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Playable ads for mobile games
If you are still doing some gaming CPI on Facebook, this will be a mega-treat for you.
The blue giant is going to give players a chance to try mobile games out before downloading.
Users will get access to a brief section of the game within the News Feed, and if they like it, they can then go to the App Store or Google Play to install it. Angry Birds was already using this and said they saw a 70% lift in day-7 ROAS.
The new ad type started rolling out on the weekend so you can check your Business Manager if any of your ad accounts have it available already.
New Video Ads metrics, to give you more accurate data
There are a few changes coming to video ads on Facebook. Some good changes, and a confusing one.
First off, the 3-second and 10-second video view counts will be measured better. Until now, if someone rewatched a part of the video, Facebook counted that towards the total time. From now on, it will be unrepeated seconds.
The company is also adding Video Plays metric. This better reflects actual video plays instead of impressions when the video is just displayed in the News Feed but doesn’t play.
Advertisers will also have the option to use Moat to verify the new metric. It’s a 3rd party measurement partner and will help accuracy in this metric.
Last, FB is removing 30-Second Video View and… Video Percentage Watched.
The last one is the one we called a bit confusing. We would find that metric interesting to follow, if accurate. Hopefully, they keep the option of Video Watches at a certain percentage.
An unexpected source for doing cool videos
Since we talked about videos… We thought we’d share this little find.
It’s really much easier these days to create decent videos, whether it’s for a product or for your personal profile.
In case you need some inspiration, Depesh Mandalia shared a video by Bright Side, in the Facebook Ads Experts Academy group.
It’s a 3 min video with clever “hacks” you can use for videos just using your phone.
Check it out right here.
FB Auction Live – quarterly event announced
OK, so these video metrics changes might be good or bad for you. The good news is that the team in FB Auction Live group (actual FB employees) have scheduled their next live stream.
It’s going to take place on 15th August, at 11 AM PDT. The topic is “The ABC’s of Facebook’s Auction” but they generally take questions from the comments too.
Join the group and watch the event if you have time. If you don’t, fret not! We will summarise the important bits for you, and link to the video the following day.
Here’s a peek at FB’s Dating feature
It seems that Dating will be just a feature on Facebook, not a totally new app.
The relevant news for advertisers is that FB does not plan to show ads in this section in the beginning, nor is it planning to make it a paid service.
Facebook is playing it smart – it will test and improve this feature until people cannot live without it, and then they will look at how best to monetize it.
Oh, and if you are interested what the dating feature brings to the table – more serious than Tinder, uses FB data and anti-spam measures.
It’s hard to please everyone
We thought we’d share this just as an example of how sometimes you cannot win.
Facebook is improving and taking down “inauthentic content”, including events.
Well, some people who wanted to attend the “fake” events got pissed off. It seems that Facebook can only lose, even if it does what it said it will do… at least when it comes to public image.
E-COMMERCE
Accepting crypto on your store just got easier
If you’re using WooCommerce (which apparently 40% of the webstores are anyway), accepting cryptocurrencies just got way easier.
Coinbase announced they’ve released a new plugin that makes it very simple to accept Bitcoin or Litecoin, with Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum coming “soon”.
“Note that all payments made through Coinbase Commerce are truly peer-to-peer — when customers send money from their cryptocurrency wallet it’s sent directly to a merchant-controlled cryptocurrency address and processed on-chain by the respective blockchain. “
In other words, it seems Coinbase just facilitates some direct payments andshould help with chargeback issues – there can’t be chargebacks on BTC blockchain for example.
Let us know if you’re giving it a go, and what results you get!
Scaling Your eCommerce Company from $0 to +$100MM
We found this article posted in the Ecommerce All-Stars Secrets group, shared by Philipp Schoeffmann.
We were sceptical of the big claim in the headline, and while it’s of course exaggerated, the advice in the article is certainly sound.
It’s a great read if you truly want to grow a 7+ figure brand, it will likely open your eyes to the broad strategies you need to take at the different stages in your company’s growth.
The good thing is that it can be summarised with this one picture:
And if you are actually doing e-commerce or building any other brand, you should check the full article to look more in depth at each of the 3 stages. Enjoy!
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
“Honey, our son skipped Fortnite practice today…”
Fifteen to twenty years ago, when we were playing video games in our nursery, we had to constantly argue with our parents about why playing Age of Empires or Counter-Strike is the better option for us than instead of playing outside in the dirt.
Well, we arrived in 2018 where parents are paying tutors to improve their children’s Fortnite skills and even take lessons themselves in an effort to better connect with their kids.
Why Fortnite? Because it’s the biggest game on Twitch these days and so big that it doesn’t even put its Android version of the game on Google Play. They don’t think Google is worth a 30% cut of the potential revenue.
And it’s getting very high prize pool tournaments, so there might even be a decent ROI on those lessons.
As always, the internet is going nuts about it.
We, with our nerdy background, are more on the side of supporting the idea of trying to bond with your kids, even if it’s about video games. At least as long as health and real social interaction don’t get neglected too much.
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