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Pre-announcing an announcement! Well, 2 announcements…
On Thursday, we’re bringing you two cool updates about WHAT THE AFF.
We can’t say exactly what they are but just open the email on 4th October and you’ll find out all about it.
To make it easier, you might wanna move this email to your inbox tab and add us, [email protected], in your contacts. That way, you are almost certainly not going to miss it!
On with the news…
Do payment issues affect your ad account quality?
Shuayb Chowdhury asked in the Facebook Ads Experts Academy if payment failures can hurt your ad account.
He ran into payment issues because of limits of payment providers and a PayPal billing failure and talked to a Facebook representative.
He posted a screenshot the conversation where he got the answer “Failed payments will have no impact on your optimisation, and Facebook’s algorithm has no bias towards accounts without payment failures.”
People in the comments agreed that failed payments won’t hurt your ad account itself but can have a negative impact on the adset level if your campaigns get stopped.
So the good news is it doesn’t affect your ad account if you have trouble with your payments, but it’s always a good idea to have a backup to keep your campaigns alive.
Tracking real effect of online ads for offline or hybrid businesses
Have you ever had the pixel misfire certain conversions? If you haven’t, you probably didn’t run that many FB campaigns. Everyone we know had that issue at some point.
And it gets tougher if you have a hybrid business, that sells both online and in physical stores. That’s what Gareth John is trying to help everyone out with, in the Facebook Ad Buyers group.
To just cut to the chase, he switched to using offline events only, even though the store has an online shop as well.
Here’s why.
It was near impossible to measure effects when combined with all other digital streams aside from Facebook (GDN, Google PPC, SEO, etc.). The way it was set up made the pixel fire several duplicate conversions which overstated the results.
And here’s the solution he came with, which anyone with this hybrid model can benefit from.
“- Download the previous day’s customers
– Segment them via “Online Booking”, “Walk In Bookings” and “Other Bookings” (Telephone, E-mail etc)
– Upload the data to OFFLINE EVENTS into different standard events (Online Bookings into OFFLINE LEAD, Walk In Bookings into OFFLINE VIEW CONTENT, and Other Bookings as OTHER OFFLINE CONVERSION (Still haven’t found a way to create custom event details in Offline)
– MAKE SURE EVERY CUSTOMER / JOB HAS A UNIQUE BOOKING ID SO THERE’S NO DUPLICATION
What I’ve found is this gives such a better way of knowing where your customers are and what campaigns are affecting sales not just online, but offline too with no duplicates or miss-fires.”
Seems useful? Go thank Gareth. Maybe you don’t get it? Well, go ask Gareth then!
FB is risking up to $1.63B in fines
Less than 10 percent of the 50 million users attacked in Facebook’s recent breach lived in the European Union.
Facebook could still be liable for up to $1.63 billion in fines, or 4 percent of its $40.7 billion in annual global revenue for the prior fiscal year if the EU determines it didn’t do enough to protect the security of its users.
Facebook wrote that it is working with regulators to share preliminary data about Friday’s security issue and is planning to release further information soon.
The big question remains what data was stolen and how it could potentially be misused.
Since it’s not a political scandal this will most likely draw less attention to Facebook than Cambridge Analytica, but it clearly doesn’t help Facebook’s position when it comes to regulations or Facebook’s login system for third-party apps.
Bigger, more interruptive YouTube Ads. Are they better?
YouTube’s TrueView in-stream ads will now push viewers to take actions beyond just a click. New extensions will let advertisers push actions like app downloads, travel booking or buying movie tickets.
For viewers who are really interested these ads can become more useful. YouTube brings up the example of a trailer for a movie where you can see when and where the movie is playing.
For viewers who aren’t interested in the product, these ads become more interruptive since the ad takes over the full screen if held vertically.
Whether YouTube viewers will actually stop in the middle of their video to buy tickets or download apps remains to be seen…
GENERAL
Turn your Facebook posts into a newsletter? The Crew has a rant about this…
So we were looking around for what happened on the Interwebz lately and ran into this article about a tool called Relike.
The tool is supposed to create an email newsletter from your Facebook posts and we couldn’t help but think… But why?
The logic we assume is that your Facebook posts are so high quality that you want to email them to your list. Honestly, to us, it sounds like a pretty low-quality way to do email.
Here’s the main issue we have with it. Facebook is a medium that usually goes for very small bits of information and in a public setting!
Sure, FB is not “Twitter short”. And they’re trying to go with longer-form video but text content is usually short and made for everyone.
Email, on the other hand, is one of the most personal connections you can have with a reader. It’s more personal than a newspaper. Certainly more personal than a Facebook page.
And this difference is why we think you should go the other way around. Create a newsletter people like, then find ways to reuse that content to create a social media presence.
If you reuse your Facebook posts for a newsletter we think you have your content strategy backwards – it’s almost like you just want to use email as a Facebook notification!
There, we said it.
If you do want to reuse content across all channels though, we recommend checking out Gary Vee’s content model right here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Travelling to New Zealand?
Better clean up your phone before you go there. The Customs and Excise Act 2018 – which came into effect yesterday – sets guidelines around how customs can carry out “digital strip-searches”.
The updated law allows customs to stop anyone at the border, demand to see their electronic devices and travellers must provide access.
If you refuse to comply and provide a password, pin-code or fingerprint you could be fined up to $5000 and your device could be seized and forensically searched.
The reason is that “a lot of the organised crime groups are becoming a lot more sophisticated in the ways they’re trying to get things across the border.”
Yes, there is no way to get things across the border besides carrying it on your phone where you have stored it locally. It seems New Zealand is stuck in 1984 when there was no such thing as the Internet.
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