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E-COMMERCE
Take advantage of your prospects’ birthday. 5 bidding strategies for big spenders
Are you leveraging your customers’ and prospects’ birthdays? If not, you really should be! Here is an easy way to capitalize on their celebrations.
Want to test new bidding strategies to scale to higher ROAS? Justin Woll shares his 5 bidding tactics.
Evergreen birthdays campaigns
Do you run birthdays ads? According to Julija Agusi, it’s an easy way to increase conversions. Why? Well, because of these reasons right here:
- Birthday offers can reactivate buyers.
- You can retarget website visitors during their birthday month.
- Birthday offers can help you acquire new customers by promoting relevant offers. You can even target prospects who have close friends with upcoming birthdays!
How do you target this audience? There are two ways:
- Demographics > Life Events > Birthday > Upcoming Birthday.
- Demographics > Life Events > Birthday > Birthday Month.
Want to target the friends of the birthday boy/girl?
- Demographics > Life Events > Friends of > Close friends of men/women/people with a birthday in X period.
You can make this targeting even more powerful in two other ways:
- Adding your niche’s interests.
- Creating lookalike audiences of your website visitors/buyers/etc.
Following this, you can even create evergreen campaigns and run them 24/7. Just make sure you don’t forget them!
5 manual bidding strategies for big spenders
Looking for new ways to scale your campaigns? Here are 5 manual bidding strategies by Justin Woll which could help you hit your target ROAS.
Before diving into them, there are a few recommendations from Justin:
- A minimum spend of $1k/day.
- If your budget is lower, you can opt for auto-bidding.
- It can take up to 24 hours for a campaign to become ROI-positive. Yet, the following bidding strategy may help you reach your ROAS-goal faster.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s move on to the bidding strategies:
Strategy number 1: Average CPP.
- Duplicate the best performing auto-bid campaign. Set the budget at $1k/day and set the bid to Maximum and 2x the average Cost Per Purchase (CPP). A minimum audience of 800k is recommended.
- Decrease the Bid if the CPP is too high, or the money is being spent too fast. Otherwise, if you’re happy with the CPP and want to go more aggressive, increase the budget.
- When you make changes, increase and decrease by $0.50-$3. Be aware that the algorithm takes 30mins-1h to recognize the change.
Moreover, changing the bid will reset the optimization on the ad set level, but you’ll still retain all the data.
- The ultimate goal of Manual bidding is to find the sweet spot that maximizes the budget. With this in mind, just keep increasing the bid until you find that sweet spot.
Strategy number 2: Slowly but surely method.
- Start with a bid that is your objective CPP.
- Then, start increasing the bid by $0.50-$3 until you find the said sweet spot that maximizes your spend.
This is a good strategy if you don’t want to be too aggressive and want to slowly increase the budget as you go.
Strategy number 3: ROAS correlation method.
- Combine all ad sets with similar ROAS from auto-bid into a new campaign with all correlating audiences. For instance, combine all the ad sets with a 2-2.9 ROAS in one campaign. Then, in another, all the ad sets with a 3-3.9 ROAS
- Set a $1k/day budget and bid 1.5 times your average CPP. The ideal audience for this method is 5-20M.
- Slowly adjust the bidding by small variations until it starts spending steadily.
Strategy number 4: Triple threat method.
- Start with three different campaigns, all with the same audiences and ads.
- Have three different budgets for the three campaigns: $800/day, $1k/day and $2.5k/day.
- Set the bid to Maximum, but start with a low bid as per your desired average CPP.
- Monitor these three campaigns closely, because not all of them are going to work. Slowly increase the bids on each campaign until you find the sweet spot for each daily budget and find your optimal performing budget.
Strategy number 5: 6-month lifetime budget method.
- Create a lifetime budget campaign set to $15k.
- Make the end date of the campaign 6 months after the start date.
- This is different from setting daily budgets, as it allows you to spend the money daily, but as if it’s going to be spent over a 6-month period.
- If it’s spending too much and the CPP is suffering, decrease the spend. Otherwise, if you are satisfied with the CPP, increase the spend.
Done! These are the five strategies. Give them a try, and if they work for you, let us know just how much you benefited from it.
The outage may be over, but CPMs are still suffering
Over 2 weeks have passed since the last FB blackout, which was one of the biggest ever experienced by its users and advertisers. However, some ad buyers are still taking damage as a result of it.
Let’s start with the Ads Manager. Since March 13, it’s become slower and started to show random campaign errors.
What about CPMs? According to a bunch of advertisers, the Cost per mille impressions surged immediately after the outage. For some advertisers, the CPMs have never reverted back to a normal level.
The volatility of the auction has left Shopify software technology company Liverecover wary of running ads on Facebook now. “The cost of ads has been extremely inconsistent and got 30-50% more expensive since mid to early first quarter.”
VaynerMedia, Gary Vaynerchuk’s media company, stated that its clients’ spend on FB has decreased by 15-30% since the outage, with this reduction a direct result of the CPM increases. However, sometime after the outage, they did actually see a return to normality for campaigns with larger budgets.
We’re pretty sure Gary is not thrilled about this major FB screw up, just like everyone else…
As per Digiday, small budget advertisers were the ones that suffered the most, both in terms of volatility and cost increase.
Did you notice any changes after the March 13 outage? Higher CPMs? Random errors in the Ads Manager? When will it return to normality?
TOOLS
100+ marketing templates and automation tools for marketers
How much time do we spend every week working on new marketing templates and sheets for various purposes?
Be it content planning, keyword research, audience research, analytics tracking, estimation calculators, performance trackers, or whatever else you might need. To be successful (and remain sane), we all need organized and well-maintained documents for efficient usage of time.
Well, you don’t have to do that anymore. The Crew have found this awesome list of well compiled 100+ marketing templates and automation tools.
Contributed by various members of our generous marketing community, these tools will definitely up your marketing game and make your life much easier.
Here’s what the compilation contains:
- Analytics Tools and Templates.
- Content Audit Tools and Templates.
- SEO and PPC Calculators.
- Competitor Analysis Templates.
- Content Research and Planning Tools.
- Keyword Research Tools and Rank Trackers.
- PPC Trackers.
- SEO Tools.
- Project Management Tools.
- Social Media Templates & Trackers.
- Supermetrics Templates.
- Blockspring Templates.
…and a whole bunch of other tools
That’s a huge bunch of done-for-you, ready-to-use tools and templates to turn you into a supercharged marketer.
New updates for Keyword Planner. Google Ads Editor v. 1.0 out now
Google Ads has been rolling out a bunch of new features for its Keyword Planner Tool and Editor. As a marketer who relies heavily on Paid Search, you have probably already noticed the several new feature announcements in your Ad account.
In case you missed it or haven’t logged in to your Google Ads account, The Crew is here to update you!
What’s new with the Keyword Planner Tool?
- A new Competition column which shows you how competitive ad placement is for a keyword.
- You can now add up to 10 seed keywords when you select the “Find new keywords” option.
- Grouped keywords can now be found under the “Grouped ideas” menu option.
- “Avg monthly searches” chart for each keyword provides you with a monthly breakdown and search volume quantities of each keyword.
- Save new keywords to an existing plan or add them to new campaigns.
- Suggested daily budget for the keywords in your plan. Use this to make sure your campaign’s budget won’t be limited. It’s located under the total Cost estimate.
Admittedly, some of these aren’t really new features. Instead, they’re just features that had been available in the old UI version and are now being incorporated into the new version…
Even so, if you work with large Search campaigns, you know that these are quite useful time savers.
Google Ads Editor v. 1.0
Additionally, Google Ads Editor (GAE) v. 1.0 is out with a new look, new layout, new features and functionalities, a new haircut and a new name.
There’s a lot that you can get done using GAE without ever having to go to the web interface.
What’s new with GAE?
- If you manage a lot of accounts, you can now apply changes across accounts. Even if they’re in different Manager Accounts (previously known as MCC).
- New GAE supports non-skippable video campaigns. You can even create bumper ads and add calls-to-action in TrueView in-stream ads.
PS: Bumper campaigns are now part of the video campaigns with Manual CPM bid strategy. If you want to add in-stream ads to bumper campaigns, change the bidding strategy to Target CPM.
- Five new custom rules. For example, one of the rules tells you if a video campaign is enabled to target Google video partners. That means your videos will be shown on network sites, rather than just YouTube. You might not want that.
- Another new custom rule will alert you if there aren’t any Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) in an ad group that has an enabled expanded text ad. Also, Ad strength indicator is being added for RSAs.
- Message extensions are now supported by the GAE.
- Maximize conversions is available for TrueView for action and display campaigns.
- Target and Exclude audience features in Smart Display campaigns.
- More features for App campaigns in GAE.
As you can see, there’s a heap of new features being packed and rolled out in the GAE v.1.0. Make sure to take a look at the column from Google’s VP of Ads Marketing, Matt Lawson here.
Instagram is testing something with videos
Instagram is answering their user feedback by looking to add a new way in which you can search through posted videos. This will enable you to find specific moments – A Video Seekbar.
It might not seem like a big deal, but it will make it a bit easier to locate and jump to key points within uploaded content.
Instagram has been known to keep a tight leash on content controls and options. As the platform expands, it’s looking to add in additional functionality to cater to the user demand.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Foodies have been compromised
How often do you eat out? How about fine dining restaurants??
If you have eaten at the likes of Buca di Beppo, Earl of Sandwich, Planet Hollywood, Chicken Guy!, Mixology, or Tequila Taqueria outlets between May 23rd, 2018 and March 18th, 2019, you’ve been breached!
You need to check your credit/debit card statements over the last year and look for suspicious activity.
Earl Enterprise Restaurants, which is the parent company of these above restaurants, was hit by a huge security breach.
More than 2M stolen credit card numbers were sold online.
The malware was installed on its point-of-sale systems which allowed hackers to steal 2.15M credit/debit card numbers, expiration dates, and cardholder names from a chain of these restaurants across 40 states.
Can’t remember if a location you visited was one of those targeted?
Check here if you were one of those 2M breached customers.
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