose what Branded Missions truly inspire them and that they want to be a part of.. 
• Reach out to a more diverse group of creators: Brands now have more opportunities to discover and engage with a broad ecosystem of talented creators who are the main drivers of culture on TikTok.

Branded Mission gives even more creators the opportunity to create branded content and be rewarded. All creators 18 and older with more than 1K followers can now participate in Branded Missions. If selected by a brand, the creators will benefit from a cash payment and boosted traffic.

Branded Mission is now in beta testing and available to brands in more than a dozen markets. TikTok says the new ad product will be available in additional markets starting in late 2022. 

LinkedIn Launching Free Tool For B2B Professionals

LinkedIn is launching a free tool called Business Manager designed to simplify the marketing efforts of B2B professionals and allow large organizations to manage their LinkedIn activity in one place. Bringing tools from Campaign Manager and LinkedIn Pages into one dashboard, advertisers can:

• View and manage your team, ad accounts, pages, and business partners
• Share audiences for ad campaigns across accounts 
• Navigate across Business Manager, Campaign Manager,  and LinkedIn Pages in one place
• Change settings across accounts such as permissions, billing, and the ability to download your monthly invoices directly from the platform

LinkedIn Business Manager is available as part of an early test for select enterprise customers. It will be available to businesses worldwide ‘in the coming weeks.’

Qualified Leads and Converted Leads

Google is making changes to conversion actions. Google Ads has replaced the “imported leads” conversion category with two new goal types:

• Qualified lead - A qualified or “interested” lead helps track Google generated leads that have also been further qualified offline (outside of Google Ads) in your customer relations management (CRM) system or internal lead generation system.
• Converted leads - A converted or “closed” lead helps track Google generated leads that have completed a chosen step in the lead conversion process, typically offline (outside of Google Ads). This step can be designated as the completion of a sale, an offline or online closed deal, or any step you define as “conversion.

These leads allow Google Ads to acquire more information and optimize campaign performance. You can also accurately identify the most promising Google generated leads using your offline conversion data and optimize towards a deeper lead-to-sale funnel events.

You can update your existing ‘‘imported leads’ conversions starting now or allow them to update to converted leads automatically beginning in July 2022.  

LinkedIn is Gradually Rolling out Cost Cap Bidding 

LinkedIn recently started rolling out a cost cap bidding strategy that allows advertisers to set a cost per result amount. LinkedIn then uses that benchmark when setting and adjusting bids for campaigns in the ad auction. 

When launching a new campaign with cost cap bidding, the campaign will go through a 7-day learning phase allowing the system to gather data to optimize the campaign’s performance. It’s important to note that editing, pausing, or restarting the campaign will reset the learning phase. 

This new bid strategy allows advertisers to optimize for the desired cost per acquisition result. LinkedIn states that the system will try to stay under that by first going after the lowest cost events available. The average cost per result may fluctuate based on multiple factors. 

Cost cap bidding is available for the following campaign objectives and optimization goals: