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Hacking bid auctions. A 10X ROAS case study & a new FB privacy tool
Depesh Mandalia dropped some knowledge on how to have the bid auction working in your favour. Then an e-commerce case study, taken from breaking even to 10X ROAS. And Facebook’s new move. Is it for the users or against advertisers?
Hacking the bid auction
Is it possible to hack FB’s bidding auction? Actually, Depesh Mandalia says it is. He shared this strategy in his group. And it begins by understanding what kind of data Facebook looks at during the auction process.
Here are the steps he suggested to achieve this:
- Test audiences and creatives to find the right blend using automatic bidding. A 1M audience will work. With a $10 daily budget. But the higher, the better. More budget means more data.
- Once you see positive results in a campaign/ad set over a 3-day period, switch to CBO. Use manual bidding with 3X, 4X and 5X your CPA. Set a budget 5X higher than the highest manual bid multiplied by ad sets. This is to give the CBO enough budget to work with.
- Cut bad ads with rules. Replace the bad ads that get paused 3 days in a row with new ones. Do this at 6 am – ad account time zone of course.
- You’ll quickly understand which ad set is doing well. Double the budget on the manual bid that is working for you.
- If none of them is doing well, it means your audience isn’t ready for this yet. Start again and test new audiences.
Those are the tips Depesh suggests. Hoping this helps you scale everything you put your eyes on!
Video Ads + DPA + CBO
Are you already using CBO? Given that it’ll soon be mandatory, it’s better to start getting used to it.
Many marketers are already using it and seeing nice results. Like Zarar Ameen. He shares a case study in a white-labelled e-commerce apparel niche.
When he started to run campaigns for his client’s e-commerce store, his ROAS was 200%, with a $25 CPA. The business wasn’t even breaking even.
But, he was able to drive a 10X ROAS using DPA and CBO. What did he really do?
He started with a simple process to gather the initial audience data:
- Product video ads and different ad sets to target different audiences.
- Website conversions, optimized for Viewed Content. After 50 events, they switched to Purchases optimization.
- Retargeting based on video views.
- Lookalike Audiences (LAL) of the video views, retargeted with product videos ads.
- Dynamic Product Ads (DPA) carousel to target video views: 30, 60, 90, 180 days.
At this point, he started to see a drop in CPA and increase in ROAS.
He launched two CBO campaigns that were using LAL’s of video views and interest-based audiences.
The ROAS reached 10X. So, what are the takeaways?
- Each ad set audience should be above 1M.
- Expand the interests while scaling.
- CBO is ideal for the ad sets that have at least 100 conversions.
Thanks to these results, Zarar Ameen managed to get a 12-month contract with his client. And a case study for us with a happy ending…
However, keep in mind that every business is different. Different audiences, different countries, different margins. All these case studies should always be adapted for your business in your own way and not followed step by step. Pick the main takeaways, test them and adjust based on what you see working!
Facebook’s new move: Against advertisers or for users?
This spring, Facebook will release a new tool called Clear History. What is that?
Basically, users will be able to wipe information that the social network collects about them using third-party apps and websites.
As you know, Facebook uses this information to show relevant ads to users. And just like we already do this on our web browsers when we clean our cookies and history, we will be able to do the same over Facebook too.
What does this mean for FB and advertisers?
With this tool, Facebook aims to gain back the users and their trust it lost after many data breach scandals in the past. On the other hand, user experience might suffer as they will be more likely to see irrelevant ads.
Besides, this is going to give advertisers some headwinds in terms of being able to target as effectively as before. Yet, we still don’t know how it will exactly influence our targeting.
Waiting for Mark to give us answers…
E-COMMERCE
Cutting out anti-sales words from your copy
Emails are important. Not just because everybody uses them… But also because you have a close connection with your audience. Plus, you already own this traffic. You don’t have to pay every time!
Knowing that, we’re bringing you some tips shared by Michael Szecsenyi. He wrote a full post centred around the concept of cutting gibberish marketing talk from your copy.
According to him, this crap talking is not helping to generate sales. Thus, it’s important to avoid it.
What does he suggest instead? Let’s get into that.
- First, let’s spot the most common phrases labelled by Michael as trash: World-class, easy to use, market-leading, high-quality product, excellent customer service, scalable, cutting edge, flexible, etc.
“These sentences come out when businesses forget about their identity […] and start to write for a faceless crowd.”
- Turn these sentences into personalized ones. How? Describe what each quality really means. Excellent customer service? We help our customer 24h, every day of the week.
Awesome product? Don’t say it. Show it! Explain what makes your product awesome.
- Ask yourself if you’d use these words with a friend. “Yo bro, this sushi has cutting edge salmon!” Do you talk like that? If not, why would you use those words with your customers? Use real words.
The Crew’s Take
While it’s very easy to come up with such sentences, they can hurt your sales. Sometimes we lack creativity during the copywriting process. Or we just don’t feel like writing. And we end up using these shortcuts.
However, if you write a copy for your biz, our biggest suggestion is to build a buyer persona and keep that persona in mind while writing your email copies. In its due course, it becomes a habit, and you’ll have to worry less. Here’s to crushing it in your next level biz with cutting edge marketing and world-class management. (⌐■_■)
SPONSORED
[Case Study] Uncover $12.5k in profit in a week with 977% ROI with MagicAdz!
A Facebook Ads case study from an affiliate using MagicAdz to find the right ads. And hear this: $1.2k spent for $12.5k profit! That’s a real 10x! The campaign ran during the end of 2018 when Casino Rewards reopened India for testing some of their gambling offers.
- Step 1: Research angles that affiliates actually run using MagicAdz. There’s a feature that shows specifically affiliate only ads, including those hidden with all sorts of tools.
- Step 2: Select ads with lots of engagement, like this one.
- Step 3: Go to see their landing pages. Trim down what is not needed and just likely to get you in trouble.
- Step 4: Localize the ad. In this case, the ad above is from a Canadian offer, which was edited to this version for India.
- Step 5: Start targeting broad. In this case, it was “People in India, who are 25 or older”, optimizing for clicks. The whole thing started strong from day 1, as you can see here. It was running at $50 per day budget, but the ad account time zone is different. So, you have to take that into account.
- Step 6: Scaling. The results were already very good so no more testing was required. The big advantage of just taking a working set of ad + lander with MagicAdz. So the campaign was duplicated 5 times, with these end results.
Why stop after one week? The traffic didn’t back out for the advertiser. Instead of waiting to get feedback and optimize for the lead quality, the scale meant the offer owner couldn’t take the risk so they paused the affiliate. Check out the full case study, directly from this MagicAdz user right here.
Main takeaways:
- Go less aggressive. It will help with the quality for the advertiser, it will help you get fewer complaints.
- If the offer is promising, work on lead quality instead of scaling first.
- Angles that work in one geo can be adapted to others.
Not a bad return, is it? One thing to keep in mind is that this affiliate has experience with more aggressive verticals. The good news is that MagicAdz is just as powerful for less aggressive e-commerce offers too!
In other words, you choose the hat you wear, MagicAdz just helps you uncover what ads really run on Facebook:
- Affiliate ads only – exclude all branding ads you might not care about
- Filter by vertical, for example, casino, crypto, sweeps, diet, ME, skin, muscle, CBD, e-com and more!
- Ads from 49 countries.
- Very powerful search: by ads, user comments and redirect path or landing page search including specific HTML code!
- 7 of the biggest e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento
These guys keep improving the tool at a fast pace, and we love that!
If you are still not convinced, you get a 14 day trial for $1 to explore everything the tool has to offer. Afterwards, it costs $299/month. Pays for itself within a few days usually!
But you already know that as a WHAT THE AFF reader, you can get it for a special price – $249/month. Keep in mind though, the discount is valid as long as you keep your subscription active.
You just have to use the code WTAFFMAGIC when signing up!
LinkedIn publishes new eBook on social management
LinkedIn has grown to 610M users. Engagement is at a record high! And users are looking at new ways to interact on the platform and engage with their audiences.
Taking the chance, LinkedIn published a new eBook covering social media marketing and management tips. Based on lessons learned by their own social media management team.
Let’s start with some valuable data insights from the eBook.
- 40% of members visit LinkedIn each day.
- Engagement is up by more than 60% year-on-year.
- Executives from all Fortune 500 companies use the platform.
- 61M users are senior level influencers. And 40M of them are involved in the decision-making process.
- 45% of all social media traffic to a company’s homepage comes from LinkedIn. Not ours though…
- 45% of article readers are in upper-level positions such as Managers, VPs, Directors, CXOs.
LinkedIn’s Global Social Media Lead Steve Kearns talks about how LinkedIn is a dynamic marketing tool with endless possibilities. And some of the ways you can take advantage of the platform include:
- Establish thought leadership. Use Content Suggestions feature to publish the content your audience cares most about.
- Driving more results. Add a free CTA button to your profile to send traffic to your website, point users to a sales rep and more.
- Establish an authentic connection with your audience. Track and reshare articles with brand mentions and those your teammates/employees are writing on LinkedIn.
- Highlight what makes your company unique. By posting rich content such as white papers, integrated videos etc.
- Tap into the power of creativity. Check out LinkedIn page posts regularly for some inspiring ideas.
Zoom In
Well, LinkedIn doesn’t get as much attention as Facebook or Instagram get. But, LinkedIn has a very specific, no-fluff niche. And some new advertising tools and features designed to help marketers maximize their efforts.
So, if you’re looking to grow your LinkedIn presence, this new guide is a good read. There’s a heap of interesting and helpful insights, and it’s worth going over.
Stop content stuffing
For your all e-commerce owners, someone has a very valuable advice for you. And it’s none other than Google itself.
The advice? Don’t stuff content at the bottom of your e-commerce Category Pages.
It’s the one simple thing you can do to put that content to more use. Without distracting the users from seeing your product listing pages.
Google’s John Mueller says:
“Stuffing content in the footer isn’t a great practice. One of the reasons why websites initially started kind of doing this kind of workaround is that it was really hard sometimes for us to rank category pages on e-commerce sites if there’s no useful information on that page if there’s no context on that page.
So, as a workaround people started stuffing whole Wikipedia articles above below the fold using a small font, sometimes using a link like that says like more information that pops out at this giant article of text.”
In simple words:
- Avoid keyword stuffing.
- Instead of adding 40 photos of your product, add more text for each product listing, alt-tags for images, captions and a crisp, visible description.
- Replace those giant blocks of text with one or two short sentences that you place above the fold, below the heading.
Here’s the entire hangout session for webmasters and site owners interested in spending an hour with John where he discussed this topic in more detail. He also talks about other related things like crawling, indexing, mobile sites, internationalization, duplicate content, sitemaps, search console, pagination, duplicate content, multi-lingual/multi-regional sites and a lot more.
Got questions? Shoot ‘em at the Webmasters community here.
Zoom In
Well, most of it seems common SEO advice. However, we still see a lot of e-commerce or sales pages having random blocks of huge text all over the page, especially in the footer. That’s so 2000’s!
Google doesn’t treat content the same way it used to a decade ago. There are better ways of improving your page rankings and avoiding such workarounds is where you can start.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Do you really read our Poolside stories by the Pool?
‘Cause if you don’t, you must! We insist. Otherwise, you are doing it wrong. Besides, you’ll see how reading by the pool makes the story come alive.
So, if you are at one of those conferences, hang out by the pool, put some swag on and read our Poolside stories.
If you don’t have a pool yet or cannot afford one, be the 1st to read and share our magazine daily. You’ll be able to afford one sooner than buying those 101-courses.
What’s the correlation? Well, it’s kinda spurious! Just like the ones we got here.
And they are as interesting as the poolside correlation we drew above. You might not know but that’s okay, we don’t judge. But did you know there’s a correlation between:
- People who drowned after falling out of a fishing boat AND Marriage rates in Kentucky.
- Per capita cheese consumption AND Number of people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets.
- Number people who drowned while in a swimming-pool AND Power generated by US nuclear power plants.
- Letters in the words of Scripps National Spelling Bee AND Number of people killed by venomous spiders.
- The number of people who drowned by falling into a pool AND Films Nicolas Cage appeared in.
And there are more such interesting (but pretty useless) stats published on that site.
‘Cause the more you know, the more you know, right?!
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