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YouTube Mastheads now available to everyone
Back in February, we talked about Google running a test that allowed advertisers to buy mastheads on a CPM basis.
The test was a success, and following that Google has now made it’s YouTube masthead ads available to all advertisers on a CPM basis.
Until now, the only way to buy these mastheads was to purchase it for a full day, with the estimated cost for such a purchase running into 6 figures.
Plus, there are no targeting options available with a full day takeover. Pretty much anyone and everyone visiting YouTube get shown these mastheads. Needless to say, this wasn’t a viable option for most marketers.
What makes it a useful placement now?
The ability to buy it on cost-per-impressions (CPM) and use advanced audience targeting to customize your targeting.
Note that these mastheads will still be available on a reservation basis, instead of Google Ads auction process.
Impressions will be generated across campaign flights, which can range from one to seven days.
Wanna see how your video content will look like as a YouTube masthead? Check this Preview Tool.
For those interested in giving this a go, you will need to contact Google’s sales team for more details.
E-COMMERCE
50 Great Shopify Stores to take inspiration
Looking for inspiration for your store? Shopify came up with this list of 50 “Exceptional Online Stores”.
So, if you’re setting up a new store, updating your existing one, or just freshening up ready for the holiday season, this list is well worth a look.
There are many things you can take inspiration from here, such as CTAs, layouts, logos, copy, images and more.
You can even go further by watching their ads in the Facebook Ad Library, signing up to their list to control their email game, or even by purchasing their product to take a look at their funnel.
There are no limits to how much you can cop… sorry, “taking inspiration”.
Happy scraping!
Find more clients on LinkedIn
To help you find more clients on Linkedin, the social network for professionals will soon allow you to list the services you offer directly on your LinkedIn profile page.
Once you add a list of services to your profile, they will automatically show up in relevant search results for those services.
Additionally, LinkedIn will encourage members to message these profiles directly to enquire about services.
“From now on, members looking for help will be able to filter their general LinkedIn searches for service providers. When you add services to your profile, you’ll show up in these search results.”
This feature will be rolled out to US Profile page with a premium subscription first, before eventually being rolled out to everybody in the US.
Here’s what you need to do:
- Visit your profile. If this feature is turned on for you, you’ll see a box under your profile photo/headline that talks about how to showcase the services you provide.
- Click “Add Services” and fill out the details about the services you provide.
- Click “Continue” and this will automatically be added to your profile.
For people outside of the US, you gotta be patient for a while. Wanna speed up the process and get early access? Get yourself whitelisted here.
As always, we’ll keep you posted on this.
SPONSORED
🚀 Going from 29k to 64k search traffic and securing 1284 top 3 rankings!
Yeah, that’s what Matt Woodward did for his website after he saw a 33% drop and had his worst year ever in terms of traffic in 2018. He made a case study out of what he did to go from 29k to 64k visits.
So, whether you have a blog, a content site in any niche, if you do e-commerce, if you have a marketing agency that helps businesses get discovered, this case study will make sure you are well on your way when it comes to search traffic and rankings!
Matt goes through all the steps as he did them for his own website, including:
- Visitor feedback. Collecting direct feedback from your users based on surveys, comments and so on.
- Manual observations. Things that you can see when you browse your website with fresh eyes.
- Technical spot checks. Things that Google likes or dislikes from a technical point of view about your website. Things like “Is your website ready for mobile indexing?”, your page load speed, your other performance metrics, etc. As complicated as this might sound, it’s actually a simple test with existing tools.
- Automated tools that can solve many of the issues you discover above
- Creating a plan of attack.
- Doing a content audit and what to adjust to improve your SEO for that content very quickly.
- Design changes that make users stay on your site longer.
- Plus other very actionable tips you must apply if you want to have a stable, rock hard SEO base for your website.
Jump on over to see Matthew’s full method on video right here.
Do you prefer text? Follow along with the case study here (includes screenshots!)
Everything about targeting! New tool for groups admins
Let’s see some top targeting tips shared by Alex Fedotoff and Andrei Lunev. How do you choose the right Moderator? Facebook comes to the rescue!
Alex Fedotoff’s complete guide to targeting
“How do I target gym owners?”
“How do I reach travelers?”
“How can I show my ads to Buddhist monks?”
Alex Fedotoff had gotten pretty bored of all these questions appearing all over FB groups.
So he rolled up his sleeves and wrote a blog post explaining how to find performing Interests without using up a big chunk of your budget.
He suggests finding the main Interest of your audience first, and then building your campaign around it.
For instance, you want to target travelers? The main Interest is, of course, travel.
The formula he uses is: 3+3+3+3+3. Back in the arithmetic classes?
No… What he means is this:
- 3 main broad Interests (over 100M users).
- 3 specific Interests with broad audiences. ( around 100M users)
- 3 even more specific Interests with smaller audiences (1-100M users)
- 3 behaviors connected to the main Interest. For instance, if the main Interest is travel, the behaviors could be: Frequent travelers, Returned from travelers 3 weeks ago, etc.
- 3 demographics connected to the broad Interest. In this case, Newlywed, Newlywed engaged, etc.
Then, it’s time to test! Run through these Interests, and at the end of the day kill the losers and keep the best-performing ones.
After 3-7 days, you should have around 10 performing Interests and be able to scale.
Not so complex, right?
Just research the Interests you’re going to test in advance, plan out the campaigns and you’re good to go!
Additionally, Alex shared some examples for Travel, Dating and Fitness niches. You can have a look here for that info and other details.
Targeting large cities
Yet another targeting-related post. This time it’s about location, with this specific question in mind: How do you target people from large cities?
This is just a quick alternative to adding them manually, as shared by Andrei Lunev.
So, instead of picking large cities out one by one, there’s a quicker way of adding them all to your list.
The process is explained via screenshots, so we’ll save our words and digital ink and just suggest that you head to the post here and watch it with your eyes!
New “Suggested Moderators” Feature
Do you run a FB Group and need to add some Moderators? Well, FB wants to help you find the best one!
What do we mean by this? Well, according to this screenshot shared by Matt Navarra, a new feature will display a list of “Suggested Moderators” for your group.
Apparently, FB picks them based on their activity and engagement in the group. Bear in mind that this hasn’t been released globally yet, and only some users have access at the moment.
This is undoubtedly a useful feature, but be careful: Being more active doesn’t necessarily mean they have the ability to moderate. Correlation does not equal causation and all that…
ADVERTISING
More FTC fines on the way
It’s been just 10 days since the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fined Facebook for $5B for privacy violations.
The FTC isn’t resting on its laurels though. Now, it’s finalizing a settlement with YouTube for improperly collecting children’s data.
Apparently, the settlement will involve a 7-figure fine. This comes after Google was collectively fined about $10B by European Commission over the last few years.
Does it end there? Of course not! Credit reporting agency Equifax joined the party as well. Or rather, they were forced to the party at gunpoint.
Equifax has been fined around $575M-$700M for its massive 2017 data security failure, which exposed the personal financial information of nearly 150M people.
That figure equates to about 20% of Equifax’s 2018 annual revenue.
FTC has made it crystal clear that it’s willing to step up the enforcement of data security and privacy in response to privacy violations, intensifying hacking, and the growing public concern around these issues.
SNAPCHAT
A filter worth 13M users
Maybe Snapchat doesn’t have the big audience that Facebook has. But, they do have something that FB will never have. Well, unless they steal it from Snapchat itself…
We’re talking about the crazy augmented reality filters you can find on the app.
And this second-quarter results showed the importance of their filters.
In fact, Snapchat added 13M daily users thanks to the viral explosion of some AR filters. They went from 190M to 203M daily active users, which is the biggest jump since 2016.
This wasn’t just a bump in users though!
In fact, their ad revenues grew to $488M, a 46% year after year increase.
This could be because of all the affiliates out there taking advantage of their fresh (aka inexpert) moderation system?
Who knows!
FROM THE CREW
Let’s talk about statistical significance
As you already noticed, we’re running a short survey to better understand what your favourite types of content are, what your background is, and what level of experience you’re currently at.
Why? Because our audience has grown a lot lately, and we noticed that it isn’t just affiliates reading this. There are a lot of other marketers getting on board! We’re flattered!
So, in order to make your reading pleasant, interesting and funny, we are asking you, fellow marketers, to tell us what you’re about. Whether it’s affiliate marketing, e-comm, SEO, agency, Google Ads, FB Ads, push traffic, ice cream or pizza… You get the idea.
In the end, this is all about serving you with the best content we can. So, the more of you answer, the better! You know, statistical significance and confidence intervals!
It’s just 3 minutes. It’s anonymous. And you don’t have to think a lot to answer the questions. No brain activity involved… Maybe it can turn into a pleasant experience, who knows!
Thanks in advance! Here’s to a better newsletter!
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
The ultimate ad placement
Facebook might have humongous ad revenues, a new crypto launch, and a bunch of other side projects, but is Mark Zuckerberg satisfied? Of course not!
They also want to map out the world.
Machine learning-powered Map will help the OpenStreetMap community create crowd-sourced maps easily.
How does it work? Its RapidID tool lets users identify, add, and edit roads in a pinch. It uses satellite images from public images and then its AI model detects the presence of roads and plots them on the map.
“This level of detail means it can spot unpaved roads, as well as alleys and even pedestrian pathways, and distinguish them from visually similar riverbeds or walls. We still have some false positives, of course, and this is where expert human judgment is needed.”
The test began with Facebook mapping 300k miles of previously unmapped road in Thailand.
What does FB wanna do with this? Fuel the growth of its Marketplace and Facebook Local.
Yeah, FB will show its Marketplace commercials in the maps…
But they also stress that they developed these tools to help the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team during natural disasters.
Considering the many years of time and effort it took Google to make sure our Uber driver finds our location in metro cities, this looks like it’s gonna be a work in progress for a long long time.
Here’s what you can get if you share us with your marketing friends!
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