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Solution to the “dream-problem” any marketer can have
Okay, this is going to be a bit weird and we don’t know how it is going to sound, but are your campaigns over delivering? Like a conversion onslaught?
A great problem to have, isn’t it? Some would say it’s a blessing and a dream… Although surprisingly others would describe it more like a nightmare. Maybe you’re paying for conversions your overstretched staff can’t even handle.
In cases like these, you are literally throwing your budgets down the drain.
So, what can you do in situations like these? Nah, manually pausing-unpausing campaigns isn’t the right way to go about it, but you already knew that, right?
You will need an automated, intelligent way to pause your paid search campaigns as soon as you hit the maximum number of leads/conversions you can fulfill.
That’s exactly what this capacity controller script does for you. Input your desired number of leads and it will stop serving ads once you’ve hit that number.
And guess what? It will automatically restart your campaigns at midnight to make sure you’re back up and running the next day.
You can modify the script to run on an account level or campaign level, and you will also receive notifications everytime it pauses or restarts any campaigns.
The script will automatically mark all the campaigns it pauses with the label you feed it, although it can only do so if that label already exists in your Google Ads account.
It also looks for these labels to identify which campaigns to reenable and un-label at midnight.
PS: If you tell the script to mark these campaigns, for example, “Paused Due To Near Conversion Limit”, but that label doesn’t exist in your account, the script will throw an error.
Okay, so here’s us handing over the script to you and here’s some additional things to keep in mind before you run the script.
TIKTOK
Give TikTok a shot with these content ideas
Jai Howitt has been using TikTok for the past six months, and in that time he’s garnered an impressive 20M views.
Now, he’s shared his insights in the FB Ad Hacks Group, and they could be a game changer for those of you looking to get started on the video sharing platform.
- Content is the king. His videos are 20 seconds long on average and aim to be engaging right from the get-go.
- The average watch time of his videos is about 90% of the entire length.
- The app is built off trends and popular songs (sounds), and most of them are 10-15 seconds long.
Some content ideas he recommends for a few niches are:
- Apparel: Follow the dance trends and get people dancing in your clothes.
- Travel: Make some real aesthetic videos of your products being used on an epic day out, or try those single take behind the scenes videos from a breathtaking location.
- Food: Satisfying videos (think smoothie bowl blending), interesting facts about food, ASMR is a good one to try.
- Fitness: Impressive transformation videos will kill it for you.
- Eco-friendly: More of a storytelling sequence with emotional (still use trending) music, sharing about topics of importance (eg climate change.)
- Jewellery: Either dance trends with people wearing your pieces or models strolling through breathtaking locations.
Wanna thank Jai or got a question or a different POV about the app? Join the discussion here.
SPONSORED
🇨🇳 Affiliate marketing company? Take on this incredible chance to step into the Chinese market with BlueFriday!
Read this: 很多钱
What? You can’t? Well, that means you and your company also have a hard time getting into the Chinese market for affiliates, right?
Not only is it a different language but China has a totally different business culture as well as a consumer culture… their traditions and their way of interacting.
Buuut…. We are talking about a market of 1.3B people, 4x the population of the US! Imagine… a market that has much more scalability than the USA, and way less competition. Actually, you don’t have to imagine because it’s already there.
And this is meant for all the companies that want a piece of that enormous cake.
This is a chance BlueFriday is giving to international businesses to enter the Chinese market partnering with them and removing the entry barriers that have stopped you so far.
BlueFriday is a premium Chinese community of affiliates and online entrepreneurs. They’re going to publish a 280-page book containing all their knowledge about affiliate marketing, COD, Shopify, Amazon, SEO, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and more. They’ll publish 100k copies in China.
What’s the partnership about? Currently, they’re looking for sponsors that will get a 2-page section in the book. It means you can place your business in front of 100k+ eyes. This will be also a must-read for the BlueFriday University students where many Chinese affiliates start their journey!
They also have more partnerships coming up! So start working with BlueFriday today.
The deadline for partnerships is 30th January so you can’t waste any time.
Contact BlueFriday and start making 很多钱 before the chance is gone.
PS: 很多钱 roughly means “a lot of Benjis” 😉
E-COMMERCE
From $61k to $246k/month with bundles and FB Ads
Quick pause: If you’re reading e-commerce related case studies, you might need a final reminder that Chinese New Year is around the corner. Make sure you’re stocked up, or at least know if your dropshipper can fulfill your orders. Back to the case study…
We found this case study by Bryan Fuentes in the Facebook Ad Buyers group, and after reading through it we thought we could bring you some cool information from it.
Setting the stage
The store was kind of struggling to grow and was around the breakeven point. While $61k/month is nothing to scoff at, it’s worth nothing if the ROAS is too low, right?
So, the store was at a tipping point. It was getting orders but not showing much progress on the bottom line. These are the mistakes identified:
- No bundles or upsells, which harmed average order value (AOV) significantly.
- Creative burnout due to using the same creatives too much.
- Lack of campaign structure.
The juicy bits we can all learn from
+ Doing research: Testing more ads was not the starting point. Instead, the first step was to find out the desires, pain points and objections of the target audience. Aside from this, conducting thorough research on the competition was important.
Armed with the buyer personas and swipes from the competition, it was time to create some new videos.
+ Creatives: This was a health-focused product, so the main video type was before/after transformations alongside testimonials.
Aside from videos, 30+ static images were also created showing the product in different backgrounds. This is something that will vary for your product, but it’s good to know that there were about four videos and many more images to start off.
What would also have been a good type of video to add is users unboxing the product. User-generated content is always a must-test.
+ Bundles and upsells: To help with AOV, they tested several options. From BTGO (buy-two-get-one) to discounts and everything in between.
+ Campaign structure: We don’t want to go into detail here because it’s something everyone does differently. Just have a structure based on what you read in 100+ case studies. If you’re desperate for a detailed breakdown of the campaign structure, head over to the original post here.
What stood out to us is that they tested the Add To Cart objective too, and it actually performed better than Purchases. Always be testing!
+ Scaling: Before even considering scaling, they analyzed the numbers. From cost-per-click (CPC), to click-throughs (CTR) and CPM. This was to see which audiences had the best numbers.
Then, they started testing the best audience with a minimum $100/day budget and multiple ads in each ad set.
Once it was clear which ones performed the best, they simply duplicated the campaign into a $500/day CBO. The best ad sets here were then duplicated again into a $1k/day CBO.
This one did not perform as well so it was clear they had hit their limit. To try and scale more, they duplicated it again but went back to a $500/day budget and it worked out fine.
During this time, creatives were constantly tested, which is an important part of keeping momentum.
The Crew’s Thoughts
A key point here, that seems to have been left unnoticed or unmentioned, is that this is comparing October 2019 with December 2019… for a health product that improves someone’s looks (reading between the lines).
So, there was an increase during the holiday season spending spree… Maybe when many people were looking ahead and preparing to tackle their New Year’s Resolutions?
As our friend Paul Jey recently said: “A high converting offer can fool a terrible media buyer into thinking they are a genius.”
Don’t get fooled by an extraordinary offer or by seasonality. The main takeaways are:
- Know your customer and your competition.
- Make awesome creatives on a regular basis.
- Test strategies to increase AOV.
- Know your numbers.
ROUNING UP THE STACK
- SEO: Websites that reach position 0 and show up as Featured Snippets will no longer be repeated again on the top spot. The corresponding search results will instead appear at the top of the second page of results.
- GOOGLE: Leading experts from our marketing community share their views on Google’s announcement to kill all 3rd-party cookies by 2022.
- INSTAGRAM: A new Stories @ mention option on IG highlights any Stories that mention your profile, and also allows you to easily re-share them into your own Stories stream.
- MICROSOFT: Microsoft joins the data-leak club, which almost every big tech giant has been a part of over the last several years. 250M customer services records exposed.
- SEO: They call it The Definite Guide to On-Page SEO in 2020. It’s definitely a must-read and covers everything from tags to content to UX for the best SEO results.
BRAIN TEASER
If you were running a race, and you passed the person in 2nd place, what place would you be in now?
You can find the solution by clicking here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
SDo you tweet from an Android device? You might wanna read this.
Ladies and gents, if you are using iOS, you may skip directly to the section below where we tell you about all the cool stuff you can get if you invite some friends to read WHAT THE AFF.
For the rest of you sailing on the Android boat, you might have noticed some issues with Twitter… Like crashes.
This problem was so widespread that the official Twitter Support account warned everyone not to update their app until they fix it.
You should be fine to update it now though, and if it’s still crashing on you check if there’s an update available.
We totally understand how the Twitter dev team must feel… We sometimes add the wrong links in this newsletter. And we know this little daily email is absolutely the same as a $30B social media giant. #sarcasm
Real talk though, it’s a clear example that pretty big mistakes can happen at big companies too, and Twitter did a decent job in communicating the problem and fixing it quickly. A good example of customer support in this case.
Now we’re off to tweet about our early weekend plans…