SEATTLE – Where Facebook ads were once a hotbed for Lookalike audiences and bottom-of-the-funnel conversion actions, it’s now a crowded space that enables ad blindness and brand apathy on a foundational level. That’s the view of Susan Wenograd, VP of marketing strategy at Aimclear, who delivered a session on optimizing social ads at SMX Advanced last week. What happened? For starters, an oversaturation of ads served to the same users means that Lookalike audiences are no longer as effective as they once were. Add that to an over-reliance on conversion-focused campaigns and Facebook’s removal o ..read more

Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The landmark law created a unified, pan-European approach to privacy and data regulation. It was designed to protect EU citizens against non-consensual data collection by global tech companies and give individuals more control over their personal data. It also carries potentially severe penalties for violators. Since being implemented last May, GDPR has impacted privacy debates around the world. It has also been an influence on California’s forthcoming CCPA, set to take effect next January. But has GDPR ..read more

As expected, Google announced coming changes to the way its Chrome browser handles cookies and addresses fingerprinting on Tuesday at its annual I/O developer conference. New tools in Chrome will allow users to block or clear third-party cookies more easily, Google said. The company also announced a browser extension that will show more information about parties involved in ad transactions and tracking. Chrome’s new cookie handling. Google said “blunt approaches” to cookie blocking haven’t been effective for users because they treat all cookies alike — from first-party cookies used to keep use ..read more

Quora’s Google Tag Manager integration. Pinterest and Quora are now approved Google Tag Manager vendors, making it easy for marketers to manage their Pinterest and Quora Pixels via Google’s platform. Why we should care The native integrations for Quora and Pinterest makes it much easier to set up those pixels in Google Tag Manager (GTM) to track ad campaign performance from those channels. No more having to create a custom HTML tag in GTM. Within GTM, you can set up your pixels from channels to track user behaviors such as viewing a piece of content, or adding items to the cart, without having ..read more