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MARKETING
Old but gold trick to block bot traffic
Bot traffic.
It’s a huge problem, especially when you’re buying clicks from sources that aren’t Facebook or Google.
Those fake bot clicks corrupt your data and waste your ad budget. So, if you buy native, push or pop traffic, finding a way to block these shlicks is crucial.
Pitching in to help, Sumit Ghosh shared an old trick to catch and block these fake clicks. Despite its vintage ageing, this is still very much a useful method.
Why is it an old trick? Because it was already shared a while ago on Stack That Money.
It was also a hack used by SEO people for stuffing keywords and outsmarting search engines, before they became smart enough to deal with this.
Let’s jump to it.
The way to find bad placements is to simply send some test traffic to a lander which has hidden links. Ones that are invisible to human eyes but can be found by bots. These links can be made with css coding.
Humans won’t see them due to them blending in with website content and background color, so if you get clicks on these links it’s clear they’re coming from bots.
Then, you can use a tracker to track such placements and block them.
A little extra work to avoid corrupted data and wasted money!
Wondering where these bot clicks come from? Have a look at this post we shared a few weeks ago.
Three easy tactics to hit $1.4M with email
Is Alexandr Fedotoff quitting FB to become a full-time email rockstar? Probably not, but he has the stats to do just that if he wishes!
In fact, in the last post he shared, Alexandr showed how he made $1.4M from email alone. Not satisfied with that? Well, this was also from just one ecomm store!
Let’s see what he did.
- Cart abandoned flows sending 10%,15% and 20% discounts.
- A welcome email series. 7 emails introducing the company and sharing a few bestseller products at a great discount. Alex said this has been running on autopilot since 2018.
- 1 daily email hitting the list with a huge value proposition. Just a very simple template containing an offer, brief description and CTA.
It looks too simple, right?
Well, as always, the difference is in the implementation. As Alex said in the post, most people massively underutilize and underestimate email for their business.
Are you one of those people? This post should give you the incentive you need to stop sleeping on email!
You could start by implementing just one of the three tactics above and tracking how your returns increase.
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Audiences Testing Framework
Recently, we shared a process for testing creatives on Facebook Ads. Well, we won’t leave the job incomplete, so today we’re bringing you a process for testing audiences.
Anwar Jabirov shared the process, which he calls “Ultimate Audience Testing Framework”.
Sounds intriguing, eh? However, we would probably call it “Ultimate Lookalikes Testing Framework” because Anwar focused on LLAs.
Enough words, let’s just see it.
First of all, a Lookalike Audience is made of 4 core variables: Percentile, Country, Source audience and Time frame.
Anwar said that the variables that worked the best for him are the following ones:
- Percentile: 1%, 1%-3%, 3%-10%. Or: 0%-2%, 2%-5%, 5%-10%.
- Countries: USA, Australia, Canada.
- Source Audiences: Page Viewers, Content Viewers, Adds To Cart, Checkouts Initiated, Purchases, Top 25% By Time Spent, 95% Video Viewers, Page Engagers.
- Time frames: 7, 14, 30.
For this post, we will use these values as examples. However, remember that you can and should test your own variables too.
Once you have set all the different Custom Audiences and LLAs, you then create separate CBO campaigns to find the best performing audiences.
Each campaign will have 1 fixed country and percentile.
1 campaign = 1 percentile = 1 country. For example, Testing Campaign 1 – 1% LLAs – USA.
Now for the variables – Each campaign will test different Source audiences and time frames.
So, the campaign will contain the following audiences:
- 1% Purchase 7-day
- 1% Purchase 14-day
- 1% Purchase 30-day
- 1% Adds To Cart 7-day
- 1% Adds To Cart 14-day
- 1% Adds To Cart 30-day
- …
So, 8 Source audiences for 3 Time frames means 24 ad sets inside one campaign. For the values reported first, there will be 3 different campaigns for each country.
What about the budget?
Anwar suggests a $250/day budget, with a minimum spend per ad set of 2x the target CPA.
Once the testing phase is done, select the best performing ad sets and put them in new CBO campaigns, structured in the same way as the testing phase.
You can see the whole schema in this picture.
Have a good time gold-digging!
SEO
Using aged domain for competitive affiliate keywords: Matt Digity’s case study
Do aged domains still work? Well, sometimes they do help you get a quick edge over using a brand new domain. However, at other times they just fall flat.
In this case study from Matt Diggity, an aged domain proves to be the hero of the story.
He shared his entire journey of taking an affiliate keyword with 50k searches/month (80% U.S. traffic) from nowhere to page 1, all using an aged domain.
It also talks about the entire technical setup, onsite optimization strategies, and the backlink building from scratch to success.
The niche was in home improvement and monetized with Amazon, so considering the high average product price, the commissions were relatively decent.
He bought a pre-built site on an aged and semi-relevant domain, which had over 100 referring domains. While there wasn’t any existing traffic, this still gave him a pretty good head start.
The site already had about 10 pages and a total of 20k words. Half of these were money pages (promoting affiliate products) and the other half just informational ones.
One major issue he had to deal with was that the main keyword he was trying to rank for had ads, featured snippets, “People also ask”, Videos, Google shopping, and even a local map pack in the SERPs.
Then, he had to beat sites like Amazon, Walmart, Wayfair and several other niche-specific authority sites with DR60+ domains.
Well, that’s an interesting backdrop for a case study isn’t it?
The project looks both challenging and interesting.
It’s a year-long journey with in-depth processes involving bloat removal, optimization, link building (with and without PBNs) and much more.
Seasonality adjustments introduced for smart bidding
Maybe you’re asking “Isn’t smart bidding already designed to take seasonality into account for setting bids?”
Yes, it does. However, there are times outside of regular seasonality time frames where you are expecting above average conversions.
For example, you might be planning to launch a new product, or you could be running a flash sale which has historically resulted in a conversion spike.
With seasonality adjustments, you can apply a predicted conversion rate adjustment and Smart Bidding will consider that for the date range selected, while trying to hit your target CPA.
Here’s how to enable seasonality adjustments:
- Click the Tools icon at the top-right corner of your Ad account.
- Select Bid Strategies under “Shared Library”.
- Click Advanced Controls.
- Select the Seasonality Adjustments option at the top.
- Create a new seasonality adjustment by clicking the blue plus symbol.
- Enter the required details, start and end dates for the event, and choose your scope and devices.
- Adjust your conversion rate to reflect your estimated conversion rate change for this event.
- Click Save.
Additional things to keep in mind while using seasonality bidding:
- Only use Seasonality adjustments if you are expecting major changes to your conversion rates.
- These adjustments are ideal for short 1-7 day time periods. They might not work as well if you use them for extended periods (more than 14 days).
- Seasonality adjustments are currently only available for Search and Display campaigns.
FROM THE CREW
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POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Beating your competition with Boff
How do you beat your competition when there are thousands of other brands selling pretty much the same thing?
We talk about it day in and day out, so we won’t get into the technicalities by the poolside. But the truth remains the same – finding unique angles.
It’s even tougher if you are an alcohol brand. Creating ad campaigns is tricky – You have to be extremely careful and your creative possibilities are somewhat limited.
That is, unless you’re Bofferding, a Luxembourg-based brewing company. They decided against careful advertising, instead going for a cheeky and daring approach by adding an angle of nudity to their ads.
The tag line: Drink in the Boff
The idea: Nude in nature = Natural.
It featured nude people posing in the outdoors, highlighting the benefits it claims to have.
.
They went for a slightly censored version of their ad creatives for their FB campaign.
Well, we don’t know how successful the campaign was or what the results looked like, but they surely know a thing or two about living on the edge.