Hi there.

Welcome to Far From Shore.

Ever notice how the start of the holiday season seems to be creeping earlier and earlier every year? Not only did I spot some stores rolling out their holiday decorations before Halloween, but the neighbours have gotten theirs up and about since November 1st.

Maybe that makes me truly ahead of the curve, since I’ve had my lights out since last December.

In this edition, we take a look at a promising update in Google Ads, question whether Meta targeting is still relevant, and deep dive into four of the biggest platform’s holiday advertising guides.

Be sure to stick around for the coffee break at the end. Everyone needs a few minutes to themselves from time to time, don’t they?

Is Google Ads finally giving back some transparency with its key insights?

If one thing’s been consistent with changes to Google Ads over the years, it’s that Google’s been clawing back more and more transparency with its data and key insights.

We’ve seen less data on impression share breakdowns, search terms, and even however it is that Performance Max campaigns do the things they do.

Now, there might be a nice change in the other direction.

We recently spotted a piece over on Search Engine Land looking at how Google Ads is now showing specific competitor impact details in its Optimization Score breakdown.

In the example given, the seemingly-driven AI insight observiced how a campaign was losing impression share due to not only heavy competition for shared terms but specifically from “amazon.com.”

It's not clear how often we'll see insights like this, or how granular they will get. On our end, we haven’t seen this level of specificity yet with our Recommendations cards though.

We also wonder whether it will just be the big advertisers who appear in these snippets or will we even see when our local Mom & Pop's start going a little nuts with their bids?

Still, it seems like a move in the right direction and we’ll be excited when we finally see some insights like this.

Meta wants us to stop being picky with our targeting - should we?

If you’ve been using Meta Ads at all this past year, you’ve probably noticed how more and more of the older options and features have disappeared.

We’re talking countless interests and other minutiae that we used to stress over when creating audiences to populate all our lovely Ad Sets.

Replacing these prior manual options, of course, has been a stronger emphasis on Meta’s AI powered capabilities as rolled out through their Advantage+ offerings.

Like most AI components of advertising platforms, the rollout of Advantage+ is pretty much happening whether we like it or not, and maybe that might actually work out in our favour.

A couple months back, Meta marketing guru Jon Loomer wrote a thoughtful piece asking whether Facebook targeting still matters.

His piece was inconclusive, but definitely suggested there was the possibility that Advantage+ could work well if you’re only optimizing for conversion quantity rather than other factors or areas of more minute segmentation.

Even though Meta Advertising is not as big a part of our portfolio as other areas of marketing, we decided to toss our hat into the ring as well and run some tests of our own.

We built a campaign for one of our accounts, this time giving Meta full control of the targeting save for language and location.

The results?

For the first couple of days, it spent and spent, hitting it's target daily budget perfectly, but without producing any results.

Pretty disappointing start - so much in fact, I was tempted to pull the plug and roll my eyes at the suggestion that the AI could get good results with minimal effort from our part.

But then something surprisingly happened. The campaign started performing. And quite well.

The campaign currently has the best Cost per Acquisition (CPA) in the account, with CPA at half of what the next best performing campaign is delivering.

On the surface, it would seem that, given enough time, the Advantage+ audience can find its niche better than the ones we manually set.

A caveat, however.

While looking positive, there's only a month of data so far.

Plenty of things can happen with another month’s worth of data. It also remains to be seen whether it will continue to behave in the same manner as we get into the holiday season and everyone's online behaviour changes.

But we’ll keep you posted on the results over on our blog post as they come in.

We read the big holiday advertising playbooks so you didn’t have to.

Speaking of the holidays, did you notice how many of the big advertising players have started releasing annual holiday marketing playbooks?

This year, we got our hands on the advertising guides from four of the big players in the advertising space: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta.

Overall (and sorry for the spoilers), there wasn’t a lot of eye opening passages in these. About a third of the content is the usual fluff about data and holiday sales, the next third is trying to upsell us on AI or other campaign types, and the final third is actually stuff we can use - but it’s still slim.

In any event, we’ll go through with the main highlights and after each I’ll assign a totally, 100% not arbitrary letter grade to a couple of points about each so you know where they stand.

Microsoft

The first of our contenders, Microsoft, put together a slick and stylish holiday advertising guide this year around.

It's heavy on facts and data (reminding us that Copilot can answer basic questions about marketing, in case we’ve forgotten), but if it's not your first holiday rodeo, then there's not a lot that's in there is surprising ("people love discounts").

The same goes for actionable insights. So, if you were hoping for some new idea to try out for your Microsoft Ads this holiday season, you’ll probably be left disappointed.

Still, it does include a checklist to walk you through getting set up on Microsoft Advertising that could be useful if you're new to the platform or having tried expanding your reach there.

From our experience, Microsoft can be a useful secondary platform if you’re maxing out what you’re getting on Google or elsewhere. Don’t expect big numbers but if your target audience is in Canada or the USA you might be able to get a small trickle of additional sales or leads from it.

Rating

• Appearance: A-

• Actionable Insights: C-

• Ability to remind us that Microsoft Advertising Exists: A+

Google

Google didn’t go flashy this year with a big PDF the way Microsoft did. Instead, you can find the Google Holiday Advertising guide on what I believe is the same URL as last time around.

First and foremost, let it be know that Google does the unthinkable by having its calendar start the week on Monday rather than a Sunday.

That aside, they take the approach of offering a checklist rather than a guide for your marketing teams to go through as they prep for the holidays.

Their checklist is far more substantial than expected and arguably has too many items in it - especially if you're a small or solo marketing team running fairly straightforward campaigns.

Though one insight jumped out which I didn’t consider, is that they suggest holiday shoppers might be more worried about shipping and return policies this year than past ones (cost of living and all), so make sure those details are clear and easy to find.

Rating

• Appearance: B-

• Actionable Insights: B+

• Correctly starting their calendar week with Sunday: F

Meta

I never thought I'd say this, but Meta's holiday guide offerings might be the most valuable of the bunch so far.

Meta has a big page that goes over the main highlights like Google did while also offering a snazzy PDF just like Microsoft.

The PDF goes over pretty much anything an advertising might need to consider (especially if this is their first time really going all out for holiday advertising).

They also offer quick ideas for video content, campaign structure tips, and data that supports cutoff dates for holiday campaigns which is worth looking over.

Like the other two players we covered, the guide also serves to remind us how great their AI tools like Advantage+ apparently are (which, as I wrote above, might be surprisingly better than initial expectations).

Rating

• Appearance: A

• Actionable Insights: A-

• Ability to soften my eternal grudge towards Meta: B-

Amazon

Oh Amazon. Why does your guide to help boost seasonal ads look so low key and very much like your brand used to be?

Amazon’s page clearly involved the least amount of effort of the big four and acts as little more than a landing page to get sign-ups for their advertising services (which they do have, in case you’ve missed it).

The bulk of what’s here are some graphical representations reminding us how much people like to shop in certain markets. More curious is their decision to include some mini-testimonial cards of seller personas talking about their tips and experiences selling on Amazon. So, again, more reason to sign up I guess.

Honestly, if you’re a small merchant planning on boosting your Amazon sales, this page will likely convince you to start boosting products. For everyone else, we’ve probably already made up our mind whether the platform can reach our audiences or not.

Rating

• Appearance: B

• Actionable Insights: C

• Ability to get new merchants advertising: B+

Coffee Break

What’s an English word that has 5 letters but is pronounced as if it only had one?

I’ll give you a hint - it has something to do with the first letter in the word.