Facebook is shrinking
We reported yesterday that Facebook was losing users for the first time in its history. Here are a few details to put things in perspective:
- Monthly active users have actually increased by 2 million from Q3 2021.
- Everyone is freaking out about this: Facebook’s daily active users dropped for the first time ever. During Q3 of 2021, 1.930 billion people logged into Facebook every day. That number has now dropped to 1.929 billion. A million daily active users were lost.
The reason for the shrinkage: TikTok (probably). Take it from the CFO of Meta, David Wehner, “We believe competitive services are negatively impacting growth, particularly with younger audiences.”
Don’t rush shifting your advertising dollars just yet: Facebook remains the dominant social app. YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger follow behind. So, for the time being, Facebook still controls four of the top five social apps or services.
Pay attention to performance but don’t make rushed decisions with your ad spend.
MOBILE
Google and Apple may be forced to “open up” their App Stores in the near future
Voting has ended. The results are here.
The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 21-1 to advance the bipartisan “Open App Market Apps” bill, which would essentially force Google and Apple to open up their App Stores.
If the bill is signed into law, Google, Apple, and app stores with more than 50 million US users will be required to give developers the option to:
- Use other payment methods to accept purchases.
- Use different price points elsewhere.
- Directly reach users for legitimate business purposes.
No more exclusivity: In addition, Google and Apple will be forced to allow “side-loading,” a fancy term for allowing users to install apps from third-party marketplaces.
While Apple and Google are strongly against this, some have characterized this bill as an unexpected outbreak of common sense.
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GOOGLE ADS
37 points checklist to audit your Google Ads account
You could make more money from your PPC campaigns just by optimizing your ad account.
And Collin Schmelebeck created a Twitter thread showing 37 points to watch to audit your Google Ads account.
It’s the cheat sheet he uses to audit his client’s accounts. And it’s grouped into 8 sections:
- Account settings
- Secret master settings
- Conversions
- Attribution
- Audience Manager
- Relevance Targeting
- Account Strategy Evaluation
- Search Campaign Audit
Account setting:
- Ad suggestions: Set it to “Don’t automatically apply ad suggestions.” Otherwise, you’re giving Google the authorization to change anything in your account.
Secret master controls:
- Auto Applied Recommendations Center: This is a hidden website that overrides that individual accounts setting you changed in the step above. Set it to “not activated” or Google still has control.
Conversions:
- Your conversion action should reflect your main goal: Purchase, trial sign up, or contact form. What are you going after?
- Make sure the values are being reported properly: Go to the final URL of one purchase and make sure the value reported is correct.
- Duplication: Worse than not reporting conversion value is doubling every purchase. Look at your repeat rate and make sure it’s in the 1.00-1.10 range.
Account strategy evaluation:
- Is there a clear difference between primary and secondary campaigns? You want main campaigns to take up most of the budget.
- Are you targeting each stage of the funnel?
- Do you have different offers for each stage of the funnel?
Well, these are some of the points, but you can find the whole checklist in this thread.
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THE CREW’S INSIGHTS
Finding your true CPA if you run paid ads for a newsletter
Running paid ads is a good way to grow your newsletter. Judging quality can be tricky, especially if you are just starting out with paid channels. Here’s the first thing you have to calculate when you run paid ads for a newsletter.
We’ll call it true CPA, as in your true cost per action. The action is usually to subscribe to your newsletter. Clear enough, right?
Now, when you look in most ad dashboards, yyou will see a CPA calculated based on the ad spend or you will see a CPA calculated based on budget spent. But that doesn’t account for the quality of subscribers at all.
In some cases 70% or more of new subscribers from paid social can be completely inactive, so you must be aware of your true CPA.
For that, you can use the following calculation.
true CPA = Ad Spend/(New Subscribers – Inactive Subscribers)
How do you determine inactive subscribers? It depends, but in our case it’s a subscriber who doesn’t engage with any of our first 5 newsletters.
We’ve explained the list hygiene processes and their benefits for deliverability in our comprehensive guide here.
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BRAIN TEASER
I hit the tall and miss the small. In a flash I am gone. What am I?
You can find the solution here.
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POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
They hacked him. So he hacked back their whole country
Meet P4x, a guy from the U.S. we really don’t want to mess with.
A year back, the North Korean government hacked P4x’s computer along with a few cyber security pros. Fortunately, P4x was able to keep the hackers from stealing anything valuable from him.
After unsuccessfully complaining to the government about the hack, P4x took matters into his own hands.
North Korea experienced a massive internet outage one day. No one, not even the U.S. Cyber Command knew what was going on.
It turns out that P4x was solely responsible for the attacks, which were carried out by exploiting a few vulnerabilities in the government’s systems.
The lesson here is, if you’re going to hack the hackers make sure your turf is really secure.