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AFFILIATE MARKETING
Everything you need is already out there: Market research
When it comes to launching your affiliate marketing campaigns, the first and most important task to complete is a thorough market research report.
The more you know about your audience, the more chance you have of hitting those conversion targets.. However, Charles Ngo says that many affiliates tend to skip this step.
We don’t really need to list all the benefits that stem from effective market research, because you already know how important it is, right?
So, let’s get straight to some of the best ways of conducting market research, as recommended by Charles Ngo.
Facebook Audience Insights: No surprises here. Anyone using FB Ads to run marketing campaigns knows just how useful this tool can be.
Start from here and try to understand the overall Facebook audience and the audience of specific Facebook pages you own. Analyze your custom audiences by uploading your email list.
Niche Subreddits: Reddit is a great place to eavesdrop into ongoing conversations about the products you’re offering. For example:
- Got a makeup related product? Drop into https://www.reddit.com/r/beauty/
- Promoting coffee gadgets? www.reddit.com/r/coffee
- Is it a Jiu-jitsu related brand? www.reddit.com/r/bjj
Charles’ biggest tip for reddit is this: Create an account, start asking questions related to your products and get to understand the pain points of people.
PS: Reddit users are quite good at sniffing out marketers/researchers. The best way to go about it is to create an account, build up some history and contribute to the community first.
Spying Tools: There are many ad spying tools out there that let you see the ads, angles, and landing pages that your competitors are running.
Don’t just blindly copy them though. Your audience has already been exposed to these ads countless times and have probably built up a banner blindness towards them. Use them for inspiration and think up ways to improve on them instead.
Product Reviews: Again, no surprises here. However, Charles does something slightly different here by looking for reviews of mainstream products that he’s promoting.
Head to Amazon and see what people are saying about that product. This could help you come up with some fresh angles for your offers.
Additionally, as Charles says, go the extra inch to gain an advantage. How?
- Do more split tests.
- Ran out of angles? Brainstorm some more.
- Have a few more conversations with your affiliate manager to develop a better relationship.
Have a look at Charles’ post here for more details.
ADVERTISING
New traffic source on the block
It looks like we have a new source of media buying in the market.
Trending video app TikTok has launched its own ad platform to help marketers reach out to its young audience and maximize the performance of their campaigns.
Currently, TikTok is testing interest-based targeting, custom audiences and pixel tracking. Pretty similar to the ad tools on other social platforms, right?
TikTok has the ability to utilize video image recognition and user engagement as signals to help categorize audience interests. It’s also working on more specific data options, via pixel-type tracking, which would further enhance its categorization capacity.
How relevant is TikTok for marketers?
It depends on your target audience, but given how popular the app is it might be worth experimenting with TikTok’s ad platform. The results could surprise you, even if your target audience looks like a bad fit.
It already has a huge segmented audience targeting, similar to Snapchat’s ‘Lifestyle Categories’. This segments users into various lists such as ‘Automotive Enthusiasts’, ‘Football fans’ and many more.
What’s its potential?
- TikTok has over 1B downloads, with 663M of those coming in 2018 alone.
- 500M active users worldwide, with an increasing number of those from the US.
- 42% of the app’s revenue now comes from the North American market.
- Users are spending, on average, 46 minutes per day on the app.
Is this just another fad, or will it become a social media mainstay? Maybe a more permanent and viable alternative to the now defunct Vine? Only time will tell.
Whatever your opinion, the app is clearly very popular with young audiences. That could make it worth tapping into, and definitely worth keeping an eye on it if that’s your target market.
SPONSORED
Searching for a media buyer, marketing manager, account manager or copywriter?
Check out Jobs in Digital Marketing – a simple, focused job platform followed by WHAT THE AFF readers, a group of smart marketers who are up to date with latest trends on all digital marketing. Because they take a few minutes every day to read this, just like you!
It’s nothing fancy, purely focused on utility:
- Post or apply for jobs.
- Search resumes of job seekers who want to be hired.
- Have your job openings featured in a special WHAT THE AFF section.
- Manage your hiring flow straight from the platform.
- Lower price than all those broad, general platforms without an industry-specific audience.
And your job gets featured in WTAFF for a month from the moment you put it up on Jobs in Digital Marketing! Here’s what you have to do:
- Choose the SIMPLE JOB listing from the product list.
- Create an employer profile with logo and company description.
- Buy the SIMPLE JOB listing, using code WTAFF for 35% off for $130 total.
- Fill in the job description, requirements, benefits and location.
- Done!
Your job will then get listed in the FEATURED JOBS section below for the whole listing period. As you might guess, there’s limited space available there so it’s first come, first served for this offer!
Post your job and let us send you the perfect fit!
PS: If you want to promote Jobs in Digital Marketing, you can sign up for our affiliate program for it right here.
ManyChat goes down. How to increase the budget. A CBO strategy to test!
Just another FB breach. How to increase a campaign’s budget without losing conversions. Looking for a CBO strategy?
Does this still make headlines?
As many of you might know, FB suffered a breakdown yesterday, causing problems for many of its users in the process.
Both FB and WhatsApp users complained about the outage, and according to Downdetector the problem was particularly prevalent in areas of the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands and New York.
This outage affected ManyChat users adversely, with broadcast and automation features grinding to a halt and subsequently causing the bots to malfunction.
Though the exact causes are still unknown, the problem does seem To be fixed now.
Routine stuff, uh?
How to increase the budget without hurting performances
What’s the riskiest sport practised by marketers? Raising the budget of a FB campaign that is performing well. Agree?
You know that the campaign is performing well, so you want to increase the budget and multiple the results. But you know that increasing the budget could screw everything up, and you could end up bidding farewell to that red hot ROAS. Sounds familiar?
To help you overcome this fear, Depesh Mandalia shared some tips on how to increase the ad sets budget on well-performing ads.
Remember though, these tips only work when you’ve already found the right offer, product, funnel and audience.
The H-Dupe
This is for low-risk takers. Duplicate the ad set into a higher budget one and give it time to build history. Depesh says that this worked well before March 2018.
The M-Bid
Low risk, but fast results: Dupe into a manual bid ad set and use that for scaling. This does require daily adjustments, but it’s also useful for finding new audience pockets.
The V-Bump
Low risk and slow building: Increase the budget by 20-30% daily, but only if results stay positive.
The H-Split
Low risk, medium speed: Split breakdowns (gender, age, country, device etc.) and split your best ad set (don’t touch that!) by ROI-positive segments.
The Slip’n’Slide
High risk but fast as hell: Increase the budget as much as you want, but use rules to cut the bad ad sets. Beware, this is a short term strategy. If you do this then expect your account to suffer in the coming weeks and months.
The High-Roller
Very high risk with even faster results: Use accelerated delivery and manual bidding with rules to find the best pocket audiences on any given day. Work fine for time-sensitive promotions.
The GT-CBO Method
Once you’ve found working creatives and audiences, shift to CBO for scaling.
These are all the different strategies shared by Depesh. Pick one based on your risk tolerance, and good luck scaling your campaigns without fear!
CBO scaling strategy
Still looking for a working CBO strategy that suits you?
John Hagan has been testing CBO at all stages of the funnel so that he’s fully prepared for September, when CBO will become mandatory.
Now, after countless tests, he has finally found a successful strategy. Not only that, but he then decided to share it on the Facebook Ad Buyers Group. What a guy!
Here’s the strategy.
Day 1. Testing Campaign.
- 1 campaign.
- 5 cold traffic ad sets.
- 3 new ads.
- $500-$1k budget.
Let the campaign spend without making adjustments.
Day 2. Optimization Campaign.
Analyze the results from the previous day. Take the top 2 ads based on your KPIs, make a new ad and launch another campaign. It should look like this:
- 1 Campaign.
- 5 different cold traffic audiences.(Different audiences from campaign 1)
- 2 ads from test campaign, 1 new ad.
- $500-$1k budget.
Repeat the optimization campaign every day and adjust the budget accordingly. According to John, with this strategy you should create an ecosystem of scaling creatives and audiences while cutting the bad ones.
Moreover, keep these things in mind:
- Allow 2-3 days of spending before cutting ads.
- Don’t remove or add ad sets to the campaign. Just wait for FB to optimize.
- Be careful with large audiences, because FB will put more budget on ad sets with a broader target.
That’s all. If you want to have a deeper look at the strategy or you got questions, head to John Hagan’s post here.
SEO
Site diversity change to search results
Google’s public Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan announced a “change” that will reduce duplicate site listings in the search results. Just a change, not an update per se.
This means you usually won’t see more than two results from the same site in the top results section. It allows Google to show more diverse results in SERPs.
The update is only going to change how Google shows websites in the search results. It doesn’t involve any change to the ranking algorithm.
Listings from subdomains and the root domain will all be considered as a single site. However, subdomains are treated as separate sites for diversity purposes when deemed relevant.
Some search results will continue to show more than one result if Google decides it’s “relevant”. Note that the word “relevant” here is not meant in the context of a web page being relevant to a search phrase.
Rather, it makes more sense to think about relevance in terms of how the web page is relevant to the users.
The site diversity launch is not a part of June 2019 Core Update that began this week. These are two different, unconnected releases.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
FB Cryptocurrency Debuts
Libra will be the name of the cryptocurrency. June 18 is the announcement date.
Landing a knockout blow on Bitcoin is the mission!
An FB cryptocurrency was just a rumour up until now, but we’ve finally got something concrete coming our way.
In fact, on June 18, FB will release some white papers explaining the basics of its cryptocurrency.
The cryptocurrency will be pegged to a basket of currencies rather than a single one. It will also be a stable coin; a token designed to have a stable price rather than something wildly fluctuating in value.
It will come with zero transaction fees, and users will be able to transfer Libra coins though FB products (Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.)
In addition, FB is planning to roll out physical devices for ATMs so users can exchange traditional assets for the cryptocurrency.
The project is very ambitious, but if successful it would put FB in a dominant position compared to other payment services.
So, will Libra actually take off? Could it really put Bitcoin out of the game, and finally bring the idea of a decentralized currency to reality? That was the whole purpose of cryptocurrency, remember?
Only time will tell. Facebook’s biggest enemy is Facebook itself. It’s one thing managing people’s data, but another managing their money… They better be careful!
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