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PUSH NOTIFICATIONS
The moment you get way more than you asked for… in a bad way!
It seems it’s a week with a bit of relatively bad news every single day, huh? In our busy search for the latest, we ran into a post by Erik Gyepes, a well-known affiliate.
As you might have seen, push notification traffic has been getting more and more popular in the past 6 months. There have also been completely new networks coming up, just with this traffic type. Believe it or not, issues come up and some networks don’t exactly have the best response to it.
Here’s what happened to Erik. He started a $20 test on a network called Megapush. Then the campaign spent over $20. Over $50… Over $200… All the way until it drained all the funds from the account, somewhere around $700. Here’s the screenshot when spend reached just over $600:
Now, a small overspend is possible but spending 35x more than the budget sounds like a technical error. Or a bad traffic delivery system.
When contacting support, Erik was told he just doesn’t know how to use the platform. And ehm, he was not the only one to have this issue of bad customer support according to others in the comments. Pretty bad customer support if you ask us.
The Crew’s Thoughts:
We like this traffic type. We think it will have a strong first half of 2019, maybe even more. But there are some things to look out for with push:
- Check a traffic source’s reputation before depositing too much with them. A simple Google search can go a long way.
- Deposit only the amount you wanna use for a test, not more. This way you can avoid Erik’s unfortunate error.
- Check how much traffic comes from geos outside your targeting. It’s rather common on some sources to have >20% outside traffic that you get charged for.
- Try to check for bot traffic on certain placements. Inevitably, bots made their way into push traffic too so you have to be careful also about this aspect.
The good news is that Erik and Megapush solved their issue.
Erik’s Thoughts:
I got a $500 compensation and also got account upgraded to some kind of VIP status.
As for the traffic/overspend issues, here are some recommendations I got and I want to share with you as well, so you can protect from such issues as they happened to me. I had to learn the hard way:
- Do not use the top bid, so the impressions don’t have priority, especially in high volume geos like IT, that makes traffic delivery slower.
- In case you do use the top bid, set small budgets, they recommended me $1 to $5 ($20 is already big).
- When you edit the campaign make sure you check your bid before you click SAVE. They always recalculate bids when you do changes, it can happen they will set it to top bid.
- Also, the more money you have on your account (balance), the more traffic will be assigned to you (you will have priority over smaller account balances). That’s good for scaling, but I would be very careful with it.
So, for now, I call this case as closed.
Martin Lewis got justice! And FB Business Manager rules changed?
Did you ever use Oprah Winfrey or other celebrities to promote your affiliate offers? Well, you don’t have to answer. Your secrets can stay hidden.
We also have some new rules around Facebook’s Business Manager, as shared by Attila. Let’s talk about that first, OK?
New Facebook Business Manager Rules
Yesterday, Attila shared some new rules for the Business Manager. These are not official rules from FB, it’s just something he experienced. And many of us are facing them as well.
Over these rules, his point is that business is getting harder and harder. That Facebook is becoming as demanding as a bank lending you money. But after all, it’s just business.
Anyway, what are these rules?
- When you create a brand new BM, you are now allowed to start with only 1 ad account, until it bills. Basically, if you don’t spend some money on your first unique ad account, you can’t have more of them.
- You can’t import a list of emails and create Lookalikes from day 1. You need to wait for some weeks. You can get the import enabled faster if you verify your business. To verify your business you need to provide proof of address, business registration, verify the phone number and email of the business that matches the domain.
And the hard part to digest is: they’re extremely demanding, but they go very easy when it’s about banning. Speaking of which…
The anti-celebritiy-ads special team!
Uhm, remember that Martin Lewis lawsuit from April 2018? He won. As part of the settlement, Facebook has agreed to put more resources into combating the use of its advertising platform by dirty players, saying it will do more to tackle scam ads that use well-known public figures to trick consumers.
Not just words. They actually want to do something. In the next three months, Facebook will launch a “scam ad” button in the UK.
Wait, that’s not all! It will set up a special team to monitor and catch scammer trends. Especially these celebrity-exploiting scam ads. Dr Oz, Oprah, Shark Tank, Elon Musk. And good ol’ Martin Lewis.
In case you don’t know him, Martin Lewis is a UK-based consumer advice personality. Why did he file this lawsuit against Facebook? Because there were at least 1K ads using his image to promote crypto offers…
While this could be funny on the affiliate side, it’s very frustrating for the person involved. So Lewis decided to file a lawsuit against Facebook. And as a consequence, Facebook agreed to take an initiative against these kinds of ads.
Plus, Facebook will partner with a UK consumer advice charity, to create the “Citizens Advice Scams Action” project (aka Casa). The social network will fund this organization with cash and ad credits worth £3M to monitor such advertising efforts.
Facebook and Casa will join the force to fight advertisers that illegally take advantage of celebrities and personalities for such purposes.
What does this mean for you?
Regardless of which hat colour you wear, you will have it harder to advertise on Facebook. So the only solution seems to go the “creating a brand” route. In other words, less about one-time affiliate stuff.
And avoid low-quality dropshipping too. Because you cannot have easy access to backup ad accounts in your Business Manager if what Attila noticed becomes widespread.
All advertisers can now buy Google’s 15-second non-skippable video ads
Video ads are every marketers’ favourite ad format. In 2018, advertisers spent $27.8B on YouTube video ads alone. Accounting for 25 percent of overall US digital ad spending.
Chances are you are already using YouTube’s TrueView ad formats as part of your marketing mix and generating decent ROAS.
So, what are we talking about?
Well, YouTube’s most popular ad-format, “non-skippable 15-second ads”, is now available to all advertisers. This ad-format is expected to be fully available across all Google properties, including YouTube, in the coming weeks.
We bet you haven’t been able to use them yet. Because these ads were previously available only to advertisers buying through YouTube’s reservation process or through Google’s premium preferred network of top YouTube channels.
More news-bytes on this ad-format:
- YouTube will continue to cap the number of ads a user sees, according to Miller.
- Check your Google Ads or Display and Video 360 accounts to see if the new feature has rolled out to you yet.
- You will need to create separate campaigns for non-skippable ads.
With FB hitting people with false-positives so much, it’s certainly worth looking to expand to YouTube and other traffic sources. One of which is the classic SEO…
SEO
SEO Case Study: How To 14x Search Traffic In 8 Months
Today, we bring you the same exact strategy which Matthew Woodward used to increase the organic website visitors from 2.7K to 39K in just 8 months. That’s a 14x increase in free, quality traffic from search engines.
The strategy can be broken down into 7 primary number of pieces:
Keyword Research
- Build your seed keywords to begin with.
- Expand on these keywords using tools like KeywordShitter and AnswerThePublic.
- Use Google Keyword Planner and some rank tracking tools to get competitive metrics on your final list of keywords.
Cool-tip: Use Ahrefs to find the keywords that you are already ranking for on Page 2-3. It’s much easier to bump them to top spots than focusing on new keywords.
Competitor Analysis
- Take a look at your competitors ranking on the first page of SERP for content length, page purpose, intent, page type, domain strength, page layouts, content type, ad placements.
- Make a note of what can be improved for each result and this will be the outline for your new piece of content.
Content Strategy
- Select your primary target keywords.
- Review your competitors in Google for each keyword.
- Create a “content specification”.
- Start adding new pieces of at least 2500 worded content, with 2x new pieces every month.
- Add more content to existing posts.
Onsite Audit
Identify your website issues by conducting a comprehensive on-site audit based on these factors:
- Site Structure: Make sure your core pages are located within 3x clicks from the homepage. You can use ScreamingFrog to check this using the Crawl Depth Report.
- PageSpeed: Use ShortPixel to optimise images and WP Rocket to optimise pretty much everything.
- Duplicate Content: Get rid of all duplicate content. Let Google only crawl what’s valuable. Get rid of the improper use of tags/categories.
- Internal Redirects: Improper migration from HTTP to HTTPS. Linking to deleted, renamed, redirected pages. Use ScreamingFrog to fix internal redirects.
- Trust Signals: Are you sending the right signals to Google?
Internal Linking:
- Distribute link value throughout the site, from pages with authority to others with less authority.
- Use a balanced combination of targeted, branded and generic anchors.
- Use Yuzo Related Posts to customise the display on the front end of the site. It also helps in automatically linking key pages across the site structure.
Link Building:
- This is the last and most important ranking factor. But its power is amplified 10X when you have built a good site structure.
- Scrape through a huge list of relevant websites with SEO value, traffic & authority.
- Publish high-quality content targeted at their audience to secure a backlink where possible.
- Build authority and topical relevancy as quickly as possible with PBN links.
- Once established, switch to outreach campaigns only.
- In 5+ months time, the site will start ranking & picking up links naturally to fuel growth.
So, there you have it. That’s all they did over these 8 months to 14x their search traffic. It sounds like it isn’t that difficult to do, if you just focus on these 3-simple-stages of Technical SEO, Content Strategy and Link Building. But the execution is always a different story.
SPONSORED
Go direct in 25+ geos with just one “network”!
OK, real talk – there are pros and cons to running directly with the advertiser. You know that right? Some of the pros include faster feedback, highest (real) payout, direct contact with offer owner to customize pages, possibility to get real exclusives…
But there are some cons. Usually has to do with payment terms and offer variety.
Well, today’s newsletter sponsor does a really good job at fixing most of those cons!
Big Bang Ads has been around for many years and they are the private affiliate network for eGENTIC, a leadgen company. So they come with the best of both worlds:
- 25 countries to choose from: Europe, Asia, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand,
- More landing page variations for each offer than we can count. Different prizes, different designs, you name it!
- Open and transparent communication about lead quality focused on finding the best solution for both sides. We’ve personally experienced this when we ran sweeps!
- Weekly payments! Yeah, you can get payments just as often as from other affiliate networks.
- Round-the-clock support from a team of affiliate managers. You don’t get just one affiliate manager! You get a team where each specializes in certain geos to give you in-depth feedback.
- One of the best reputations in the industry. Ask your contacts in the space and you’ll notice Big Bang Ads/eGENTIC have created a very positive impression for everyone they’ve worked with!
With everything put together, if you haven’t tested Big Bang Ads yet, you’re probably leaving money on the table.
Oh, and since eGENTIC is based in Germany, a country with some very strict privacy laws – this means these offers are audited inside-out to comply with strict regulations, so the offers won’t just disappear with a change to privacy laws like GDPR. Thus, better stability!
Sign up with Big Bang Ads right here. Tell the team WHAT THE AFF says hello!
PS: If Mastercard decides to extend those new subscription rules to CC submit sweeps, you might wanna explore some CPL offers 😉
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Video-gamer beats F1 driver on a real race track!
What a time to be alive! An egg is the most liked picture on Instagram and now someone who trained using a race simulator only won on the race track against a former F1 driver.
Enzo Bonito, a 23-year-old, beat Luca di Grassi, a Formula E and ex-Formula 1 driver!
The race took place on January 19th, on a track in Mexico. It’s called the Race of Champions. You might have seen it around… Drivers from all sort of motorsports compete against each other. And since 2016, virtual racers were allowed too!
“Sim racing”, as its called, has made quite some strides over the years. So much that it’s extremely good practice for real-world racing too, as Enzo has proven!
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