This week on The PPC Show , Paul and JD break down the top 8 headlines and trends in ad tech and digital marketing.

Show Notes

LinkedIn Launches Audience Network To Serve Sponsored Content

LinkedIn launched the LinkedIn Audience Network, a platform enabling advertisers to serve sponsored content on sites and apps beyond its own feed.

6,000 LinkedIn advertisers have participated in our Audience Network beta program. On average, these advertisers have seen a 3-13% increase in unique impressions served, and up to an 80% increase in unique clicks.
For additional control, upload a block list of up to 20,000 URLS to prevent your ads from serving on specific publishers or entire IAB categories of apps and websites. Learn more about block lists.

IAB categories are way more detailed than FB and Google. (And Snapchat from two weeks ago.)

New AdWords Metric Shows How Often Your Shopping Ad Is In The Top Spot

help you get a head start identifying product data gaps and measuring your competitiveness in Shopping campaigns, we’re rolling out product status reporting and absolute top impression share.
Google recently launched Absolute Top Impression Share (ATIS) as a competitive metric for Shopping to give advertisers further insight into ad prominence within the product carousel. Advertisers will be able to see how often ads are showing in the most prominent position with the greatest potential for clicks and visibility. The ATIS metric can be found in AdWords Next and viewed for Shopping ads and Local Inventory Ads, across devices, and at the campaign, ad group and product group levels.

Bing Ads New Remarketing Bid Adjustment Opportunity

Using historical ad performance data, the remarketing bid adjustment opportunity will provide you with curated suggestions on how to adjust your bids to show your ads to the target audiences that are most important to you.
In an effort to help advertisers, Bing Ads will help set effective bidding strategies through remarketing bid adjustment suggestions in the Opportunity tab.

Bid adjustment suggestions will be based on historical ad performance data. Bing Ads will use this data to provide curated suggestions on how to adjust bids in order to get your ads in front of the audiences that are most important to you.

WhatsApp Announces Free Business App, Will Charge Big Enterprises

WhatsApp, Facebook owned, is gearing up to finally monetize its messaging app by charging large enterprise businesses for tools to better communicate with customers.

WhatsApp has tripled in size under relatively hands-off management by Facebook.

Instagram starts testing Facebook’s app-like Canvas ads within Stories feed

Facebook is bringing its most creative ad format to its most creative app. “We are beginning to test an integration of Canvas with ads in Instagram Stories. Since the launch of ads in stories, we’ve been focused on delivering business value to advertisers and Canvas offers a seamless extension of the full screen immersive experience, helping marketers tell compelling brand and product stories,” said an Instagram spokesperson in an emailed statement.

The test is limited to certain brands buying ads through Instagram’s API, but an eventual official extension of Canvas to Instagram should be something of a no-brainer. In April, Facebook plugged Canvas into its Marketing API

YouTube Users on iOS Can Now Live Stream Their Screens

Google has updated its YouTube app for iOS with the ability to live stream iPhone or iPad screens. Only verified YouTube users with no live streaming restrictions will be able to take advantage of this feature. Live streaming content on their screen, YouTube users can also use the device’s microphone and front-facing camera to add their own commentary.

Twitter is just randomly deleting people's lists – and no one knows why

Twitter has silently, and without warning, deleted reams of lists users have spent months curating. These lists are used by journalists, activists, and loads of other people, to organize and manage twits they follow and aggregate their tweets, links, photos, and videos.

Google Data Studio adds third-party data connectors

Google Data Studio, Google’s free tool for creating visual reporting dashboards, natively connects to other Google products such as AdWords, Analytics and Google Sheets. But importing data from other sources using Google Sheets is not always an elegant or comprehensive solution. On Wednesday, Google introduced a beta for third-party connectors.