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GENERAL
Have we mentioned the giveaway?
Well, yes we have mentioned it a few times already but we’re mentioning it again.
We’ve announced our first guest, Paul Jeyapal.
We’ve added more bonus entries for referring people into the giveaway.
And we’ve temporarily added our frequent reader bonus in there.
So, go to the link here, get your bonus and share the giveaway with your friends to get more entries.
Be on the lookout for our next guest announcement early next week 😉
Twitter and Facebook take one for the “team” while Google is MIA
Yesterday, Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg, and Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey,have been grilled by members of the US Congress while Google only appeared as an empty chair after its CEO Larry Page refused to attend the hearing.
Both executives admitted that their companies made mistakes in the 2016 election. Sandberg said Facebook had been “too slow to spot this and too slow to act,” and Dorsey said his work on the issue was “not done nor will it ever be”.
During the Senate sessions, several legislators said they planned to introduce legislation to rein in companies like Facebook and Twitter and that there should be a collaboration between the companies and the government.
As we said two days ago, we are sceptical that governments can do a better job than the companies themselves when it comes to compliance. Typically governments react quite slowly.
Republican representatives accused Dorsey that Twitter has an anti-conservative bias on its site that got answered by Dorsey saying: “An analysis of tweets found no statistically significant difference between how often a Democrat’s tweet was viewed compared to a Republican’s.”
What we can see is that politicians don’t like it when elections get manipulated (without them being the ones manipulating them) and that they want to come up with more regulations.
Social media sites are afraid of getting hit harshly by some not so well-thought-out regulations and are willing to cooperate and already started to do so by requiring documentation for political ad buys and so on.
This brings us to a talk the WTAFF Crew had on “what’s next in affiliate marketing”. And we noticed that the cycles that happened over the past 10-20 years or so all involved a new, unregulated traffic source where affiliates flourished.
All these talks about regulations make us a bit sceptical because it will likely be harder for new platforms to make their way towards the top, and politicians will have their eyes on them too.
The aggressive tactics won’t die out overnight of course, but the companies in power, that own the users, the data and the tools used to browse the Internet are under pressure to stomp said tactics.
E-COMMERCE
What to do when PayPal says you cannot use them anymore?
Go to Facebook groups and try to get help is the answer for most… And it’s not a bad idea.
Julia Kx ran into issues with her PayPal merchant account and asked the Facebook Ad Buyers group for help.
There’s no easy solution, you probably know that you just have to go with a higher risk processor or you have to seriously improve your chargeback rates.
The reason we’re sharing this though is that the discussion went towards what actually happened, and what is viewed as a high-risk number when it comes to disputes.
Long story short, Julia went on vacation and didn’t answer disputes for a week. Customers escalated and PayPal probably had no choice but to flag her business. The dispute rate was already rather high, according to others, at around 3%.
So a very clear lesson – stay on top of your customer service! The life of an entrepreneur is not glamorous, especially in the early days. You are a slave to your customers, and time off is something your business cannot afford sometimes…
Instagram to create a standalone app only for shopping?
Given how previous rumours and leaks were true, this one seems likely a yes too.
The app will probably be called IG Shopping and it will let users browse items from merchants that they follow and buy stuff directly from the app.
It makes sense for IG to do this, and they probably will but let’s not waste too much time on speculation.
GENERAL
People did sorta mean it with #DeleteFacebook
The Q2 numbers from Facebook make even more sense now after Pew Research published this study on how Americans have changed their relationship with Facebook.
To give you the short story – 26% of people said they deleted the app from their phone. Now, this doesn’t mean they closed their accounts and won’t use it in the browser but it’s telling.
42% also took a break from the social network, simply checking it less, and over 50% adjusted their privacy settings.
Another worrying result is that young people are much more likely to take such actions. 44% of 18-29-year-olds said they deleted the app from their phones.
Lucky for Facebook that they prepared for such an event with Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp… And maybe even Oculus will become more relevant in the near future.
3 answers to FAQs from Depesh Mandalia
Frequently asked questions – even if they are answered many times in a group or a forum, they pop over and over again.
Here are 3 answers about Facebook from Depesh Mandalia, in his Facebook Ads Experts Academy, that you won’t need to be answered again.
What’s the deal with a lookalike audience? What does it really do?
It’s about finding people similar to your seed audience. And this means the quality of your seed audience matters.
One big misconception people have is that lookalike audiences will always bring you the best audiences.
It’s not necessarily true, especially if you don’t have a high-quality seed audience. That means more than a handful of high-quality people in your audience.
Then lookalikes will probably be some of the best audiences!
What’s the minimum budget to run Facebook campaigns?
It depends, of course. Depesh uses $5 per ad set per day to test, across 20-40 ad sets.
How can you build a strong brand with dropshipping, like Wish?
OK, this one is not about Facebook Ads but still.
You have to be honest about delivery times, you have to focus on the PURPOSE of the brand.
Why do you exist? What problem do you solve in your customer’s life or what opportunity do you create?
Can anyone else offer what you have? How can you keep your customers coming back?
Those are the questions you need to answer to really build a brand.
If you want more details on any of the questions, head over to the post and ask!
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Goldman Sachs sacks plans to open crypto trading desk
If you didn’t get our play on words there, Goldman Sachs had plans to open a crypto trading desk.
And now those plans have changed and they aren’t opening one anymore, at least for the time being.
As you might expect, crypto prices went down on this news.
Fret not. Goldman has sent us a technical analysis they did. You can find the graph below, trade accordingly!
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