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Pinning some dollars to the wall
Is Pinterest part of your marketing attack plan? We recently discussed the platform’s impressive reach (60% of all US women), and now we’ve come across this juicy case study from Sanj Modha: $69k revenue from a $6k spend with Pinterest Ads.
Let’s look at some of the highlights:
- If you already have working offers and products, Pinterest can be a great channel to horizontally scale your business.
- CPMs are very low: Sanj experienced a CPM as low as $1.23. This translated into an $11 CPA on a $107 AOV.
- You can build Actalike Audiences, which are the same as FB’s Lookalike Audiences.
- In addition, there’s keyword targeting: Sanj suggests using the same approach as on Google Ads for finding high-buying intent keywords.
- Look for keywords that have at least 250k search volume.
- Video Ads are preferred, with unboxing and testimonial videos converting like crazy. Keep them short and to the point.
Some downsides:
- You can’t scale to the Moon, simply because the audience isn’t as large as Facebook’s.
- Sometimes the platform can be buggy, but if you run Facebook Ads you should be used to that, right?
- Tags don’t always show up properly when using their Pixel. So, make sure to use your own UTMs tags.
This should be enough to prick your curiosity on Pinterest, right? After all, it’s not every day you see a 10x ROAS.
SEO
Let’s get into the technical side of SEO: For 2020 and beyond
The world of SEO constantly moves and changes at a breakneck speed. New tech, new methodologies, constant algorithm updates from Google, new user behaviours and search methods. The list goes on…
So, what should you do in 2020 (and beyond) to keep up with the leaders in this ever-changing landscape?
Aymen Loukil shared some important insights to focus on, so let’s take a quick look at it.
+ Mobile-first indexing: Googlebot is now Mobile, meaning the mobile version of a site is evaluated to decide on its relevance and ranking. So, make sure you have the same content on both versions.
- Keep the same meta and SEO tags (title, description, headings, image alt tags, canonical if responsive implementation).
- Keep identical meta robots.
- Keep an exact structured data markup.
- On mobile, avoid interaction-based lazy loading such as clicking, swiping or typing.
- If you have a video on your page, make sure it’s placed in an easy to find location.
+ Web performance: According to The Web Almanac 2019 performance report, only 13% of all websites are considered fast.
- Define your performance KPIs & metrics. Use Time to first byte (TTFB) for the back-end, First Contentful Paint (FCP), SpeedIndex and TTI for the front-end.
- Setup synthetic and field tools. Use Google Lighthouse for the first and CRuX for the second.
- Compare your website against your competition.
+ Visual Search: The visibility of the classic blue links is decreasing, leaving more room for images and video snippets on SERPs. Make use of this to grow your site visitors.
- Use unique, original and high-quality images (minimum 50k pixels).
- Use descriptive file names, alt tags and captions. Avoid image titles like IMG168393.jpg.
- Markup your images with structured data (Schema/Product, Schema/ImageObject, Schema/VideoObject).
- If you use Schema/VideoObject, remember to fill the thumbnailUrl attribute with the video thumbnail image.
- If you use Schema/Product, remember to fill the availability attribute to show up on Google images product search.
- Use Google Cloud Vision API to check that Google can correctly identify the main topic of your images.
+ Video optimization: Your videos can show up on Google search, Google images, Videos search results and Google Discover.
- Use crawlable and indexable videos with persistent URLs, embedded on crawlable and indexable pages.
- Markup your videos with Schema/VideoObject. Provide a description, name, thumbnailUrl, uploadDate.
- Two attributes could help Google understand the sections of your video : hasPart, clips.
That’s just the tip of the vast SEO iceberg. Check out Aymen’s post to get into the more detailed and technical nitty gritties of the whole thing.
SPONSORED
🎧 Whatever your business, we have some cool discussions you can listen to this coming weekend!
Yeah, whether you do e-commerce, lead-gen, other affiliate marketing verticals, on whatever traffic source (almost), we’ve managed to create a collection of interviews with knowledgeable folks.
Here are some interviews that will soothe your marketer mind:
Exclusive Facebook Ads CBO Q&A With Depesh Mandalia – With mandatory CBO being a question of time, even if FB is slowly rolling it out instead of all at once, this is a must-see if you haven’t completely figured it out yet.
Step-by-step path to building an agency with Cat Howell – Need to up your game in the agency world? Cat Howell’s insights are bound to give you a handful of ideas to apply, whether that’s for your sales or for your day-to-day internal processes.
Unravelling Mysteries of Amazon FBA With Top 100 Seller, Howard Thai – If Amazon is your playing field, we’ve got you covered.
Building and flipping online empires with Greg Elfrink – Last but not least, if you have a business that just works, you might want to learn what it takes to sell it… Or maybe you want to buy more underpriced online business for your empire.
Don’t forget you can always find all episodes on Apple Podcasts and Spotify too!
What if you use the same Pixel for two ad accounts?
A few days ago, we posted a simple yet important question from Depesh Mandalia about attribution modelling for FB Ads.
The question was this: “If two or more of your ad accounts use the same Pixel and a user clicks on an ad from both these accounts before making a purchase would this conversion be de-duped between those two accounts and why?”
You might have jumped into the discussion to share your view or try and find the correct answer, but for those of you wondering what the outcome was, here’s Depesh’s take:
- Conversions are deduped across the same pixel if purchases happen across two different ad accounts (dedupe means to remove a duplication.)
- Conversions are not deduped if the pixels are different and within different ad accounts but the sales occur from the same website (this could occur if two affiliates are both using their pixel on the same merchant site.)
- Adding a LOB (line of business) in Business Manager will allow you to a) dedupe multiple pixels running across multiple ad accounts b) use Facebook’s Attribution tool to track and measure performance across other marketing channels (they also use GA UTM tags.)
In fact, FB is also working on enhancing its attribution modelling. Here’s what’s driving the change:
- The upcoming changes in cookies coming over the next few years and getting a better view of data.
- Convincing advertisers to spend more. Not just on Facebook, but using things like Brand Awareness and building brand-driven marketing campaigns because of the knock-on impact this has on all advertising channels.
That’s not all. Depesh goes into a lot of detail and talks about a case study he ran way back in 2015. It might be five years old, but the results and arguments are still relevant today when it comes to conversions and attributions.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
- FACEBOOK: The company is giving the World Health Organization unlimited campaign budgets to help fight the spread of misinformation about COVID-19.
- TWITTER: Twitter is testing its own versions of stories, called Fleets.
- MARKETING: The average American wasted $125 in 2019 due to fake and inaccurate reviews, amounting to $25B in total consumer spending in the US.
- INFLUENCER: In this Morning Brew interview, The Fat Jewish breaks an NDA with Bloomberg and says the influencer marketing bubble will explode.
- PPC: Complete checklist to import your Google campaigns into Microsoft’s platform the right way.
- SECURITY: Let’s Encrypt revoked 3M SSL certificates due to a bug they were affected by. Check to make sure you still have the secure icon in your browser – you’ll have to apply again if you lost it.
- FACEBOOK: In this interview 15 years ago, Mark Zuckerberg claimed they could already predict if two people could get into a relationship. Imagine what they can predict now, 15 years and a mountain range of data later.
BRAIN TEASER
Two very short friends, John and Jack, were living together in an apartment. Since they used to lose their apartment key very often, they decided to leave it on top of the door frame when they leave home. In order to reach the key, John was climbing on Jack’s shoulders and thus taking it down from the frame. However, John was the taller and the heavier guy of the two. Why didn’t Jack climb on his shoulders instead?
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.
Let’s make fun of Facebook bans
How many times did you resort to cuss words because Facebook banned your account? Or maybe you’re one of those people that takes their frustration out on innocent bystanders like office chairs or furniture when things go wrong?
Well, we found a game that could turn Facebook bans into a funny thing. Like losing a game while playing Call of Duty.
The game is called “Clumsy Bird” and was suggested by Attila O’ dree. We’ve spent the last two hours playing it…
How does it work?
You basically have to make your ad account avoid the bans being aimed at it. Every time your ad account touches a ban block, it’s game over! It’s super-easy, at least in appearance.
Give it a try and let us know your score by answering this email!
For competition’s sake, our top score is seven steps. If you can do better, send us a screenshot and we’ll give you a virtual high five!