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Let us tell you a Story about Ads…
So many choices for placements… more placements than we can even remember. Seriously, we don’t know exactly how many there are without checking our Ads Manager.
However, one of them stands out from the rest. Not only for us either, but also for Lwal Mayath who posted about it in the eCom Mastermind FB group.
That placement is Story Ads on Instagram, Facebook and Messenger. But also Snapchat, WhatsApp (soon), YouTube and LinkedIn. It’s becoming a classic placement on all apps, and it was also FB’s fastest growing segment, remember?
The results speak for themselves – for Lwal, his campaigns had:
- 78% more clicks.
- 23% higher conversion rate.
- 40% lower CPM.
This is similar to our experience with Story Ads. Our ads focused on Stories actually had less than half the cost per result when it came to getting new readers for WHAT THE AFF.
But whenever I run “All Placements”, Stories are awful! You know, you wouldn’t have a 300×100 banner for the newsfeed, right? So why would you use a static square image on Stories?
Have a look at the mix we currently have. We’re not saying they’re perfect, but they are tailored for Stories at least. What does that mean?
- Forget static when it comes to Stories. You can have a static image as a concept, but make sure you add at least some subtle animation to it.
- Vertical. People used to make fun of vertical videos. Now it’s the standard for Stories.
- Under 15 seconds. Yeah, people actually forget about this.
- Easy to understand without sound.
- Built for autoplay.
- Almost unlimited text, maybe? You can have as much text as you need in the video. However, FB might flag your thumbnail for too much text if you leave it auto-generated, so just upload a no text thumbnail for your video and you’re good.
- No comments and likes. Social-proofing can be a headache and you don’t need to worry about it here.
Our prediction is that Story Ads will be one of the best performing in 2020. That applies for e-commerce, lead-gen agencies, affiliates and everything else in between.
SEO
Simple hack to spy on your competitors GMB Categories
SEOs in the house, how are those Google My Business (GMB) listings working out for you? Are you using any third-party tools to squeeze the maximum juice out of the categories your listings can show up for?
There are over 2000+ categories and you can only be part of a handful of them. So, apart from the relevance factor, how do you decide on which ones are most useful to you?
One way to go about it is competitor research, right? You wanna figure out the categories your competitors are using.
But how do you do that without using any paid tools? You can use this competitive intelligence hack shared by Jesse Neubert in SEO Signals Lab.
- Search for your competitors’ GMB listing.
- Find for the URL that looks like this:
*/maps/places/Business+Name/@latitude+@longitude
Important: This method will only work if you are able to find the URL in this exact format.
- Right-click and view the source code of the page using “View source”.
- Look for the primary category keyword.
- Carry on until you have found the full list of categories they have chosen.
Voila! Now you have information on all the Primary & Secondary categories your competitors are using, and you can optimize your own listings accordingly.
SPONSORED
📘 Alex Fedotov’s CBO Blueprint he uses to consistently scale & grow – without inconsistencies
Well, 2020 is here. Does that figure ring a bell to you Facebook marketers? CBO!
We discuss CBO case studies and strategies very frequently in our daily briefing and now, Alex Fedotov is taking things further.
To help you prepare for this CBO transition and master the strategies, Alex has come up with his The Ultimate CBO Blueprint.
We know what you are thinking: “who has got the time and motivation to go through another TL;DR document”, right? Don’t worry. It’s not one of those 100s of pages of useless theory, but just real, actionable, to the point content and REAL results.
Here’s what you will get in this CBO Blueprint:
- 5 deep and step-by-step instructional videos inside of accounts spending $1k – $5k a day on CBO.
- His exact strategies and cheat sheets for testing, optimization and scaling with CBOs for any ad budget.
- 5 step by step cheatsheets he used to spend $3M – $5M per month on Facebook ads with 3X+ ROAS.
- Low budget ($100 a day) and high budget ($10k a day) CBO strategies you can use for massive scaling in 2020.
- Bonus 1: Kill or scale training for FB ads cheatsheet (How Alex and his team achieves maximum growth in any niche)
- Bonus 2: Advanced LLA formulas for max ROAS.
- Bonus 3: $2M CBO case studies (everything revealed)
Get your copy of The Ultimate CBO Blueprint for just $97 right away.
Get your Google Shopping products listed in organic SERPs
Thanks to Jim Banks and Kirk Williams, we heard of an announcement that Google sent to many Merchant Account holders yesterday.
It was about the launch of a new feature offering called “Surfaces Across Google” (SAG). This is the link to the official announcement.
Okay, let’s first understand what it means and what it really does. In simple terms, SAG is basically Organic Shopping Ads or free product listings in Google’s SERPs.
“Just as we don’t charge sites to be part of the Google Search index, participating merchants are eligible to appear on Surfaces Across Google results for free.”
Eligibility Criteria for these organic Shopping Ads? Merchant Accounts fulfilling one of these two criteria will show up on Surfaces Across Google automatically:
- You have (correct) structured data markup on your product pages.
- You submit a feed through Google Merchant Center.
Google suggests adding the following Product attributes to become eligible: id, title, description, link, image_link, price, brand, gtin.
How can you check if your Merchant account has SAG activated?
Head to the Tools section of GMC and select the “Surfaces across Google” link. There you can find out whether this feature is active on your account.
You will also be able to check other aspects of the program, such as your Product and Business Information. You can even include the Shipping Policy page from your website, which Google may choose to use in some SERPs.
Are there any other optimizations available to ensure Google shows your products in SAG? Well, even though it’s a new feature, there actually are a few things you could do.
Google recommends adding these essential attributes to your feed for products:
- Item_group_id (for grouping product variants)
- Color (primary color)
- Size, pattern, additional_image_link (up to 10 additional images per product)
- Gender
- Age_group
- Size_type & size_system
- Material (primary materials )
- Condition
- Multipack
So, login to your Merchants Accounts (or get one if you don’t already have one), ensure that you are eligible and your products are showing up in SERPs. Then, sit back and enjoy some extra traffic.
ROUNING UP THE STACK
- FACEBOOK: Cat Howell spends 1.5 hours going through her exact agency process to create high-converting FB Ads campaigns. Perfect for anyone without the structure in place already.
- E-COMMERCE: Owen Blue shares his experience for what it takes to get a store going, aside from ads.
- GOOGLE: This is what you need to look out for in 2020 when it comes to Google Ads and SEO. Hint: Google asserts its dominance.
- FACEBOOK ADS: Want to brainstorm and geek out about retargeting? Check out this discussion started by Andrew Foxwell in his Facebook group.
- INFLUENCER MARKETING: Another way to benefit from influencers. Get custom content instead of a shoutout and you have social-proofed content to use in your ads.
BRAIN TEASER
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Spider-Man is real and his suit was built at the Zhejiang University
OK, maybe not his full suit, but let’s call this the very first prototype.
Researchers Xin Li and Kaige Shi developed a new vacuum suction unit that can grip even rough and uneven surfaces.
This basically means you can use it to climb on walls, just like Spidey.
To be fair though, it’s more likely that this tech will be used for robotic arms rather than for humans fighting supervillains… More boring, but also a lot safer!
If Xin Li and Kaige Shi are reading this, we have some ideas you could work on next:
- Captain America’s shield
- Wonder Woman’s lasso
- Iron Man’s Mark 50 suit (the one using nanotech)
That’d be great. Thanks!