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In today’s edition:

• 🤝 Today's Tip of the Day is for YouTube

• 🧪 A testing protocol for Meta’s AI-powered ads tools

• Facebook metric changes

• Shorts updates

• 🗞️ Additional industry news from TikTok, YouTube, and more

Want to tap into influential UGC? Looking for an easier way to work with creators who mention your brand or product?

Tap Into UGC Shorts on YouTube

Creator Partnerships is a beta feature in Google Ads that connects brands with YouTube creators who have already featured your products or brand in Shorts videos. 

The tool simplifies connecting with these creators and securing usage rights for their videos so you can manage seamless collaborations.

Here's how to get started:

1. In your Google Ads account, navigate to the "Tools" icon and click on "Creator Partnerships." 

2. Browse through the suggested Shorts videos featuring your brand.

3. Simply link the videos you want to use to your Google Ads account to incorporate them into your campaigns easily.

Today's tip was inspired by Social Media Examiner’s Editorial team and news from Google.

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Facebook and Instagram Ads Updates for 2025: What Marketers Need to Know

Are you struggling to keep up with the latest Meta advertising changes? Wondering how AI is reshaping the ads landscape?

For marketers who haven't recently embraced advertising on Meta platforms, particularly those who stepped back after the iOS updates, now is the time to reconsider. 

The potential reach is enormous, with over 3 billion monthly active users on Facebook and nearly 3 billion on Instagram. 

More importantly, Meta's advertising remains one of the most cost-effective options for reaching a target audience with paid social media marketing. Facebook ads expert Tara Zirker routinely sees averages of: 

• $20 cost per action overall on the platform

• $8 cost per lead

• less than $1 per click when targeting US markets

3 Advantage+ Features to Explore

Meta has introduced a suite of Advantage Plus features representing a significant shift toward AI-driven advertising.

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns

This feature represents Meta's fully automated solution for eCommerce businesses. 

The system uses a dedicated algorithm separate from other ad products and requires minimal input from advertisers–simply upload your creative assets and select your catalog source. The AI handles audience targeting, placement optimization, and delivery from there.

This feature works across various price points, even for products priced at several hundred dollars. However, it performs best for accounts with substantial historical data from which the AI can learn.

Advantage+ Placements

This optimization feature allows the algorithm to identify where your ads perform best effectively.

Zirker strongly advises against manually selecting placements, a practice she sees many advertisers still following. 

Her analysis of numerous accounts reveals that even with unrestricted placements, about 60-80% of the advertising budget typically goes to Instagram, where the audience is most responsive. At the same time, she’s found that Facebook audiences can sometimes be even more valuable than Instagram audiences for certain businesses.

This demonstrates the importance of letting the algorithm optimize across all available placements rather than restricting them based on assumptions.

Advantage+ Creative

According to Zirker, creative optimization should consume about 80% of your advertising effort, as it's becoming the primary differentiator in campaign success. Meta has developed sophisticated tools to better serve advertisers with tools to enhance ad creative automatically.

The system can now adjust image brightness, generate animations, add music, and more. One particularly powerful feature is the ability to take a basic product image and automatically generate various background settings for testing.

The system can also intelligently extend backgrounds to fit different placements while preserving critical elements like text and logos.

When you enable these enhancements, Meta will show you preview examples of possible variations and suggest using top-performing ads from previous campaigns. However, you won't always know exactly which enhancements will be applied to individual ads.

Advantage+ Ad Strategy Implementation: Budget and Testing

You'll need enough budget for at least 200 conversions per day during your testing period; if your cost per lead is $10, you should plan for a daily testing budget of $2,000. This might seem substantial, but it's necessary to ensure Meta's AI has enough data to optimize effectively.

From that budget, allocate 10-30% specifically for new features or approaches. 

For Advantage Plus Shopping campaigns, you might initially see negative ROI in the early hours, but profitable campaigns often emerge by the end of the 24-hour cycle.

• Review your initial ad performance 4-6 hours after launch and pause any ads showing no conversions.

• Pause any unprofitable ad sets at the 8-9 hour mark, though you can keep those close to profitability.

• By the 12-hour point, pause any ad sets that aren't definitively profitable.

• Make a final check at 14-16 hours to pause any ad sets that have dipped below profitability.

Through this testing process, you'll typically find that about 15 out of 20 initial ad sets are effective, and five can be permanently scrapped. 

Once you identify your winners, create new ad sets to replace the unsuccessful ones and continue the testing cycle.

Today's advice is provided with insights from Tara Zirker, a featured guest on the Social Media Marketing Podcast.

Metrics on Facebook: Facebook has announced that Views will become the primary metric for measuring content performance across all formats on their platform. For video content, the term "Plays" will be renamed to "Views," though the calculation method remains unchanged. For Stories, photos, and text posts, Views will replace Impressions, with the key difference being that repeat views from the same user will now be counted individually. The platform is also updating its video metrics, with "Minutes Viewed" and "Average Minutes Viewed" replacing "Watch Time" and "Average Watch Time" respectively. Standard engagement metrics such as Reach, 3-second views, 1-minute views, Reactions, Comments, and Shares will remain unchanged. These updates will be rolled out across Insights in Meta Business Suite and Professional Dashboard in the coming weeks, with Views being integrated into all advertising measurement tools across all ad formats. Source: Facebook

Ads on Threads: Multiple sources report that Meta will bring ads to its Threads platform in 2024. Source: The Verge

Threads Drafts: You can save up to 100 drafts for Threads posts. Source: Threads va Threads

TikTok Affiliate Monetization: TikTok is exploring new ways to integrate shopping into its platform with new affiliate partners such as Amazon, LTK, Target, Impact, Rakuten & more. Creators in the test group can monetize their content and earn income through their organic videos without relying on link-in-bio tools or promo codes. The feature, separate from TikTok Shop, allows creators to search for products within TikTok's interface and add links during video creation. These links appear under a "Related Product" or "Click to View" label in the comments section. Source: TechCrunch

TikTok Symphony Creative Studio: The AI-powered video creation platform now available to all advertisers transforms basic inputs like product URLs into TikTok-ready videos within minutes, featuring licensed assets and automatic AI-generated content labeling. Key features include Generate & Remix Videos, Avatar Videos (with stock and custom options), translation and dubbing capabilities, and a comprehensive video editor. The platform is accessible to all TikTok for Business users, with additional features like Refresh Videos and Generate TikTok Scripts planned for future release. Source: TikTok

YouTube Shorts Updates: YouTube is implementing changes to ensure that Shorts videos between 1-3 minutes in length will be properly displayed across Channel Pages, Studio, and subscriptions. This update is expected to be completed by early December. Additionally, a new feature is rolling out that allows viewers watching Shorts to set notifications for upcoming scheduled live streams happening within the next 24 hours. This feature works for any stream orientation and includes Premieres. Source: YouTube

Did You Know?

Hummingbirds vocalize with a variety of chirps, squeaks, and other sounds.