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YOUTUBE
Transitioning from FB to YouTube campaigns
According to Ian M Nagy, YouTube is the ultimate untapped traffic source. But it won’t stay untapped for long, so you should take advantage of it as soon as possible before the costs start to increase.
To help you get started running ads on YouTube, he shared a 6-step strategy to take your FB funnels and use them on YouTube.
Let’s have a look at this 6-step process.
Tracking
First, you have to ensure that your tracking is on point:
- Set up Google Ads tracking events parallel to the events you’re tracking on FB.
- Set up your Google Ads column view to show the conversion that you will be primarily optimizing for. Go for the same optimization goal you used on Facebook.
- Use Google Tag Manager to make sure you have the “Global Site Tag” installed. This will allow you to create retargeting audiences.
Audiences
On YouTube, you can target people in different ways:
- Based on keywords.
- Market audiences: Users who are in the research phase of the buying cycle for a particular niche.
- Affinity & Custom Affinity Audiences: Users who have shown interest to similar products and services that you sell.
- Placements: Relevant channels and videos.
All of these are worth testing, yet, if you want to scale a campaign that is already doing well on FB, you should focus on In-Market and Affinity audiences.
So, choose the top 3-5 audiences and test them.
Once you find the best performers for your targeted CPA, you should be able to scale it up.
Creatives
You do not need professional quality produced videos to scale on YouTube, but the creatives must be effective.
Here’s the formula that Ian suggests following:
- Pattern Interrupt (1-5 secs): The first 5 secs are crucial for catching attention. He claims that odds propositions work very well to catch your audience’s attention: “What does [holds up weird thing] have to do with [getting X result your audience wants]? I’ll get to that in a moment…”
- Disqualification (5-30 secs): You pay for ads when someone clicks or watch 30+ secs of your ads. Thus, you have to drive down the CPC and CPV by eliminating people who aren’t interested in your offer.
- Hero Journey: Here you build rapport and authority through your story and by showing that you understand where your prospect is in his/her journey, and how you achieved what they want to achieve using your product/service.
- Social Proof: Build credibility and social proof by showing your customers who has already benefited from your products/services. If your products have been featured in the media, showcasing this helps as well.
- Long CTA: Elaborate on the features and benefits your customers will get and have them take action. You can use the same bullets used in your funnel/sales page.
- Nurture and Sales ads: You also want to run ads which convey social proof and instill a sense of urgency for them to act.
Campaign Setup
- Use 1 audience per campaign.
- Segment Ad groups by device and age.
- Include multiple creatives for every Ad group
- Start with CPV bidding and use a lower bidding for broader audiences ($0.03 to $0.04) and higher for tighter audiences ($0.07 to $0.08).
Optimization
You’ll want to have a minimum 0.1% CTR: Start by removing the device/demographics that are not performing.
Ian suggests cutting the ad group that did not meet your target CPA after spending 2-3x of your target CPA cost.
Scaling
Scale by raising the budget by 10-20% every day on campaigns that are performing at your target CPA: Ian recommends moving to CPA bidding once you have 200-300 conversions, with the goal being to drive your CPA down.
Additionally, make sure to keep adding new audiences and creatives while scaling.
Finish line. Were you looking for new traffic sources to scale your business over FB? You’re covered for now!
TRACKING
Intelligent Tracking Prevention
Apple announced an update to the Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.2 (ITP) for beta versions of iOS 12.3 and Safari on macOS Mojave 10.14.5.
This update is designed to further protect user privacy by preventing cross-site tracking. ITP 2.2 will put a cap of 1-day on cookies used for user tracking via link decoration. After the 1-day period, these cookies will expire and will no longer be responsive for user tracking.
What is link decoration?
Link decoration means styling of links using HTML properties such as color, underlines and appending URL query strings to a link. For example, “ClickID=” which many advertisers and affiliates use for tracking purposes.
How does link decoration enable cross-site tracking?
By using URL query strings. For example, any traffic you bring to your website from a social media platform or an ad network, a click ID is generated and added to the URL. Each of these click IDs is then connected to the real user ID.
Hence, every time a user visits your landers, the social network uses JavaScript to read the click ID in the URL query string and stores it in a first-party cookie.
This allows the social networks to track the user activities on external websites and is used to serve targeted ads on these websites. All because they once navigated there through a link from that social platform.
Additionally, once the user shares the link with their friends and family, it can be used to connect people and their devices as well.
This is what Apple intends to prevent with ITP 2.0.
So, if ITP 2.2 identifies your website as having cross-domain tracking capabilities and have a URL query string attached to your URL, the max cookie life will be set to 1-day.
Final Thoughts
Well, Apple rightly says it’s obligated to prevent cross-site tracking for its Safari users. There are legitimate uses as well as privacy-infringing uses of query strings and cross-site tracking.
This seems way more like a strong move against Facebook and its workarounds for tracking users across multiple platforms.
The main takeaway is that it could make life more difficult for advertisers when they’re trying to properly measure performance. If the tracking cookie expires after a single day and you cannot attribute sales past that date.
Although, Safari only has a modest 5-7% of the total browser market share, hence it’s not a huge percentage of your target audience that will be affected by this.
Let’s just hope Chrome doesn’t pull something like this…
F8: Day 2
Yesterday, May 1, was the second and last day of the F8, and it focused on the investments Facebook is making in the AI and AR/VR sectors.
Artificial Intelligence
In the recent years, FB has used AI to detect harmful content and they’re working to make sure that their system is more equipped to catch problematic content with as little supervision as possible. Thus, less human control in the content moderation.
It’s developed enough that they can now catch content violations across more languages. Currently, it does only work across the most commonly spoken ones.
Unsurprisingly, they’re still developing systems to recognize content in more languages without even translating the sentences first.
Lastly, they’re working to make sure that AI systems do not discriminate against people. This mostly happens when the systems are trained by humans, but they’re tackling this by creating guidelines and processes to limit this problem.
What can we expect? It will get harder and harder to push content that goes against FB policies. Not even content published in less common languages will be safe.
AR and VR
FB wants to build lifelike avatars to help people using VR interact naturally with others, regardless of the physical distance between them.
“We’re using a layered approach that replicates human anatomy and can automatically adapt to perfectly match any individual’s appearance and unique motion.
We design these models from the inside-out, developing a virtual skeleton then layering on the muscular structure, skin and clothing.”
Yet, we’ll have to wait a long time before these studies turn into actual products.
In addition, they’re already working on a system to moderate the new environment where these avatars will interact. They’re including tools for reporting or blocking users who are violating guidelines.
This image reminds us of a Black Mirror episode. Or maybe your first thought was The Matrix? Either way, whatever you think, it looks like the future is heading in that direction. And, of course, FB will be an important player.
There is still a long time before we’ll actually be communicating through avatars, but it’s important to have an idea of where we are heading.
Are you already thinking about how to run campaigns in an avatar environment? Well, that will probably be an F8 2020 topic.
SEO
Must-do SEO tasks, regardless of what Google says
Google has been known to keep their search ranking algorithms under a tight lock and key, never really releasing what has an effect on your rankings.
Not only that, but every time some smart SEO specialist thinks they have it figured out, Google go ahead and update the algo and make it even more confusing for SEOs and site owners, for whom organic traffic is the heart and soul of their online business.
However, regardless of what Google says, there are some things that are always going to make a significant difference and add value to your organic web presence. Here are some of the top things according to SearchEngineLand.
Image Alt text optimization. Google has been using Alt text all these years to understand what an image is all about. Though, it might now have started to use machine learning for this purpose, optimizing your images using Alt text is still a good idea.
Remember, Google recently started adding more images to its SERPs, hinting that you should use Alt Tags more for your images.
Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness (EAT). Google is always going to provide searchers the most credible and authoritative content based on their search queries. It’s speculated that after an algo update this March, a lot of the details surrounding EAT were redacted. Still, relevant, highly-valuable and insightful is always going to be valued by Google.
Content length. John Mueller has publicly confirmed that word count is not a ranking factor. However, this doesn’t mean you should be aiming for short form content. As stated above, your goal should be to provide the best possible information. Whether that can be done for a specific search term in 500 words or 3000 words is all down to your judgement.
Long-form content gets an average of 77.2% more links than short articles. Therefore, long-form content appears to be ideal for backlink acquisition.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). Again, John clarified that AMP is not a ranking factor, but we all know how much Google stresses on “mobile-first” content. This is what AMP does. Nearly 31M websites adopted AMP in the last year. Users are moving from the desktop to the small screen, so the longer you avoid implementing AMP, the further down you will slide.
Latent Semantic Indexing. Using carefully chosen LSI keywords to cover additional necessary information related to your main keywords will help to improve your rankings and to avoid keyword stuffing penalties. Not only that, but it makes your content a lot more natural to read than keyword stuffed articles.
Secure Sockets Layer Certificates. When users land on any website, Google clearly indicates whether or not it’s secure. That red symbol and the “Not Secure” label can cause people to leave your site immediately, especially if you collect any personal information like names, addresses, credit card info. No matter how it impacts rankings, get an SSL for your website if you aren’t already using one.
Final Thoughts
When you think of SEO, don’t just think of your rankings. Focus on creating a good online presence, which includes mobile-optimized content, a secure website, valuable content and anything else that you think contributes to an improved online presence.
That’s something which is always going to make a difference to your rankings, regardless of what Google says.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Something left behind on the Moon: Please, remove it!
What happened 50 years ago when the Apollo 11 landed on the Moon? For the first time in history a person set foot on the surface of the Moon.
The astronauts undoubtedly felt triumphant and elated. And they probably took a bunch of selfies…
But even the Apollo 11 astronauts are human, and even they had to execute an important task that no history book will never talk about.
They had to get rid of all the bags of human waste they had accumulated over the journey.
The past 50 years have seen NASA send 6 Apollo missions to 6 different locations on the Moon, and a total of 12 astronauts have landed on the surface of the natural satellite. Guess what?
All of them discarded their waste on the Moon.
Now, NASA has a new mission to achieve: To go back to the Moon and retrieve 96 bags of poop that these astronauts left behind.
Because, according to scientists, studying this 50-year-old waste could provide us with vital information about life in space. In fact, the microbes in these bags could help scientists understand if life can endure such extreme conditions, like cosmic rays exposure and solar energy particles.
All for curiosity and science!