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This time, copying competitors didn’t work
Buy them! If that doesn’t work, copy them. So far, this was a very successful business strategy for Facebook.
But not even Facebook has a 100 percent success rate with that approach. One feature that didn’t work out as well as Facebook would have liked, is Facebook Watch.
Facebook has invested more than $1B buying original shows and content for Watch, but it looks like, a lot of users are not familiar with the Watch brand.
Launched in 2017 and positioned as a new source of revenue, Watch’s performance is below expectations. With teens losing interest in Facebook, the company is now focussing on video content for older users.
Not only would Facebook pay for some shows, but video publishers would also be able to earn about 55 percent of the ad revenue on average.
Yet, the reality for publishers is that they make more by uploading the same video to YouTube, Amazon and other video platforms than selling the series to Facebook.
The biggest problem seems to be that people are not in the mindset of consuming longer videos when they go on Facebook. People go there to connect with friends and only watch video content if someone else posts it on their NewsFeed.
Missed shot, Mark!
6 geos to keep an eye on for FB Ads!
Facebook recently released a market snapshot of its user base in some of the European countries for Q3 of 2018 and it seems quite intriguing! They are basically giving you a hint to add more geos to your ad-sets *wink*.
According to the report, Facebook has around 17M monthly users from Russia, with around 5.6M using the platform every day. While 14M users access it from a mobile device every month, 4.8M use a mobile device to access it on a daily basis.
In Poland, 16M users are active on its platform every month and 88% of them use it on a daily basis, with more than 90% of them accessing it from a mobile device and about 86% of them use it every day.
In the Czech Republic, 5.2M users access the platform on daily basis with 79% of them actively engaging on the platform every day. With 4.5M users accessing it from a mobile device, the majority of them use it on a daily basis.
As far as running campaigns to these audiences is concerned, it does work well with ads in English too, though some follow marketers discuss in the Facebook Ads Experts Academy group that if you really want to go deep, using local languages proved to be better.
They also prefer to use local payment methods as opposed to Mastercard/Visa especially in Germany and the dispute/return rate can be a little higher than US/UK users. Though, Stripe as a payment gateway works well too.
So, if you are looking to launch or scale your campaigns in these lesser-known territories, the key takeaways from this report are to focus more on mobile traffic and using ad communication in local languages for higher ROAS.
GENERAL
Google versus Russia – who wins?
Russia initiated a civil action against Google over the search engine’s alleged failure to censor search results in the country. Basically, Google has not adhered to a registry of banned websites.
The fine amount? Just $10K for Google. Peanuts! But this time due to a weaker position of Russia: the only tools the nation has to enforce its data rules are fines that typically only come to a few thousand dollars. Nice for you, Big G!
But Russian authorities plan to change the law to allow them to impose more significant financial penalties on firms that fail to comply with its laws. The proposed increase allows fines of up to 1 per cent of global revenues.
In Google’s case, that would be more than $1B. Can’t talk about peanuts anymore…
How can Amazon Machine Learning help your business?
Curious to learn and expand your horizons on Machine Learning? For free? It could help you grow your e-comm biz too!
Previously exclusive to its employees only, Amazon has announced that they are making a range of its machine learning courses available for free for everyone and anyone interested! All you have to do is sign-up on their AWS platform and the courses are yours.
With over 30 different courses and about 45 hours of content in the form of videos and lab tests, it’s relevant for everyone from beginner to an advanced learner.
Though these courses are free and available to anyone, the most likely to benefit from this are developers, data scientists, data platform engineers, and even general business professionals like us.
Covering basic concepts, building on real-life examples, or even predicting entertainment award nominations, they have it all covered. Just let your freak flags fly!
How can it be helpful for your e-comm store?
Well, some of the examples include predicting gift-wrapping eligibility for your store and optimizing delivery routes for faster shipping times. It is just a totally different angle for being innovative while scaling that business of yours!
That’s not all, there is also an exam that gets you “AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty” certification, for the price of $300 (currently discounted by 50%, down to $150).
Interested in learning more about machine learning? We have a few more recommendations!
Google has also partnered with Coursera to launch a free crash course and a paid specialization course on machine learning recently. Microsoft also has a similar paid program to train developers on the topic.
There are a lot of learning options available out there to stay ahead of the market and growing your business exponentially, really! But you also have to get geeky with it…
Why you should personalize your store
Given that we are in the e-commerce/Amazon mood, here is something that Amazon does really well. And it’s very profitable: personalized user experience.
Ever thought about it?
You should: in the last year, businesses have lost $756B because of poor personalization.
Although only 7% of the visits click the recommendations section, these drove 24% more sales, according to Sales Force. And according to Smart Insights, “visitors who viewed this also viewed” can generate the 68% of e-commerce revenue.
Amazon uses these personalization strategies. Why shouldn’t you?
There are more statistics that may persuade you on personalizing your store.
According to Janrain, 48% of consumers spend more when their experience is personalized. And Monetate states that online stores experience a 49% increase in revenue when investing in analytics to understand how to personalize their store.
Convinced?
Well, Matt Tanguay posted many suggestions, in the eCommerce Elites Masterminds group, on how to personalize your store:
- Add a section ”viewers who saw this also viewed” to your product page. Those recommendations account for 30% of Amazon sales.
- Send personalized emails based on user behaviour: email retargeting to send offers.
- Remind shoppers of their previous purchases and recently viewed items. You can do this through email or retargeting on Facebook.
- Suggest complementary products. For example, suggest accessories to complete the outfit they’re looking at.
- Show personalized social proof personalization by matching live purchase notifications to the products currently being viewed.
Have you already implemented some of them? Or will you? We hope so. But don’t say that those statistics weren’t persuading enough. We don’t accept excuses when talking about increasing sales!
SPONSORED
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After the madness of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it might be a good idea to get ready for the winter holidays. Don’t you think so?
This year, Adcash is offering 10% cashback to all advertisers who run campaigns during the holiday period. But why should you advertise with Adcash?
Adcash is a DSP with 11+ years’ industry experience and its media buying platform allows you to create, analyze and optimize all your campaigns in one place.
With Adcash you can create just 1 campaign and access worldwide inventory from over 200+ programmatic partners and exclusive direct traffic from over 10K websites. So volume will never be an issue!
Not only can you get your hands on some nice new inventory, you can also use a new bid type – CPA Target. More than 25% of Adcash advertisers are already using it, and it’s bringing them much better results than regular CPM or CPC campaigns. This new bid type automatically optimizes campaigns to bring more conversions and higher ROI. Plus, you can use it with any Adcash ad formats including:
Pop-Under
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Native
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If you’re looking for a place to scale, Adcash and especially its Pop and Push Notifications are a must try. One more thing… they also have their own advanced fraud-filters to minimize any bot traffic.
Don’t forget, you will get 10% cashback for all the ad spend you have from 21st December 2018 until 2nd January 2019 (minimum spend €/$650 over 13 days). All you have to do is register and run campaigns during the holiday period!
Already using Adcash? No worries, all existing advertisers are also included in this holiday promo, you just need to submit your email to take part in this campaign.
Also, the promo includes CPA Target, CPC and CPM bid types and all ad formats, so just do what you’re best at and get a present from Adcash!
So if you’re new, sign up right here – if you already have an account, register for the promo here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Let’s move to Mars with Musk
On this 2018 Cyber Monday, cyber things happened…And we’re not talking about sales!
NASA’s Mars lander, InSight, successfully touched down on the surface of the Red Planet yesterday afternoon, surviving an intense plunge through the Martian atmosphere.
It marks the eighth picture-perfect landing on Mars for NASA. Good job NASA!
And in the six months ahead, InSight should uncover a deeper knowledge of Mars’ interior than we never had before.
And Elon Musk must know something. In fact, he said he is personally heading to the red planet. Besides, Musk stated that there is a 70% chance he will move to Mars.
Well, the WTAFF Crew has an idea of why Elon wants to escape there: The SEC must have less authority there, so he can’t get fined and fired for what he tweets. Landing secured!
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