ADVERTISING
How to ace this weekend’s advertising frenzy
Sure, Black Friday’s about to bust the door down (virtually) and if you’re still figuring out campaigns now, you’re probably procrastinating.
But, let’s be honest – we all procrastinate from time to time. And if you’re still trying to figure out the campaign strategy for this year’s big sale, Dan Snow has a couple of tips. He’s been taking to Twitter with them all week, and here’s a roundup of his BFCM advice:
- People are actively trying to buy stuff. Capitalize on it. Your conversion rate and average order value are going to be at annual highs this weekend, so take advantage by running collection ads, sending traffic to a variety of pages, and creating product bundles for a bigger average purchase.
- Your highest ROAS audience should be customers who’ve already made a purchase. But, the FB Pixel maxes out at 180 days. To solve this, Dan recommends exporting your order info to extract as many customers as you can – excluding those who’ve made a purchase in the past 180 days.
- Make the most of prospecting budgets. To scale spend the smart way, check how age groups are performing and how spend is getting allocated. If you’re seeing a high-performing age group, break them into their own audience and spend away!
All the Black Friday advertising talk is going to be over in just a few days (though we’ll be right onto holiday sale chatter), so take the remaining time to nail down your campaigns and get ready for the big day-slash-weekend!
Check out Dan Snow’s Twitter page to find all of his tips!
Three video tips from Facebook
Facebook’s been on a roll lately with advertising tips, and they continued the streak this week with a few best practices for videos.
Whether you’re looking to create high-converting ads or long-form content for your Facebook page, these tips should set you on the right path:
- Add a 3-5 second trailer. You’re probably familiar with the concept of a ‘hook’ in writing, where you get the reader invested in your content before you dive in. Facebook recommends doing the same with videos, saying that a 3-5 second trailer at the beginning of the video could encourage people to keep watching.
- Frame it. Facebook advises framing your videos in a 4:5 aspect ratio to be shown properly in both mobile and desktop settings.
- Keep the community engaged. One of the easiest ways to show your customers you care – and this applies for any social platform – is to respond to your customers in the comment section. Beware, you could be in for a wild ride.
The Crew’s take: Facebook’s tips are designed for videos in general on the platform, but the tips translate well into advertising. Keeping the community engaged with well-formatted, entertaining videos is normally a surefire way to get some traction with your ads.
Facebook’s full post goes into much more detail than we could fit here. Go check it out!
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SEO
175-pages guidelines from Google explains the UX key factors to rank high
Ever heard of the Quality Rater Guidelines?
It’s a 175-page document created by Google. It gathers all the guidelines that Quality Raters use to evaluate search results.
It’s a treasure trove of information.
And while 175 pages can be a lot of stuff to digest, this blog post from Search Engine Journal reported some UX (user experience) insights you can find in Google’s behemoth of a document.
And since Google is heavily focused on UX, these are some points to be aware of:
+ Interstitial and monetization with ads: Google clearly stated in 2016 that “intrusive interstitials” have a negative impact on a website ranking, but the company makes it clear that ads are not bad. However, make sure that ads are not obtrusive to the main content.
+ Setting expectations and clickbait: A good page sets expectations for wherever it’s leading you on the other side of the click. And, it addresses expectations.
In other words, a good page tells you what will happen when you click through.
There are many sections in Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines focused on users’ expectations. Thus, make sure you meet (or exceed) those expectations!
+ Mobile usability: It seems weird that we are still talking about this now, but yeah, there are still websites not optimized for the mobile experience.
Anyway, the general rule is that mobile users are much more impatient than desktop users. They’re looking for a result, and they want it fast.
The piece from Search Engine Journal provides different examples, but if you’re a real geek, get the information straight from the source.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
INSTAGRAM: Satyam Sinha on Twitter has noticed that Instagram is testing animated messages, just another update in a line of them from the company recently.
BIG TECH: Europe’s picky about their privacy laws, and lawmakers have just proposed a new framework for sharing information that’s worth a look.
YOUTUBE: There might be a new way for users to write out timestamps in the comments, according to a new update from Google’s experimentation thread.
SNAPCHAT: Don’t count Snap out! A new piece from Digiday outlines how advertisers are seeing solid results on the platform in recent months.
E-COMMERCE: We don’t need to tell you twice, but this year’s going to be a big one for e-commerce. Some new data and infographics from HubSpot help outline this further.
BRAIN TEASER
Here’s a fun one. Can you name three consecutive days without saying Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday?
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.
Going down with the ship
Was your favorite website down yesterday? It’s not just you. There was an Amazon Web Services outage yesterday, and it took down a sizable chunk of the internet with it.
The issue was mostly localized to North America, but it affected companies from Acorns to the Washington Post.
As it turns out, Amazon went down with the ship too – to some extent. The outage reportedly affected Amazon’s ability to “post updates to the Service Health Dashboard.”
The outage is being fixed as of this writing, though, and most brands affected are back up and running.
Let’s just hope this doesn’t happen to e-commerce sites this weekend…