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Using custom labels in Shopping campaigns
Custom labels are a pretty useful way of segregating different products in your Google Shopping campaigns.
You can use them to filter and group different types of products and measure results accordingly. Sandeep Kumar broke it all down in the Google Ad Buyers group on Facebook so, if you’re not familiar with custom labels, it might be something you want to check out.
Custom labels are helpful because you can use them to:
- Group specific category products together.
- Get a better overview of your performance campaigns.
- Find the best converting products.
- Get improved control over your campaigns.
- Bid higher on fast selling products and lower the bid on slow selling products.
- Apply custom labels according to the ad group and set different bids based on different product groupings in the ads campaigns.
Here are some scenarios where you can use custom labels to your advantage:
- Case 1: You can label your products based on the high, medium and low margin and adjust bids accordingly.
- Case 2: Adjust bids based on product pricing. You can assign higher bids to the most expensive items and lower the bids on less expensive ones.
- Case 3: Label and show your products based on the seasonality. This allows you to show products that are in season.
- Case 4: Free + shipping vs other items, so you can discover which model is working better.
Check out this help article for more details on how to enable and make the most of them in your Shopping campaigns.
‘Tis the season and Facebook is also showing some positive signs
Not to be outdone by Alphabet, aka Google, Facebook also posted some better-than-expected numbers for the most recent quarter.
The stats
- Total revenue: $17.73B
- Revenue from advertising: 17.44B (up 17% YoY)
- FB daily active users: 1.73B (up 11% YoY)
- Family of apps daily active users: 2.36B (up 12% YoY)
But what about advertising and traffic costs?
As expected, metrics in engagement and activity increased due to social distancing measures being active in so many regions.
Demand for ads dropped massively in March, but April has shown stability. This probably translates to “Don’t expect cheaper traffic than you had in late March”. In fact, with companies adjusting and restarting their advertising, prices should actually go up. Oh well…
Anything else I should know?
Yes, there is. FB announced a $2M grant to support publishers reporting on the pandemic in the APAC region.
Unrelated to this quarterly report, there is an interesting Twitter thread developing regarding the FB Ads Policy. Ryan Skelly brought up an ad that most advertisers consider to go against policy (a Shopify screenshot claiming certain returns with loads of text).
Rob Leathern from FB jumped in and implied that, aside from being too text-heavy, the ad does indeed follow policy. We’ve heard of people get banned for such ads, yet Rob is saying that is perfectly okay. We highly recommend following this to get some clarity!
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Get a first peek into how the game-changers of today are preparing for business success. Then, if you want to take full advantage of the network brunchwork provides you with, you will be able to join their top-class “at home” events, featuring industry leaders from Techstars, DoorDash, Spotify, Credit Karma and more! And that’s just in the next month!
Sign up to the brunchwork newsletter right here.
COPYWRITING
How The Hustle captivates over 1M readers
Are you good at writing compelling emails, Facebook Ads copy and blog posts?
Got some finely honed processes that you follow?
Brad Wolverton shared some tips on how they craft content for The Hustle. For those of you who don’t know, The Hustle is a business newsletter with over 1M subscribers and Brad is the head of content. Some might say that he knows a thing or two when it comes to writing.
- The most important sentence is the first one: If it doesn’t entice the reader to read the second, you’re dead.
- Short sentences are better than long sentences: Great writing is about using the fewest amount of words as possible to get your point across.
- Use the Hemingway tool: This tool will help you make your writing bold and clear.
- Strip every sentence to its core: “Every word that serves no function, every adverb that carries the same meaning as its adjacent verb… get rid of ’em. They are noise.”
- When you speak, you use certain words and mannerisms that define your personality and tone of voice. Keep them in your writing.
- Write what you want to say, then write it shorter.
- Ask yourself who you’re writing for. Write for yourself or a friend. Don’t imagine you’re writing for an audience, otherwise you’ll be timid. Fearful writing is not fun.
There are some more points in the thread. Plus some book suggestions such as “The Craft of Revision” for editing and “Story Craft” for storytelling.
That’s some useful info, especially if you write daily copy and content pieces as we do.
FROM THE CREW
Workshops over Netflix
There are two workshops happening soon that The Crew wants to bring to your attention:
- How to Manage Your Affiliate Ads Amidst Crisis, and Beyond – Having a look at what works now that we’re one month into the pandemic. We’ve already heard some surprising stats. Hosted by Outbrain on May 6th, 11am EST.
- Adconf: How to Stay in the Game – This is hosted by Adcash. It will be affiliate marketing focused and speakers will talk about what’s going on right now in the space and what you can do to adapt. This is hosted by Adcash on May 5th, 12pm EDT.
They’re both free to attend, so it’s up on you to decide: Game of Thrones reruns or marketing speeches?
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
- REDDIT: Chats make their way to Reddit as well, where users can start group discussions of up to five members within subreddits.
- FACEBOOK: While Reddit brings chats to humans, FB brings bots to chats. Blender is the name and chatting like a human is the game. It’s open-sourced by FB’s AI team, check it out!
- INSTAGRAM: Jane Manchung Wong discovered IG is working on a “DM Me” sticker. The sticker mania is still here it seems.
- GOOGLE: The company took down over 2.7B bad ads in the past year. That’s 5k ads per minute!
- LINKEDIN: Also reporting their quarterly results, Microsoft says LinkedIn reached 690M members and grew 26% in user sessions.
- SNAPCHAT: Announcing the launch of First Commercial, the first ad a user sees that day in their first Snap show session regardless of what the user chooses to watch, making it more of a “mass audience reach” play.
BRAIN TEASER
What is an alien’s favourite outdoor game to play with humans?
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.
Memes are an art and computers are the artists
It’s official! As proven by this this AI-driven meme generator.
If you’re always on the lookout for good memes for business (or personal) use, you are sorted, my friend!
The guys at Imgflip have recognized your needs and created something called This Meme Does Not Exist, a meme generator powered by a deep artificial neural network.
How does it work? Well, It allows you to use 48 popular templates from a collection of more than 100M images, which then feed the algorithm with 20k examples from each. This, in turn, allows the AI to generate a piece of art for you.
These AI-crafted memes can, at times, be a bit off kilter and bizarre but that’s exactly what makes them so brilliant.
So, considering how much time we’ve all got to waste (read: skill up) during lockdown, click here and witness the creation of art thyself.