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E-COMMERCE
FB strategy for high-ticket products. New fee on Chinese imported goods
Trump has announced new, higher fees on Chinese products, will this mean lower margins for American dropshippers?
Do you sell high end, big ticket items? If the answer is yes, then this strategy might help you get more bacon to your ROAS.
Trump announces another 25% tariff on Chinese goods
Yesterday, Trump announced that America will be raising taxes from 10% to 25% on $200B worth of imported Chinese goods.
The 25% tariff already applies to high tech products. However, the same taxes are now being extended to other ranges of items.
In a trademark Trump move, this was recently announced over Twitter. As such, it’s unclear what additional lines of products this will apply to. However, it clearly shows that negotiations between China and the US aren’t going so smoothly.
Let’s see how the situation evolves.
There is already a discussion going on about it. You can join it or just lurk here.
Increasing ROAS
How can you increase the ROAS for high ticket products? Paul Bruce shares the strategy he used to generate an 8x ROAS for a $250 niche product.
Here are the simple steps he followed:
- Ad delivery of the cold traffic campaign optimized for Landing Page View. Website Purchase as objective.
- Gave it enough time to gather data and optimize. Especially for high price products, the system takes more time to optimize your campaigns.
- Used various different retargeting ads.
What not to do:
- Do not spend too much budget on prospecting.
- Do not choose an event lower than Purchase to optimize. Given that you’re trying to sell a high ticket product, the percentage of buyers is very low. Thus, optimizing for Purchase help you find the audience with higher buying intentions.
Well, the steps look pretty simple and basic but it seemed to work for him quite well. You can have a look at his FB post to get into more details and ask any questions you might have.
Facebook makes ThruPlay default option
A small update for Video View campaigns on Facebook this Monday.
On September 2018, FB launched the ThruPlay option, giving businesses the ability to optimize and pay only for ads that are watched to completion or for at least 15 seconds, whichever comes first.
From July 31, FB will make the ThruPlay a default option and eliminate the 10-secs video optimization.
So, the options available for ad delivery optimization will be the 2-seconds Video View and ThruPlay.
PAYMENT GATEWAYS
MasterCard and Visa to pay merchants back $5.5B
If you operate in the USA, and if you accepted Visa or MasterCard between January 1, 2004 to January 25, 2019, you might be part of this.
What is it about?
Visa and MasterCard forced merchants to pay excessive fees.
Merchants might get back between $5.5B and $6.24B as part of this.
That’s after 13 years of waiting so this whole thing took its sweet time.
SPONSORED
Let’s see how much Binom costs when you scale, plus one free month, then 50% discount on the second!
Trackers start getting pricey when you track a lot of traffic. It’s one of the biggest reasons affiliates look for alternative solutions. That’s why we thought we’d look at the cost advantage of a self-hosted solution like Binom.
First off, if you buy it on a yearly plan, a Binom license is $69/month. That doesn’t change whether you run 100 clicks per day or 10M. What does change is the cost of hosting!
So let’s say you want one of the best Hezner dedicated servers available to host Binom, with 8-core Intel Xeon processor and 128GB RAM. Well, that costs about $125/month and can handle around 10 million requests a day, without danger of damaging performance if setup correctly by the Binom support team!
In other words, $224/month to track well over 300 million clicks! You also have some affiliate-favourite features like…
- Custom columns. You can add your own formulas to calculate stuff, no need to export them into a spreadsheet.
- Events. You can track scroll percentage on your lander, detect bots, and have this reported as an event.
- Exit-point tracking. If you have multiple CTAs on your lander, you can track each one individually.
- Filters. You can filter what info you see, just like in spreadsheets. So for example, the placements with 100%+ ROI that you want to whitelist.
- Traffic loss and leads approval. Especially useful for COD offers, you can see the status of whether the conversion status is HOLD, REJECT or LEAD. No need to add custom conversions – but you can if you want to!
- Domain flagging checks. Binom integrates with Google Safe Browsing API so you can instantly check if any of your domains got flagged.
- Godlike customer support. Yeah, it’s the hardest to prove but when everyone is in awe about it, there’s a lot of truth in this claim. So there’s no need for any tech knowledge for this self-hosted solution.
And you can check Binom’s live demo right here.
Here’s something special, just for you, readers of WHAT THE AFF. Use our coupon code WTAFF50 to get one free month to use Binom as you wish, then 50% off for the next!
That’s right! No license fee for the first month and the Binom team will properly setup your server to make sure it’s performing as it should!
Sign up now using the code WTAFF50 and the Binom support team will have you rolling in no-time!
Lots of updates for Display, Video 360 advertisers and AdSense publishers
Several updates have been announced by Google that affect both advertisers and publishers. While all these updates are more brand-safety centric, it also means more controls for advertisers and a little less for publishers using AdSense.
Let’s look at the advertiser focused updates first.
Brand-safety initiatives announced for Google Display and Video 360 advertisers and publishers.
In an effort to improve brand-safety on its advertising platforms, Google announced several new initiatives for Display and Video 360 advertisers.
Here are the new updates:
Defaulting to ads.txt inventory. All ad campaigns will default to ads.txt-authorized inventory only. This also means that only publishers that have placed ads.txt files on their sites will be eligible for bids from DV360. This will come into effect from August 2019.
Supporting app-ads.txt. To improve inventory transparency for apps on mobile devices, as well as connected TVs, support for app-ads.txt started in March 2019. In the next few months, Display & Video 360 will stop buying unauthorized app inventory as identified by app-ads.txt files. As the adoption increases, marketers will be able to choose to buy only app inventory that is authorized.
Brand-controls Dashboard: This new dashboard will centralize all brand safety controls in one place and settings applied to each campaign can be viewed and controlled from this dashboard. That includes a view of exclusions, use of ads.txt-only authorized sellers and verification services for display, video, app and TrueView campaigns.
Updates to AdSense
If you are using AdSense to monetize your website traffic, you should be aware of these updates being rolled out to ad units under Google AdSense.
What’s changing?
Ad sizes: All new ad units will be responsive by default in order to improve performance and flexibility. Although, you will still be able to create fixed-sized ad units manually.
Ad types: Text-only and Display-only ad units are being phased out in favor of richer ad formats. If you still want to keep using text-only ad units, you can create a native In-feed ad unit and choose the manual style option and the “Text only” template.
Text Ad styles: Text ad styles for “Text and Display ads” are being removed. You won’t be able to create ad styles for your new ad units as new ad units will have Google-optimized text ad styling. Existing ad styles will also be optimized by Google in the next few months. For customization, you can use native ads such as In-article ads or In-feed ads on your site.
“If no ads available”: “If no ads available” option is also being removed. Such ad spaces will either collapse or show a blank space by default.
Experiments: As all these updates are rolled out, obsolete ad unit settings experiments will also be removed. Any active ad unit experiments will also stop automatically.
Synchronous code: The option to change code type to synchronous is also being removed. Though, if you still need this, you can manually create synchronous code.
Instagram is working on a new ‘Join Chat’ Sticker for Stories
After the F8, it became clear that FB is focusing its immediate efforts on Groups. This doesn’t seem to be exclusive to Facebook though. It looks like they’re extending this focus to Instagram as well.
In fact, the app introduced the new ‘Join Chat’ sticker option which would enable Stories viewers to join a private chat group directly from a Story.
The sticker prompts the users to add a note on what the chat is about, with the lower note saying: ‘People who view your story can request to join this group chat’.
This could help brands and creators to build communities and stronger relationships even on Instagram.
Zuck said that groups and private chats are the future, and this is just a step toward that vision.
YOUTUBE
Announcements from Brandcast 2019
In a glamorous pitch for more ad dollars, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced several updates at the recently concluded Brandcast event in New York.
Here are the key highlights from the event:
New niche markets: 70 new broadcast and cable channels are being added to its own lineup of channels under the Google Preferred reservation program. This would also allow advertisers access to more live and in-demand ad inventory with more focused targeting based on subscriber interests.
Google Preferred algorithm: Several key updates to its proprietary P-score algorithm for increased visibility for videos with higher production value and content frequently watched on TV screens. New tools to give marketers and advertisers metrics into offline sales and provide deeper insights across audiences and content creative.
YouTube Originals: Access to YouTube Originals for all its users under an ad-supported streaming model. In addition to existing shows featuring celebs and influencers, it plans to add a slate of new shows to the mix.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
How can a bot save the rainforests?
“F me and you and he he he and his and what he really?”
“To whirl hey go big for will whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa we hugged will rule of luo by it who hit him when he will blow a call will hit?”
You might be wondering if we’ve gone crazy, but rest assured we haven’t (yet!)
These statements came from an under-developed, speech-to-text algorithm that recently tried to turn some live jungle sounds into text, and then posted the results to Twitter.
It’s an Existential Jungle Bot project created by Sarab Sethi, who is also working on developing low-cost devices that can monitor jungle sounds in real-time and pick up on any changes in biodiversity.
By creating such audio fingerprints of its surroundings, it can be used to find and differentiate between a pristine area within a forest, a waterlogged area, and a place on the mend.
Oh and, by picking out specific sounds made by different species of birds, it might soon be able to tell us about their presence or absence.
This could prove incredibly useful for ecologists who are looking to understand the health of our ecosystem. However, judging by the current posts of this bot, it looks like it’ll need a lot more time and effort to do what it’s actually meant to.
Though, not a bad start by any means. It’s still a start!
We’re following it on Twitter and will be looking forward to its Tweets. Do you think that one day it could write our magazine by listening to sounds made by marketers on their keyboards?
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