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CONVERSION OPTIMIZATION
Just being mobile responsive won’t cut it
These days we see everybody talking about responsive websites, responsive landing pages, responsive product pages, etc. It seems that everything related to mobile comes back to responsiveness.
In contrast to the usual talk of mobile responsiveness, Mohamed Ali Aguel shared something a bit controversial, but nonetheless interesting and truthful:
“Having your pages resize based on the screen size and device is good and all but it doesn’t cut it in the world of performance marketing.”
In other words, when you make a page responsive to mobile, it doesn’t mean you’re also optimizing it for mobile conversions. The mindset of the mobile user is different from the mindset of the desktop user.
Even the mobile triggers are different from the desktop triggers.
Mohammed Ali Aguel shared his suggestions on this:
- Have a floating button on mobile.
- Include less text and more graphics and bullet points.
- Minimize the length of the landers. For instance, right/left scroll for the testimonials section.
- Design the offer to maximize the space.
- Optimize the first screen in a way that it looks like a VSL (Video Sales Letters).
- Install a heatmap, collect data and adjust wherever needed.
So, next time you’re building a sales page, landing page or whatever, don’t just make it responsive. Make sure you optimize it for mobile conversions.
MESSENGER MARKETING
Facebook Messenger updates
Two short but important updates for marketers using the FB Messenger app.
Messenger Scan Code
What changed? From August 2019, the Messenger camera will no longer support scanning Messenger Codes.
What you can do: Facebook suggests using the QR codes with m.me links, which is a lightweight and efficient solution. For more info about the m.me links, you can check this page.
Changes in the checkbox plugin
What Changed? The checkbox plugin allows you to display a checkbox on the lead forms on your website. This allows users to opt-in to receive messages from your bot in Messenger.
Until recently you were able to have this box pre-checked on your website. But Facebook has now removed this functionality.
What you can do: Update your plugin as soon as possible and set up a new opt-in plan with your Facebook automation provider.
Bunch of other updates for Groups, Pages, Messenger and Newsfeed
There are a handful of other updates being announced by Facebook to curb the reach of fake and harmful content on its platform.
Updates for Groups
- Groups that “repeatedly share misinformation” will now be distributed to fewer people in the News Feed.
- Allowing users to remove their own posts and comments from a group, even after leaving the group.
- Increasing scrutiny on groups’ moderation when determining if a group is violating rules.
Updates for Pages and Newsfeed
- Low-quality pages will be cut out from the news feed. Just like Google, it will rank posts shown on the news feed. If your Page is frequently linked to and talked about by other sites, the algo will treat it as a trusted source.
- Addition of “Status with respect to clickbait” in the Page Quality.
- FB will also start fact-checking videos in the US. “Trust Indicators” will be shown when users click to see context around a publication.
Updates for Messenger
- “Forward” indicators are being rolled out in Messenger to let people know when a message has been forwarded.
- “Context buttons” for people to find more details around information they’ve been sent.
- A more detailed blocking tool and verified profile badges on Messenger.
SPONSORED
The Hottest Adult + Mainstream Games Offers Available Online
When it comes to making bucks in performance marketing, you need to think about diversity. Diversity in targeting, in campaign setup, in offer variety, and in vertical selection will all provide the greatest return on your traffic.
VIPoffers has been hard at work tooling away on the adult games vertical to run in conjunction with their proven dating and paysite offerings. Their goal is to create a complete adult offer ecosystem that converts well while boasting the best payouts in the industry.
FreeAdultGames – VIPoffers’ Flagship Adult Games Offer
Chances are you’ve seen their FreeAdultGames landing pages out there on the internet. About five years ago, the VIPoffers team created a handful of games offers to test the adult games waters. Over time, adult games offers have blossomed into an insanely profitable vertical for their affiliates.
They’ve witnessed a number of affiliates turn adult gaming into their main vertical as the market for them continues to grow. Luckily for you, they’ve been churning tons of new landing pages, iframes, and creatives on a monthly basis so they have a depth of content second to none.
The best part of these offers is that they accept over 100 geos and even have top-converting landing pages translated into 13 different languages so you can diversify your campaigns by geo.
FreeAdultGames is the perfect way to earn high EPCs and top payouts in a developing, yet high-performing vertical. The best conversion results are coming out of FR, DE, NO, SE and FI.
MyHotGamePortal – Mainstream Games for the Masses
Mainstream games offers are a newer creation for the VIPoffers team. Affiliates came to them with a need for cleaner games offers, and they developed MyHotGamePortal in order to convert more mainstream traffic. They took lessons from FreeAdultGames, cleaned up the landing pages, refined the flows, and charged ahead with the top performers.
Offers like MyHotGamePortal provide a solution for a larger audience and deliver solid EPCs thanks to their proven trial model. With a wide range of game types like RPG, Casino, Adventure, Puzzle, and Real-Time Strategy games, MyHotGamePortal delivers powerful results on a diverse mix of traffic.
Since MyHotGamePortal is more of a comprehensive gaming hub, affiliates find it is easy to promote on native, display, social media, email, and search. Cast your net wider today with a gaming offer that appeals to a larger chunk of the online market while converting just as well as their adult offers… you will certainly be happy you did!
Work Together with VIPoffers
Want to promote these offers? Have ideas or questions on setting up a unique games flow? Hit up VIPoffers! Their deeply-experienced marketing team is available around the clock to develop custom funnels + new approaches that will make you some serious money.
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Delivering performance in a mature ad account: Case Study
Getting started with Google Ad campaigns is not a difficult job. Anyone can set up an account and run campaigns with basic settings.
More often than not, it won’t work out and you’ll move on from there.
But even if you are an advanced marketer and know what you’re doing, running successful campaigns over a long period will see you face many new challenges as you strive to deliver constant performance and improvement.
MarketingLand shared a case study of one such mature ad account which delivered consistently great results with under-control CPAs. The challenge that lay ahead was to continue to deliver lead growth.
For over a year, they ran 80 different tests on a wide range of features in search of optimization and growth.
The majority of these tests were conducted using the “Drafts & Experiments” feature. This is a relatively safe way to A/B test new features and settings on a certain percentage of traffic. If you find your experiment is successful, you can then implement the changes campaign or account wide.
In this case study, they split the traffic 50-50 between the actual campaigns and experiment variations.
Let’s look at some of these experiments and their results:
Experiment 1. Ad copy test
- Hypothesis: Ad copy with a question rather than a statement in first heading will provide better CTR.
- Results: Over an 18-day test, the CTR increased by 1%. Nothing significant.
- Lessons: Question-related ads might not always work. It depends on the search query and ad, so this method can’t be applied everywhere.
Experiment 2. Responsive Search Ads test
- Hypothesis: Responsive search ads will deliver higher CTR than expanded text ads.
- Results: Over a 47-day test, the CTR increase was again just a mere 1%. However, the responsive ads did not harm performance and allowed the rotation of more ad copy.
- Lessons: Despite a lack of performance increase, searchers engaged well with this new ad type.
Experiment 3. Landing Page test
- Hypothesis: Hero image on the landing page was changed from male to female.
- Results: Over a 30-day test, the CTR increased from 7% to 14.88%.
- Lessons: Changing something as small as the gender on the image can sometimes have a dramatic effect. In general, users are more likely to respond well to female imagery..
Experiment 4. Target CPA bidding test
- Hypothesis: Target CPA (Cost per acquisition) bidding will deliver conversions at better CPA than manual bidding.
- Results: Over a 34-day test, the experiment delivered 53 conversions. The original campaign had 70 conversions at a lower CPA.
- Lessons: Automated bidding strategies are not optimal just yet. While they do work in some campaigns, they won’t necessarily work everywhere. Google does recommend running Target CPA bidding for longer time frames, but that’s not always practical for accounts with budget limitations.
Final Thoughts
There is nothing fool-proof that works everywhere and can blindly be applied as a general rule of thumb across all accounts. What works for one account/campaign might not necessarily work somewhere else.
Like we always say, test each variant for all campaigns/account separately.
Also, while you run these tests, keep these two things in mind:
- Have a specific goal or KPI in mind on which the outcome will be judged. If you are testing a new ad type, then your KPI should probably be CTR and not CPA. Your results might show a better CPA, but that’s not what an ad format test is about.
- Do not alter the run time of the experiment to achieve the desired result. You might increase the run time for a week and see great results. Increase it by another week and you might see a drop off in results.
Altering the period to suit our needs is not a fair test. That’s just a time-design bias.
Instagram demoting inappropriate content
Instagram is reducing the spread of posts that are inappropriate but do not go against Community Guidelines.
What does this mean? For example, if a post is sexually suggestive, but doesn’t depict a sex act or nudity, it could still get demoted. Or, if a meme is considered as bad taste, but doesn’t go as far as to violate the Guidelines, its spread could be reduced.
This kind of content would not appear for the broader community on the Explore section or on the hashtags pages. Yet, the feed and the stories won’t be affected.
Zoom In
This update really makes sense for clickbaits, fake news and harassment content.
But when it comes to sexualized, yet-not-explicit content and provocative memes etc, it can seriously hurt creators and users. In fact, this kind of content has always been very popular on the Gram.
Yep, we are really sorry to say this… but you will probably no longer see Dan Bilzerian’s pictures on Instagram’s Explore tab.
Jokes apart, this update could reduce the growth potential of many creators.
FROM THE CREW
An affiliate needs your help to battle cancer!
Hey ladies and gents, we want to change the tone for a minute here.
Silver Stolsten, an affiliate veteran, has been battling stage 4 cancer for the past 16 months.
He’s a friend to many of our readers, and one of them brought this to our attention. Thanks, Justin!
Unfortunately, things aren’t looking great for Silver. A handful of internet marketers have put together a unique deal to help raise some money for Silver and his family though.
For only $29, you can buy a bundle of products like iStack FBEML Las Vegas replay, Ezra Firestone’s “Breaking into E-commerce”, Tony Flores’ “Emotional Trigger Words” and much much more!
Look, just go check how you can help Silver right here. All proceeds from it go to Silver and his family.
It takes you one minute, you can get a real bargain on something you might have thought about buying and you massively help a human in need.
All the best to Silver and his family from The WTAFF Crew. Hope you beat the hell out of cancer!
Help Silver Stolsten and his family battle cancer by buying this marketing bundle here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
A picture has just been shot. But it’s already 55M years old
Scientists had a Eureka moment yesterday morning when they were finally able to capture an image of the supermassive black hole and its shadow at the center of a galaxy known as M87.
As you might expect, it makes things a bit messier when you’re trying to photograph something that holds light hostage. Despite all this, after huge efforts from around the world, they have somehow managed to capture the image of this black hole silhouette.
Located more than 50M light-years away, in the heart of a giant galaxy Messier 87, it’s reportedly 6.5B times of the mass of the Sun.
Is it just us or does it look ominously similar to the Eye of the Sauron from LOTR?
Well, looks like we have now seen the unseeable and we can’t unsee it!