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A SMALL REMINDER
If you haven’t done so already, follow the GIF below to move this to your main inbox.
Why are we asking you to do this? Because several of you lovely people told us that some of our newsletters aren’t being delivered where you expect it to be.
We assume this is happening because many of you are new and Big G took notice of this, so we’ll keep this reminder here for the coming week.
SEO
Too much content on Category pages isn’t good?
In an interview with John Mueller, Marie Haynes revealed that 90-95% of the content on product or category pages is unnecessary.
Having less or no content also makes it difficult for Google to rank such pages. Hence, opting for fewer but more relevant sentences, such as product recommendations your audience will find useful, can help improve the ranking of your store.
The Google algorithm also gets confused when there is a list of products at the top of the page and a long article below. The algo is unable to determine whether such pages have commercial intent or are purely informational.
Page Intent as Ranking Factor
Speaking of page/user intent when trying to rank different kinds of pages, Cyrus Shepard shared an interesting take from the same interview.
Page/user intent of a page could very well be a documented ranking factor used by Google. We are using the words “could very well be” because, you know, nothing is certain when talking about the Google algo and SEO…
Anyway, to give an example, an information page about a product is not going to rank well if the user intent is to buy that product and vice versa.
SPONSORED BY EMEBO
Why have affiliate networks and brands not been told about this solution tracking & management solution?
We are talking about Emebo, a brand new tracking platform that promises to deliver the ultimate tracking solution for networks and brand owners. And eventually, promises to wipe out obsolete solutions.
Emebo spent the last months carefully beta testing and building an innovative platform that makes tracking and managing affiliates as effortless as possible. It’s not just about clicks and conversions.
Why? Here are the frustrations they solved for them:
- Easily integrate with 3rd party processors like ClickBank, BuyGoods or affiliate networks that use Cake and HasOffers, without having to worry about all the annoying tech stuff.
- Design creatives directly from the platform, or have your affiliates submit new ones by doing the same thing. No more annoying creative approval messages.
- Affiliates can upload their own invoices.
- Build any type of performance or general report, by using Emebo’s dynamic report builder. Whether it’s about performance reports on even the smallest data point, you can do it.
- There’s no monthly plan. No setup fees, no hidden fees and no minimum period contract. It’s all pay as you go.
Now the beta test is over, and Emebo is getting ready to release its public version.
Sign up to be the first to know when public access is ready.
Existing Customers: Ads or no ads? That’s the question
If you shut down your campaigns for existing customers, would they come back anyway?
Only a test will tell, uh?
So that’s exactly what Maurice Rahmey did:
He shut down campaigns on half of his acquired customers and kept them running for the other half.
The result? Facebook reported a 4x ROAS but, when looking at the numbers, there was just a 7% growth in revenue from the audience they advertised to compared to the audience that didn’t see any ads.
In other words, the 4x ROAS of the retargeting campaign was actually a mere 0.4x ROAS.
So, while retargeting campaigns can result in a sky high ROAS, the actual numbers in the backend can be disappointing.
Does this mean you shouldn’t advertise to acquired customers?
Customers have already experienced your product, so the likelihood of them buying again is higher. However, this doesn’t mean you should completely shut your campaigns.
What can you do instead?
- In some cases, the customer just needs a gentle reminder. Here, you can use a cheaper channel than Facebook Ads, such as SMS and email.
Although it’s worth remembering that some people don’t read their emails. In these cases, here’s what you can do when running ads:
- Monitor and limit frequency.
- Monitor and limit view conversions.
- Limit your audience to people who are harder to reach via email or SMS.
No more wasted budget!
Smart bidding vs COVID-19
Bid management for PPC campaigns has always been a hot topic for search marketers and, if you add Google’s smart bidding into the mix, it’s still a mystery to most of us.
The machine learning behind it and the decisions it makes are not easy to predict, and add the volatility of COVID-19 to that and you find more of your campaigns either paused or going absolutely haywire.
Why? Because smart bidding is designed to find patterns and set bids on your behalf but with the whole world changing, nobody knows how machine learning will react to this!
Lessons learned & shared by some of the most influential PPC expert
Lesson 1: Smart bidding adapted quickly to changes.
Smart bidding uses both aggregated and recent trends but favors what’s been happening recently. Just like it can handle events such as BFCM quickly and adjust bids, it was able to find patterns during the pandemic and adjust accordingly.
Quick Tip: Use Alerts to stay informed and adjust your messaging or promotional strategies rather than reducing bids. Here’s a script that allows you to automate this process.
Lesson 2: Don’t pause. Reduce your budgets instead.
Campaigns where the budgets were reduced returned to normal levels quickly once the recovery began. By comparison, paused campaigns stopped learning and when re-enabled, the algorithm was confused about the new state of the world.
Lesson 3: Leverage bid automation.
In a normal world, bid strategies like ‘Maximize Clicks’ might attract the lowest quality clicks. However, in times like these many clicks also become cheap due to advertisers slashing their budgets.
Wanna go into the crux of the things? The SEL team has explained these insights in detail here.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
- FACEBOOK: You can advertise medical masks on FB and IG again. However, FB does have some restrictions, such as needing a four month advertising history.
- YOUTUBE: Creators will be able to customize the look and feel of their channel.
- FACEBOOK: Facebook will remove the Target Cost bidding option from September 15. It’s not official yet, though. This is coming from private info from the FB Dublin offices, reported by Sergio Menichini in an Italian Facebook Group, GCLE.
- TWITTER: You will now be prompted to read an article (in case you haven’t already) before sharing or retweeting it.
- SNAPCHAT: Take an overview of Snap’s video conversion tool and how to use it in the right manner for vertical video creative creation.
- TIKTOK: As spotted by Savannah, TikTok seems to be the advertiser’s Wild West right now and is full of fake campaigns running to spammy websites.
- SEO: Chatter in the WebmastersWorld and data from leading SEO tools hints that a new algo update might be brewing.
BRAIN TEASER
Wherever the wind goes, towards there I dance. With the sun above me I grow; yet without water below, I can never survive. And the taller I grow, the deeper I become. What am I?
You can find the solution here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Here’s where to find your next 7-figure product – Thank us later
One of the basic rules of marketing is that your product must solve a problem or satisfy a need.
Agree?
We don’t.
Well, we believed this until about five minutes ago. Then we came across a Twitter page that destroyed all our marketing beliefs.
It’s called Unnecessary Inventions. It’s exactly what it sounds like: A dude offering the best but most useless inventions in the world.
Here are some examples:
- A wireless charging bed for your phone. We all know our phone works 10x harder than we do, so it deserves a good night’s sleep/charge.
- A pair of pants that have just one big pocket across the back. You can even place a laptop in it, although you might struggle to sit down.
- A fidget spinner backpack.
There’s plenty of other crazy stuff too, such as a mask that allows you to drink beer while lowering the risk of infections. This dude wants to reopen bars! And we’re pretty sure we’ll see him at the CES 2021 in Las Vegas.
This account is definitely a lot of fun, but maybe also a source of inspiration for your next angle 😉