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REGULATIONS
Can you guess which vertical Spain wants to ban?
Spain is introducing new restrictions as they look to limit the promotion of online gambling from advertisers.
October 2018 saw Spain’s Finance Minister announced plans to restrict these ads. Now, 7 months down the line, it seems like this is being put into play.
This past week, Francisco Fernández Marugán submitted some documentation to the government that recommended a total ban.
Francisco Fernández Marugán is Spanish Congress member, and according to him “is a public health issue that requires a regulatory”
The restrictions, however, haven’t yet been officialized. So, there’s no law to stop it, but according to these actions there could well be regulations on the way.
If you’re focused on running such offers and Spain is among the main geos you run, heed this warning.
Soon, these ads could become illegal. Thus, make your moves! Buena suerte!
KC Chow’s tips for keeping a clean subscriber list!
We’re just going straight into KC Chow’s email list health tips. He talks about cleaning out the deadwood and keeping your list healthy.
First things first, what kind of subscribers do you need to remove?
- Subscribers that last opened your emails 90 – 120 days ago.
- Subscribers that marked your emails as spam. (usually done automatically by email service providers)
- Contacts that received your emails more than 10 times but never opened them.
- Invalid email addresses.
- Spam trap (generic addresses, not personal like info@)
What are the signs of a unhealthy email list? The main symptom of an unhealthy list is a bad open rate. Mailing to a bad list of contact will generally result in severely underperforming campaigns.
What impact can invalid email addresses have on your campaigns? Data quality is one variables that ISPs look at when deciding what to do with your emails.
When your list is clean, and other variables like IP reputation, content, and engagement are strong, it’s more likely that your emails will hit the main inbox.
How often should you clean your list? KC Chow suggests doing it every 3 days or every week.
Well, every 3 days looks a bit overkill, but cleaning up every 2 weeks seems like a good option to us!
Maybe it’s time that The Crew releases some tips about email list hygiene and deliverability…
SPONSORED
Shine bright like a diamond! ROI Collective is a diamond partner of Affiliate World Europe 2019!
Are you ready to join ROI Collective for 2 days of intense networking, learning and sangrias in sunny Barcelona? No?! Well, better get ready then so you don’t miss out on your chance to see the latest ROI Collective has to bring to the table in terms of finance affiliate offers.
ROI Collective is a network that doubles down on mastering one thing and that is the finance vertical. They know the games played in the affiliate space inside and out so they focus on what affiliates really want.
- Transparent margins with real payouts – no “shaving and scrubbing”.
- A direct relationship with a big pool of brokers to always rotate for the highest EPC for affiliates.
- Hands-on affiliate managers helping optimizing traffic and adjusting the rotation of brokers.
- Maintaining an impeccable relationship with advertisers.
They build these relationships within the industry by having a big presence at important conferences. That’s why they are a diamond partner at Affiliate World Europe 2019!
In other words, ROI Collective’s goal is to make sure both affiliates and advertisers get what they are looking for. No tricks, no games.
Join ROI Collective, The WTAFF Crew and thousands of top movers in the industry in Barcelona on 8-9th July. Check out Booth A25 where the ROI Collective team will be waiting for you with cool raffles and ONE EPIC SURPRISE.
We know what it is but we have to keep it secret. All we can say is that it’s valuable, it’s unique and the more you are into football (soccer for our US readers), the more you will love it!
Want to get a head start in your business with ROI Collective? Sign up to the network right here.
You’ll get to try out some of the best offers in the finance vertical… And you might afford to pop more bottles in the clubs in Barcelona 😉
REPORTS
Empire Flippers Report: 274 online businesses analyzed!
Are you thinking about buying an online business, or maybe selling your existing one?
Before taking action, make sure to have a look at the first annual report released by Empire Flippers, one of the major marketplaces for buying and selling online businesses.
The company analyzed $50.8 million worth of business deals, sharing the hot trends that emerged in the past year.
The report is huge, but we’ll try to bring you the most relevant insights. Let’s have a look:
What makes a business more valuable? According to the data analyzed by Empire Flippers, three factors result in a higher business valuation:
- Strong brand.
- Multiple sources of traffic.
- Multiple sources of revenue.
What kind of business had the most value?
- In 2017, content websites produced the most revenue (54.18 percent of sales revenue): Amazon Associates websites are the frontrunners in this category.
- 2018 saw a shift, with e-commerce business sales becoming more valuable than the rest. They represented 56.13 percent of sales revenues, with the majority of e-commerce businesses being Amazon FBA.
The trend is still growing into 2019 too. E-commerce businesses are representing more and more of the total sales revenues.
However, content sites are still an asset that buyers crave in 2019: They’re fairly hands-off businesses and they can be a launchpad to almost every other type of monetization out there.
In 2017, 125 content sites were sold, whereas in 2018, there were 157. The total combined sales prices grew by 26 percent too, from $9.7M to $12.2M.
What’s the biggest risk for content sites? Most of these businesses rely heavily on SEO traffic, and we all know one thing: You can’t control Google!
It’s the same story for monetization too: Affiliates programmes change, offers come and go, and accounts get banned.
What about e-commerce businesses transactions? The first trend you can notice is that a ecomm business takes longer to be sold, especially for Amazon FBA businesses.
This is due to a diligence factor: There is just a lot more for a buyer to look into with an e-commerce business compared to a content site. You need to take into account the Income statement, how the supply chain is mapped out, supplier relationships, inventory, sellability etc.
What are the biggest risks for e-commerce? Getting traffic from a single source can be a critical point of failure.
Also, you should always be “recruiting” new factories to build your products and save yourself from being at the mercy of a single manufacturer.
This is just a tidbit from the report. It goes on, analyzing Ad sense content site businesses, Amazon FBA business, Saas businesses and much more.
Even though you’re not looking to buy or sell a business, we really suggest you take a look at the whole report and catch the most relevant info for your business.
7 tips to maintain the ROAS while scaling. Update for lead gen campaigns
One common trend that all media buyers experience while scaling their campaigns is that the ROAS starts declining as we increase the budgets. How do you deal with that?
FB has updated its CRM and autoresponder integration for lead gen campaigns, so should we get rid of Zapier?
Let’s look at some scaling strategies first.
Spend increases, ROAS decreases: What to do?
How do you make sure that you maintain your ROAS while scaling your campaigns? Depesh Mandalia shared 7 tips to help you with this.
These are no secrets or hacks. Instead, you should focus on getting your foundations right. Let’s take a closer look.
Audience Ad Fatigue: While scaling your campaigns, your audience is bound to be saturated. Most of them have been seeing your ads for a while, so you need to make sure you’re refreshing your ad creatives frequently.
Depesh said that when he scaled to $200K per day, he used to refresh his ads a few times every day.
However, it’s more about your reach. Which means if you have an ad set with a reach of only 20 percent of the whole audience you’re targeting, the majority of your target audience hasn’t even seen your ads.
In that case, you might not need to refresh your ads. If the frequency starts to increase, you might want to consider doing that, though.
Creative Fatigue: Essentially a follow on to the point we discussed above. In order to be able to refresh your creatives frequently, you have to be equipped with an efficient process.
Depesh has an automated system for this where he uses $10-$50 ad sets to just churn out new ads and keep testing them. The automated rules decide whether an ad is ready to scale or to be cut.
When you are scaling, this testing needs to be a 24/7 process.
Ad black holes: This part is about optimizing your ad sets on a regular basis. Using the average metrics of your ad sets, you should be killing or replacing the underperforming ones.
This ensures you have the best ads when scaling and you don’t let bad ads bring your performance down.
One Track Scaling: Use vertical and horizontal scaling. Vertical scaling is done by increasing the budgets, preferably by 20 percent per day. Horizontal scaling, on the other hand, is done by duplicating the ad sets.
Horizontal scaling is a faster way to scale, especially if you test more segments (split by platform, device, age etc) and campaign objectives.
LLA risk and reward: Broaden lookalike audiences from 1 to 5%, and you can even go up to 10% while scaling. Keep in mind that you have to adapt your ad creatives for each audience, as a 1% lookalike will be closer to your ideal customer than a 5% lookalike.
Larger audiences generally give more scope for scaling and you can keep cutting the underperforming ones.
Funnels: Scale and optimize all your funnel audiences, such as cold, warm and hot audiences. But here’s the catch – when you scale your cold audience campaigns, it automatically means you have to add more budgets to your retargeting campaigns.
Automation: Use FB’s built-in tools or 3rd party tools to automate the process. At the very least use these tools to alert you. For example, if you observe that CPA is beyond your cap for an ad, pause and replace it automatically.
It’s nearly impossible to scale your campaigns and manage everything manually on your own. You might have to consider scaling your staff as well.
Here is Depesh’s post on this to take your forward with more insights.
Setup CRM for lead gen campaigns within FB
If you are running lead gen campaigns, you already know the importance of the CRM integration used to alert you about receiving new leads and collating all your leads in one place.
Most of us use Zapier for managing the RCM integrations. However, now it looks like FB Ads Manager will prompt you to automatically connect your CRM, without needing Zapier integration.
They have added integrations with almost every major CRM and autoresponder out there. Here’s the updated list from Facebook.
We’ve not yet tested this for ourselves, so we can’t be certain about its efficiency and performance. That’s why most of us rely on Zapier for this.
However, it doesn’t hurt to test it out and see if FB’s built-in integration works as well as Zapier does. There’s no reason it can’t!
Google graveyard
Over the last couple of decades, Google has launched countless products and services. Some of these went on to be hugely successful, some are still growing, and some went straight to the digital graveyard.
In total, there are around 166 Google offerings that had the plug pulled on them. This is made up of 142 services, 12 hardware products and 12 apps.
Curious? Here’s a website dedicated to this stuff, with full details on each of the products and their declines.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Managing e-commerce returns
What should you do if you FB Ads Manager has bugs? Or if your campaigns are simply not performing?
Reach out to Mark Zuckerberg directly, of course. Preferably at a FB conference where thousands of other people are also present and will also hear about your complaints. Maybe, that’s the way it works – at least for some people.
During this year’s annual shareholder conference of Amazon, Bezos was doing a Q&A session with shareholders as usual when an unusual question was thrown in his direction.
Customer: “Can you please return this product for me?”
Jeff: “Yeah, sure. We’ll help you with that right after the meeting. My apologies that you had to use this unusual venue to accomplish what should have been a routine task. We’ll also look into the root cause of why that happened.
Anybody else got anything they need to return?”
Watch the video here to see how it happened!
Next time your website gets penalised by Google or you want to know when the Black Friday bug will stop affecting FB campaign performance, you know where to catch Sundar or Mark!
Right there in their homes!
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