SOCIAL MEDIA
Video descriptions and Stories just got longer
In the world of short form video content, length still matters.
Just… maybe not in the way you’d think.
Say more: TikTok announced they’re increasing the video description character limit from 300 to 2200—a 730% increase.
TikTok believes more characters could help marketers boost engagement “while becoming more searchable and better recommended to viewers.”
Interesting… especially that last part.
One uninterrupted minute: Instagram is stretching the maximum Stories length from 15 to 60 seconds.
That means Stories won’t be broken into 15-second clips, which should provide a smoother viewing experience.
Yep, that includes Stories ads as well.
Why we care: Both updates are important for marketers. Longer Stories gives you more runway for promoting products and messages.
And longer video descriptions could help you float to the top of TikTok’s search, which is an increasingly popular engine for younger generations. Fun times!
ADVERTISING
New ad network for boozy brands
Good news for the brands behind the bar counter…
Drizly, an online shopping and delivery platform for alcohol, launched a new ad network tailored to alcohol brands and manufacturers.
Drinks on us: Drizly used to focus on helping individual brands build and display campaigns on their website and app.
But now they’re opening search and display campaigns to all brands, giving everyone the ability to target specific demographics and locations. Nice.
Make that two: Drizly doubled its traffic from 2M in 2020 to 4.1M today… and it’s getting bigger.
Currently, Drizly’s network consists of 5,000 retailers. The company hopes that serving ads will attract emerging small and medium-sized brands.
Why we care: Like Walmart, Marriott, and several others, Drizly is yet another example of individual platforms creating their own ad networks for niche merchants and brands.
And if you’re in the industry, you know platforms like Meta and Google make it difficult to advertise alcohol.
Migrating your ad efforts to a niche network could help you brew more effective—and cheaper—campaigns.
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E-COMMERCE
These data feed errors are sabotaging your e-commerce campaigns. Here’s how to fix them
When you correctly update products with new data, it passes to your feed for your campaigns to take notice.
But update product data incorrectly… and you’ll confuse the data feed.
Data feed errors can tank your campaign performance and raise costs.
For example, simply excluding out-of-stock items from Google search campaigns increased ROAS for retailers by 181%, according to a new DataFeedWatch report.
The study also reveals the most common problems retailers encounter in their data feed:
- Shipping issues (23.5% of all product disapprovals). Common errors include too-high values and unspecified shipping attributes – e.g. missing shipping countries.
- Title issues (25.9%). Titles that go over 70 characters reduce visibility, which can cause disapprovals.
- Image attribute issues (20.3%). Top errors include promotional overlays on images, images that are too small, missing or invalid images, and generic visuals.
- Global trade item number (GTIN) value issues (19.2%). Make sure you submit the correct GTIN or skip it altogether if you don’t want Google to flag your items.
- Price issues (13.2%). Wrong or non-updated prices and other price mismatches will make Google disapprove of your product quickly.
Additional issues include availability, link issues, item group ID, and others. Paying attention to these can greatly improve your performance.
Here are the feed tactics that seasoned advertisers use to extract better value from their campaigns:
- Optimize product titles. 14% advertisers overwrite their product titles, either by changing some keywords or rewriting the title from scratch.
- Use custom_labels. 13% created a product group for a product featured in an ongoing sale. Segmenting feeds based on margins can improve your ROAS by 96%.
- Filter less profitable products. 64% of merchants drop products from their campaigns due to prices being below a certain margin.
- Provide additional images. 25% of merchants provide more visual assets, which also gives shoppers more options to examine the product.
The key is checking and optimizing your product data so it can pass through the feed smoothly.
Simply updating your product data correctly can turn campaigns around… and it takes less time than brewing a French press of coffee!
Seems worth it, right?
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THE CREW’S INSIGHTS
To increase cold email conversion, try writing relevant content
When done well, cold emails make millions of dollars.
Done poorly, they get marked as spam and earn you little more than a few angry replies.
So if you’re not having much success with cold emails, try this insight:
Hit pause. Stop endlessly retooling your email copy and your targeting, and stop blasting inboxes.
Instead, ask one question: What’s the most helpful, novel, relevant piece of content for the people I’m emailing?
Then, write that piece of content. Make it as good as you can.
Once the content’s written, write a new cold email with a softer sell and a bigger focus on the piece of content. Make it clear that it’s free, publicly available, and that you believe they may find it useful.
For best results, get as niche as possible. Imagine you’re cold emailing people in ten countries about HR & Payroll services.
Instead of sending them all the same piece of content, use a content template and personalize the cold emails with country-specific information.
This is a small lift, but can have a big impact on perceived value.
And it may help you get the lift in response rate you’re hoping for.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
SEO: Here’s one way you can outrank competitors and make them think you’re cheating: Powerful backlinks from the internet’s best websites, like The Economist, Bloomberg, HubSpot and more. Here’s why 100s of businesses use dofollow.io to get links from DR 65+ domains.*
GOOGLE: Three new updates rolled out to country targeting for shopping products, including Ads, Merchant Center, and Content API. Also, you can opt out of using the “feedLabel” field if your codebase needs a country to handle products and data feeds.
SEO: You’re not seeing double. Google may “de-duplicate” website content if it’s “almost duplicate,” according to John Mueller. So if two pages have the same text but different prices, they can both appear on SERPs. Good to know.
TIKTOK: Thumbs down. Soon users will be able to downvote comments to help TikTok identify “irrelevant” or “inappropriate” comments and remove them. Maybe that means we’ll see less spam in ad comment sections, too…
SEO: It’s official… September’s Product review update has shaken up the results page. Pop media articles are seeing a big downtrend, and so are English-speaking domains located in countries where it’s not the primary language. Interesting…
*This is a sponsored post
BRAIN TEASER
A murderer is condemned to death. He has to choose between three rooms: the first is full of raging fires; the second, assassins with loaded guns; and the third, lions who haven’t eaten in years.
Which room is the safest?
You can find the answer here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Dear brands, please don’t overdo it
If your brand has a voice, does that mean you should comment on everything?
No, probably not.
Case in point: the recent passing of Queen Elizabeth II brought the sometimes-funny-mostly-cringe out of many brands.
If you’re a funko-pop manufacturer, or Domino’s Pizza… it’s probably not necessary to comment on every major world event.
Because who really wants hot takes from their pizza?