SOCIAL MEDIA
Advertising insights on Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter
Yesterday was a good day for you social media marketers out there – Twitter shared some data on diversifying ad formats, Snapchat updated Audience Reach insights, and we got an Axios report on what’s working well on Instagram right now.
Ready to dive in? Here are the biggest takeaways:
- Multiple video ad formats will help your campaigns perform better on Twitter. A new Twitter-sponsored study, conducted across six industry verticals and 136 different ad scenarios, found that two or three separate video ad formats will generate more awareness about your brand, as opposed to just one. Diversify!
- Snapchat updated its Snap Focus education model to include more information on audiences. One of our favorite insights was that Twitter users are least likely to use Snapchat, while Instagram is on the complete opposite end of that spectrum. Check out the full module here.
- Illustrations, infographics, and text are gaining a lot of traction on Instagram. More people are turning to Instagram for information, which makes it important to know what your followers want! Right now, people are engaging with long text in addition to pretty visuals.
Finally, a day without some groundbreaking TikTok news…wait, no, that’s not true. Apple, which was rumored to be another potential buyer of the app, confirmed that it is not entertaining the idea.
If that’s not enough for one day, here’s an interesting Bloomberg piece speculating on the potential sale price of TikTok – the sale price that the U.S. government may be getting ‘a substantial portion’ of.
SEO
Do real people determine Google’s search engine rankings?
You may not have known this until today, but Google doesn’t just use algorithms to help figure out what the top 10 results look like – they use people, also known as search quality raters.
In a post yesterday about how Google uses people to improve search, Danny Sullivan clarified how search quality raters actually affect rankings:
- Google has a group of more than 10k raters worldwide. To improve search results, these raters are provided with two sets of results pages for a set of queries – one set is of the results Google is currently showing, and the other is the updated version Google is planning to implement.
- The raters scrutinize the results pages to determine whether the results are actually relevant for the queries. To do this, they look at the content in question in addition to researching the different sites and authors that published the content. Finally, they provide a quality rating for each page.
- Ratings are not used directly for search ranking. This is the big one – Google makes it clear that the quality ratings given out by evaluators do not have a direct impact on search rankings. Rather, these rankings help Google evaluate how well their algorithms are doing at displaying relevant results.
Like it or not, algorithms are still the name of the game when it comes to SEO – but it’s nice to know there’s some human input along the way.
SPONSORED BY SUPERFAT
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We have a confession to make.
We’re often snacking while writing this newsletter… and in general.
What about you? Come on, we can’t be the only ones, right? Thought so!
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It’s not just about taste. SuperFat created functional, healthy snacks that don’t make you crash – perfect for snacking while working!
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SuperFat was even recommended by Tim Ferriss who said: “With only 150 calories, 3g of net carbs, and 1g of sugar per serving, they’re one of my favorite new snacks.”
Sign up to SuperFat’s affiliate program. Your followers will thank you!
The ROAS might be on fire, but what about the net ROAS?
If you’ve done much advertising, you’ll know that ROAS (return on ad spend) is one of the main metrics you use when making decisions about your campaigns.
But is it smart to be making decisions based on ROAS? Or, a better question – have you ever thought about making decisions based on your net ROAS instead?
You might already be doing this, but Luke Austin just offered a great guide for how you can start including this metric (net ROAS) in your Ads Manager. Forget those spreadsheets…
It’s done using Custom Metrics, and here are the five steps to do it:
- Set up your ad account by SKU. This allows you to break down your ROAS by each product, rather than your account-wide ROAS. As a result of this, you can optimize your campaigns based on single product returns. To learn more about this, check out this thread.
- Determine your customer 60-day LTV (Lifetime value) based on the first product purchased.
- Determine the COGS (cost of goods sold) for each product. And, to make the projections as accurate as possible, make sure to include refund rate, merchant & CC fees, fulfillment cost, and anything else that’s relevant to your business.
- Next, build out your custom metrics. The formula is:
60-day net LTV = ( PCV – ( PCV x {% COGS} ) ) x {60-Day LTV multiplier}
PCV stands for “purchase conversion value” in this case.
Finally, to determine the net ROAS, divide the 60-day net LTV by the amount of your ad spend.
- Run campaigns to just one product and leave the rest of your catalog out. It can take some work, but it’s useful to have a clear understanding of your numbers.
Much of the work here is done in the first step, and it can seem like a lot to set up your account by SKU. However, it can be extremely beneficial – the Twitter thread we linked above should help convince you. There’s a YouTube video included as well, if you’re looking for some more details.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
GOOGLE: Yesterday, the EU announced they were launching an antitrust investigation into Google’s purchase of Fitbit.
FACEBOOK: In an effort to make Messenger easier to use on business websites, Facebook has updated its Messenger plugin. Customers can now start a conversation with you via Messenger on your website without having to sign in!
SEO: Brodie Clark on Twitter offers up some great examples of how FAQ Schema rich results are getting changes.
TIKTOK: Wondering what the future of TikTok might look like if they get bought by Microsoft? Owen Williams put together a great (and realistic) piece on Medium.
LINKEDIN: If you create content on LinkedIn, you’ll want to read this. The company shared the most-used hashtags from May through July. Number one? #marketing
BRAIN TEASER
We’re starting something new with today’s brain teaser, and we think you’ll like it. Venture a guess: which subject line from last week had the highest open rate? Here they are:
📦 Leaked trove.
🎠 The Four Horsemen.
🤷♂️ How the turntables… (this was the favorite on our Twitter poll)
💭 What’s next?
💉 It’s vital.
You can find the solution here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
The weirdest SEO myths out there
About a week ago, Helen Pollitt posted a promising Twitter thread, posing the question: What’s the weirdest thing a client or colleague has told you “helps with SEO”?
There were some incredible responses, and we’re about to share our favorites. But first, if you’re reading this and you consider yourself competent with SEO, brace yourself. There are some pretty hilariously painful examples coming up.
Here were the highlights:
“I should use keywords in emails for SEO” – Dan Wilson shared this one. We’re sorry, Dan.
“A colleague back in the day *cough* 3 years ago *cough* once tried to tell me that if a site didn’t have Google Analytics then Google wouldn’t crawl it. They also tried telling me that keywords needed to be bold on a page or Google wouldn’t see them…” – this golden example is courtesy of Tony Cannings.
“Back in the day, it was all about spending more money on paid search as ‘that’s what increases rankings’. And when I say back in the day, I mean last week.” – thanks to Steven Macdonald for giving us a laugh on that one.
That’s probably enough for today, because we want to stop before the SEOs reading this throw their computers out the window. If you have a ridiculous SEO story to share, shoot us an email – we’d love to hear it!