How it started and how it’s going
Secure some marketing dollars and buckle up, because Twitter’s just announced an updated ad type that’ll be pretty exciting for some of you: New and improved Carousel ads.
Here’s what Twitter said in their blog post yesterday:
- You can measure the performance of individual Carousel cards. Ready to obsessively over-optimize your carousels, image-by-image? That’s something you’ll be able to do with Twitter’s new Carousels, as you’ll be able to see the performance of individual cards.
- Twitter has some promising data. In their beta testing, Twitter found that Carousel ads increased clickthrough by 15% to websites and boosted app installs by 24% when compared to single-asset formats.
- This isn’t the end of the road. Twitter’s frequently making updates and changes to their ads platform. In the announcement, they mentioned that they’re currently working on stronger bidding and optimization options, among other things.
The Crew’s take: Twitter flies under the radar as an ads platform. But, for certain types of businesses, it can be a great way to drive traffic and sales – try out their new Carousel feature and see if you can get a lift in conversions!
Are Smart Shopping Campaigns worth it?
If you thought political arguments on Twitter were bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet until you stumble across the debates that go on between marketers.
In truth, it’s not that bad – but there are often some productive discussions that arise out of marketers’ disagreements on how to sell stuff. One of those exact situations happened this week, when there was a debate about Smart Shopping Campaigns (SSC) versus standard campaigns.
Plenty of marketers chipped in, but Kirk Williams slammed down the gavel with his assessment. Here were his main points:
- There’s no true way to A/B test SSC and Standard campaigns. If you’re running a couple different ads for the same product, Google’s always going to prioritize the SSC campaign, meaning there’s no great way to A/B test the process. You’ll have to test it with different products or run non-sequential tests.
- It’s apples and oranges. Kirk notes that SSC campaigns will mostly target GDN and YouTube, whereas Standard campaigns mostly show up in the SERPs.
- One or the other isn’t inherently better. It all depends on your goals, and the SSC-versus-Standard dilemma isn’t one that Kirk’s too excited about. Instead, evaluate your brand’s goals and figure out which route is the smartest to take.
Kirk’s advice wasn’t the only wisdom in the thread, so go check out the full thing here to see a little bit of drama and a great discussion.
SPONSORED BY ADCASH
What affiliate marketers should know about 2021 trends
November 19th.
3 presentations.
20 minutes for each session.
3 affiliate marketing geeks sharing their thoughts on how to make the most of affiliate marketing in 2021.
It’s the Adconf virtual event, the affiliate marketing online event organized by Adcash.
One hour and a half of pure content. No fluff. Not trying to adapt a real-life conference to a virtual one. Online-first!
What about the content and the speakers? Here’s the lineup:
- Luke Kling (Super affiliate and founder of affLIFT): “How to Go From Red to Green with Basic Affiliate Marketing Fundamentals”
- Maxime Chevallon (Chief Operating Officer at Adcash): “Recap on a Roller Coaster Year: 2020’s Trends, and Main Takeaways for 2021”
- Dasha Nazarova (Head of marketing communication at RedTrack): “Holiday Season Optimization Rush To Reap The Benefits in 2021”
- Afterwards, they’ll have a Q&A session where you can ask all your questions, curiosities, or clarify anything about the sessions and event!
In addition to these talks, Adcash will be giving away awesome prizes throughout the conference.
It’s free to attend, but spots are limited.
Do bad quality ads beat good quality ads?
The Facebook Ads platform has been very tricky lately.
And, sometimes the headaches start to outweigh the conversions…
However, if we use a birds-eye view, Facebook still has the juiciest traffic out there. If you’re looking for some tips, these pointers from the Ads Alchemist can be very helpful:
- Stop thinking you know what’s going to happen: If you’re struggling to decide which creative to pick between two of them, just run a test and find it out.
- Let Facebook be free: This means don’t go with narrow targeting and small audiences. The algorithm is smarter than you at finding the right people.
- Retargeting is a must and also make sure that your retargeting creatives are different from the prospecting ads.
- When you create Lookalike Audiences, do not stop at 1% Purchases. There are so many percentage ranges and events to test that can bring in a lot of customers.
- Optimization is key and when you look at results, start at the ad level. It’s important to see the data for single ads before turning off an entire ad set.
- Be cold-blooded: Take decisions based on data, not emotions or what you think might happen.
- A high quality creative can get you really high costs. This obviously changes from account to account. But often, the best performing creatives are the lower quality ones that look organic.
Running Facebook Ads isn’t the same thing as two years ago, or even last year for that matter. But even though you’re just starting out, you can still surf the wave if you’re smart and learn from legit sources (like Stacked Marketer, right?).
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
TWITTER: The new Stories-style feature from Twitter, called Fleets, is rolling out in Japan. Spoiler alert, the announcement tweet’s in Japanese, so you’ll have to pull out Google Translate to read the full thing.
FACEBOOK: Andrew Foxwell is reporting that Facebook’s live chat hours for advertisers are going to be expanded as we head into shopping season. We can only hope!
ADVERTISING: A new report from eMarketer shows that despite the pandemic, search advertising is growing. Check out the full report for more details!
E-COMMERCE: $115B! That’s how much Alibaba along with JD.com recorded in sales on Singles Day. Warm yourself up, because this shopping season looks fabulous!
BRAIN TEASER
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Apple’s newest computers can run iOS games
Yes, they can run normal iOS apps, too (but we’re more interested in the games).
Apple held their “One More Thing” special event earlier this week, and it went about as expected. The company announced the release of Big Sur, the latest MacOS software, and they also announced a couple new MacBooks.
The new MacBooks look pretty similar to the older ones, but they’ve got a new chip – called the M1. Amongst other things (like additional speed and battery life), the M1 chip allows MacBooks to run iOS apps, which will be downloadable from the Mac App Store.
If nothing else, this finally means it won’t be such a pain to type in Among Us…