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Blue giant is starting to get exhausted: Q4 2019 earnings report
It’s that time of the quarter again. Facebook released its Q4 2019 report and Mark Zuckerberg turned to the social network to share some of his thoughts about Facebook.
Starting with the report:
Monthly active users: 2.5B, an 8% year-over-year growth.
Daily Active Users: 1.6B, an increase of 9% year-over-year.
Total Revenue: $21B, 25% y-o-y increase. That’s a lot, uh?
Advertising Revenue: $20B. Again, a 25% yearly growth.
Total Costs: Up by 24% compared to Q4 2018: $12B.
Alright, Facebook did smash expectations yet again, especially when it comes to revenue. However, the rising costs are kinda worrying for Wall Street. In any case, on the advertising side of things competition is still going up and up, which we can see by the Ad revenue growth.
User growth is slowing down, but Facebook said this was expected due to the platform becoming more and more mature.
What was Mark Zuckerberg’s POV?
- They’re very focused on preserving elections and democratic processes.
- The FTC settlement taught them a lesson and they’ll put more effort into privacy.
- They want to make payments available on Facebook. More specifically, they’re working on WhatsApp Payments and Libra.
- Their VR/AR products are kinda successful in the market and they’ll keep grinding to improve these technologies.
Well, more or less the same stuff as he shared a while ago in his last post.
The Crew thoughts
The growth of ad revenues and users is slowing down, although this moment was always expected to come. It can’t just keep growing at crazy rates forever because, well, there aren’t any other users outside humans :). Kind of the same thoughts as our last post: Growth is slowing down but Facebook isn’t going everywhere.
Forbes hit hard by… something
“My traffic that is down circa 10x and that’s being corroborated by fellow writers I know well.”
Yeah, that apparently comes from a senior writer at Forbes.
What happened? After Google’s broad core algo update, which was released around January 13, the traffic for Forbes started tanking.
This is a massive and concerning drop in traffic from Google Search. We’re talking “down circa 10x” starting January 27th at 11 PM ET.
In fact, some of the usually popular articles aren’t even reaching 100 views per day right now.
From the looks of things, the January 2020 core algo update and the Featured Snippet de-duplication change seem to have heavily penalised Forbes. Or maybe, there was another algorithmic update from Google that has caused this drop for Forbes and a few other sites.
The writer at Forbes shared some traffic charts showing the dip in traffic that started at 11 PM ET on 27th January, but that has since been deleted from the Twitter thread due to privacy reasons. But, you can join the discussion here.
Zoom Out: It is hard to pinpoint what is really going on with this. With all the changes happening on Google’s end, between the core update on the 13th January, Featured Snippet change on the 22nd and Favicon testing on the 27th, something has hit Forbes hard.
Maybe it has some connection to the clickbaity headlines Forbes uses? We don’t know for sure. Have any of you seen a sudden spike or a drop in traffic anytime this month?
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- Round-trip tickets to Amsterdam.
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Who can claim the crown? There are 7 categories and each will only have one king or queen.
- Dating.
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FACEBOOK ADS
Retargeting campaign structure that turned $13k into $232k
Kevin Pierce shared how he achieved these results, but first, let’s see some background info:
It’s a high-ticket store with a solid brand and customer service. The AOV is around $100-150.
DPA Retargeting: DPA campaigns are powerful, and this is how Kevin set them up:
One campaign, with 10 ad sets targeting the following audiences:
- 5x Website views audiences, each one excluding ATC 7, 14, 30, 90, 180 days.
- 5x ATC audiences, each one excluding Purchases at 7, 14, 30, 90, 180 days.
You can get some overlapping here but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Manual retargeting: Here he runs conversion campaigns, starting with at least five ad sets. These are the audiences to hit:, starting with at least five ad sets. These are the audiences to hit:
- FB Page Engagers.
- Instagram Page Engagers.
- Post/Ad Engagers.
- Saved Post/Ad.
- Website Visitors.
- Add To Cart.
- View Content.
- Initiate Checkout.
- Video Views (25%,50%,75%,10s).
Each one of them is on a 180-days basis. Although, if the size is too large, he breaks them down like in the DPA campaign.
Talking about creatives, it’s better to use different formats than the ones used for cold campaigns. His tip is to create GIFs because they catch attention and it’s easy to create a lot of variations, providing fresh content for users constantly.
ROUNING UP THE STACK
- FROM THE CREW: Hey! Wanna have an insider look into WHAT THE AFF, how it started and something about our future plans? Check out this podcast hosted by Wewe Media, where WTAFF founder shared how this pretty little thing started and where we’re headed.
- TOOLS: Do you ever build graphical forecasts for your advertising? This tool does. You put in the numbers, and it spits out your conversion and margin forecasts. Thumbs up to Mack Grenfell for sharing it.
- GOOGLE: Google AI is working to build a human-like chatbot that can talk about anything and everything. Do you ever feel alone?
- ADVERTISING: If you are tired of Google and Facebook, here are 17 traffic sources you might want to put some of your eggs in.
- BOT MARKETING: Ever thought about creating a business card using none other than your chatbot? Ryan Bowles shared how to do it!
- FACEBOOK: In other news, Facebook will have to shell out 550M to settle a facial recognition case in Illinois. Essentially, Facebook violated Illinois biometric privacy rules.
- SEO: Time to delete some plug-ins because WordPress 5.4 will add Lazy-Loading to all images.
BRAIN TEASER
A time when they are green, a time when they’re brown, but both of these times, cause me to frown. But just in between, for a very short while, they’re perfect and yellow and cause me to smile!
What am I talking about here?
You can find the solution by clicking here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Corona is relishing the new Coronavirus… in Search
No, no, no. Corona beer has got nothing to do with the deadly outbreak that originated in Wuhan, China. But some people seem to think it does…
Alright, we don’t want to make funny jokes about this terrible crisis, but ever since the outbreak searches for “corona beer virus”, “beer virus” and “beer coronavirus” have increased substantially worldwide.
In fact, searches for “beer virus” have spiked by 744% and “beer coronavirus” has increased by 3200%.
What is really going on with the Mexican beer and the virus? Well, of course, there is absolutely no connection between the two.
It’s just that the name coronavirus comes from the crown-like spikes that can be seen protruding from the virus under a microscope. In Spanish, corona means crown.
Fortunately for Corona (the beer), the stock price of parent company Constellation Brands has held steady.
Well, you never know. Next thing you might hear on the Internet is that Corona beer is the cure for the virus. It’s a weird world we live in.