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Google’s new features to help with personalized ads
In a time when over-personalized ads creep people out, Google is bringing out tools to personalize ads even more.
OK, sounds a bit weird but these features can be useful and only creepy if you use them badly.
Just like its big rival FB, Google wants to make sure users like the ads they get… That’s tough to do so relevance is very important. Enter machine learning.
Google’s algorithms are probably just as hard to figure out as Facebook’s, but there’s good news. The company launched a couple of useful features.
First, when you use so-called “responsive search ads”, you can preview the ad combinations as you build them and also view reporting for headlines, descriptions and top combos.
Next, they introduced a metric called “ad strength”. This sounds a lot like a relevance score on steroids because it measures relevance, quantity and diversity of your ad copy, plus there is actionable feedback based on it. This will be available starting early September.
All in all, Google wants you to put all your creativity into their dashboard and let their machine-learning create the best combinations for each user.
Facebook and their help for clickbait sites
Over the past years, Facebook made a clear move towards limiting organic reach, for different reasons but generally to try and get more money on their bottom line.
They said it’s because people didn’t like seeing pages in their newsfeeds but then pages with extremely high engagement all the time started dying out and having very little reach. So we think it was much more a business decision for their ad business, rather than a user experience one.
Sure, user experience mattered but not as much as Facebook said. And now FB is facing a shitstorm for allowing bad promoted content – because once you pay, your reach is often pretty decent. Anyway, you probably already knew this.
What’s new though, is that FB is testing a tool with 5 publishers, one of which is BuzzFeed (top-notch content, no clickbait from them, EVER!) to improve organic reach.
This tool lets publishers split test without paying for a boost, like us regular folk.
We find it a bit ironic that BuzzFeed, one of the sites known to live off clickbait headlines, is the one getting access from Facebook to a tool to… Uhm, improve their bait!
GENERAL
Advertising on Twitch – thoughts from an influencer
We’ve been talking about Twitch over the past few weeks. It’s not really the playground for an affiliate but if you own your product or at least the store, it’s something to pay attention to.
And not for running Twitch Ads. For partnering with streamers, as your influencers.
That said, according to an anonymous streamer who talked to Digiday, Twitch will very likely try to be much more advertiser-friendly, as part of Amazon’s plans to increase their ads business.
At the same time, the only successful ads seem to be the ones where you indeed partner with the streamer to have a relevant product placed on their stream.
And that’s not surprising. Streamers create genuine and strong communities, so if the streamer is smart, they will be able to choose relevant products their followers love, which in turn means a great result for the advertiser.
“So what’s in it for me?” we hear you asking.
If you’re someone who has built their own product or you have an e-commerce store, Twitch streamers might be a decent traffic source for you.
It’s not all gaming, especially at the mid-tier level. Although it dominates, you can have cooking streams, singing, poker (if you don’t count that as gaming), pranking IT scammers, etc.
And these streamers are not huge, which means they will generally be much more accessible.
Look for streamers in the 500-1k concurrent viewers range that have a relevant audience for you, and offer them an advertising deal.
1k concurrent doesn’t mean 1k total, it will probably add up to 2-3x total uniques during the whole day.
They are small enough that they need all the financial support they can get but at 500-1k viewers, you will still get a significant amount of unique high-quality monthly impressions.
How to win over Millennials and Gen Z
We all know about personalized ads. You do a quick Google search about cancer and you’ve got yourself a sweet cemetery ad on Facebook like this man from Vienna, Austria.
Or perhaps you really want a nice hoodie – and when scrolling through your Facebook timeline, you find countless ads about hoodies and other clothing. But with each generation, there is a shift in the social media game, and thus the ad-game too.
According to a survey done by VidMob, millennials only spend 33% of their time online watching videos, while Gen Z spends 41% of their time this way. You want to reach GenZ? Don’t expect to reach them with ads in articles. Gen Z spends 54% of this watch time on social media, that’s a big factor too.
Talking about social media, female Gen Z Snapchat users are more positive towards humoristic video ads (55%), but least favorable are ads with celebrities (18%).
It really makes you think, because after the change in the “Stories” page on Snapchat, you’ve got the Kardashians, Jeffree Star, or Lil Pump showing up there. (Seriously, who cares about all these people?) Don’t worry, there are some funny stories as well. We all like a good laugh sometimes.
Maybe you want to target both of them. What works? And what doesn’t?
Both generations are more likely to interact with ads resembling their style or taste (56%) than ads featuring a celebrity (45%) or people of the same age (29%).
If we take another study from Pixability, we can also see that on Facebook, GenZ is more likely to watch ads to the end, but millennials are more likely to view and click. Targeting these ads is done differently on each platform, and each targeting parameter can have different outcomes.
Both studies can help you understand how to win the everyday ad-game for millennials and Gen Z. Pixability even includes great tips in their study. Use them to your advantage, and its game over for them.
Oh, and a little tip. Don’t use memes in ads. If you really need to, partner with a YouTuber, let him do the meme, and profit.
A great example is Pewdiepie with his $399 chair meme, or his Monster sponsoring, where he just opens the can and drinks it at the start of the video. Simple, yet smart!
Ryan Deiss interview at Affiliate World Europe
Philipp Schoeffmann had a talk with Ryan Deiss, the founder and CEO of DigitalMarketer, at AWE this year.
Ryan’s advice is to shift your focus from the offer side to the customer side. Know who your highest value customers are and create special offerings for them.
And once you figured out who your high-value customer is, just ask new ones if they fit in that category.
Ryan uses the example from DigitalMarketer -they simply ask customers if they are an agency. Agencies are their highest value customers.
Next, when thinking about building a business and brand, not just running campaigns…
People oftentimes build businesses around something that is non-transferable. Running good offers that convert and make good money is one thing, but this is non-transferable since all the value is in the offers themselves if you don’t build a brand around it.
Don’t run one offer till it’s dead and then switch to the next one. Try to recapitalize on the same high-value customers. Put more emphasis on the brand. Seek to build the type of business that somebody wants to buy from.
When asked about the biggest challenges in his career Ryan just named one thing: Cash flow.
He almost “grew” companies into bankruptcy twice. Always monitor your cash flow closely and make sure you have enough to pay the bills.
Those were the quick bits of advice Ryan gave for people looking to create a long-term business, and not just jump from offer to offer in the affiliate marketing space.
E-COMMERCE
Dealing with transaction disputes
One of the big headaches of e-commerce is having to deal with chargebacks. This can even get you suspended from your payment processor so dealing with it the right way is quite important.
Israa Alrawi Ibrahim brought up an issue with Stripe and asked the Facebook Ad Buyers group how to win those disputes.
Well, there is some helpful advice in there, from improving practices to have fewer disputes, to keeping all documents and interaction on record, and even to using other payment processors that might be more lenient.
Even with all of this though, we want to tell you what we were told by people who are actually responsible for judging disputes.
You essentially have close to 0% chance of winning if the other person is set on making a chargeback.
That’s because the bank will always side with their customer, not with you. So, improve your practices with existing customers and sometimes be OK with flat-out refusing customers.
It will save you a lot of headaches and in the end also a good amount of money.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Talk like a corporation
Have you ever wondered how to speak like a corporation?
How to put words together in such a way that sentences are grammatically correct but you actually aren’t saying anything?
You could go through business school… But that’s expensive and takes a long time. Why not try out this amazing tool – the Corporate Gibberish Generator!
We did, and here’s what we got:
“WHAT THE AFF practically invented the term “performance”.
What do we redefine? Anything and everything, regardless of obscurity! Think ultra-B2B2C. What do we integrate? Anything and everything, regardless of reconditeness!
We have proven we know that it is better to engineer extensibly than to disintermediate cyber-intra-intuitively. We will benchmark the term “visionary”.
We understand that it is better to revolutionize intra-interactively than to drive transparently. We believe we know that if you drive efficiently then you may also generate strategically.”
Yep, that’s totally us. Can’t disagree with that, can you?
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