Expanded Trends tool arrives, along with a Conversion API
Want to know what’s trending this fall? Ask Pinterest.
The platform just announced an expanded Pinterest Trends tool that helps you find out what type of content is popular so you can promote the right pins… and maybe even go viral.
So hot right now: The Pinterest Trends tool—previously available in the US, UK, and Canada—will expand to 30 additional countries with three new features:
- A widget on Pinterest homepage that shows what’s trending among your audience in the past 90 days.
- Trends by demographics to help you filter by age, topic, time, and place.
- Seasonal trends so you can align your content calendar to when users are most engaged with various topics.
To analyze pins and wins, Pinterest also launched a new API for Conversions that helps advertisers securely and reliably connect their data to the platform.
It’s a tagless, server-to-server solution with promising early results so far. It may help you in both lower funnel actions—such as checkouts—and full-funnel actions, like add-to-carts.
Why we care: The new API for Conversions and Pinterest Trends tools could improve your tracking capabilities and allow you to analyze and predict your audience behavior.
Besides being a good improvement, it comes at the right time for the holidays.
E-COMMERCE
How will your target audience shop this BFCM?
Despite the economic forecast, we just looked out the window and… yep, people are definitely still shopping.
In fact, 65% of shoppers plan to spend the same or more during holidays according to research by Klaviyo and Qualtrics.
Here are a few lightbulbs from their study:
- By generation, millennials and Gen Z are more likely than boomers and Gen X to increase their holiday shopping, especially in hobbies, home decor, and jewelry.
- By relationship status, inflation may affect partnered people more than singles, but they will still look to spend more on stuff like jewelry and electronics.
- By family status, inflation is affecting parents more than any other demographic. When they spend, it’ll be mostly on fitness, jewelry, and electronics.
- By household income, households earning less than $75k a year are deeply affected already, while those earning $200k–$500k are the least affected by inflation.
Why we care: Hey, these Q4 sales predictions are getting… confusing. Some say they’ll grow. Others say they’ll shrink?
Use the stats to be aware of the market conditions, but mostly rely on your own numbers. The numbers talk about the average business. But if you have a great offer and brilliant marketing… you can do way better than “average”.
And speaking about BFCM, here’s something that can help…
SPONSORED BY UPFLUENCE
How 1600+ brands are boosting Q4 sales with influencers, the easy way
Stop us if you can relate: It’s Q4, just a month until Black Friday, and your brand still needs to set up campaigns with influencers… But, is there enough time?
First, you have to find an influencer that matches your brand. Then you have to make sure their followers and engagement stats are real. And then, you have to make sure they can make great content.
Relatable, right? There’s an easier way…
This Q4, over 1600 brands are scaling their influence campaigns effortlessly thanks to Upfluence’s suite of discovery and recruitment tools.
- You get access to a database of pre-vetted influencers. You can be sure you’re investing in a creator with genuine followers and engagement.
- You can clearly see their profile performance metrics and get advanced audience demographics.
- You can track ROI and sales.
And you can create and run an affiliate program right within Upfluence.
One warning: You have to be able to handle a lot of pats on the back and high-fives when your team sees the results you get with Upfluence!
Turn influencer marketing into your top channel in Q4 2022.
META
When to use Facebook’s new Advantage Custom Audiences
Did you hear? Facebook started rolling out this new feature recently.
It uses automation and machine learning to expand your custom audience beyond what you’ve initially targeted and improve performance.
Sounds great on paper!
But while it’s tempting to try out every new ad feature, the question is: Should you? And if so, when?
Well, according to Jon Loomer, who covered this in his recent article, you should use Advantage Custom Audiences (ACA) only when you’re running prospecting ads.
Here’s why:
- Advertisers treat small custom audiences the same way they do broad targeting. If you spend $100 per day, you’re going to exhaust that audience and push up your costs per mille (CPM).
- ACA allows you to expand that audience gradually—and only if the data says it improved results. This can improve your frequency and CPM.
When you shouldn’t use it: Jon says it doesn’t make much sense when you’re remarketing or have a very specific message.
Take abandoned carts or upsells, for example. These ads are quite specific and would only make sense to your existing custom audience.
That’s why sometimes it’s better to keep this feature off.
Also, consider privacy and transparency. Most data now stays in the dark due to privacy regulations. So while ACA may appear to work, you may not be able to prove it.
You won’t know if the audience is expanded, or by how much, or how many results came from expansion… which makes it a heck of a difficult task to track.
If Meta comes up with a breakdown showing performance of your ACA, that could make the feature much more attractive… and more useful, too.
Until they do, try to limit ACA to prospecting. It may help your campaigns… even if you won’t be able to prove it.
SPONSORED BY WORLD BUILDERS
The one skill every marketer should study
As marketers, we use storytelling every day. Naturally, we should be a student of it as well.
World Builders, a free weekly newsletter, does a wonderful job breaking down the craft into practical and actionable takeaways.
Whether you’re a marketer figuring out your brand narrative or a founder getting your product off the ground, you’ll find many lessons worth revisiting here.
THE CREW’S INSIGHTS
For high-converting social proof, kill the wall of logos and do this instead
It’s practically a religious ritual at this point:
When you build a landing page, you include a wall of logos using the biggest-name companies that have some association with your product.
Oh, some Apple Store employee mentioned they enjoyed your product? Boom. Apple’s going up on the logo wall.
And on it goes.
But logo walls aren’t the best way to build trust and drive conversions. We’ve become so accustomed to logo walls we forget they exist entirely. Our brains skim over them in an instant.
And logo walls are often dubious. We don’t know what they actually mean.
Want to know what high-converting landing pages use instead? Instead of a logo wall, they use pictures of real people.
Or, they use pictures of real people in tandem with a logo wall.
In general, one real person equals more credibility than multiple logos.
It’s even better if you can get one recognizable person.
IWhy pictures work better than logos: We implicitly trust people more than logos. Part of this is because of how humans work, and part of it is because we trust that if you’re using someone’s face, you probably have their approval.
Oh, by the way… We have insights like these because we spend hundreds of hours each year analyzing top brands for Stacked Marketer Pro, our paid content product.
Stacked Marketer Pro members have access to thousands of practical, useful insights like these. Interested? You can get access for a week for just $7.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
EMAIL DELIVERABILITY: You’re putting in the hours to create high-converting Black Friday email promos. If you don’t perfect your deliverability first, those campaigns might as well be in Klingon. This free deliverability course shows you everything you need to do before pressing “send”.*
TIKTOK: Old enough to stream? TikTok raised the minimum age from 16 to 18 for livestreaming after “incidents of abuse of teenage hosts.” Also, TikTok now allows users to host adult-only broadcasts… and no, not in an OnlyFans kind of way.
METAVERSE: Indian e-commerce heavyweight Flipkart is launching Flipverse, an “interactive, gamified, and immersive shopping experience” in the metaverse. Brands like Puma and Nivea have already partnered to set up stores. Interesting.
INSTAGRAM: Remember Myspace? Instagram is apparently working on a feature allowing you to add a song to your profile. Guess it’s time to finish writing our brand theme song…
*This is a sponsored post
BRAIN TEASER
How far can you walk into the woods?
You can find the answer here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Grape feeder wanted
Do you have gorgeous hands and a basic grasp of Greek and Latin?
Then you’re the perfect candidate for the “grape feeder role” at this posh London restaurant.
The restaurant offers “immersive experiences of Greek and Roman cuisine”—so obviously that should include someone who drops grapes into diners’ mouths.
If you’re down with that, you get free manicures as well as finest food and wine.
The only thing left is to be mentored by a person named Julius. Or Acacius. In 700BC.