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$3M/month in ad spend across the world: Key lessons learned
Andrew Foxwell, who runs a marketing agency, shared his take after reviewing 5 ad accounts that had a collective spend of $3M per month. Mucha plata, si?
Should we jump into them? Suuure.
Here’s everything.
- Value bidding on prospecting is something that all the successful accounts have in common. And usually, they don’t have a minimum ROAS.
- 10% (or anything above 6%) Lookalike Audiences (LLAs) is where the most stable volumes come from. Open targeting performs better on more matured accounts.
- Smaller LLAs, such as 1-2%, show wild instability. According to Andrew, the auction isn’t able to deliver on smaller LLAs the way it used to do.
- Loyalty, remarketing, email lists and frequent purchasers are a must. Relying on cold audiences isn’t going to cut it.
- For accounts with only one product, cost-caps with a $5 range of the CPA perform well. For accounts with more products, default bidding is better.
- Almost no one is splitting placements. Meaning that the same creative is used both in the FB Newsfeed and Stories. There’s a big potential if you split placements and use different creatives.
- Creatives remain the most important thing. And you should recreate them daily and always test new ones. Well, how many times did you read something similar here? What does that mean? You got it, right?
Here’s to fewer headaches with FB Ads!
CONTENT MARKETING
Ever heard of “social listening”?
Yesterday, we shared a content marketing guide on how you can churn out great content on a consistent basis to grow your audience and keep them engaged.
In this guide, Steven Black briefly talked about using social listening to know and understand your audience.
But how can you use social listening as part of your overall content marketing strategy? Let’s take a dive into that.
Social listening for your brand
- Find out the questions, concerns and doubts your customers have the most. You can use this to build content for a FAQ page or a Chatbot flow to answer these areas.
- Find common issues around your customers’ brand experience. You can use this to reduce customer friction points while you find ways of improving the customer experience and satisfaction.
- Find out what your customers love about you. Use that info in your ads, products and other content you produce.
- Are your customers and potential customers talking positively or negatively about your brand. Use this info to pinpoint problem areas and ways of improving them.
Social listening to your competitors
- Your competition is only as good as their audience says they are. How well do you know your competitor’s audience?
- Find out your share of the audience compared to your competitors.
- Are their customers unhappy with their product? Is there a scope for you to create a better product or experience?
- Does their content engage more than yours? Why?
- What new products are they offering? Find out how people feel about them and then out manoeuvre the competition.
Once you have enough data on the pointers above, you can then use it to your advantage and gain the upper hand. Look at their keywords, hashtags, leading phrases and understand why they are so popular with these.
Social listening for your niche
- Put yourself ahead of the industry curve by getting a sense of the current market within your niche. This allows you to come up with the right products, content and the right communication to stay ahead of your competition and market trends.
- Keep an eye on anything that could disrupt the industry. These are things that the audience starts talking about out of nowhere and en masse.
- Pay attention to social issues relevant to your brand.
- Find existing pain points that a new product, customer experience or business model can solve.
Social listening for campaign planning
Use insights and other data points to build and improve your existing campaigns
Things to track:
- Impressions and engagement from your posts.
- Sentiments about your campaigns and ads.
- Are there influencers talking about your brand?
- Does a certain demographic engage more than others?
- What are the positive and negative themes from your campaigns?
You can then break down all of these insights by: Network, Content type, Message type, Gender, Age, Sentiment.
Find it interesting? Steven talks about more ways of using social listening for content planning, product research on his post here.
SPONSORED
The best place to find skilled, reliable and hard-working remote workers!
We’re speaking from experience here. OnlineJobs.ph is the place where we found our first and oldest hire almost 4 years ago. Have a look at our logo, our social media posts, our memes and all our videos for the past year! All visuals are done by that same awesome guy!
Anytime we’re looking for virtual assistants, programmers, designers or writers, we put a job listing on OnlineJobs.ph as well.
That’s because we always get several very good candidates. There’s a huge talent pool to choose from.
Now, don’t get us wrong, not all applicants are so-called rockstars. You must have a process to choose the best ones for you, you have to make sure you understand their work culture, you will also have to provide some basic training – just like any new hires.
If you’re a seasoned business person, you already know a thing or two about hiring. If you’re new to this, OnlineJobs.ph has its own very detailed guide on how to hire and manage your team. Whether you recruit on their platform or somewhere else, it’s very helpful.
By the way, one misconception is that you are just working with freelancers. That’s mostly not true. You are hiring full-time, reliable people to be there for your business when it needs it! People who are used to working in remote teams and adapt to your time zone needs.
Why is OnlineJobs.ph better than alternatives?
- Everyone speaks English. In case you didn’t know it, just about everyone with an Internet connection in the Philippines has a good level of English.
- Background data checks on your candidates.
- Worker coaching service. If you need help training your new hire, it’s included in the Premium plan!
- No long term commitment. Once you found the right candidate, you don’t pay anymore. You just enjoy the productivity of your new hires!
- Over 500,000 resumes to choose from. Yeah, that’s a big talent pool!
We’ve made some big claims about the platform but why don’t you try it for yourself? You can post 3 jobs for free. If you are already convinced, check the Pro or Premium options at $69/month or $99/month.
If you want to test it out for free, all you have to do is sign up for an account right here and post your job.
LinkedIn reveals how their new algorithm works
LinkedIn has been constantly updating its ranking algorithm over the last year and a half. This week, they finally revealed what changed and how its algorithm works.
In order to create more engagement for users, it is moving away from ranking trending content and putting more weight on niche-specific professional conversations.
Previously, most of the engagement on posts in its news feed was focused on the top 1% of power users on the platform.
To create a more evenly distributed network, LinkedIn introduced creator-side optimization, which gives more attention to creators with smaller audiences.
It also means that it might rank a post from a connection higher if the post needs more engagement.
LinkedIn does not give more weight to certain types of post formats (videos, images, long-form articles, etc.). Rather, it now considers posts that encourage engagement.
“Post things that encourage a response. If you’re posting a link, express an opinion with it.”
It can now predict the likelihood of a user jumping into a conversation. Not just that, it can also determine what kind of impact joining a conversation may have on their network and if others in their network will join the conversation.
Hashtags will continue to help. But keep the number of hashtags included in a post at three or less.
“If a connection uses a hashtag you also happen to follow, it gets an extra boost!”
Well, these are some no-fluff, straight-to-the-point insights coming from LinkedIn and they look pretty interesting!
Definitely worth a try to give LinkedIn another go and see how accurate these insights are. If you happen to be there on the platform, show some love and follow us here.
SEO
An official standard for using robots.txt
Google is looking to turn its decades-old Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) into an official internet standard. Taking it forward, it has open-sourced its robots.txt parser as part of that effort.
The rules outlined in REP have been an unofficial standard for the past 25 years. All this time, REP was open to interpretation by developers and hadn’t been updated to cover today’s use cases.
This created a challenge for website owners because the ambiguously written, de-facto standard made it difficult to write the rules correctly.
Google has now documented the REP process for the modern web and submitted it to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for review.
Here are some updates to the rules:
- Any URI based transfer protocol can use robots.txt. It’s not limited to HTTP anymore. Can be used for FTP or CoAP as well.
- Developers must parse at least the first 500 kibibytes of a robots.txt.
- A new maximum caching time of 24 hours or cache directive value if available, which gives website owners the flexibility to update their robots.txt whenever they want.
- When a robots.txt file becomes inaccessible due to server failures, known disallowed pages are not crawled for a reasonably long period of time.
FROM THE CREW
We got a new haircut!
If you follow us on FB, you probably saw that WHAT THE AFF now has a brand new website.
New style, both for the homepage and the past posts. If you’re curious about our new look, you can click here. Let us know if you like it. And share it with your marketing friends.
We also used some dark persuasion tactics to skyrocket the subscribers’ conversion rate. So be careful… Joking!
Announcement to iCloud email service users
Are you one of the few people using Apple’s email services like iCloud, Mac or Me? Bad news!
We’ve had issues delivering our daily emails to these addresses in the past week. Why? We don’t really know. You guys open our emails regularly, those who don’t open for a specific time were added to an inactive list but somehow Apple decided to not let active readers receive our emails anymore.
The rest of you reading this are probably asking: If you can’t deliver your email to iCloud users, why the heck are you writing this? They will never see it.
Well, as stupid as it sounds, Apple suggested this solution. Thanks, Apple!
Tell your Apple-using friends to perhaps subscribe with another email. We’ll try to fix this in the next couple of days but if we don’t find a solution, we’ll stop sending emails to that group of emails.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
The largest and creepiest FB advertiser
Have you ever bought something from Wish?
Even if you haven’t, you’ve surely seen at least one of their ads. They spend around $100M a year on FB advertising. And in 2015, it was the biggest advertiser on FB, thus, it’s likely they showed up on your Newsfeed.
Despite their high spend, there’s something really interesting about Wish.
What is it? Well, their product itself and the creatives they use to make things as weird as possible.
They are very weird. And sometimes you can’t even understand what they’re trying to sell. And very often, the stuff they sell is so weird that it’s hard to understand if someone in this galaxy will ever buy it.
However, they still spend 9 figures on Facebook and sell $8.7B worth of goods. Therefore, they probably know what they’re doing.
So, now the question is, should you try to test something similar to their ads? Or will your account just get banned because you’re not a high spender?
If you’re feeling ambitious, here’s an article with a compiled list of weirdest Wish products and their ads, ever.
Have fun!
Here’s what you can get if you share us with your marketing friends!
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