Twitter is testing Fleet ads
It looks like Twitter wants to make money off everything. (But that might not be a bad thing for marketers.)
What’s going on: The company has announced that it will begin testing Fleet ads with a small number of advertisers in the US.
In case you have more discipline than us and don’t use Twitter much, Fleets is the company’s version of Instagram Stories which debuted in November 2020.
Ad formats supported: Fleet ads will support videos and images in 9:16. If you run a video ad, the maximum length is 50 seconds. “Swipe-up” call to action will also be supported.
In terms of metrics, you’ll get the standard ones like profile visits, impressions, and site visits, among others. You’ll also get video starts, views, and completions for videos.
How many people use Fleets? Twitter has yet to share any figures around the usage of Fleets, hence it’s hard to decide if you should invest time and resources into this format. But the easiest solution is probably to adapt your Instagram and Facebook Stories Ads to Twitter Fleets and give it a test.
MICROSOFT
Microsoft will finally have Lookalike Audiences
If you’ve had success with Lookalike Audiences on Facebook or Google, we have some good news for you.
In a blog post, Microsoft announced the launch of “Similar Audiences” in the US. “Similar Audiences” is Microsoft’s version of Lookalike Audiences on Facebook.
Promising initial results: Ads shown to Similar Audiences have a 39 percent higher conversion rate than ads shown to non-audience targeted users, according to Microsoft.
Requirements: To get started with Similar Audiences, you must have a remarketing list of at least 300 people.
Some other interesting updates from the blog post:
- Expanding the Audience network: Microsoft said that France and Germany will join its Audience network.
- Import everything: Microsoft has also made it easier to import your campaigns from Facebook and Google. It appears that the overall goal is for you to be able to easily import everything you have from these two platforms and get started right away without any setup.
- Shopify: These days, everyone loves Shopify users. Google announced some cool Shopify integrations last week, and now Microsoft has announced a Shopify app that allows merchants to easily set up shopping campaigns.
The Crew’s Take: We love what Microsoft is doing regarding their ad tools. We’d also love it if they did as good of a job at expanding their market share…
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MARKETING
Pay what you want
Have you ever tried this pricing strategy?
It allows customers to decide how much to pay for a product, and it can be an alternative to free trials or samples.
This method has both benefits and drawbacks.
And whether or not you should test this pricing format, depends on your goals. And Thomas McKinlay from Ariyh analyzed the different upsides and downsides of the pay-what-you-want option.
Why it works:
- Pay-what-you-want promos are seen as more original and entertaining, and hence garner more attention.
- You’ll reach a better audience than simply giving something away for free.
Limitations:
- If a large number of companies adopt this method, the novelty may wear off.
- People are more likely to pay than to choose zero. However, the average price chosen by people is lower than when you sell at a fixed price.
- It shifts the decision-making burden on the client. This may cause analysis paralysis and as a result, an abandoned purchase. The “pick your own price” format could be the solution. So you basically give the user different pricing options, so they need to make a smaller decision.
Pay-what-you-want is an alternative to the most common formats, such as “just pay shipping”, or ”$1”. It’s not a strategy to generate revenue, but one to attract new customers.
The biggest advantage over these two is the novelty factor. Few brands implemented this format, although “just pay shipping” is pretty frequent.
And here are some stats from real-life examples from studies conducted on the pricing format:
- In an experiment testing pay-what-you-want vs 40% discounts for the promotion of professional photo portraits, people chose to pay €16.12 on average (equivalent to a 63% discount). But it attracted double the number of customers.
- People chose to pay €1.41 on average for a razor when Gillette tried pay-what-you-want vs. free samples. (11.8% of the standard price).
Are you thinking about testing this strategy? If you’re going to test this format, Thomas McKinlay provided further stats and advice to consider.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
GOOGLE: The search engine wants to give you a chance. If you’re running shopping ads but your website is subpar, Google will display a “Website needs improvement” message and terminate your account until you meet the requirements for removing this message.
EBAY: PayPal and eBay have called it quits for good. You can no longer deposit payments to PayPal if you sell on eBay.
ADVERTISING: If programmatic and direct advertising had a child, the child would be known as “premium programmatic.” Doug Huntington goes into greater detail about why he believes premium programmatic is the way of the future in a post-cookie world.
PPC: Google has provided a quick recap of last week’s Google Ads announcements (hint: there are a lot of them, 15 in total).
E-COMMERCE: Post-pandemic e-commerce ad spending is increasing. To be more specific, by 49.8 percent.
ADVERTISING: Have you ever heard of Opera Ads? Neither have we. But, according to reports, they’re here and doing well, with a 130 percent revenue increase since launch.
CLUBHOUSE: How do you monetize your Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces shows with ads? A new collective has an idea.
BRAIN TEASER
Five hundred begins it, five hundred ends it, and five in the middle is seen.
The first of all numbers, the first of all letters, take up their places between.
Join them all together to bring before you the name of a legendary king.
You can find the solution here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Microsoft, make me a copy of TikTok
Developers, meet your arch enemy: GPT-3.
During Microsoft’s Build Conference, the company has announced they’re using GPT-3 to translate spoken text into code.
Not so fast: You won’t be able to make the next version of TikTok using this tool. Microsoft is making this for making no-code and low-code PowerApps formulas.
Give me more power: Is this just the beginning of what GPT-3 can do for making everyone a developer? Time will tell. For now, if you’re a dev, you’re not going to get replaced anytime soon.
If you do, we (marketers) will probably go before you, so hopefully we can grab beers while our AI is optimizing our Facebook campaigns and yours is making the next version of Facebook.