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May the 4th be with you
Google has announced the first core algorithm update in the post-apocalyptic world and the second one of 2020 after the January core update.
The update began rolling out on May 4, 2020 at around 3:50pm ET and will take one to two weeks to fully roll out.
What does this translate into?
Well, speaking in Google’s terms, if the relevance of your content has changed since the last update, it will move higher or lower in rankings.
Plus, there’s always newly published content that didn’t exist at the time of the last update. That all gets reassessed against previously existing content.
Why does this update seem more important than usual?
Being the first update since the pandemic, it has the potential to be especially volatile due to the significant shifts in search behavior
To put it simply, COVID-19 has changed what people need from Google’s search results, so what was relevant before might be less relevant now.
This means Google is faced with the unique challenge of catching up with how the world is searching.
Blessing in disguise for SEOs?
The more volatile the update, the more valuable SEO services become. You might soon find yourself in a position where there’s a significant rise in demand for your work.
ADVERTISING
Yesterday, we said performance marketers are thriving but what about brands?
In case you missed our quick breakdown on why performance marketers are set to take over more of the ad market, check out yesterday’s newsletter.
This doesn’t mean that brand advertising is dead, but there are some signs that it’s struggling a bit. Now, thanks to Digiday, we have a rundown of what some of the biggest brands are doing with their budgets.
- Procter & Gamble is actually increasing spend. Considering it’s the largest consumer goods maker we aren’t exactly shocked by this. Their organic sales were up 7% this quarter, the best result in a decade. They have what people need.
- Unilever is looking for bargains. Same budget but looking for ROI. Unlike their biggest competitor, P&G, sales were flat. Moving to the performance side, eh?
- L’Oréal is cutting spend now but will be looking to bounce back. Less demand for their products, so they’re saving their budget for when things are getting back to normal.
- Coca-Cola drastically decreased spending. They rely on bars, restaurants and cinemas. Plus, all their ads are branded towards showing people choosing them in those locations. Not a good period for them, but it could be a massive bounce back too?
- Amazon is going full speed ahead. To round up our picks, Amazon is reallocating some of its budget but is not decreasing spend. It would be the company that comes out ahead the most in the end.
As you can see, brands who sell necessary products are mostly maintaining or increasing spend, but they still look to move into performance-focused campaigns. Meanwhile, pure brand plays are feeling the shock more.
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- Over 500+ highly scaled and accurate targeting segments built from over 4 trillion monthly data points globally.
- 1B global users from premium inventory at scale: You get access to users that read Yahoo!, HuffPost and editorial partners Apple News, MSN and Samsung Upday. Borrow the trust of these brands for your ROAS.
- 6x more ROAS than pre-roll: That’s how much better native videos launched on Verizon Media did compared to pre-roll ads.
- 66% of users trust ads on premium sites versus only 40% on social media. In other words, people trust ads they see in news environments like Yahoo! and HuffPost more than user-generated content they see on social media sites.
Here’s how you can get the insider-track into this platform. Verizon Media is hosting a workshop in which they’ll explain:
- How affiliates can deliver high-quality leads using Verizon Media properties.
- An overview of the platform.
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This takes place on May 13th, 11AM – 12PM GMT.
Reserve your free spot now and discover the performance of premium native ads!
How, when, what, who… whatever! We got you covered
In our daily scraping of the interwebz, we found a bunch of small but useful pieces of information to give your Tuesday a boost.
When to use Ad Set Budget Optimization
Since advertisers can now choose between Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) and Ad Set Budget Optimization (ABO), they’re probably wondering when to go for one over the other.
Here’s a post shared by Monika Apostolidisz about the situations where ABO might be better suited to your campaigns.
Premise: You should always do your own tests. CBO is optimal when it has a lot of data and budget, but the specific cases are:
- ABO can give you a greater chance of success when your budget is below $500 per day and you can’t give the CBO system 3-4 days of room for optimization before pausing it.
- Testing and retargeting: Here using ad set budget optimization might be better since you can control how the AI spends the budget on different audiences.
- New ad accounts: Since you don’t have enough data to let the AI optimize, ABO can work better on new accounts. With ABO you can guide the AI and, once you get enough data, you shift to CBO.
In a bad relationship with your Page Score?
Has your Page Score plummeted? It’s understandable, especially considering the shipping and logistics chaos the current situation has created.
However, there’s always something you can do to give it a spike. One of those things is to run a giveaway via email.
Yes, let’s check out this method of spiking your Page Score, shared by Abhay Dhiman. He used it to increase his Page Score by 0.6 points.
It’s a quick tactic: You basically send an email to your list announcing a giveaway.
- The condition for entering? Review a Facebook Ad. Exactly! You tell them to review your Facebook advertisements, directly affecting your Page Score in the process.
- Walk them through it: You gotta make it easier for them. Not everybody knows how to review a Facebook Ad, so show them the exact steps they have to take.
- Bonus cookie: You can ask them to complete a second action to access an even bigger prize. In his case, Abhay asked for a review on Trustpilot.
To make this even easier for you, Abhay provided an email template you can copy-paste.
Pushing down your CPL
If you’re doing lead generation on Facebook, you’re probably using a funnel that looks more or less like this:
Ad → Squeeze Page offering a lead magnet → Thank You page.
However, there is a tiny step you can add to push down your CPM while still maintaining high quality leads. And that step is called content upgrade.
Tuhinangshu Gon Chowdhury shared a video on how he did it for his business.
The juice is: Instead of asking for the email in exchange for a lead magnet, take them to a page where you just give away the content of your lead magnet (or part of it). And, at the end of the page, ask for their email for a content upgrade.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
- YOUTUBE: The platform will allow some channels to sell subscriptions for their own digital properties through channels.
- LINKEDIN: Virtual interviews aren’t anything new but with demand soaring, LinkedIn has introduced new tools specifically for this purpose.
- DOMAINS: ICANN has blocked the sales of the dot org domain registry to a PE firm.
- WORDPRESS: The new version (5.4.1) comes with bug fixes but also security patches. You can read the full details in the official announcement.
- AMAZON: Tim Bray, a senior engineer and VP at AWS, has quit because of the company’s treatment of whistleblowers.
- YOUTUBE: Another piece of news from them, the company is running a small experiment in the US that shows some viewers of specific videos the products that are discussed in them.
BRAIN TEASER
No matter how little or how much you use me, you change me every month. What am I?
You can find the solution by clicking here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
“AR! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing?”
No, of course augmented reality has some real world uses, but most of them are rather unimpressive. What we found here, however, is rather useful!
A demo from Cyril Diagne shows how he can copy-paste items from the real world directly into Photoshop, Just by using this app.
Look, it’s a bit difficult to explain, so head over to this video Cyril posted to see it in action for yourself.
It’s something more companies are working on, so chances are that we’ll see this on our phones sooner rather than later. It actually seems really useful, especially for us marketers and our creative process.
If you just can’t wait, you can get Cyril’s code on GitHub right here.