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New tool in Ads Manager. Google is watching you shop
Google announced a new performance tool for Search marketers. However, they didn’t announce what information they track and how they use it. Let’s have a look at the feature update first before moving on to updating our Search settings.
New Performance Planner for Search
Google announced the launch of a new Performance Planner to help with your ad spend planning.
How will it work?
It focuses on driving incremental conversions by identifying the best spend amounts for your campaigns.
For example, if you have $50k in ad spend spread across 100 different campaigns, it will recommend how to best distribute that budget across those campaigns to maximize conversions. It will also provide projected results based on these adjustments.
Google says that Performance Planner can help advertisers drive up to 43% more conversions.
They also explained how Performance Planner has been engineered to provide the most accurate forecasts possible.
“Performance Planner takes into account billions of search queries, and is usually updated every 24 hours. Performance Planner then simulates relevant ad auctions in aggregate, including variables like seasonality, competitor activity, landing page, etc.
It then forecasts conversions based on the conversion types in the “Conversions” column of your Google Ads performance reports.”
Check it out in your Ads Manager to review the recommendations for your accounts.
Google spying on your shopping history
Most of you will already know that Google tracks your search and location history. What you might not know is that it also tracks your shopping history.
It does this based on the items that you purchase through any of Google’s services, and also based on the receipts that are emailed to your Gmail account.
Google says that this information is only used to personalize your experience and not to serve ads. Lol, yeah right!
There is no way you can stop Google from storing this information, but what you can do is change your settings to stop allowing it to access and use this information in the products and services it provides you.
Here’s how!
- From Google.com, click on the “Settings” button at the bottom right of the page.
- Click on “Search Settings”.
- Under “Private results,” check the “Do not use private results” option.
PS: Removing this functionality might interfere with other Google services. For example, you won’t be able to ask the Google Assistant questions about when your packages will be delivered.
Happy shopping in solitude!
YOUTUBE
Image Ads on YouTube
YouTube, the king of moving image content, announced that it will allow advertisers to run YouTube campaigns by simply using image ads, which will appear within YouTube home feeds.
As part of Google’s new Discovery Ads, it will use audience targeting to display your ads to relevant users based on their activity.
“Discovery ads are a simple and effective way to tap into the power of YouTube – and you don’t even need a video. Just upload your best images from your social campaign, then we’ll optimize your media mix for maximum performance across Gmail, Discover and the YouTube Home feed.
The YouTube Home feed has long been a great place for users to discover their next favorite creator, and it can be a great place for them to discover your brand, too.”
This all makes perfect sense. After all, YouTube is the second largest search engine on the web.
Being able to promote your business to its 1.8B users has the potential to be very effective for advertisers, even if it’s not in the form of a video.
Remember, more than 90% of viewers say they have discovered new brands or products on YouTube.
Also, these image ads are probably not that different from the lower panel image ads you see on YouTube videos already.
At first, it might be a little confusing for the users to see the new ad format entering their home feed, but it could still be effective.
SPONSORED
Get the best of Voluum as low as $44/month with a WTAFF discount!
You must have heard of Voluum already, right? Did you also hear about the new Entry Plan at $69/month or $49/month on an annual contract? Did you know that as one of our valued readers, you can get it at $62/month or $44/month?Neat, right?
You get all of Voluum’s essentials for reliably tracking and optimizing your performance campaigns. It’s a plan crafted based on the community’s feedback. You can sign up or reactivate your account right here. It includes the special WTAFF reader pricing!
If you are not familiar with Voluum… Let us get you up to date!
It’s the first software-as-a-service tracker for performance campaigns, built by an affiliate for affiliates. It was launched over 5 years ago and since then, it has been many marketers’ preferred solution. We actually don’t know anyone who started affiliate marketing more than 2 years ago who didn’t try Voluum.
In these 5 years, they’ve built a one-stop platform to easily find new offers, promote them and optimize campaigns. Here are just some of the main features affiliates like in Voluum:
- Automatic optimizer using Traffic Distribution AI – less time spent optimizing and refreshing campaigns, let the machines do the work!
- Dedicated tracking domain with an SSL certificate – which can boost conversion rates by up to 400% depending on traffic source! (available on the Entry Plan)
- Anti-Fraud Kit – which helps you easily identify bot traffic, block it and provide proof to ask for a refund from your ad network, in some cases.
- Voluum Mobile App – allows you to track and get notified about important changes on the go. (available on Entry Plan)
- Custom Notifications – let your tracker notify you when important changes need your attention!
- Multicurrency – track conversions in whatever currency you want. (available on Entry Plan)
- Offers Marketplace – find, filter, compare and apply to run offers from top networks from inside your Voluum account! (available on Entry Plan)
Voluum’s cloud-based system ensures easy setup and data safety, plus super-fast 5ms redirects. You will also get special Customer Care services to support migrating from other solutions, onboarding, live webinar and 24/7 chat management.
For you WHAT THE AFF readers, Voluum has prepared a special discount. Up to 60% off on your plan of choice (Entry, Basic or Advanced on both annual and monthly plans) and free onboarding!
Check out all the plans and get yours right here.
How to find happy customers. What metrics to watch when cutting ads. Hackers attack groups
Happy customers are the best customers, right? We’ve got a trick to find hordes of new and happy customers.
What metrics do you look at when killing ads? Some pieces of advice by advanced Facebook marketers.
Digging for 5-star customers
Each business has several types of customers, but the most valued ones are always those returning customers that are happy with your products and services.
This post is all about retargeting your best customers and others potential customers similar to these.
The trick has been shared by Julija Agusi on the Momentum Marketing Tribe FB group.
Let’s dive into it:
- First, go to your store and gather the email addresses of all the customers that rated your brand with 5-stars.
- Import these emails into your Business Manager and create a Custom Audience.
What to do with this data?
Find new customers:
- Create a campaign with Reach objective and target this Custom Audience. They are fans of your brand, thus they should engage with the ads by leaving comments and likes.
- Create a Lookalike of that CA to find new customers, and use the same Post ID of the previous campaign to leverage the social proof.
Raise the Customer Lifetime Value:
- Remarket to the Custom Audience with other products: They are happy with what they bought from you, so they’re much more likely to buy again.
This is a great looking strategy to find more hot buyers and to retarget previous ones, and it can be used as an alternative to building custom audiences based on the AOV from the Pixel. Well worth giving it a try!
The metrics that matter when cutting ads
Lately, many marketers have been complaining about high CPMs on their campaigns. However, judging by the discussion on this post, it looks like it doesn’t actually matter that much.
What?
Sau DN asked a question in the Facebook Ads Experts Academy about when should she start turning off ad sets with a high CPM.
Among all the answers, the one trend that stood out from the crowd is that CPM doesn’t matter that much when deciding to turn the ad sets off.
Even Depesh Mandalia suggests not acting based on CPM. This week, for example, he saw CPMs on some of his campaigns peaking to £60-£80. But this didn’t matter to him. Instead, he was focusing on his CPR (Cost per Result.)
Gil David also suggested never using CPM as a metric to turn off ad sets. Focusing on CPC, Relevance Score and Frequency is a better way to go about it in his opinion.
Well, this kinda follows up on our post from Friday where we talked about getting rid of CPC and CPM to cut ads. Yet, the answers here are more balanced. What are your thoughts?
Facebook groups under hacker-attack
Facebook has spent the last week mistakenly removing many groups for violating their content policy, but what’s going on?
Basically, it turns out that a spammer has been posting abusive or extremist content in some Groups to try and sabotage them. This caused FB to remove the Groups in question.
Thankfully, the social network has since recognized this as a hack and they’re now working to restore the affected Groups.
So, if you manage some Groups and you had this problem, FB is coming to the rescue.
It would also be a good practice to routinely check your Group and make sure it is cleared of abusive content.
BOT MARKETING
Lead gen for Messenger
During this F8, Facebook announced new lead generation forms for Messenger Ads.
Now, the feature has started rolling out, as shared by Rutger Thole in this post.
So, if you use any third-party tools like ManyChat to create your ads, have a look at your Ads Manager. This feature might already be available for you, so you can just build the ads on Facebook itself.
TOOLS
Canva + Pexels + Pixabay = Netflix of stock photos
Canva, your favourite online image editing tool, has acquired your favourite stock image services Pixabay and Pexels.
These new acquisitions will allow Canva access to an additional 1M images, videos and illustrations, along with 120k contributors from all over the world.
Canva also announced a new service, Photos Unlimited. They are dubbing this as the Netflix of stock photography, with a monthly subscription giving you access to a humongous library of stock images.
Thanks to all you marketers, Canva is now valued at more than $1B.
New ad format
Running app-install ads on Twitter? If so, this update might be interesting for you.
The social network has yet again released Carousel Ads, which provide advertisers with the ability to add multiple images for context.
Twitter already tested this format over the past few years, but it hasn’t caught on yet.
However, according to SocialMediaToday, this one looks different and provides a more stand out visual experience.
“It seems more simple, less cluttered than Twitter’s previous attempts.[…] it also seems to align better with evolving, side-scrolling user habits.”
So, maybe this iteration could be used more by advertisers than the previous versions.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Translatotron is here. Bonjour! Hola! Guten Tag! Ciao!
Remember the early days of Google Translate? The poor thing was just in the early stages of development and simply got laughed at and made fun of.
We only used it when we absolutely had to, but it’s come a long way since then.
Thanks to Google Translate’s built-in AI features, it now translates content with much higher accuracy and readability.
It looks like the search giant isn’t stopping there though.
Say hello to Translatotron, a tool that utilizes a “sequence-to-sequence network” to convert source spectrograms into translated spectrograms in a given target language.
Didn’t get that? Yeah, it’s a bit too technical for us too.
Basically, in the real world, you should be able to say something like “My name is John, how are you?” in English to someone who only speaks Spanish and Translatotron will translate your message more quickly and accurately than ever before.
You can read more about its functionality and listen to a few before-and-after voice samples right here.
As useful as this tool sounds, it’s unfortunately not available for the general public just yet. Perhaps it will be quietly added to Google Translate in the future though…
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