3 ways Facebook updated its Instagram Stories for business purposes

While Snapchat is gaining ground in social media advertising, Facebook launched 3 new features  for Instagram stories,  offering more and more possibilities for advertisers to promote their business.

1° Carrousel in Instagram Stories

Until now, Instagram stories were limited to one single medium (photo or video) with a maximum duration of 15 seconds. Now it is possible to use 3 different media, allowing to tell longer and more structured stories.

2°Sell Items in Instagram Stories

Next to Instagram Newsfeed ads, the feature is now available also in Stories that will contain shopping bag icons that users can click to see details about the product.

3° Instagram Newsfeed ads turned automatically to Instagram Stories ads

Now Instagram can turn any Newsfeed ad (video or photo) into a Story, if it fits on Instagram ratios. No need to develop any special content for this placement.  

In its competition with Snapchat, Facebook seems to be consistently offering new possibilities to advertisers. These new features will facilitate the use of this high impact format, and offer new traffic and conversions possibilities. But for now, these formats should mainly be used for awareness purpose. Performances in terms of traffic and conversions are not proved yet.

OATH : new buying mode for native formats

Oath (formerly Yahoo !) has changed the buying model of native formats. Through the sales house Skynet has now introduced 3 different ways instead of only one: depending on the campaign objective, native formats may be managed by CPM (cost per thousand), CPC (cost per click) or CPL (cost per lead). It is based on a new, more complex, method. There is no fixed price anymore before the campaign. Instead they launched a two steps process, when a campaign starts. First a test is launched on a fraction of the total committed budget and during a limited period. Based on that the CPM, CPC or CPL is determined. This rather sophisticated method will not facilitate planning of future campaigns. It heavily depends on the sales house, even though Skynet claims to better fit the objectives of the campaigns.

Trustmedia : (almost) same formats across platforms

For the “econewspapers” De Tijd & l’Echo, 3 materials are now required: paper, tablet and smartphone. Advertisers can  so take the full of the 3 platforms where the two titles are deployed. Beware: while full page ads are available on paper and tablet, the smartphone platform provides with a half page.

NRJ Vlaanderen with sales house VAR

While NRJ FR inventory is managed by RMB, and Nostalgie -in both languages- by IP, NRJ Vlaanderen that is run by Mediahuis and SBS will be commercialised by VAR. It has been long since the sales house of the VRT stations has been active for private interests. To remind NRJ Vlaanderen is about to start after the summer with combination of key city radios. Targetgroup : adults 14-44.  NRJ will have theoretical FM-reach of 65%. See our previous news on NRJ Vlaanderen.

In-Market Audiences for search now available in Adwords (and Bing)

You can now target users based on purchase intent signals and this is what you should know about it.

What are In-market audiences?

In-Market Audiences is well known and used in Adwords Display campaigns and targets consumers who are most likely to make a purchase based on intent signals such as search queries and website history of a user. There are multiple audiences available going from apparel to travel each with more detailed targeting options. The Consumer Electronics audience is for instance divided in audio, game consoles, televisions and more.

What can this mean for you?

In-market audiences allows you to expand the reach to those who may not have interacted with your site but are interested to buy your product or service. You can add similar audiences and in-market audiences together and it will be a great way to shift part of your budget on new customer acquisition. Testing will determine whether the categories of the in-market audiences match your product and make consumers convert so you can analyses and make the necessary bid adjustments if needed.

For SEA this is a new way of working by using broader (generic) keyword types and overlaying this with In-market audiences. This shifts the focus from specific keywords match types to a more machine learning approach, which in turn could prove successful in combination with smart bidding. A trend Google promotes more and more but Bing is also going the same direction by launching the same product in the US.