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NATIVE ADS
Taboola is running split tests for you!
Well, not exactly, but the native ad network has decided to make use of its huge pile of data by helping marketers select the best landers, images and headlines.
How? With Taboola Trends. This newly released tool makes use of Taboola’s global traffic to show advertisers what the best performing creatives are.
Bear in mind that Taboola (according to them) reaches 52% of all desktop users globally. So, we can be confident that they have enough data to know a thing or two about high CTR ads… Let’s take a look at the features of their new tool:
- Image trends: Compares and shows the images with the highest CTRs.
- Video trends: Which videos are achieving the highest completion rate.
- Title Analyzer: Insert your headline and Taboola will forecast the performance for you.
- Keyword Trends: What are the most frequently used keywords at the moment.
- Phrase Trends: Same as Keyword Trends, but for longer phrases.
- Topic Trends: What are the most discussed topics of the interwebz at the moment.
For all these features, you can narrow down the stats by country, language, platform and categories.
Big thanks to Taboola for sharing the data! This is a tool that all advertisers can take advantage of – not just native marketers.
Mastering the newly launched Google Ads audiences
Yesterday, Google announced the launch of two new audiences for Search Ads – Affinity Audience and Seasonal Events. They backed these releases up with impressive figures from the beta advertisers that have been benefitting tremendously from the updates.
As a follow up to that post, today we’ll talk about some strategies to help you master these new audiences. Diving right to it:
- Begin the planning process by looking at your Audience Insights. You will find a lot of information about who you’re already reaching and who you might want to consider reaching out to.
- Use these audiences with the “Observation” setting. Add the relevant audiences and wait for the stats/data to accumulate.
- Start with two to three of the most impactful audiences, and only expand when you’ve confirmed that they’re effective.
- Apply these audiences at the campaign level. If you have any specific reason to do so, you can apply them at ad group level.
- It’s recommended to use Smart Bidding, which automatically takes care of bid adjustments.
- However, if you prefer not to use Smart Bidding, adjust bids based on performance differences. To make your bid modifiers impactful, opt for significant volume such as + or – 50% and not just + or – 5%. You want to make an actual, measurable impact.
- Affinity Audiences work with plenty of niches that may have been written off for audience targeting. Health care, financial and religiously-affiliated advertisers, and plenty of others, can use affinity audiences.
- Plan for shifts in audience size. Big Black Friday shoppers aren’t going to be super active in late spring. You can use the information in Audience Insights to get a sense of your relative audience size.
- Apply your original Customer Match list (seed list), even if only for reporting purposes. You will find more insights from that list, along with the scale of similar audiences.
- Think long term. Customer Match provides longer-term signals, and you should be thinking of your customers in the long term!should be thinking of your customers in the long term! These similar audiences are based on longer-term, potentially higher value signals, exactly like your best customers.
- Refresh your seed list regularly. By default, Customer Match audiences don’t have an expiration date, so you will find a lot of members that you aren’t interested in reaching anymore. Refreshing the list will help you create similar audiences that are based on your recent, high-quality customers.
Well, combining these new audiences with your customer match can be a very effective strategy for your Search campaigns. Hope you get to benefit from these strategies!
SPONSORED
🏆 1M websites data says the award for the Best Backlink Checker Tool goes to…
Ladies and gents, the results are out. After a lot of experiments, re-considerations, careful analysis, Mathew Woodward has finally published the results from his case study.
What does it comprise of? He took 4 best backlink checking tools in the industry:
- Ahrefs
- SEMrush
- Majestic
- SEO Spyglass
He used the above market leaders in SEO industry to collect data for the same set of 1M links. Yes, you got that right! One-freaking-million websites with tons of data.
The results from the case study here reveal the tool that showed the most number of:
- Referring IPs i.e Total Wins By IP
- Referring Subnets i.e Total Wins By Subnets
Historically, Ahrefs has always been the KING of backlink checkers. SEMrush has played second fiddle to Ahrefs but last year, SEMrush raised $40M to expand and give a fierce competition to Ahrefs and others.
Majestic, a seasoned vetern, has had a great sales pitch but does their tool match their sales pitch? Or did SEO Spyglass take the top spot?
Check out the results and the complete details from Mathew Woodward’s case study here. (No sign-up required)
AFFILIATE MARKETING
How an ex-politician built an 8-figure CC submit trap empire
This story is a mix of Facebook Ads, fake celebrity advertorials, terrible Chinese supplements, a 27-year old entrepreneur and politics. Doesn’t that just sound like a story waiting to explode? It’s already looking hotter than burning coal!
Grab your cuppa coffee, because it’s an interesting story.
Asher Burke, the protagonist of this story, did something that we already know very well: He promoted ED and diet products on Facebook. He used celebrity faces in his pre-landers, and then billed buyers’ credit cards over and over again after they opted in for a single trial.
Just another black hat marketer, right? Well, Asher took things to a whole new level…
Burke’s genius was in fusing the scam with a boiler room–style operation that relied on convincing thousands of average people to rent their personal Facebook accounts to the company, which Ads Inc. then used to place ads for its deceptive trial offers.
Then, rather than running CPA offers, he decided to sell his own products… This increases the margins, but also increases the risks with the FTC.
Since 2016, Ads Inc. (Burke’s company) and black hat marketers working in the company have used thousands of rented accounts to spend more than $50M on Facebook Ads.
They also used workers in the Philippines to manage account rentals and legions of associated Facebook pages. Not only that, but they then built up a network of stay-at-home moms in the US to recruit friends and family members to rent their accounts.
“We’re the best in the world,” said an Ads. Inc, employee. The best in the world in BH techniques obviously.
The formula they used is famous: An ad stating something scandalous a celebrity said or did -> A Fox News lookalike article that shows the celebrity talking about the product -> A $4-something trial -> Re-bills.
Some suggestions from the black hat marketers employed by Burke?
“I like to say Willie Nelson is a fount of revenue. You slap his face on a CBD offer on a site that looks like Fox News, and it sells itself.”
News about a celebrity being caught also works. This ad, for example, made $79k from $44k spent:
As the BH marketer said: “Send them to jail. Jail makes more Benjis than everything else”
The BuzzFeedNews investigation went very deep. And you can read the whole article here.
You’ll find other ads and landers run by Ads Inc, including the spent and revenue for some of them. It also delves into some Slack conversions, such as: “Preparing my brain for 12 hours of Adderall,” and suggestions of injecting the substance.
After reading all this, we think Asher Buke could easily be the inspiration for a BH marketing version of The Wolf of Wall Street. Asher would be played by Leonardo Di Caprio, of course!
The story has a tragic end though… We are sorry to say that reading this post, we discovered that Asher Burke died in a helicopter accident this March in Kenya. He was there to set up a helicopter safari business venture.
SWEET SIX
- SHOPIFY: Most e-commerce owners using Shopify experienced issues with the platform yesterday. Checkout completion was delayed and admin features were inaccessible. The issue has now been resolved.
- FACEBOOK: Watch this space for Zucc’s take on why voice is important, how giving people voice and bringing people together go hand in hand, the challenges involved and the major threats to free expression around the world.
E-COMMERCE: TLDR – A case study of a store selling posture braces. 1 product, 528k in sales, $300k in ad spend, $79k in COGS, $149k (28%) in the margins. - INSTAGRAM: These new options on IG help you better manage which third-party apps can access your IG account information and what specific data they can get.
- SEO: Data of 2B links from 90M domains reveals that the distribution of PageRank is highly right-skewed. The majority of hosts have very low PageRank.
- FACEBOOK: Starting October 28, FB is removing the grey verified badges from Pages. Page owners will begin seeing notices via their Page this week.
BRAIN TEASER
How can you make seven even?
You’ll find the answer at the end of this email.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
We are stuck here… foreva
NASA or no NASA. Musk or no Musk… It looks like we are never going to colonize exoplanets.
This Nobel prize-winning scientist, Michel Mayor, crushed our dreams of colonizing other planets someday.
“Things should be clear: we will not migrate there.” 🙁
Why? Because of sheer distance. Even the closest such planet is a few light years away, and the time it would take to get there is behemothic. Using the means of travel we have available today, it would take literally hundreds of millions of days.
Well, looks like we are going to be stuck on Earth forever.
Let’s just take care of our planet while it’s still beautiful and inhabitable, yeah?
Considering these insights from Mayor, we think someone should inform Musk that he might have wasted all these years building an unviable business.
Let’s just go back to bed, goodnight world!
BRAIN TEASER ANSWER
Remove the letter s.