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Updates from F8. Resolving the ads approval delay issue
The annual FB conference started yesterday. And the future looks bright and privacy-focused… We look at some of the key takeaways form F8.
Delayed ad approval? Depesh Mandalia shares his viewpoint.
Facebook F8: All you need to know
The Facebook F8 is happening in San Jose, starting yesterday and continuing on until the end of today.
For those of you that don’t know, F8 is the annual conference held by FB, gathering all the developers and entrepreneurs that build products and services around the social network.
The first day has already kicked in, and many updates and pieces of news have already entered the public domain.
The WTAFF Crew brings you the ones most relevant to marketers. Should we start?
Mark Zuckerberg’s opening: Unsurprisingly, Mark opened the F8 with his pitch about a privacy-focused future social network. These are the same concepts he talked about previously in his FB post, with his goal being to give people the chance to enjoy more privacy and the freedom to express themselves to the people they’re close to.
This shift will influence the next set of changes and new products at FB.
Messenger
In line with the privacy-focused vision, Messenger is releasing new features to shape stronger bonds between people, businesses and developers.
A faster, lighter app: They’re rebuilding the architecture of Messenger from the ground up to be faster and lighter than ever before. This revolutionized app will roll out later this year.
A way to watch together: Messenger will now let you discover and co-watch videos on Facebook in real time. You’ll be able to seamlessly share a video from the Facebook app on Messenger and invite others to join while messaging or on a video chat.
So, instead of inviting your friends to the cinema, you’ll watch short videos together on Messenger.
Desktop App for Messenger: Facebook announced a Messenger app for desktop. A useful feature for group video calls, project collaboration or multitasking.
Features for businesses: Mark didn’t forget about us. FB will, in fact, introduce Messenger lead generation templates to Ads Manager. Businesses will be able to create ads to drive people to a simple Q&A in Messenger.
Additionally, they created an appointment experience so people can book appointments within a Messenger conversation.
Business Catalogue: In the next few months, people will be able to see a business catalogue right within WhatsApp while chatting with a business. This will help brands to showcase their goods in an easier way.
FB5, a new fresh design: The new FB design will make communities as central as friends and the social network faster, simpler, and more immersive. There will also be some style changes. We think this is FB’s way of communicating its change of direction too.
Groups First: FB said that Groups are the most meaningful part of how people use FB, So they’re being placed front and centre in their strategy and design.
- Groups tab redesigned: The new Group tab now shows a personalized feed of activity across all your groups.
- The new design will also make it easier for you to discover new groups and to engage seamlessly within your existing ones.
Connect with your secret crush: The FB algo is the new Cupido. Yes, you read that correctly. With Facebook Dating, you will be able to opt-in to discover potential matches within your own Facebook communities.
Moreover, with the new Secret Crush feature, it’ll be easier to connect with your bitches. In fact, you’ll be able to upload up to nine FB friends you want to connect with. Then, if your crush also adds you to their Crush Secret list, it’ll be a match!
New tab to meet new friends: A new tab to easily find new people to connect with.
Shipping on the Marketplace: People will soon be able to ship Marketplace items anywhere in the continental US and pay for their purchases directly on Facebook. For sellers, this means reaching more buyers and more secure transactions.
Ability to Shop from Creators: From next week, you’ll be able to shop the looks from the creators you follow, without ever leaving the app. Just tap on the content and buy it on the spot.
FB will roll out this feature to a small group of creators before releasing it globally at a later day.
New and improved camera: In the next few weeks, FB will introduce a new camera that will make it easier to use popular creative tools like effects and interactive stickers. Snapchat doesn’t like this…
AR and VR
Portal will expand internationally this year. Plus, they’re adding WhatsApp to a Portal.
The newest Oculus Quest and Rift S Pre-Orders Open will be available from May 21.
The Crew’s Take
This is just the first day and there are already way too many updates for us to talk about. What’s most important for us is Instagram’s in-app checkout, which was also announced previously. But now we know for sure that it’s going to be rolled out to more creators.
Plus, the ability to showcase a catalogue on Whatsapp and the new lead generation templates in Messenger.
All the other updates might not be too relevant for us marketers directly. You still want to be in the know though, right? They are changing the way people interact with each other, and this is likely to change the way they interact with businesses as well.
Apparently, Groups will become the central pillar of FB, so you should already be planning some strategies around them.
Ad approval delay: 48-hour buffer
As you might have noticed, there is way too much going on at Facebook’s end. Looks like their entire ad review team is at F8 conference, or maybe it’s just sudden influx of advertisers.
Depesh says its because of a high volume of ads going into the system for auto and manual review causing these huge delays in ad approvals.
Have you got an upcoming campaign launch or a time sensitive retargeting campaign? Or maybe you simply want to test new ads?
It’s recommended that you get your ads published in Inactive state at least 48 hours before you intend to make them live.
E-COMMERCE
Break-even cost calculator
While testing new products or launching new campaigns, it’s highly important to know your numbers. Especially your CPAs and ROAS, to understand if that particular product is going to yield good returns, just break even or incur losses.
Otherwise, you’re just shooting in the dark, aren’t you?
Mike Pavlou shared a calculator template which helps you calculate the breakeven CPAs and ROAS on any products you sell.
It contains 2 calculators: One for those who use one payment gateway and another if you use two or more payment gateways. You can also edit the sheet to include more payment gateways.
Quite a simple one but useful one!
the tables and making spying work in your favour?
SPONSORED
Snap Ads vs FB Ads and giving away $100k trucks with Van Oakes
Snapchat is certainly not completely out of the woods after their IPO but they are working hard and they have very passionate users.
At least that’s what Van Oakes found out when testing Snap Ads – there are people you literally don’t find on any other app, so you are missing out if you don’t at least try!
There are few people better suited for this topic of FB vs Snap than Van. He runs most traffic on Facebook and has taken Snap Ads by storm.
Our talk with Van goes through:
- His previous career as a door-to-door salesperson
- His company’s very interesting business model where they give away trucks worth $100k
- Facebook Ads vs Snap Ads
- What makes Snap Ads unique and a great place to be at right now
- Where Snap Ads fall short
- What verticals are good for Snap Ads
- Van’s steps and checklists for launching Snap campaigns
- His biggest screw up in marketing and how he lost $80k
- The worst purchase he ever made
Have a question for Van? Ask in the comments!
Don’t forget to subscribe to our channel to get the episodes as soon as they are out.
PS: Want to get early access to all future episodes? Join WHAT THE AFF Insiders! It’s a FB group that includes industry thought leaders, past guests and people who refer at least 5 marketers to read WHAT THE AFF. All you have to do is create your unique link here, then share it with your friends.
TOOLS
Pinterest and Quora pixels now available on Google Tag Manager
If you use Google Tag Manager (GTM) for your tracking management, managing Pinterest and Quora campaigns is going to get a lot easier for you.
Pinterest and Quora are now approved Google Tag Manager vendors, Meaning you don’t have to create custom HTML tags in GTM for them any more.
Note that this integration currently supports only website tracking and not apps.
Need help with adding each platform’s tags to your GTM?
Here are the instructions shared by Pinterest and Quora.
With this, GTM now supports more than 80 websites natively, including FB, LinkedIn, Twitter, Adobe Analytics, Microsoft Ads and more.
BOT MARKETING
Template updates in ManyChat
There is another simple yet helpful update for those who use ManyChat for Bot Marketing – The ability to merge Bot Fields in Templates.
What does this mean?
This new update includes support for merging Template Bot Fields and Template Settings with your existing templates with the same type of content.
By default, it gets merged automatically (such as User Fields and Tags). However, you can now also merge them manually during the last step of the Template installation process.
Suppose you use a “Company Email” Bot Field on your existing page (the one where you store your business email address). It will now be merged automatically with the field from a new Template during the installation.
Google Ad Recommendations: Apply or Ignore?
Ever since Google rolled out Optimization Score for Ad campaigns, we’re all seeing a bunch of notifications and recommended changes to improve our account score.
You might see that your account score is 70% and applying each recommendation can take your score to 100% or closer to 100%. It’s tempting, we agree!
But, should you apply these recommendations or just ignore them?
Well, its recommended to review each and every suggestion manually and determine if it makes sense for your specific goals and account strategy.
What does that mean?
One of the top recommendations in most accounts is around Smart Bidding Strategies. The funny thing is each account might have a different campaign objectives, yet you see that Google recommends similar Smart Bidding strategies on all of them.
This is where human judgement needs to come in.
Target CPA may work great for lead generation but may have a negative impact on ROAS.
There may be cases where the CPA might be higher for a particular term, but the revenue generated is significantly above the ROAS goal.
Another scenario is where the system recommends switching to Target ROAS strategy. However, what if this campaign is about lead generation and there is no revenue being recorded.
This is a great example of a recommendation that you should simply dismiss.
Tip: Google recommends that in order to maximize results using Target CPA, you need at least 30 conversions in the past 30 days. Target ROAS bid strategies require 50 conversions in 30 days for the machine learning to generate good results.
For brand campaigns, you might already see a high CTR, low CPC and great ROAs and yet still see a recommendation to switch to Target CPA bidding. In this case, applying such a recommendation could limit the number of impressions for your branded terms.
Final Thoughts
The best way to test these recommendations is by using Drafts and Experiments. Set up experiments with a traffic split to test existing settings with these automatic bid strategies, and then you can determine whether they will work well for your campaigns.
Even if you decide to implement any automated bid strategy, it is a good idea to continue to monitor it regularly.
Want to read more on this, assisted revenue campaigns and attribution modeling? Then head to the post here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Search Engine of Webcams
Do you ever wonder what is happening in a Tennessee forest? Do you ever ask yourself how many people are currently drinking in Temple Bar, Dublin?
But most importantly, do you want to know if Israelian fields are being seeded yet?
Maybe you just want to know what the hell these questions are about?
Totally understandable. We’re talking about something you’ve probably never heard of: EarthCam.
EarthCam is the leading network of live webcams and offers the most comprehensive search engine of internet cameras from around the world.
Basically, you can watch what is happening in some far flung and forgotten corner of the globe, or maybe a famous landmark like the Statue of Liberty. All live through internet cams placed all over the Earth.
You can even spy on the EarthCam headquarters to see what they’re about.
So if you’re wondering what is happening around the world RIGHT NOW, head to EarthCam and satisfy every curiosity of yours.
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