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New bugs and new ad placements. 4 not-so-obvious steps to FB success
Many advertisers complained about a bug in the Ads Manager during the weekend. Have a look at what they were talking about. Besides, others noticed a brand new ad placement launched on FB. You are gonna love hearing about it! Much awaited, eh?
Then, for a refreshing start to the week, some tips from Depesh to build long-lasting ROI positive campaigns.
Here we go!
ALERT: FB dropping pixels, optimisation events and changing DPA windows
It seems that Facebook had some issues during the weekend. If you have some campaigns running, have a look! Because many people experienced bugs. Related to pixels, optimization and DPA windows.
Cat Howell was one of the first to share it in her group. Head here to learn more about the Ads Managers fault.
Facebook Groups as Placement?
Facebook thinks that groups are a key element to keep communities active on the social. And of course, monetization can’t miss here too. What are we talking about?
We haven’t found any official announcements yet, but it seems that some FB marketers started noticing a new placement for their Ads: Facebook Groups.
Zoom In
Probably, this new placement is still in a beta testing phase. But we can already hear the first complaints from FB Groups owners: We don’t want our community members to be targeted by ads!
Though we bet, some of you marketers have been waiting for this for a long time and are already mouth-watering over it.
For the Group Admins’ concerns, there isn’t much to do: This is Mark’s jurisdiction. He places ads wherever he pleases to.
One objection on the media buying side could be: Will we have control over where our ads will be shown? Given that it’s still unofficial, we don’t have this answer. But we’ll keep you informed as soon as something comes out!
Depesh Mandalia: 4 steps to FB Ads juice
It’s Monday. And the WTAFF Crew wants to help you start this week in the most actionable way! Something that might look like 200% ROAS.
To achieve this, here are the 4 steps for FB Ads success, coming straight from Depesh Mandalia.
Let’s start!
Know your Target
Aiming for earnings from the first sale, second sale or aiming for LTV makes a BIG difference in your strategy.
Once you know it, you can move forward from there. By breaking down ROAS into CPA and AOV. Or LTV into AOV and repeat rate. And then, breaking CPA into CPC and CR.
Therefore, to analyze your data, first, you have to know what you want!
Test, foreva and eva!
It sounds obvious! But it’s what you test, how you test and why you test that makes the difference in your success! Thus, before starting to test, you need a testing framework.
It helps to reduce testing cost and time. Plus, it ensures that your returns stay positive while you scale.
Fall in love with your customers
How is that saying? ”Love your customers 365 days a year, not just on Valentine”, right?
You can’t chase your ideal customer with billboards and by throwing leaflets in their face!
If you want their love (cash), you will need to give them three things: Relevance, Rapport, Relationship.
Squeeze more juice before you scale
If you want to scale with consistency and profitability, you must optimize. But Depesh’s definition of optimizing is uncommon. By optimization, he means giving Facebook what it wants: users’ satisfaction.
If you can do this, Facebook will give you what you want: Best users at the best price!
Here we are. If you manage to have these 4 things on point, scaling won’t be difficult. This is what Depesh advises for getting the best results on Facebook.
Though his post might sound like a building ground for promoting his course, we thought of sharing it anyway. ‘Cause hey, the insights sound really useful!
To another glorious week!
AMAZON
Taxes? Not a problem for Jeff. But Austria is!
Jeff Bezos has a famous business skill. However, not one that people are really appreciative of. Plus, Austria is investigating the retail giant for suspicious “unfair trade practices”.
Let’s have a look!
How riches stay riches
Imagine a world where your store has a 74% conversion rate. And imagine that in this world, you don’t have to pay any taxes.
Can this ever be a reality for someone?
For Jeff Bezos it is. Yeah…
You’re lucky! Because today we are entering his magic world. We won’t talk about how he converts 74% of his prime customers… But about the $0 in taxes that he is going to pay on his $11.2 B net earnings.
Yes! You read that right! Zero dollars in taxes.
Aaaand, it’s the second year in a row that this happened! Well done Jeff! You the real tax wizard…
Amazon’s low to non-existent tax rate has been criticized by politicians ranging from Senator Bernie Sanders to President Donald Trump.
Yet, the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy notes that Amazon’s non-existent tax payment is a result of the Trump Administration’s corporation-friendly tax cuts.
Well Jeff, you know who to say thanks to…
Amazon is kinda famous for avoiding taxes. And it made big headlines when this summer, they convinced Seattle’s Mayor to cut a tax that helped homeless of the city.
An average American pays an income tax rate between 10 and 15%. The corporates tax rate has been reduced to 21%. Amazon’s rate? -1%. Maybe this how Jeff made it to the top of the Forbes list!
The Crew’s take
0 taxes. This is what every business dreams of. However, in the long run, this could lead to negative effects for such a big company like Amazon.
Why? Because in a world where customers really care about a brand’s reputation, being known as the taxes fox isn’t so beneficial. Be careful Jeff!
Austria zooms out on Amazon’s trade practices
If you are a regular reader of our emails, you are certainly aware of Amazon’s unfair trade practices. It has been accused by various sellers of abusing its dominant position to favour its own products on its marketplace.
But this time, the Austrian Federal Competition Authority (BWB) has also taken note of it and launched a probe against Amazon.
The Austrian authority says it has received several complaints against the US retailer from various Austrian sellers on the following suspicions:
- Discriminating against other retailers and thereby trying to inordinately favour its own products on the Amazon marketplace.
- Terminating sellers’ accounts abruptly and for no apparent reasons.
- Forcing retailers to disclose their product prices and adding incorrect delivery details to the sellers’ accounts.
- Deleting other sellers’ products from product rankings and introducing jurisdiction clauses that make it difficult for them to take legitimate action.
Hence, BWB has launched a probe against Amazon to investigate these claims. A similar probe has also been started by the German federal cartel office last November.
The investigations could eventually lead to warnings, sanctions or even fines being imposed on Amazon if the cartel court finds it breached EU and Austrian law.
The Crew’s Thoughts
It looks like such habits come naturally to companies once they start dominating their respective market. Be it Amazon, Facebook or even Google. Considering the influence they have and the kind of lobbying they do, we don’t see any of them straightening out anytime soon.
SPONSORED
The WTAFF Crew at Affiliate Summit Europe! And we have a special discount ONLY for you!
The WTAFF Crew is heading to Amsterdam for Affiliate Summit Europe and we’ve got something for you too! Before we give you your gift, let’s talk about what’s happening there in March.
Well, the official Affiliate Summit Europe agenda has been released. We’re just gonna highlight what we’re probably checking out, aside from Steven Bartlett’s keynote.
First on our list is the Happiness Hub – we’re gonna check it out to get ideas for how to make future WTAFF Crew members happy working with us. We think we are on the right path but we definitely don’t know it all.
Country Roundtables for Germany, UK and The Netherlands is something we’ll miss but you shouldn’t. If you want to have your offers and traffic flourish in these geos, book a seat!
What we’ll not miss are the speeches and panels about Staying relevant & competitive in an Amazon-centric world! Frequent readers know we keep a close eye on Amazon.
After all this, we might not have enough energy left so we’ll head fo the Official after-party sponsored by Webgains, at the Panama Night Club, starting at 8pm. No better place to recover than a club, right?
The WTAFF Crew are not the only important people there. You have reps fromNike, Ubereats, Expedia, Skyscanner, Decathlon and ASOS. Just check out all the companies attending right here.
In between, we’ll be hanging out in the VIP Lounge, but you can hit us up on the networking app if you wanna meet!
OK, we can already hear you! But where’s our gift? Exclusive ticket discount! Use the code WTAFF15OFF to get 15% off ANY PASS type before March 1st!
Grab your Affiliate Summit Europe 2019 tickets at 15% off right here.
FROM THE CREW
ZorbasMedia interviews Manu Cinca
We are back in the news again!
ZorbasMedia visited us in Vienna to meet Manu Cinca, founder of WTAFF and the Crew. In this YouTube interview episode, Manu talks about online business, traffic arbitrage, e-mail marketing and entrepreneurship in general.
Here are the highlights from the interview:
- Affiliate Marketing as a business.
- Affiliate Marketing in 2019.
- The biggest trends in 2019.
- Experimenting with Facebook Ads.
- Vienna as a city for business and life.
- Business operations for STM forum.
- The main lessons taken from the startup experience.
- Ways to overgrow in Affiliate Marketing.
- Skills to achieve success in Affiliate Marketing.
- Daily newsletters as a successful online business.
If you have any questions, feedback or complaints just comment below and we will try our best to address them all.
But before that, do check us out. Like, Share and spread the love!
Google Shopping Panel update and a bug in its Ad Preview tool
This weekend, we came across two updates about Google.
One of them is a shopping panel’s update about providing more product information to its search users. The other, instead, is just a bug that caused some information to be revealed, unintentionally.
Shopping Panel Update
Google has updated its Shopping Product Panel by adding product buttons to the listings.
These product listings show up on the right side of the desktop web search results. And are quite similar to the swipeable-carousels that show up on mobile devices.
The new buttons include:
- Details.
- Reviews.
- Stores.
Clicking on them triggers an overlay, which pops up additional product information on top of the search results.
What does this mean?
Searchers will now be able to find detailed information about products within the search results page. Hence, these changes might have an impact on your sales. Head over to your Analytics to check if you notice any changes to your revenue from Google.
Bug in Ad Preview and Diagnosis Tool
Over the weekend, some users noticed a weird bug in Google’s Ad Preview and Diagnosis Tool. It started showing information which it shouldn’t have. And within the next few hours, the tool became inaccessible for obvious reasons.
The tool began to show information from Google auction process which included information like available formats, Ad score, bid eCPM, Fmt ECPM, the number of rejections etc on the simulated search results page.
Well, no one is really sure what these data points exactly mean. However, for most of us advertisers, it’s not difficult to take an educated guess Maybe, it gave us an unintended clue about what really goes on inside the auction process.
As an advertiser, one can be justifiably concerned when their campaign data is shown somewhere it shouldn’t be displayed. Though, Google says it is aware of the issue and is working on fixing it.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Have you seen this person?
One of our Crew members is missing!
And we won’t be able to bring your more news anymore unless we find this person. And yes, you will be rewarded with $100M. And you can choose how you prefer it. Cash or wire transfer?
But, don’t even try. Because you won’t be able to find this person.
No, she hasn’t left God’s good earth. This person just doesn’t exist. The image definitely exists though.
How’s that possible?
It’s an AI generated image of a person that never existed.
So, need images of models for your ad-campaigns? No problem!
Need to fill your team members info on the “About Us” page of your website? You are taken care of.
You are a loner but want to create images of guests who visited you for the weekend party? You got it.
But, if you are a model or run a website selling stock photos, please consider a career change asap. Thank us never.
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