FROM THE CREW
How much revenue did Stacked Marketer make in 2020?
We had to lead with that, we know it’s what you’ll be most curious about…
If you’ve been subscribed for over a year, you might have seen our 2019 report (the first one we ever did). It was well received, and it was helpful for us as well.
We’re doing it again for 2020. What can you expect from this report?
- Our newsletter engagement numbers like open rate, CTR and unsubscribe rate across the year.
- Our revenue and expenses for 2020.
- Our year start and year end subscriber numbers.
- A reflection on successes and failures from 2020 based on our yearly goals.
And this report specifically is wrapped up with the biggest announcement we’ve ever made since starting the newsletter.
So this is why you got that $0.07 refund from Facebook Ads
It probably happened more than once. And it probably wasn’t just because of this but the whole ordeal instantly made us think of those laughable refunds.
Here’s what’s going on: Facebook has been hiding the fact that reach estimates were based on wrong data for years.
Jason Kint shared some of the juicy court documents that detail the events and conversations that happened around the topic.
To give you the one sentence summary: One product manager told execs that FB is making revenue off of wrong data, while execs turned a blind eye in order to pad FB’s bottom line.
It certainly hasn’t been Facebook’s week. If you want to go through the bigger story around this topic on the weekend, have a look at the Financial Times’ piece on it here.
SEO
How to write a good content brief for SEO
To get quality output from your writers, you usually need to provide quality briefs.
But, briefs get trickier when SEO is involved. What really makes a content brief SEO-focused?
Kameron Jenkins from Moz shared a blog post on creating effective SEO debriefs that your writers will love.
What information should you include in an SEO content brief?
- Primary query target and intent: It’s not a SEO brief if you don’t include the query you want to target.
- Format: Not all writers are savvy at structuring content with SEO in mind.
- Topics to cover and related questions to answer: The query helps the writer understand the big idea of the post. But you should also include other subtopics related to the main query that came out from the keywords research.
- Funnel stage: The query kinda addresses this question, but it’s better to define in which stage of the funnel is the audience you’re trying to reach.
- Audience segment: Define the specific customer persona you want to target.
- The goal action you want your readers to take: What actions do you want your reader to take after reading the piece? A newsletter signup? A demo request?
- Ballpark length: The topic itself will determine the length of the post, however, it’s good to indicate the approximate word count.
- Internal and external link opportunities: Indicate relevant content the piece should link to. And existing content that could link to this new post.
- Competitor content: Search your target query and pull the top three-or-so ranking URLs for this section of your content brief.
- On-page SEO cheat sheet: Title tags, meta-description, subheadings. Include a list of tips and resources for helping your writers with important on-page SEO elements.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
GOOGLE: Responsive Search Ads are now the default for Google Ads.
SNAPCHAT: MAGNA and the IPG Media Lab did some research on whether 6-second or 15-second spots are better on Snapchat.
SEO: Google puts the “equal” sign in their Core Web Vitals metric boundaries. This will make it slightly easier to get a good score.
GOOGLE: Here’s a tip for creating real urgency with your Google Ads from Tony Chopp.
SEO: Can’t get enough of SEO talk? Check out Search Central Live, a free event by Google.
BRAIN TEASER
Which word in the dictionary is spelled incorrectly?
You can find the solution here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
RoaringKitty was bamboozling everyone – he is not, in fact, a feline of any kind!
Seriously, Keith Gill, aka RoaringKitty used the line “I am not a cat!” in his testimony. And he had a kitten picture in the background with the text “hang in there”.
It’s safe to assume that Keith has become an Internet legend.
Who else was part of this? Vlad Tenev (Robinhood CEO), Ken Griffin (CEO of Citadel), Gabe Plotkin (Founder of Melvin Capital) and Steve Huffman (Reddit CEO).
We were used to big tech related hearings but this one had its fair share of entertainment too.
If you want to see a breakdown of the serious part, head over here.
And if you want to enjoy the memes, we recommend r/WallStreetBets, of course.