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Acquisition Channel Trends & Opportunities: Google, LinkedIn, Pinterest

Want to get more paying users? I've analyzed over 1800 marketing news from the past week, identifying the top 3 opportunities for founders that can help you get more paying users. Let's get started.

1. Google Ads Has a Bunch of Updates to Help You Get More Paying Users Faster

Google finished their Marketing Livestream last week, where they announced a slew of updates. Here are the most relevant ones if you're a founder:

  • Custom audiences (Google's version of Facebook Custom Audiences) are now available to nearly all advertisers;
  • Images extensions (an image appearing alongside your Google Ad) are also available globally.
  • New Google Maps ad formats: The company announced several of them. One of them is the navigational ad format, where a nearby business can show if someone's driving from location A to location B and has Google Maps navigation enabled.

The opportunity: In my Zero to Users report on acquisition channels that consistently work for founders, I've noticed that most people who succeeded with Facebook Ads used custom/lookalike audiences. If you're one of them, you'd definitely want to try Google's Custom Audiences, now that they're available to everyone.

There are also a lot more opportunities depending on your niche so take a look at the full overview of newly released features/ad extensions to get a better feel of what you can do.

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2. Doing Virtual Events? LinkedIn has a New Ad Format for You

It's called LinkedIn Event Ads.

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Where will those ads appear: Right in the LinkedIn event feed.

Can I measure the results of those ads? Yes. LinkedIn has also released an analytics tool, where you'll be able to see the reach, engagement, and firmographic makeup of event attendees.

The opportunity: Rishi Jobanputra, a senior director at LinkedIn, said that 60 brands created virtual events ads during the beta. Compared to LinkedIn’s Single Image Ad format, event Ads reduced cost per registration by an average of 40%. However, its important to note this number only occured during LinkedIn's testing - it might change now that the ad format is rolling out globally.

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3. Did You Know? Pinterest Has 5 Billion Searches Every Month

"There are now more than 5 billion searches on Pinterest every month." That numbers comes directly from an article by the Pinterest Engineering team.

Non-branded: 97% of Pinterest searches are non-branded, according to an advertising guide released by Pinterest in 2020. This means that people search for "small handbag" rather for a "michael kors handbag", using Pinterest for discovery.

The opportunity: I was aware that Pinterest was a big search engine, but wasn't ware it was that big. Compared to Google, they're still pretty small (Google does approximately 3.5 billion searches each day), but still, 5 billion is definitely a figure to keep your mind on before deciding to invest time on the platform.

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  1. 2

    Insightful post! Virtual events are all over my LinkedIn feed so I'm not surprised that LinkedIn offers a solution to promote them, it's a great idea.
    I Didn't know that Pinterest was that huge 👀

  2. 1

    Super helpful numbers here, thanks for the share Darko!

  3. 1

    Can't wait to see how the google ads update plays out! I've been using G ads for quite some time now for ruttl and it's been working out pretty well 👨‍💻

  4. 1

    darko, what are you building

  5. 1

    I am still interested in Pinterest -- this channel is underatted in my opinion. Is there any way that I can learn more about how startup founder can use it to find user and grow a business?

    1. 1

      I've been a lot of interesting rooms on Pinterest on Clubhouse.

  6. 1

    These are all good ideas, though it can get costly quick. Pinterest can be free, but it takes a lot to grow on there now. Either way, good thoughts!

    For now, My cofounder and I are sticking to mainly free methods for growth :P

    1. 1

      Well, at the end of the day it comes to making more than you spend.

  7. 1

    Isn't LinkedIn expensive? :/

    1. 1

      I actually did a Clubhouse room on these news, and a woman who marketed to minorities said she found LinkedIn cheaper than Facebook :O Was really surprising to me. So yeah, in many cases LinkedIn can be expensive, but it really depends on the niche.

  8. 1

    What do you think is the most important update for founders from the Google event?

    1. 1

      Well, there are different types of founders so hard to pinpoint to one news :)

      If you have a visual product, then Image Extensions might be the most important feature for you.

      If you have success with lookalikes on FB, then Custom Audiences will prob be the most important news.

  9. 1

    5 billion a month, that around 170 million searches a day :O

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