Want to let Google do the work for you?
Another day, another Google feature that lets the algorithm make changes to your campaigns.
Barry Schartz discovered an important announcement hidden in the middle of Google’s recent lengthy press release: Auto-applied recommendations.
What that means: This is an opt-in feature that allows Google to automatically apply certain recommendations to your account.
What recommendations? Here are some examples:
- Bid more efficiently with Target ROAS
- Add dynamic search ads
- Use optimized ad rotation
You can see a full list of the recommendations here.
Important note: Your budgets won’t be changed with this feature, only your bids and bid strategies.
What this means for you: If you’re a new advertiser, this could potentially save you time and improve your account performance. If you’re an experienced advertiser, it might not be the best way to manage spend and performance. Give it a go and see for yourself!
Oversaturated
One week ago, we discussed how to get around Facebook’s frustrating 8-event limit, where each individual domain can only have a maximum of 8 conversion events.
The solution was straightforward: Submit your domain to the Public Suffix List. Once you’ve been approved, you can create subdomains and verify each one separately on Facebook. For example, having 3 subdomains would give you 8×3=24 conversion events.
One ‘minor’ issue: Too many people started doing this, to the point where the team behind the Public Suffix became overburdened (special thanks to Tim Fleischer, an Insight member, for sharing this):
“We are freezing the approval of new submissions that cite the FB / IOS 14 interop issue in order to provide Facebook or Apple, with a much more robust set of resources, the opportunity to sort this out amongst/between themselves.”
That’s a polite way of saying: “Yeah, we’ll let the power players sort this one out”.
For the time being, nobody knows what will happen. A complete list of domains currently in the database can be found here (where you’ll notice some notable sites like myshopify.com).
If you’re a member of Insights, you can read the full discussion here.
SPONSORED BY INSIGHTS
Looking at a $100M e-commerce brand’s SMS marketing
Remember our very first deep dive about Snow? We’ve updated it to include SMS marketing too.
The whole deep dive is now 165 pages of deep insights into what Snow does great and where it can improve. Influencer campaigns, ads, emails, SMS and more.
Have a look at the preview of it here.
We’ll also have Josh, the CEO and founder of Snow join us on April 23rd for a live session on Zoom. It’s for Insights subscribers only.
Curious who else stopped by before? Check out the list of past guests.
A subscription to Insights also includes:
- Previous deep dives. You’ll immediately have the updated Snow deep dive and the Morning Brew deep dive. The next one will be released on 1st May so subscribing today will get you three deep dives within a month! That’s just $33 per deep dive that is more detailed than a $1k audit.
- Recordings of past sessions.
- Over 100 tips, guides and case studies.
- A supportive and knowledgeable community.
Not sure if it’s for you? Here’s what we can do. If it’s not for you, just message us within 24 hours of your sign up and we’ll refund you.
Try it out risk-free for $99/month.
MARKETING
How to get 1M downloads with absolutely zero ad spend
David Joch took 444 days to hit the 1M downloads mark for his app, Avocation. David and his team spent $0 to hit that milestone.
Here are the main points that contributed to this large and cheap growth.
+ Put your most important keyword into the app name. Their app name is “Avocation – Habit Tracker”. Figure out your most important keyword and put it in your name.
+ Ask for reviews in your app. An unsatisfied user won’t forget to leave you a bad review. But how many happy users take the time to give you a positive one? Track the more active users, and ask them for a review. Remember: Being too pushy in asking for reviews can backfire.
+ Translate your app into new languages. This will increase your total addressable market and help you get more users.
+ Invest time to create screenshots that highlight your best features and make them catchy. Visuals are important for encouraging app downloads!
+ Experiment with your app subtitle and description: These are what stores use for ranking. Figure out which keywords work, and which ones don’t.
+ Submit a request to get featured by Apple.
+ Share your story in relevant subreddits. Find a subreddit where people are dealing with the problem your app solves. But be careful, because people don’t like self-promotion. The way to go is to talk about your story and what inspired you. David even shared an example of a Reddit post that worked well for them.
+ Monitor your performance. App stores will provide some data, but if you want to go in depth, you can use the Google Analytics version for apps.
+ Provide value on social media. Focus on a single platform there first and do an awesome job there. Focus on providing useful content. If people enjoy your posts, they will check out your app.
And to wrap it up, be patient. The downside of not using paid advertising is that it will take a while before you see the results of your work. But be patient and improve the app constantly.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
FACEBOOK: Facebook has just announced that it has restored many of the Messenger API features that were previously removed in Europe due to local privacy laws. In other words, Facebook Messenger is making a comeback as a viable way to reach people for the EU region.
ADVERTISING: Verizon is introducing a competitor to Google FLoC in which they use first-party data instead of user IDs.
SEO: Do Fiverr “Google My Maps Citations” help with local rankings? As it turns out – perhaps unsurprisingly – the answer is no.
SPOTIFY: The music network revamps its top charts, giving new artists more exposure.
INSTAGRAM: Instead of disabling likes for everyone, Instagram is now experimenting with allowing users to choose whether or not they want to hide their posts’ like count.
BRAIN TEASER
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Hindsight is $273k
There’s nothing like looking back at old cryptocurrency prices, theorizing about what could have been if you’d just bought a few Bitcoin back in the day.
Jon Erlichman posted a tweet yesterday, titled “Value of $1,000 if invested 5 years ago.”
It was a big list of cryptos and tech giants. You can check out on Twitter here. Here are of the highlights:
Ethereum: Just over $273k.
Bitcoin: Around $148k.
Shopify: Just under $42k.
And if you need a cherry on top to complete your why-didn’t-I-invest self-loathing, here’s a great site for you.