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Pixel and Custom audience to become useless? New feature for FB attribution tool. How to set up a paid membership
FB updates are usually eagerly anticipated by marketers, but this one isn’t being so well received. In fact, marketers are dreading the new update, which will allow users to clean their data history.
There’s also a new feature in the Attribution tool, and Cat Howell walks you through the process of creating paid memberships on FB.
Clear history tool: What will change
Yesterday, Facebook announced that the “clear history” tool will roll out over the next few months, with the aim of increasing transparency and giving people more control over their data.
What does this feature do? It will allow users to see the websites and apps that have access to their FB account and activity data, and give them the ability to delete this information, revoke the access, and turn off FB’s ability to store it.
Once this tool is released, changes for advertisers will follow. Facebook took the time to explain 4 important points that advertisers should keep in mind:
- Giving people transparency and control is good for business: According to FB, when people know how their information is used they tend to be more comfortable with ads. Therefore, advertising and protecting people’s information are not at odds with one another.
- They’re showing people how advertisers use FB tools: FB wants to educate users on how advertisers use its tools, and to encourage other businesses to follow suit.
- The new feature may impact targeting: Well, this doesn’t come as a surprise, but how exactly?
“When someone disconnects their off-Facebook activity, we won’t use the data they clear for targeting.”
This means that some tools (Pixel and Custom Audience) can’t be used to reach your audience with ads. So, keep this change in mind during your next strategy planning session.
- Measurement will remain intact: FB used measurements and analytical tools to protect people’s identities. They don’t share personal information, so this new tool won’t change this measurement.
What does it mean for marketers?
Facebook, until now, has been an elite sniper when it comes to targeting users. Yet, on the other side of the coin, this power came at a big cost for users’ privacy and data.
Given the privacy crisis that FB has been going through, the new clear history tool will be a big step forward as FB look to address the data problems that regulators and users have criticised the social network for..
Total transparency is the final goal, and that golden targeting power is likely to suffer more as FB accelerate towards their end-goal.
Hopefully, they will come up with something to compensate for this “loss”. Anyway, as always we’ll just have to adapt and milk the cash cow before other changes that make the game even harder come along.
Facebook Attribution updates coming
Are you leveraging the Facebook Attribution tool? If you are, you might be pleased to hear about the new insights and enhancements coming to this tool soon.
Looking at this picture shared by Depesh Mandalia, the Attribution tool will show the conversion path of customers.
So, you’ll be able to track all the user touchpoints that led to the final conversion.
This feature is already available within Google Analytics, but now FB is bringing it to their own system natively.
Why you shouldn’t blindly trust analytics and attribution data
Although this update may excite you, Mike Mahon made a very good point in the comments section.
In short, he claims that attribution tools “are just another way of being wrong.”
What does he mean?
Here are some examples shared by Mike:
- Conflicting code that influences the data.
- Untrackable customer interactions (such as offline interactions).
- Black box attribution where the ad platform is both player and referee with no one having any idea what the machine is doing.
- Ad platforms and analytics tools not sharing data with each other, due to illegal and IP issues.
- Human behaviour and reaction to things like weather, local events, global events.
- Data volumes that either never reach statistical significance or take too long to get there.
- Ad blockers.
- Bot traffic.
So what’s the deal? All these issues can hurt the cleanliness and trustworthiness of the data.
Mike says that you should still make use of analytics and attribution tools, but always be aware that there could be some pitfalls. Basically, always question whether your data is accurate.
Good points to apply for every traffic source.
How to create a Paid Subscription on Facebook
You’ll have probably noticed that FB recently released the option to create paid subscription groups on the platform itself, without ever needing to move onto external platforms.
If you’re trying to create a paid subscription service or are planning to do so in the near future, Cat Howell shared a video where she walks through the steps to set it all up on Facebook.
So, if you were wondering how to do it, you can find the steps here.
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Google Marketing live 2019: What you can’t afford to miss
Did you watch yesterday’s Google Marketing Live (GML) keynote?
If you did, you’ll have seen that there were some massive product announcements around Google Ad platforms.
If you didn’t have the chance to catch it live, grab your cuppa coffee and buckle up as we bring you up to speed with everything that was announced in the keynote from Day 1 of GML.
Let’s have a look at some of the key updates and how they are going to impact us.
Discovery Ads: Remember the Discover feed? Previously known as Google Now, it appears on the homepage of the Google app for iOS and Android and the Google.com homepage on mobile.
For the 1st time, ads are being introduced to this feed. They fit squarely with the theme of the feed and will run across YouTube home feed, Gmail and the Discover feed.
To reach this new placement, you can create a Discovery campaign, upload ad copy and creative assets and Google will optimize the best performing combinations using machine learning.
It uses consumers’ past site visitation, app downloads, videos watched, map searches and much more as its optimization signals. They will work on a CPC basis, in case you were wondering.
Gallery Ads: Visually compelling, carousel format, giant gallery ads right within Google Search. These ad units will appear at the top of the mobile search results page, and will display in the form of a scrollable gallery of four to eight images.
Unfortunately these are not available for Desktop. However, there is a decent chance of videos being included in Gallery ads in the near future.
Again, these are CPC based ads. However, advertisers will pay either when a user clicks through to a landing page or when they swipe to the third image in the sequence. The cost for a click or a swipe will be the same.
Google Shopping: Google is striking back at Amazon with loads of new features and enhancements for shopping. This includes new inventory for Showcase Shopping Ads, hyper-personalization and a frictionless checkout process.
- Showcase Shopping ads are being extended to Google Images, Discover feed and YouTube feed, enabling you to deliver discovery-based shopping experiences on a huge variety of high-funnel touchpoints.
For the uninitiated, standard shopping ads take users to a landing page, whereas Showcase Shopping Ads take them to a catalogue of related products within the search results page.
- Hyper-personalization in Shopping ads to lure users from Amazon, where no two Shopping home screens will look the same. Users will also be able to buy online or locally. B2B products have been mapped to local retailers, and local product inventory listings are provided via retailer product feeds.
Users will also see shopping recommendations based on their shopping history, search history and lists.
- Frictionless checkouts and returns for consumers as Google steps in to mediate between the consumer and retailer, therefore offering a more uniform customer service and returns experience. The ”Add to cart” button within Image results will allow shoppers to seamlessly purchase what they want, all backed by a Google guarantee.
So, if users don’t get what they were expecting, their order is late, or they have issues getting a refund, they can just turn to Google for help.
Smart bidding updates: More powerful machine learning to find patterns in data and make informed decisions. Three big improvements to smart bidding are:
- Campaign-level conversion goals.
- Conversion action sets across multiple campaigns.
- Seasonality adjustments for upcoming events and holidays.
New, merged audiences: Google is merging custom affinity audiences and custom intent audiences to create custom audiences. Apart from access to audience profiles, a key difference between Google’s and Facebook’s custom audience is Google’s direct access to search data.
Audience Expansion Tool: Google’s version of lookalike audiences, used to reach consumers who behave similarly to the people interested in your products and services.
Local campaigns: Automated campaigns that promote your local business stores across Search, Display, Maps, and YouTube. Simply provide your store locations, ad copy, images, a budget and a bid, and Google will optimize ad delivery across its properties to maximize foot traffic to your stores.
Remember, these are just the announcements from day 1. We wonder what’s day 2 of GML gonna bring. It’s not too late for you to register to watch Day 2 live, but if you’re busy don’t worry! We’ll bring you all the updates right here.
COPYWRITING
Angles Blueprint
Angles are precious assets for every affiliate marketer, with the ability to turn a campaign from an absolute loser into a green, scalable one.
To help you come up with killer new angles, Vladislav Molchanov shared a quick way to jog with new angles.
The images gather all the human needs, emotions and core desires you can hit.
Two small but helpful updates
As spotted by Jane Manchun Wong, Instagram is testing out a new way to separate new and old likes on your posts. This can be helpful when you’re trying to differentiate between the old activity and the latest interactions when trying to make sense of your data.
For example, you might want to know the amount of engagement your posts get within the first few hours of posting the content.
This would first be rolled out to Android users with an iOS release later on.
Additionally, for Instagram Creator accounts, access to a new chart of followers and unfollowers has been made available. It helps by providing additional context to your Instagram performance analytics.
This is not available to regular business account users yet, as it’s an exclusive feature for Creator accounts only.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Say goodbye to chatty Uber drivers
There are quiet, calm Uber drivers, and then there are the loud and chatty drivers.
Which one do you prefer?
Probably, when your mood is high (your stats are green), a nice chatty driver is pleasant. However, if you’ve had a long and tiring day where FB banned all your accounts for no reason, an over enthusiastic Uber driver will just get on your nerves.
The fact is, you never know how your driver will be: Sad, happy, down to have a conversation, or just blasting out heavy metal music. The future is uncertain, right?
No more!
Uber is releasing the Quiet Mode option. Oh yes! If you’re using Uber Black, you can request a silent ride and avoid a wearing journey home full of mindless chatter.
On the other hand, if you spend all day in front of a screen and you’re up for a conversation, you can make your driver know about your upbeat mood by adding it into the options.
Here’s to more compatible Uber drivers!
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