TIKTOK
TikTok Trends
Jack London put it best: You can’t wait for inspiration; you have to go after it with a club.
Well, TikTok just launched a pretty nice club. It’s called the “Business Creative Hub,” and it’s a new page within your TikTok Business Account that shows you the most popular trending videos.
Not just any videos: The videos you’ll see here won’t be the same videos you see on your TikTok feed. According to TikTok, videos under Business Creative Hub are “the most trending business content in your area, relevant to the industry you choose”. That is, if you sell socks, don’t expect to see content about cute ducks.
What it’s useful for: Inspiration. Advertising on TikTok is unlike advertising anywhere else. As an inevitable result, TikTok found that a common challenge its advertisers faced was a lack of ideas for new content to post. Business Creative Hub is an attempt to make waiting for short video inspiration a thing of the past.
Google announces a big time-saver
When you run ads, you want to make sure they show up in the right places. You don’t want your legal service ads showing up on 9GAG, or your DTC steak brand getting front-page real estate on a vegan blog.
Ginny Martin, a Google product liaison, recently announced an update that will make this less likely.
It’s called Dynamic Exclusion Lists.
They’re constantly updated: The whole idea of Dynamic Exclusion Lists is to keep an up-to-date list of bad websites on which you do not want to appear.
How it works: According to Google, the lists will be updated by you or a trusted third party, such as brand safety organizations and industry groups.
Why this is helpful: According to the Google Ads blog, the main reason for this new feature is time:
“We’ve heard from some of our partners that the current tools in place for blocking web pages or websites require dedicated resources and regular updating, which can pose a challenge for any advertiser, but especially smaller ones with limited staff and in-house expertise.
So today, we’re announcing a new feature that will help simplify this process – giving advertisers the ability to use dynamic exclusion lists that can be updated seamlessly and continuously over time.”
If you struggled with the Google Ads Network because you had to constantly exclude websites from the list, this is the feature you’ve been looking for.
SPONSORED BY YTZ
Use YTZ Smart Links to make an extra 20% revenue from your traffic without working one more minute
It doesn’t matter what a great media buyer you are. Or how persuasive your landing page is. Traffic waste and click loss is a problem for anyone that buys traffic on the internet.
Be it poor targeting, budget caps, or maybe you’re just in the testing phase.
All this waste of traffic translates to loss of revenue opportunities. It can be the difference between breaking even and being profitable.
YTZ wants to help you squeeze every last penny out of your traffic. Their SmartLink leverages an internal algorithm that optimizes thousands of offers at once to get the optimal performance out of your remnant traffic.
For example, when a user leaves your page, the YTZ algorithm analyzes all available data points and redirects the user to the best-performing offer.
It’s all explained in this one-minute video here.
Everyone can use the YTZ SmartLink: Affiliate networks, media buyers, advertisers, emailers, and more.
YTZ has worked in the performance marketing industry for over 10 years. This means they have accumulated enough experience as well as data to make the most out of your traffic.
Stop wasting your advertising budget.
FROM THE CREW
It’s our birthday and we’re giving away a MacBook Air
We do birthdays a bit differently here… This month, Stacked Marketer turned 3 and we’re giving one subscriber a MacBook Air to celebrate.
How? It’s pretty simple.
When you share our newsletter using your referral link between today and Friday, 23rd April 2021, you’ll have the chance to win a shiny new MacBook Air – a machine that’s the perfect balance of power, portability and instagramability (we might have just made up that word).
Each time you refer a person to Stacked Marketer, you receive a ticket for this raffle. In short, 1 referral = 1 ticket. (other rules that apply can be found here)
Click here to grab your referral link.
The more new subscribers you refer, the higher your chances! But don’t try to get sneaky – you’ll get disqualified.
E-COMMERCE
The profitable e-commerce growth formula
Drive visitors, convert them as often as possible, increase their value, focus on variable costs, and your e-commerce store will grow profitably.
This summarizes the formula that Matthew Axline uses to breakdown the growth of an e-commerce store:
(Visitors x Conversion Rate x Lifetime Value) – Variable Costs = Profit.
It seems easy, but it’s not. And in this Twitter thread, Matthew explains how to treat each one of these variables.
+ Visitors
There are two ways to generate visitors: paid and organic. In the early stage, brands rely heavily on paid traffic and lightly on organic. As they grow, companies should invert this.
For paid traffic, Matthew has some suggestions:
- Facebook and Google are the stars of the show, with Snapchat, Pinterest, and TikTok, in the background.
- Breaking down your Facebook ad account by profitable angles and products will improve your revenue.
- Creative strategy is a must. You must have a system for understanding why creatives work. And, replicating the success.
- Facebook generates the demand. Google captures it. The goal on Google is to own as much real estate as you can. Bid on your brand keywords, competitors’ brand keywords, as well as other relevant ones. Invest in Google Shopping.
- SEO: Paid advertising can generate quick and fast returns. Content marketing, on the other hand, has a compounding value that accumulates in the long term.
+ Conversion rate optimization
There are plenty of routes to take. But some principles are:
- Focus on paid advertising funnels because it’s easier and quicker to test different variables.
- Ensure that the customer journey is consistent from the ad to the purchase.
- Your offer (product + price + positioning) has the biggest influence on the conversion rate. Not the color of the CTA.
+ Lifetime value (LTV)
No other strategy can outperform a well-executed SMS and email strategy. If you fail here, you’re wasting all your efforts in acquiring customers.
+ Variable costs
These are made of:
- Cost of good and services
- Customer acquisition costs
- Operating costs
Ideally, each one of these elements isn’t above 25% of your revenue. So, if the costs of good and services (COGS) are 40% of the revenue, then it’s an area to improve.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
ADVERTISING: Dieter Bohn asked the teams behind Brave, Opera, Edge, and Firefox if they planned to support Google FLoC. Their response: A diplomatic “no.”
FACEBOOK: The social media giant may soon offer campaign budget optimization across all of its mobile and web properties, as opposed to being confined to a single app.
SNAPCHAT: The social network published some interesting statistics about how their users perceive Mother’s and Father’s Day.
GOOGLE: According to Google’s John Mueller, UGC product reviews will struggle to rank following the latest search update.
TIKTOK: An interesting case study of how a skincare brand used TikTok to go viral and saw a 35x increase in website traffic.
GOOGLE: Here are five Google Sheets tricks you probably didn’t know about. If you use Sheets for ad campaigns or whatever else, these tips are helpful.
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.
NFTs are taking over
It’s 2021, and everything’s an NFT. That includes real houses, single pixels, and memes. Of course memes.
In the most recent NFT news – because we know you’re at the edge of your seat – Edward Snowden just sold one for about $5M.
It’s a piece of digital art that includes, in its total length, the court decision that ruled the NSA’s mass surveillance violated the law.
In plain English: It’s something you could make on Photoshop in about 5 minutes. But, it’s hard to argue with the market!
Speaking of which… Anyone out there want to drop $5M on a particular newsletter NFT? Asking for a friend.