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Lessons from analyzing 43M posts on Facebook. New 10 days rule on Facebook Ads
What if you had to launch a new campaign on FB every 10 days to stay ROI-positive? And what if you had to post 5 times per day to keep your audience engaged?
Read on as we uncover all those what-ifs and you will know!
43M Facebook Posts from top 20k brands analyzed: New Research
What could come out from analyzing 43M branded posts? You’ll probably get a lot of info from that, no?
This is exactly what you’re about to get: Some useful lessons from the top 20K brands marketing on Facebook. And the 43M posts they created and shared.
The period of analysis ranges from Q1 of 2017 to Q2 of 2018.
- Top Pages post a lot more: A famous debate has been about how much content should be posted on FB. And yet, everybody kept posting more and more. There has been a 24% increase in posts shared.
- Posting 5 times per day resulted in the highest overall engagement: 5 times per day appears to be the optimal Facebook posting frequency. Pages that posted more or less than 5 saw a decrease in engagement.
- Engagement dropped by more than 50% over the last 18 months.
- Facebook engagement went down for videos, images and links: Though there is a difference between engagement across these three formats, they all saw a decrease.
- Top Page categories experienced 49-70% overall drop in engagement: Top categories like artists, movies and media experienced a huge engagement fall.
The overall lessons: Organic reach is going down, and posting 5 times per day is the best strategy. So, you’re probably thinking: That’s why I pay for that damn traffic!
The engagement drop is due to the growing competition, better quality of content and a higher priority for paid posts in the Newsfeed.
However, if you still wanna try to drive some organics clicks, here is a suggestion you can follow:
“Create content centred around people’s desire to connect and share interesting things with their friends and family. Even if that something is as simple as a friendly “hello” or reminder about the special place their relationship holds in their heart.”
Reminder: If that doesn’t work, you can always go back to your Ads Manager…
The 10-Day-Rule?
As soon as you think you have figured out how Facebook works, there is something new coming out, right?
This is what happened to Mohamed Abedo. After seeing a rise in the CPA, he contacted Facebook Support and the rep came out with a new rule: The 10-day rule.
What does that mean? That after 10 days, campaigns’ performance will start to drop. Because users lose interest. Thus, every 10 days, you have to launch a new campaign. Even though Mohammed’s initial campaign generated 1000 purchases.
But not only that. The rep also shared a new rule for ad set duplication: If you want to duplicate an ad set, you should duplicate it in a new campaign, if the original one is more than 10 days old.
Well, this is what a Facebook rep suggested to Mohammed.
We are not saying these are the absolute rules. Reps don’t always get it right. But as it happened, it’s something that you too should be aware of.
Plus, we have a question: Do you believe in Facebook reps?
INFLUENCER MARKETING
State of Influencer Marketing
n 2018, 400 million people viewed Instagram Stories every day. And the Gram reached 1B monthly active users, showing no signs of slowing down.
And as the user base grows, marketers continue to follow the trend: Sponsored feed posts shared by influencers increased by 37% from 2017 to 2018.
Signals that suggest a popularity explosion in influencer marketing. But what are the trends that we can expect in 2019?
- The rise of micro-influencers: Micro or nano influencers are better suited to deliver a relevant brand message to a narrow, defined niche. Plus, they’re more approachable and budget-friendly.
- Relational Influencer Marketing: Brands will shift from transactional influencer marketing to cultivating organic relationships and partnerships with influencers.
However, marketers should be cautious when going for influencer campaigns. When you’re dealing with humans, there are some downsides you just can’t avoid.
And some pitfalls like the Fyre Festival scandal and the lawsuit against influencer Luke Sabbat for promoting Snapchat on Instagram, and failing to do it, caused more people to doubt the role of influencers.
The two main challenges to overcome are:
- Fake Followers: Many influencers started buying followers or deploying fake follower accounts to show better metrics to brands.
- False Sponsored Content: In an attempt to kickstart their careers, some aspiring influencers have resorted to publishing content on behalf of brands they don’t work with. And then, they use these results to dupe other brands with this track record.
The next question that comes spontaneously is:
What should you look out for when hunting for influencers?
There are some red flags that should warn you when chasing influencers to promote your biz:
- Low reach or views in Stories compared to others with similar followings.
- Ad to organic content ratio too large.
- Too many non-engaged comments, such as emojis, comments from the same account, which means they’re buying engagements, and many unoriginal comments like Your content is awesome!
- A similar number of likes and comments on every post: Authentic accounts will have a variety of engagement on organic posts.
- High following with super low engagement: Especially if it consistently goes below 1%.
- Sudden increase or decrease in follower count. Guess it? Followers’ shopping!
Even though Facebook and Instagram increased their efforts against fake accounts, always watch out when looking to work with new influencers.
These six bad-influencer indicators should help you find the right ones!
Mobile speed? Now you can feel it
After Google introduced mobile speed score in July, it released a new update: Advertisers can now see the loading speed of more mobile landing pages.
Moreover, this update enables the tool to generate a speed score within the advertising console, without needing as many ad clicks as previously required.
The score is evaluated on a 10-point scale, where 10 is the fastest. And the factors to determine that score are: Page speed and potential conversion rate.
Why is it important?
Slow loading pages are frustrating for users, and they hurt your conversions. A slow mobile page means a slow business.
So, given that Google Ads now gives you more feedback, keep your landers lightening fast!
SPONSORED
VIPOffers – Go Direct and Earn More!
Things are ramping up over at VIPOffers in 2019! Boasting over 20 years in business as a respected adult direct advertiser, VIPOffers is a company you absolutely need to work with.
The team has been hard at work this winter building more engaging offers, interactive landing pages, and exclusive conversion funnels that consistently deliver industry-leading EPCs on a variety of traffic types.
VIPOffers is the home of hundreds of 100% private offers and brands that you won’t find anywhere else.
After months of testing, the VIPOffers team just rolled out a handful of new Dating, Games, and Paysite funnels that will blow your mind. These funnels are fully responsive, available in 13 different languages that convert in 100+ geos worldwide and built for CPL & CPA traffic types.
With a new, robust user acquisition platform in place, VIPOffers wants to capture more of the EU market in 2019. In turn, the VIPOffers team is currently paying higher rates for European geos, so now is the perfect time to partner with VIPOffers to monetize your EU traffic.
Contact a member of their friendly support team here or visit VIPOffers to sign up for an account today. Making money with VIPOffers is a no brainer, here’s why:
- $3+ PAY PER LEAD – SINGLE OPT IN – No email verification needed!
- $60+ PAY PER SIGNUP – 100+ COUNTRIES ACCEPTED – VIPOffers loves international traffic.
- WEEKLY PAYMENTS – ON TIME, EVERY TIME – Multiple payment methods accepted!
- TRAFFIC ACCEPTED: WEB, MOBILE, POP, SOCIAL & EMAIL – VIP converts traffic where other programs cannot.
- CUSTOM LANDING PAGES, EXCLUSIVE OFFERS & EYE-CATCHING CREATIVE – Get your hands on an exclusive white label and set yourself apart from the herd.
Want to meet VIPOffers?
The all-star team at VIPOffers travels the world looking to connect with affiliates and media buyers. The next stop is The European Summit in Lisbon, Portugal. Stop by Booth 9 or Meet Market Table 134 on March 1-4th 2019 to meet the team and learn more about the hottest offers on the market today.
VIPOffers: Over $2 Billion Paid Out to Affiliates Since 1996
ADVERTISING
Does your Google Ads and Analytics data ever match?
How many of you can confidently say that your Google Ads data always matches with your Analytics data? Or, how many of you have the Analytics mechanism set up properly for accurate data analysis?
No need to panic. Let’s start by acknowledging that it’s very common and normal to have such data discrepancy between your Ads interface and Analytics.
In this humble post, we will stick to basics but actionable items to make it a worthy read for you.
Let dive into 2 things:
- Measuring the data discrepancy.
- Probable causes of data discrepancy so you know where exactly to look.
Measuring the data discrepancy
Here are the steps to measure the data discrepancy:
- Go to your Analytics account.
- Hit Navigation -> AdWords-> Campaigns Report in the main view.
- Under the “Clicks” tab, click on “Select a metric” and then choose “Clicks” from the list of drop-down options.
Report Output: It will give you a click discrepancy report between ad clicks and analytics sessions for your ad campaigns. If you see a huge difference between the clicks and sessions here, that’s your level of data discrepancy.
Yet, a small difference can be ignored. Why? Because clicks and sessions are different metrics. A click is a single interaction (a hit) while a session is a group of hits.
Let’s suppose you see a huge data discrepancy in ad clicks and analytics sessions. Where can you dig deeper to find the causes?
An extensive list of almost all probable causes
- Google Ads account is not linked to Google Analytics. In this case, all your ad traffic will be reported as organic traffic in Analytics. Hence, the discrepancy.
- Wrong or multiple Google Ad accounts linked to Google Analytics.
- A user clicked on the same ad multiple times. If you are using Auto-tagging, multiple clicks by the same user can result in a new GA session for each click. With Manual URL tagging, multiple clicks on the same ad by the same user will not cause a new GA session.
- Google Analytics sessions are not filtered for invalid clicks. Google Ads filters out invalid clicks, GA does not. Hence, more sessions than ad clicks.
- Google Analytics tracking code missing from landing pages. In this case, Google Ads will track clicks, but GA won’t. Use Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Tag Inspector to find pages with missing GA code.
- Multiple Google Analytics tracking code firing on landing pages. If your Google Ad campaigns are moving from one marketer to another, they generally install their own tracking. The more GA tracking codes installed on a page, the more number of sessions are recorded for each click.
- View filters are excluding Google Analytics session data. It can be solved by these simple steps.
- Manual tagging is not configured correctly. Avoid manual tagging. Google strongly recommends using Auto-tagging. It will be the default setting for all campaigns in the coming months anyway.
- Google Ads destination URLs are not tagged. This happens when you have Auto-tagging disabled and aren’t using any manual URL tagging as well.
- Using both manual tagging and auto-tagging for Google Analytics. The most common issue. And the one that causes a huge discrepancy. MAKE SURE to avoid using both auto-tagging as well as manual tagging if you are not using 3rd party tracking tools.
- Using both manual tagging and auto-tagging for non-Google Analytics purpose. If you are using 3rd party tracking tools, go to Admin -> Property Settings -> Advanced Settings. Check the box to allow manual tagging (UTMs) to override auto-tagging (GCLID).
- You are comparing apples to oranges. If everything else fails, it could mean you are just comparing wrong data points. Especially when comparing longer date-ranges. So many things, so many combinations and variations of the above things can happen over a longer period of time.
We covered the most common and burning reasons responsible for the data discrepancy.
There are more other technical scenarios and an extensive list of steps to fix them. So, if you are serious about having your data issues fixed once and for all, head over to the post here and don’t call it a day until you have made sure your Analytics is set up and tracking your ad campaigns like a father tracks his 16-year-old daughter.
WORDPRESS
Critical unpatched flaw uncovered In WordPress
If you are using WordPress platform to manage your websites and landing pages, we have a piece of important news for you.
Make sure you have updated your website to the latest WordPress version 5.0.3 and do that right away!
A critical remote code execution vulnerability in previous versions has been identified by Cybersecurity researchers at RIPS Technologies.
Any lowkey attacker can exploit this vulnerability to gain Author account access using phishing, password reuse or other attacks. The attack can be executed within seconds to gain complete control over a vulnerable WordPress page.
“An attacker who gains access to an account with at least author privileges on a target WordPress site can execute arbitrary PHP code on the underlying server, leading to a full remote takeover”.
For you nerds, here’s a video demonstration of how this attack works. For others, just take our advice and update your WordPress.
The next release of WordPress would include a fix to completely address the issue. However, we are sure you would prefer to just update your WordPress than just wait for the next release.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Mark is back to school
Well, guess who’s getting featured with his side project in our Poolside today!
This is going to be his personal challenge for 2019.
His previous projects included using AI to automate his home controls and learning Mandarin.
And for this year, he wants to focus on debates. On a serious note, it’s about the future of technology and the Internet, and how tech affects us as a society.
Watch him kickoff the first such discussion with Harvard Law Professor, Jonathan Zittrain.
They discuss things like information fiduciaries, encryption, decentralized services, governance, fighting misinformation, different business models, privacy innovation, and future research areas.
Yeah well, we get it. It seems like a nerdy kind of a day for us at WTAFF and Mark is in the same mood as well. Coincidence? Or maybe visionaries just think alike?
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