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AFFILIATE MARKETING
Don’t throw money at Pavel…
A while ago, Roxy St shared a post looking for Pavel Bykov from an affiliate network called Faunus.
Apparently, she hadn’t received her payouts and more people complained the same in the comments section. This post is from 20th January, and we didn’t find any replies from Pavel Bykov.
You’re probably wondering: Why are you talking about it now? Because we wanted to not jump to conclusions too quickly with any sort of accusations… But now it seems pretty safe to say that many others had this issue. Oh, and we forgot to check the post a few days after it was made… Sorry!
Anyway, over a month later, Pavel is nowhere to be found, so we’re pretty confident in bringing up this red flag to everyone.
We don’t know what really happened. What was the amount involved and why Pavel Bykov couldn’t pay his affiliates. But now you know what we know and you can follow Roxy’s post for updates! Stay safe out there!
PS: The WTAFF Crew has a small story about Pavel too… He organized a crypto conference in Prague where he pitched his gambling ICO. Let’s just say we had a good instinct back then to ignore the ICO hype.
E-COMMERCE
Back to basics
Yesterday, we learned about writing personalized emails and how it can help you increase conversions and customer service for your e-commerce stores.
Today, we touch upon another angle of personalization and how it can set your brand apart from the thousands of others out there:
Personalized Thank You Cards!
In this modern era, where almost everything is automated or digitalized, people love going old school.
Yes, we are talking about personalized, handwritten thank-you cards on paper.
Lately, paper planner, postcards etc. are becoming popular again.
Following the same trend, Julija Agusi shares how she used personalized postcards to increase the sales for her e-comm stores, membership sites and courses related businesses.
Here’s how she adopted the strategy:
- Find the best/popular quotes and sayings related to your niche.
- Design beautiful postcards around the above content. Don’t forget to include your website URL below the quote!
- Add a personalized message on the other side of the postcard. You can start with a simple “Thank You”. Make them feel it is personal. Don’t just send them discount coupons!
- There are a lot of sites offering this service where you upload the design and your message. And they are directly sent to the customer. Julija used sites like MyPostcards, Postable to do this.
- For Shopify store owners, there are apps which automate the whole process and send these cards to your customers. You can automate the whole process using rules. For example, when a customer spends above $50, a card is sent to them after a week with a promo code.
Here are some other situations where this strategy worked wonders for Julija:
- An automated process where each subscriber gets a card every two months. It helped her improve customer retention by two months without changing anything else.
- Angry customer with complaints. We all usually offer them a refund. Go the extra mile and send them a card apologizing and addressing the issue. Julija had a few such customers getting back to the membership and becoming a diehard fan. And a few others appreciating the way their issues were taken care of.
- Send these cards to your influencers for reviewing your products and building a relationship with them. This works perfectly to get great exposure with any new product, getting free content and becoming an authority in a certain niche.
Well, postcards are something one can touch, feel and share with their family and friends offline. Everybody expects emails, but not such personalized cards. Also, it’s a great branding exercise. Include this in your marketing strategy and see if it does the same magic for you as it did for Julija. Thank her later!
PS: WTAFF might turn to paper soon. Wait for it!
SPONSORED
Co-Founder & CEO Carlo Bellati explains why Chinese New Year was business as usual for uDroppy users!
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!
Facebook releasing new updates. 5-minute checklist for your Ads Manager
How important is it to have a well-organized Ads Manager dashboard? Well, it takes just 5 minutes to keep it organised. We will show you how… Also, Facebook is releasing new updates for long-form videos. And David Schloss has some insights about the new “Why am I seeing this” update.
Ads Manager Checklist
“When you’re setting your FB campaigns, the early stage of actions can make or break you”
This is what Alexandr Fedotov thinks and in line with this belief, he shared a 5-minute checklist to set up your Ads Manager in the right manner for success. Being organized allows you to find the right data faster and helps in better decision making.
Let’s dive into it.
Before starting, open your Ads Manager and click on the dropdown menu to find “Performance and Clicks”, where you can edit your columns.
First step
Now it’s time to choose the metrics you want to see in your dashboard. The order he recommends is:
- Results: Success metrics related to your campaign objectives.
- Reach: Helps you identify if you are able to reach enough people to meet your goals.
- Frequency: Audience fatigue is real. Once you start hitting above 4 here, it’s time to launch new creatives.
- Relevance score: The higher your number, the more the algorithm works in your favour. However, the results section is far more important.
- Optional: Here you can choose to see your eCPM, your effective CPM or the CPM of your specific Ads Manager. This will depend on your ads’ quality and engagement with users.
- CPM: This to help you estimate your spending.
- Unique Link CTR (Click Through Rate)
- CPC (Cost Per Click).
- Landing Page Views: If your Unique Link CTR is good but you notice a drop in Landing Page Views, it means your website is slow. Optimize it.
- You can include additional metrics in the following order: Cost per landing page view, Add-To-Cart (ATC), Cost per ATC, Initiate Checkout, Cost per Initiate Checkout, Purchases, Purchase conversion value, Amount spent, ROAS, Offline Conversions.
Second Step
Step 2 is about standardizing your ads and ad set names.
- Campaign level: Store/Client name – Funnel Placement – Campaign Type. For instance: WTAFF – TOF (Top of the funnel) – Conversions.
- Ad set level: Here you take the campaign name and add identifications relevant for you. It mostly depends on what you’re testing. Split testing Lookalikes?
- Then the name could be: WTAFF – TOF – Conversions – Website visitors LAL – 1%.
- Ads level: Here you add the creative variation you’re using: WTAFF – TOF – Conversions – Website visitors LAL – 1% – Testimonial video – Long copy.
If you are managing high spends and you are running different affiliate offers, e-com stores or you run ads for many clients, this will help you stay organized and keep your data clean.
New Custom Audiences updates
Recently, we discussed a Facebook update aimed at better advertising transparency. That update went live yesterday, 27th February. And with this roll-out, users will now be able to see the names of the businesses using their info and how their info was gathered.
This info is available by clicking the “Why am I seeing this” button.
David Schloss shared more info about this feature. Something he received straight from his FB Rep. And it is important to be aware of it, especially if you run ads for other businesses:
- If an agency runs ads through their clients’ account, the agency’s name won’t be shown in the “Why I am seeing this” section.
But, if the agency owns the client’s ad account and they don’t specify they run ads on behalf of their client, the agency’s name will appear in the “Why I am seeing this” section.
- If the agency specifies that its own account is used to advertise for another business, the agency’s name won’t appear in the “Why I am seeing this” section.
- If an agency owns the brand’s Facebook Page in their Business Manager, “Why Am I Seeing This” will show the name of the agency.
So if you are running ads for other businesses, be aware of these rules and chose the right set up in your Business Manager.
Showcase Premium Ads
Just a few days ago, we talked about Facebook betting on long-form videos. Today, we are sharing with you an advertising product they released to monetize this type of content: Showcase.
“Showcase gives ad buyers the chance to reach their target audiences using the highest-quality videos on Facebook.”
Currently, Showcase is available only in the US with the following options:
- In-Stream Reserve: It allows advertisers to reach video watching audience from a selection of hundreds of most engaging, highest quality publishers and creators. They’re like In-Stream Ads, but you can choose from a wide selection of videos and creators. Basically, you’ll know where your Video Ads will be shown.
- In-Stream Reserve Categories: This allows advertisers to reach audiences based on contextually relevant content: sports, fashion/beauty and entertainment. More categories are being added here.
- Sponsorship: It gives advertisers the chance to be the exclusive sponsor of a program for US viewers. This is something for large and established brands.
These features will attract TV media buyers with large budgets, hence the CPMs might go higher.
However, these advertisers are more about branding. Not really about performance marketing. So, this is an advantage for us. Buuut… the question is: Are these kinds of ads really useful for us? Let us know your thoughts and how you would take advantage of them.
SEARCH
Search experience is changing! Don’t sleep on it
Search experience has remained the same for as long as the Internet has existed. People type and they see the results.
That’s now changing! Search is changing! Voice is transforming how people interact with their devices. And how results are presented to them. To understand this better, MDG Advertising released this infographic. It looks at the key trends and ways in which you can evolve your strategies to be prepared for the future.
Why is Voice a big deal?
- Simply because of the huge popularity of digital voice assistants like Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana, Samsung Bixby.
- Integration of voice assistants with smart speakers like Amazon Echo, Google Home. 72% of Americans use voice assistants. And 32% of Americans own a smart speaker.
Voice assistants and Search
- People love using voice assistants to perform search queries.
- 89% use it to search. 88% use it to ask questions.
- 71% of voice assistant users say they’d rather search via voice than by typing.
- More than 20% of all Google mobile searches are now conducted via voice.
- 30% of all searches will be conducted without a screen by 2020.
How can you optimize your business for Voice search?
Well, both consumers as well as search engines approach text-based searches and voice-based searches differently. Here’s what you can do to take advantage of voice-based searches:
- Think conversation, not query. Voice-based searches are longer and more conversational than text queries. Consider targeting a wider-range of keywords as well as more informal keywords.
- Optimize for questions. Consider optimizing for question-based queries and building FAQ pages.
- Improve your site performance. Voice assistants only choose a handful of results from sites they trust. Consider focusing extra resources on site structure, speed, and mobile friendliness.
Is Voice Search important for a specific type of businesses?
Yes, local businesses!
- 58% of users use voice search to find local business information.
- 46% of users regularly use voice to find local businesses.
- 27% of users rely on voice search to even find the websites of local businesses.
- Voice searches over mobile are 3X more likely to be local-based than text searches.
What can local businesses do to optimize for voice search?
- Make sure your Google My Business and other similar platforms are updated with the right information.
- Allocate resources to encouraging and managing your online ratings and reviews.
Other important aspects of voice search?
Not all voice assistants work the same way. Apple’s Siri draws ratings and reviews from Yelp. Google Assistant draws ratings and reviews from its own data.
This means you need custom optimization strategies for each type of assistant. Knowing your audience also helps to focus more on a specific kind of voice assistant.
Zoom In
Voice assistants and searches are still evolving. As the technology on which they are built evolves more, they will become more popular among consumers and more valuable for brands. Being an early adopter always helps gain some brownie points. And yes, the impact will be different for each business, of course, but it is worth considering.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
$85k job offer in Japan
Japan is facing a very serious crisis. And it is looking for help.
Its ninja population is on a serious decline. And they need some of you ninjas out there!
Before you get any wrong ideas, they are not looking for ninjas to run around, cutting off heads with swords and chucking ninja stars. Instead, they are looking for “ninja performers” for tourism purposes.
So, if your affiliate business is seeing a decline, e-commerce store is not working out or too many FB algo and feature changes are frustrating for you, we got you!
It’s a proper job offer with competitive pay. As a master ninja, you can earn up to $85k. And there is not much competition around to bother you either.
Here’s to new beginnings and new journeys!
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