Keep tabs on those rejected ads
Facebook is rolling out a new dashboard that’ll keep you up-to-date on issues related to your suspended and rejected ads.
The news was shared by Matt Navarra on Twitter, and the new dashboard purports to help you, per screenshots.
“Review the most recent accounts and assets that need attention due to not complying with our Advertising Policies or other standards”
The Crew’s take: The issue of ads getting banned, sometimes for no reason (like this onion ad), has been a big one for marketers. So, we’re hopeful this small update will help – if only a little.
COPYWRITING
Lessons from a year of copywriting
Copywriting is one of those aspects of marketing where there isn’t, for the most part, much objective truth.
Everyone has their preferences and style, and it can lead to a lot of confusion about what really makes a good copywriter – and what copywriting really entails.
So whether you’re looking to dip your toes into the copywriting waters or you’re in the business of hiring them, this new piece from Jackson Best lays out some of his biggest copywriting learnings over the past year:
- Copywriters should have a good understanding of tech. Though it’d be romantic if writers could scribble their ideas down on parchment, or a typewriter, and submit them, that isn’t how the world works now. Freelance copywriters should be comfortable using a variety of software tools – it’s part of the territory in 2021.
- Most clients can’t write good briefs. When Jackson began writing, one of the first things he noticed was that clients don’t always set reasonable expectations. A one-sentence explanation of the content just doesn’t cut it. So, clients out there, pour some effort into those briefs!
- Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Jackson wrote about realizing that, when you’re on a schedule, there’s no such thing as perfect writing. Whether it’s your writing or someone else’s, remember that you won’t always be shipping out the best writing on the planet.
Jackson’s full post is here, if you want to dig a little deeper.
SPONSORED BY UNBOUNCE
Create your highest-performing landing pages with these guides
Landing page design and copy are two of the most important elements to get your visitors converting. If you like driving conversions, then you need to know where to start with both.
That’s what these free guides from Unbounce will help you with!
Design is a blindspot for most marketers, but don’t let your lack of design skills hold back your conversion potential. The 7 Principles of Conversion-Centered Design is a framework for building high-converting marketing campaigns. Here’s a taste of the tips to turn more visitors into leads, sales, and signups for your biz:
- Design for a single campaign goal (the highest-converting landing pages always have an attention ratio of 1:1).
- Use F-Pattern vs Z-Patterns to design your landing page flow.
- Pick a perfect hero image that “shows not tells.”
- Draw attention to points of interest using negative space.
Read The 7 Principles of Conversion-Centered Design and put this framework into practice to design better landing pages.
And if you’re someone who takes months to come up with the right headline, the Unbounce Guide to Landing Page Copywriting is what you need. It’ll teach you everything you need to know about copywriting for landing page conversions, like:
- How to write headlines, sub-headlines, and subheadings to capture your visitors’ attention.
- Finding your value proposition for your audience.
- Using social proof (testimonials and review scores) to reinforce your copy and earn your visitors’ trust.
- How to craft calls to action that attract attention and drive results for your business.
See how to write landing page copy that’ll improve your conversion rates.
SEO
How a small Shopify store beat big brands at the SEO game
And how you can do the same.
This case study shared by Adam Riemer is a list of actionable items you can execute on if you’re running a Shopify store.
For context: The store Adam works with is a small brand in a highly competitive retail niche – here’s how Adam helped this store improve its rankings in the SERPs.
+ Fix Shopify issues: Shopify is not really SEO friendly. But, the majority of Shopify SEO issues are known and can be remedied. Adam shared a long list of issues.
To identify them, he crawled the site and picked three samples of each type of page:
- Product display page
- Category (also known as collections)
- Blog post
From here, he looked for the issues that occurred in at least two of the three pages. If this is the case – if you’re seeing common errors in at least two page types – the problem is likely to be in the template, and can be fixed at scale.
+ Create content. Here were some of Adam’s tips:
- They turned the most frequent questions that occurred in the live chat into copy.
- They replaced the giant rotating hero images in the homepage and category page with visual navigation and crawlable links.
+ Remove duplicate pages: When you add the same product to two different categories, Shopify creates two identical pages.
It’s not an issue for the user, but search engines can’t identify the official one. You can fix this by adding a canonical link to the duplicated page, pointing it to the main one.
These are far from all the tactics that Adam shared. For the bigger picture, give his blog post a read here.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
SHOPIFY: Well, this was clever. Shopify took to Twitter yesterday and linked to the Shopify-built stores where you could buy the clothes that Michelle Obama, Jill Biden, and Kamala Harris were wearing at yesterday’s inauguration.
QUORA: A fellow reader, Blake Smith, chimed in with a better version of the Quora formula we wrote about the other day. To find high-view, low-answer questions, search “site:quora.com intitle:keyword “1 answer” “view 1 upvoter” “k views””
SEO: It appears that Google is beginning to test third-party links in Featured Snippets.
PINTEREST: Since September, Pinterest has been testing certain types of Stories on the platform. Now, though, they’re testing different formats and rolling out the feature to more users.
SEO: If you’re looking for a basic rundown of the biggest SEO trends to look out for in 2021, this Adweek article is the place to go.
FACEBOOK: Many advertisers are complaining about a messed up reporting. According to Jon Biggs, this is due to Facebook updating to the attribution settings. He shared a solution in the Facebook Ad Buyers group. But the original Facebook post might be helpful too.
BRAIN TEASER
They don’t touch in hallways, doors, or cars.
But they do touch in malls, parks, and bars. What are they?
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.
That’s one way to spend $80k
Traveling during a worldwide pandemic is difficult, if not impossible at times.
But, certain destinations are safer than others – and this new private island in the Maldives is a perfect isolation spot. A perfect spot, that is, if you’ve got $80k per night to spend.
It can accommodate 24 guests, and it’s just over 32k square meters in size. Not bad, right?
This story reminds us of back in 2011, when you could rent the entire country of Liechtenstein for $70k a night (for a minimum of two nights, of course).
Given the choice, which would you pick?