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PUSH TRAFFIC
Fightin’ back against the Chrome 80 crackdown
The Crew finds the problem. The Crew finds the solutions.
Yes, we’re talking about the post we shared last Friday on how the next Chrome update will block push notification requests for some websites and users.
We brought up the problem in our WHAT THE AFF Insider group, and the discussion led to a solution from our fellow Andrew Payne (link won’t work if you’re not in the group).
To keep things short, we’ll get straight to the workaround: Rotate domains. The impact of this will depend on how strict Google’s parameters are going to be. However, rotating domains will avoid penalties. Easy uh?
Although, this will only work if you’re trying to build a big list of subscribers with paid traffic. If you run a content website and want to stay in touch with readers, changing domains is not ideal…
In any case, we’re still thankful to Andrew Payne for his suggestions. If you want to get in the group, here’s what you have to do: Do you have five friends who could benefit from reading WTAFF? Send them your referral link and you’ll gain access to the group.
You will shoot three birds with one stone: You’ll help us grow the community, you’ll help your friends stay updated with the latest know-how and you’ll get access to our private group. Sweet, eh?
The impact of FB’s recent changes on LLAs
You may have noticed that Facebook recently changed how Lookalike Audiences work. The country level targeting was removed from the creation process, and instead the location set up will be used at the ad set level.
This impacted the process in two ways:
- Facebook disabled the current LLAs in the Audiences dashboard and now shows a “Retiring” status. Campaigns using the LLAs created with the old process will still work.
- There’s no convenient place to see the estimated size of your LLAs. To find the size, you have to navigate to the ad set level, select the LLA and set the Locations. Facebook will then provide an estimated audience size.
Well, in case you weren’t yet aware, this update from SocialMedia Examiner is pretty useful.
They even shared a list of LLAs you should be targeting. We won’t bring the whole list, but instead focus on some of the most interesting:
- LLA from people who bought at least twice: This will help you find high-quality customers.
- LLA from people who bought a specific product: Extremely useful when you want to launch a new product that’s either similar or complementary.
That’s it. A short but useful update.
SPONSORED
🤫 Confessions of Affiliate Marketers by AffJet: Are 41% of affiliates considering quitting the industry?
Okay, let’s talk about life as an affiliate marketer.
We never get to talk much about it. Even if we do, we don’t know if what we are hearing is true and to what extent really. Maybe, nobody is asking the right questions? Yeah?
Strategies, loopholes, hacks. Those are the things you hear about often… Even from us in the case studies we find. But there are other important questions that have to be asked…
Like what does the future hold for you as a new entrant or someone with limited experience in the industry. Does life bring you all lambos and jets or is it a life of slow death?
AffJet has been in the industry for many years, so they reached out to 87 affiliates, most of whom you probably already know. They wanted to ask different kinds of questions and get deep confessions unlike anything we’ve seen in our industry so far.
So you see, it’s like that anonymous game of truth you play with friends and get to hear some real hard facts.
PS: Let’s just give you a glimpse of a few quick facts that come from this survey.
- Around 41% of affiliate marketers confessed that they would or in the process of considering career change due to …work related stress.
- 34% are not sure about it but that only means a majority of us affiliate marketers are significantly affected by stress.
- On the bright side, 77% said they rate their job satisfaction at 4+ on a scale of 1 to 5, so most people do really enjoy what they are doing.
How curious are you to find out what your peer affiliate marketers think about this industry, their personal as well as business lives and how much of it is really worth it? What skills are needed? What is the workload? What’s the good, the bad and the ugly about real affiliate life?
Download the full results (read confessions) from the industry’s very own AffJet here.
MARKETING
Features, formats & trends to look out for in 2020
As an omni-channel marketer, you will agree that there is way too much going on in the social media space. There’s an overwhelming amount of information, tons of social platforms to stay active on, and a non-stop torrent of feature releases to keep track of.
So, what are some of the top features, formats and trends you should focus on in the coming year?
MarketingLand did some digging and came up with this list. You should definitely throw an eye at it:
Facebook:
+ Facebook Groups: No surprises here! You are probably already part of countless FB groups, and maybe you even have your own FB group(s) for your brand.
With a new redesigned tab, a lot of community-driven features, Watch Party for groups, and Pixel tracking for a small set of Groups, FB has made its plans clear that Groups are a central focus of the platform.
+ Messenger Ads: Launched in 2015, this format has seen numerous upgrades and improvements to turn it into a valuable medium in 2020. Using the same creatives that previously worked for your FB/IG campaigns, this format automatically reaches out to users via the placement most likely to drive campaign results at the lowest cost.
+ Click to Messenger Ads: Last October, Facebook released a new feature that allows advertisers to use Stories ads to start conversations in Messenger. Users can swipe up to converse with your business without ever having to leave the platform, while businesses can choose from numerous apps available to use for this format.
+ Instant Experience Ads: Also known as Canvas ads, these full-screen takeovers load instantly, are mobile-optimized, and designed to capture the full attention of the audience.
+ Dynamic Ad Formats: Powered by FB’s machine learning, these are designed to deliver a personalized version of the ad to everyone who sees it, based on which ad types they are most likely to respond to.
+ Creator Studio: With several enhancements such as a dedicated Monetization Overview section, new audience and retention insights, the ability to manage Instagram posts and IGTV from within the Creator Studio, it’s now a one-stop-shop to post, schedule, manage, monetize, and measure content across Facebook Pages and Instagram accounts.
Instagram:
+ Story Ads: Two years after the rollout of Story Ads, it’s already proven to be a huge hit to 3M marketers. Around 20% of all ad spend was spent on this format during the second quarter of 2019.
+ Shoppable posts: Launched last year, these allow users to make purchases from in-feed or Story content without leaving the app.
+ IGTV: Not every marketer’s fav, but it’s still a hub for watching and creating long-form video content, all while maintaining a direct connection to the platform. The content here doesn’t disappear after a time duration and offers the ability to record hour-long videos.
Well, that’s just the main platforms. There’s plenty more to discover about other platforms such as Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, Pinterest and TikTok.
ROUNING UP THE STACK
- FACEBOOK: The platform is going to launch a new desktop design for all users.
- SEO: GMB hack to get 68k more views: Use “quick tips” available for your industry and/or “reviews” on third party sites. Turn them into images and GEO tag as usual.
- FACEBOOK: If you’re getting poor results from your camps lately, it might be because your LLAs and CAs were inflated by people buying Christmas gifts or products on sale but who aren’t actually connected with your brand.
- GOOGLE ADS: The company is testing custom dimensions in Google Ads, which allows you to append annotations to your campaigns to report on categories and subcategories aligned with your business structure and goals.
- INSTAGRAM: New options for Boomerang camera mode for Stories: ‘SloMo’, ‘Echo’ and ‘Duo’.
BRAIN TEASER
Always in you, Sometimes on you;
If I surround you, I can kill you.
What am I?
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.
Turn WTAFF into a daily podcast with this new feature
We recently talked about CES 2020 and the myriad of new tools and inventions being developed. However, we lost this one from Google.
It’s just a feature of the Google Assistant: But it will be able to read websites for you!
“Hey Google, read this page!”
And it will read the site you loaded.
This function will roll out this year and will be limited to Android phones.
Now we’re wondering how you will take advantage of this?
Maybe you’ll just make it read your Shopify stats to you?
We have an idea: Make it read our newsletter while you sip your coffee in the morning!