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Stay up to date with The Crew’s Bangkok shenanigans
Today, The WTAFF Crew landed in Bangkok.
We’re going to be sharing some live updates over Instagram throughout the whole week.
If you haven’t been following us already, go check us out right here.
The book with ALL the tricks to make users do as you wish!
You’ve probably heard multiple times that you have to design the user’s journey, that you have to tell users what to do so they end up buying, right?
Keep it simple, silly!
Well, there’s a website dedicated to uncovering the biggest such design patterns. And we are talking about the whole UX of a website, not just the colour scheme.
It’s neatly called Dark Patterns because it deals with the most hidden design patterns that nudge people heavily into one direction: the one that generates more for the company. You can find a 7-minute explanation video here or on their website.
Still, it’s a tricky line to balance, because doing this too much could end up hurting your reputation. We find it fascinating and we thought you would too. Especially if you are interested in creating funnels or websites that convert like no other.
And even if you don’t want to, it’s a cool collection of all companies’ (big and small) “dark patterns”.
Our favourite dark pattern? Privacy Zuckering, named after FB CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It refers to being tricked into publicly sharing more information about yourself than you really thought to do initially!
It’s not our favourite because of what it does – we just like the name.
There’s a new ad format on Quora!
If you’ve been following us since the beginning, you already know that we like to keep an eye on traffic sources with potential. Quora has been one of them because they are in the early days of their advertising business while having an extremely engaged community.
For those that don’t know, Quora is a question and answer website. You likely have seen it as the first result on Google for many of your questions. Like the old Yahoo! Answers but newer.
Well, they have several ad units, including native ads. And 300M+ monthly unique visitors, so volume is not bad either. Plus, you can target by behaviour or context which can be quite powerful.
There’s some more good news about Quora this week. They’ve launched a new ad type called Promoted Answers.
Just like the name tells us, you can answer certain questions on Quora and then promote that answer to have it as one of the top results – just like Google’s Search Ads.
The cool thing here is that you don’t only get more traffic, and can target with the same capabilities as the regular ads. It’s that you can improve your brand’s credibility by featuring good answers!
If you’re building a community or want to position your brand as the go-to for certain topics, Quora Promoted Answers sounds like a no-brainer to test!
Amazon makes demands to retailers who use their platform
Didn’t we tell you to not build your business on somebody else’s land?
Facebook has been the black sheep this year with plenty of changes that negatively affected advertisers, and now, Amazon is also leveraging its position more.
More specifically, brands who sell through Amazon get tougher demands from Jeff Bezos’s behemoth.
Where’s the proof you ask? Well, it’s a bit of a long story that you can read in full right here, on Recode.
But here are the cliff notes for you.
PopSockets was a very successful Amazon seller. The company saw Amazon as integral to their business of selling phone grips and/or stands.
Recently, however, Amazon imposed lower pricing and higher marketing costs on PopSockets. The company decided to not sell directly on Amazon anymore.
They worked out a deal with iServe. Amazon stepped in and banned iServe from selling PopSockets products.
Amazon cites its policy. Just like Facebook usually does when it comes to ads. While the policy didn’t change, the way it is enforced has. Sounds familiar?
The same advice we hear and give for Facebook or Google is certainly valid for Amazon too.
Use it but don’t expect any of these companies to make things better and better for you. They will come after your share when they can, so make sure you build on your own land too. On your own website, email list, push subscribers and whatever else will come to mind.
“The Best Facebook Video Ad Format” – $1k experiment
Which is every marketer’s favourite ad format when it comes to advertising, especially on Facebook? Videos, right!
With video ad spaces increasing more than ever with the introduction of videos over IM, Stories, IGTV, Watch party, Facebook videos are the priority for FB at the moment. TNBT!
Here’s the transcript where Mark talks about it during their Q3 earnings call.
Staying video focused, AdEspresso did a $1k experiment to test “The Best Facebook Ad Format” and today, we bring you the details and results from the test. So you don’t have to run this test yourselves and burn money on it!
Experiment Setup:
Video Types: Animated vs Face-to-camera (no captions) vs Face-to-camera (captions).
Goal: Generating Leads.
KPI: CPL.
Campaign Structure: One ad per adset.
Budget: $333 per adset over 11 days.
Bid Strategy: Lowest cost (without bid cap).
Placements: Mobile newsfeed.
Audience: US 1% LLA of existing leads and US 1% LLA of existing customer. Existing leads/customers and retargeting audience excluded.
Optimization: Conversions. Buying impressions.
Before we go further, wanna take any guesses on which video type did the best?
Hypothesis:
While everybody’s initial thoughts would be that most of videos are played with sound-off and animated/explainer videos sound too generic and impersonal. Hence, the Face-to-camera video with captions should dominate hands down, right?
Results:
The Animated Video was clearly the best!
Best CPL, CPC, CTR and CR too. The next best being face-to-camera (no captions).
The best had 51% of the cost per lead compared to the face-to-camera version with captions, that’s a significant saving on ad budget.
Our take: Animated videos definitely should be part of your ad campaigns! Even a simple 3 video experiment can reduce your CPA by half. And never assume, even AdEspresso didn’t get their predictions right for this experiment. Test, test, test and always test everything!
Facebook Watch: Let’s try again.
It looks like that Facebook doesn’t want to give up on Watch. The Facebook video format that allows people to watch longer videos on the blue social media.
Despite this new feature from Facebook not working, after a whole year of trying to make it popular and with more than $1B invested, Facebook won’t back down on competing with Youtube and Netflix.
If you are a Buffy fan, there is good news for you.
Facebook is hoping that a crop of popular ’90s TV shows can beef up Facebook Watch and the company’s big bet on TV-like video programming.
On Friday, Facebook dropped all 268 episodes of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Angel,” and “Firefly” on Watch as part of a licensing deal with 20th Century Fox. Now you know what to do the next weekend…
The drop of the shows comes at a time when Facebook is widely rolling out its Watch Party feature, which allows people to watch videos together and comment on them in real time.
Hugely intentioned on making Facebook Watch popular.
Will Facebook win the Watch bet?
We really hope so! How come?
Well, Facebook Watch is kind of a TV format. And if brands bought media space on television for decades, it means that this will work too.
Now, mix the proven power of TV advertising with all the stuff that traditional television doesn’t have, but Facebook does: users’ data, laser targeting and a crazy powerful algorithm.
SPONSORED
5 out of 10 affiliates named this ad format as the best growing in 2018
We’re talking about push notification ads!
And no, we didn’t do a formal survey, we just spoke to our friends in the industry – most consider push ads the better pop-under.
That’s why our friends from TrafficForce added this powerful format to their inventory.
What sort of verticals work with this you ask?
Most do, and of course, so do the usual suspects:
- Leadgen like sweepstakes
- CC Trials (both sweeps and diet)
- Dating
- Mobile apps
Look, this ad format only got more popular in the last 6 months. Get in early, test it everywhere, including TrafficForce and reap the rewards!
By the way, the team will also be at Affiliate World Asia, at booth A55!
We’ve given you this tip before but we’ll repeat it – it’s just that good. In-person meetings at conferences are great to discuss deeper details. Start testing their traffic now, by signing up here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
“So what’s the real-world use case for blockchain?”
You’ve asked yourself and others too, we’re sure.
Some came with good answers, some with bad answers and you have likely made your mind up by now. Still, the result of a study will surprise some of you.
What study? This one. The team behind it documented 43 blockchain use-cases and then went looking for evidence of the success of those use-cases.
Result? 0.00%. Yep, 3 zeros.
One red flag discovered by the team conducting the study is that blockchain companies who were asked about it refused to call back once they were asked for evidence.
So, while it’s OK to be optimistic about crypto, don’t forget it’s far from proven! And we don’t blame you if you have 0 trust in crypto either. This study certainly strengthens that opinion right now!
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