Brian Meert's Blog, page 124

Google AdWords Bans Cryptocurrency Ads

March 28, 2018
Anna Hubbel
Photo courtesy of Recode.com

This summer, Google AdWords says it’s going to update its financial services policy to no longer allow cryptocurrency ads. The update will also ban ads for binary options and similar products, Contracts for Difference, rolling spot forex, and financial spread betting.

Cryptocurrency is a digital currency protected in transactions by cryptography, the most popular of which is bitcoin. As more and more transactions occur online, cryptocurrency has been the focus of discussions about what the future of currency will look like.

In light of those discussions, Google ads have been used to promote the use of cryptocurrency. This update, however, come June 2018, will restrict the distribution of such ads.

The ban accompanies many other actions taken by Google over the years for the purpose of cracking down on ad fraud, malware, and content scammers. According to a blog post by Scott Spencer, Google’s director of sustainable ads, Google removed 100 “bad ads” per second, 3.2 billion ads total in 2017 alone.

“This means we’re able to block the majority of bad ad experiences, like malvertising and phishing scams, before the scams impact people,” said Spencer.

In addition, 79 million ads trying to direct people to malware-laden sites, 400,000 of those sites were removed, 66 million “trick-to-click” ads were taken down, and 48 million prompting the installation of unwanted software were deleted.

To further crack down on the misuse of its network, Google took action against the source of these unwanted ads. Specifically, 320,000 violating publishers were removed in 2017, and 90,000 websites and 700,000 mobile apps were blacklisted. In addition, Google ads were removed from 8,700 pages in violation of Google’s policies.

In his post, Spencer acknowledges that revenue generated through Google ads is a respectable way to make money as a publisher. “We paid $12.6 billion to publishing partners in our ad network last year,” said Spencer. “But in order to make money from Google ads, you have to play by rules— that means respecting the user experience more than the ads.”

Both the trend of “fake news” and the spike in popularity around online news in general in recent years has scammers taking advantage, says Spencer. For instance, a Google ad may contain a headline that reads “Kim Kardashian to run for President of the United States” just to get people to click on it. However, instead of finding a news story about Kim Kardashian’s presidency speech, people find themselves on a website that sells weight loss pills.

“In 2017, we found that a small number of publishers were responsible for the majority of these violations,” said Spencer. “Of the 11,000 websites we reviewed for potentially violating the misrepresentative content policy, we blocked over 650 of those sites and terminated 90 publishers from our network.”

Google is not alone in its cryptocurrency ban. In January 2018, Facebook introduced a new policy that bans cryptocurrency ads. And earlier this week, a Recode post said Twitter is soon to follow suit, though it hasn’t been publicly announced yet.

Google’s updated policy will apply to all accounts globally.

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Want to Increase Your Facebook CTR? Mention a Kardashian

March 22, 2018
Anna Hubbel

Mentioning a #Kardashian in your posts, especially #kimkardashian & #kyliejenner inceases your CTR. #socialmedia
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There’s no escaping the Kardashian name. You either can’t stand it or can’t get enough of it. In either case, the name is a dominant presence across magazine covers, news headlines, and social media. The world is always keeping up with the Kardashians in one way or another. We especially see them in our Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat Discover.

How does the Kardashian name impact the click-through-rate (CTR) of Facebook posts? To answer this question, Keywee gathered data from more than 500 publishers worldwide, examining Facebook posts from 2017 that incorporated at least one name from the Kardashian family. As a refresher, Kardashian family members include:

Kim Kardashian
Khloe Kardashian
Kourtney Kardashian
Rob Kardashian
Kris Jenner
Caitlyn Jenner
Kylie Jenner
Kendall Jenner

Looking at posts mentioning one of the Kardashians, either in the headline or in the text, Keywee (unsurprisingly) discovered high performance for reach and engagement.

Posts, Impressions, and Clicks

The total number of Kardashian-reference posts in 2017, according to Keywee, only made up 0.42 percent of all posts (which simply means not many publishers were mentioning Kardashians). However, one percent of all impressions (the number of times the post was displayed in feeds) and two percent of all clicks came from these posts. In other words, Kardashian-reference posts reached more users and generated more clicks on the post (engagement). When users see the word “Kardashian,” they click.

Image Courtesy of Keywee
Kardashian CTR

Keywee’s data also found that Kardashian posts generated double the CTR of the overall average CTR in 2017. For publishers, that means half the cost per click (CPC). But want to hear something interesting? The results are different for each individual Kardashian. Yes, some Kardashian family members are more popular than others. To determine the popularity scale, Keywee first analyzed the number of articles and posts per Kardashian.

Image Courtesy of Keywee

Kim and Kylie Kardashian, surprising to no one, were notably more popular than the others, although Kendall is not drastically far behind. Some posts went big by mentioning both Kim and Kylie.

Image Courtesy of Keywee

It’s also worth noting that Kim, Kylie, and Kendall have the most active social media accounts in the family. Keywee says they have the highest post reach in the family as well. Out of all the posts, the one that mentioned Kylie had the highest CTR.

Image Courtesy of Keywee

However, having high CTRs does not make her posts the most reliable if the CTR range is large, like Kylie’s. In contrast, Kim’s CTR range is smaller, making her posts more reliable for CTR. Kourtney too, although having fewer post mentions overall, is considered more reliable because her median CTR was the highest at 17.1 percent.

Image Courtesy of Keywee

If you’re a publisher that generates content where the name Kardashian is relevant to your audience, then super! These findings give you an idea of what your audience may want.

However, if Kardashian isn’t relevant to your business or brand, don’t try to squeeze it into your strategy: you can’t force something to relevance only because it’s relevant for another publisher’s campaign. But if you can find creative ways to incorporate the Kardashian name into your posts, don’t be afraid to do so. As this study showed, almost everyone on Facebook wants to keep up with the Kardashians.

The post Want to Increase Your Facebook CTR? Mention a Kardashian appeared first on AdvertiseMint.

How to Use the Exclusion Marketing Method to Improve Facebook Ad ROI

March 22, 2018
Ben Heath

To avoid wasting money on customers who already converted, use the exclusion marketing method. #facebookads #facebookadverising
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You likely know that you can use several different objectives for your Facebook ad campaigns. By selecting a campaign objective, you’re telling Facebook what you want from that campaign. This is very important because Facebook will optimize your ad campaign for that objective. For example, if you choose the traffic objective, Facebook will try to generate as many link clicks as possible for you by automatically finding people within your audience who are most likely to click on your ad.

Facebook’s targeting feature mentioned above is a fantastic feature. It makes all of your ad campaigns a lot more effective, and it significantly reduces the cost of Facebook advertising. But it does create one big problem: you will eventually target customers who already converted. This post will show you how the exclusion marketing method solves that problem.

The Exclusion Marketing Method

To explain how the exclusion marketing method works, I’ll use a Facebook campaign with the traffic objective as an example.

When you create a traffic campaign, Facebook will serve your ad to people who are most likely to click on it. Facebook determines whether or not someone is likely to click on your ad by seeing if they previously clicked on it. People who already clicked on your ad are obviously interested in what you’re advertising, and they are highly likely to click on your ad again. Facebook’s targeting algorithms factor this in, and it will show your ad to people who clicked on it in the last few days.

Overall, Facebook’s method of serving ads to those who are likely to convert is effective because not everyone will convert into a lead or sale the first time they click on your ad and visit your website. After that first click, a lot of people will take some time to think about what you’re offering, or they may not convert for a whole host of other reasons. You don’t want to miss out on easy leads and sales so continuing to advertise to these people is important.

Hopefully some of the people who clicked on your Facebook ads converted into a lead or sale. However, continuing to advertise to those people is a waste of money. You need to distinguish between those who clicked and converted and those who clicked and did not convert. Once you do that, you can exclude people who already converted from your Facebook ad campaigns. I use the exclusion marketing method to do this, and it’s a simple three-step process.

Step 1: Install the Facebook Pixel

If you already installed the Facebook Pixel on your website, then you can go ahead and skip to step two. Otherwise, install the Facebook Pixel on your website to identify the people who already converted. To install the Facebook Pixel, you need to go to the Pixels tab in your Facebook ad account.

Then you need to click the “set up” button that will open a window that looks like this:

Here you have three options:

Use an integration or Tag Manager
Manually Install the Code Yourself
Email instructions to a Developer

If you are using one of the platforms (BigCommerce, Google Tag Manager, Magento, etc.) listed in the first option, then you can simply select that option and follow the installation instructions. Otherwise, you will either need to install the Facebook Pixel yourself (option two) or hire a developer to install it for you (option three).

If you have a WordPress website, you’ll have to install the pixel yourself. Remember, you can always hire a developer to install the pixel for you. You can find a developer on Upwork or Fiverr.

How to Install the Facebook Pixel on WordPress

To install the Facebook Pixel on a WordPress website, you don’t need to select the second option from the screenshot above. Instead, you need your Facebook Pixel ID, which you can find by selecting option three. That option will open a dialogue box that looks like this:

Copy your pixel ID and then head over to your WordPress website. The easiest way to install the Facebook Pixel on WordPress is to use a plugin. There are several plugin options, but my favourite is Pixel Cat.

Install Pixel Cat and then activate it. That will open a page that looks like this:

Paste your Facebook Pixel ID into the text field, click save, and that’s it. The Facebook Pixel is now installed in your website.

Step 2: Create a Custom Audience

Let’s move to step two, creating a Custom Audience. Now that you installed the Facebook Pixel, you can track the people who visit your website. But for the exclusion marketing method to work, you need to identify the people who became a lead or who made a purchase. That way, you can exclude them from your target audience. To identify these people, you need to create a website Custom Audience.

Within your Facebook ad account, go to the Audiences tab.

Select “Create Audience” and “Custom Audience.”

That will open a dialogue box that looks like this:

There are lots of Custom Audiences options, but for the purpose of this post, you should select “Website Traffic” from the options above. That will open a dialogue box that looks like this:

Here, you’ll need to change a few options. First, change “All website visitors” to “People who visited specific web pages.” Then change “URL contains” to “URL equals” and adjust the time period from 30 days to 180 days.

Now you need to copy the URL of the thank-you page that people are taken to after they convert and paste that into the text field.

If you have a Facebook campaign that’s designed to generate inquiries for your services, for example, exclude the people who already inquired and visited your page. Copy the URL of your page and paste it into the text field. Your Custom Audience window should now look something like this:

Next, name your Custom Audience and select “Create Audience.” Your Custom Audience may take a bit of time to populate.

Step 3: Exclude the Custom Audience from Your Facebook Ad Campaign

Let’s move to the third and final step of the exclusion marketing method, excluding the Custom Audience you created from your Facebook ad campaign. This step is very quick and easy to do once you know how to do it.

Go to your Facebook ad account again and go to Ads Manager. Then select the ad campaign that you would like to exclude your Custom Audience from and navigate to the ad set level. In the audience section, you will see a Custom Audiences text field. Beneath that there is a little exclude button that you should click on:

When you do, another text field will appear. Go ahead and type the name of your new Custom Audience into that second text field. Don’t forget to save the changes you made!

Now the people within that Custom Audience will not see any ads from that ad set. Depending on how many conversions you already generated, that could have a significant impact on your cost per lead and sale. It also guarantees that you won’t waste part of your ad budget on people who have already converted.

Why Not Use the Conversions Campaign Objective?

You might think, “Why don’t I just use the conversions campaign objective? That way, Facebook will optimize my ad campaign for conversions, and I’ll avoid this issue altogether.”

If you don’t generate a lot of conversions, you shouldn’t use the conversions objective. To properly optimize for conversions, Facebook says you need to generate at least 50 conversions per week in each ad set. That’s a lot of conversions, and depending on the product or service you offer, that might not be possible for you. In that case, it’s often better to use the traffic campaign objective.

Let’s Review What You Learned Today

Facebook’s intelligent targeting algorithms make all your Facebook ad campaign more effective. But with some campaign objectives, one big problem arises: people who have already converted won’t automatically be excluded from your campaign—you’ll waste money advertising to those people. The exclusion marketing method solves that problem.

The three steps of the exclusion marketing method are

Install the Facebook Pixel on your website
Create a website Custom Audience
Exclude the Custom Audience from your Facebook ad campaign

That’s right. Getting better results from your Facebook ad campaigns is as easy as one, two, three.

Ben Heath is the Founder & CEO of Lead Guru, which produces high-quality Facebook advertising resources for business owners, marketers, and entrepreneurs.

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Apologizes for Data Breach

March 21, 2018
Anne Felicitas

@facebook ceo #markzuckerberg responds to #cambridgeanalytica data breach.
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Photo courtesy of Entrepreneur.com

When stories emerged that Cambridge Analytica used Facebook’s platform to harvest information from the profiles of 50 million people, the outraged public demanded CEO Mark Zuckerberg to step up and speak.

Today, Zuckerberg posted a statement on his personal Facebook profile, apologizing for the data breach and promising to prevent future misuse of private information.

“We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” Zuckerberg said in his post.

Zuckerberg continues on to describe the data protection measures already in place since 2014 and the steps he will take to ensure users’ data are protected.

First, said Zuckerberg, the company will audit any suspicious apps with access to large amounts of data before the 2014 data reduction. Any app developer who refuses to comply with the audit or who misused identifiable information will be banned, and the affected individuals will be notified.

Second, Facebook will further restrict developers’ data access, first by removing developer access to data with apps that haven’t been used in 3 months, and second, by reducing data developers can access to only name, profile photo, and email address. If developers want to access data about users’ posts and other private information, they must first request approval from Facebook and sign a contract.

Third, Facebook will roll out a feature on top of News Feed that shows everyone all the apps they’ve used. From there, they can revoke those apps’ permissions to their data.

Zuckerberg was forced to address the public today after a few news publications from The New York Times and The Guardian revealed that Cambridge Analytica, the data firm that worked for Trump’s presidential campaign, harvested personal information from 50 million people. Cambridge Analytica obtained the data from Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan. Kogan collected the data from 300,000 Facebook users who downloaded his personality quiz app thisisyourdigitallife.

“This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it,” said Zuckerberg.

For many, Zuckerberg’s written statement was not good enough. Tonight, the CEO will appear in an interview with CNN to answer hard questions.

The post Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Apologizes for Data Breach appeared first on AdvertiseMint.

Trump Election Data Firm Harvested Data from 50 Million Facebook Profiles

March 21, 2018
Anna Hubbel
President Trump with Steven Bannon, photo courtesy of Time.com

Cambridge Analytica, the data firm that worked for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, harvested personal information from 50 million Facebook profiles.

Russian-American academic Aleksandr Kogan gathered private information from Facebook users in mid-2014 for his app thisisyourdigitallife. Kogan told Facebook he was using the data for research. It was later discovered by the social media company that he gave the data to Cambridge Analytica to serve political ads to US voters based on their personality traits and Facebook activity. By distributing his data to a third party, he violated Facebook’s terms.

When Facebook first discovered the leak in 2015, Cambridge Analytica agreed to delete the information it collected and gave every indication that it had. However, the firm did not delete the data, continuing to misuse it.

Facebook publicly responds to the data breach by renaming it a misuse of private information because, according to the social network, “no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked.”

Many of the scientists who collected the data under the employment of Cambridge and parent-firm Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), according to the Times and New York Magazine, were foreigners. They were primarily Canadian and European, with SCL based in London. As such, the case may qualify as a violation of US election law. Cambridge Analytica, however, denies this claim, telling the Times that “personnel in strategic roles were US nationals or green card holders.”

Robert Mercer, a conservative billionaire, is an investor in Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon, President Trump’s former advisor and chairman of Breitbart News Network, is the former vice president.

According to an article by The New York Times, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie said, about the founders of Cambridge Analytica, “Rules don’t matter for them. For them, this is a war, and it’s all fair.” He added, “They want to fight a culture war in America. Cambridge Analytica was supposed to be the arsenal of weapons to fight that culture war.”

Robert Mercer with daughter, Rebekah. Robert Mercer is a part owner of Cambridge Analytica.
The Consequences
Facebook Suspends Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group

Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica and SCL, as well as Wylie and Kogan, from using its platform.

“We are committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people’s information,” Facebook said in its announcement of the suspension. “We will take whatever steps are required to see that this happens. We will take legal action if necessary to hold them responsible and accountable for any unlawful behavior.”

American and British Lawmakers Demand Answers from Facebook

In its response to public criticism and the American and British lawmakers who now demand answers, Facebook says it had every reason to believe that the data had been destroyed back in 2015.

“When we learned of this violation in 2015,” said Facebook, “we removed [Kogan’s] app from Facebook and demanded certifications from Kogan and all parties he had given data to that the information had been destroyed. Cambridge Analytica, Kogan and Wylie all certified to us that they destroyed the data.”

Facebook also says it has improved its security significantly since 2014 when the collection of personal data by the firm first began. In addition to requiring apps requesting personal user information to undergo an app review process, the network says users now have more control over their privacy.

“In 2014, after hearing feedback from the Facebook community, we made an update to ensure that each person decides what information they want to share about themselves, including their friend list. This is just one of the many ways we give people the tools to control their experience. Before you decide to use an app, you can review the permissions the developer is requesting and choose which information to share. You can manage or revoke those permissions at any time.”

Facebook added that the company now regularly conducts both manual and automated checks to ensure policy compliance and to prevent misuse going forward. “These include steps such as random audits of existing apps, along with the regular and proactive monitoring of the fastest growing apps,” said Facebook.

Lawmakers demand that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg step forward and directly answer questions regarding his company’s perceivable inability to prevent misuse of the platform.

Facebook’s Stock Dropped

According to Time, Facebook’s stock suffered the biggest drop since 2015. The drop fluctuated between five and eight percent over the past few days. If headlines continue to place Facebook in a negative light, or if another scandal emerges, the company may see more stocks drop in the future.

Facebook just can’t seem to pull away from the lasting effects of Russian interference during the 2016 US Presidential Election. Ever since the country learned that Russian troll accounts distributed politically divisive ads on Facebook, it’s been one negative headline after another. National investigations have since ensued, and Facebook repeatedly comes out the other side as the common denominator: misused, abused, and manipulated.

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6 Best Practices for Instagram Stories Ads

March 21, 2018
Anna Hubbel

6 Best Practices for @Instagram Stories Ads. #socialmediamarketing #advertising #instagramads
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The best kind of ad is one that tells a compelling story. It captivates its intended audience in a short span of time while also establishing brand or product information that will leave a lasting impression. It’s stunning, informative, and clever.

That’s why Instagram Stories is such a crucial and practical format for advertising. It allows you to accomplish all of these qualities in a way that makes your ad more than just a selling tactic; it makes it an experience.

For those of you who are not familiar with the format, Instagram Stories are full-screen visuals, either static or video, that you can view and share within a lifespan of 24 hours (unless you choose to save the Story). They’re great for brief, mobile experiences that capture spontaneous moments.

Instagram Stories is certainly a very popular form of social networking and consumerism that continues to grow. For one, the format has over 300 million daily active users, and according to recent studies commissioned by Facebook IQ, one in three self-reported daily Instagram users in BR, ID, UK, and the US indicated that ads seen on Instagram Stories positively influenced their interest in a product or brand. Instagram Stories may be one of the most influential forms of advertising in this day and age.

That being said, using Instagram Stories effectively still requires strategy and thoughtful creativity on your part. The aforementioned Facebook studies uncovered valuable insights as to what constitutes an effective Instagram Stories ad, and the findings bear similarities to the findings about mobile feed ads.

Photo Courtesy of TechCrunch
Best Creative Practices for Instagram Stories Ads

To help you make the most effective Instagram Stories ads to benefit your campaign, here are six best practices, compiled using insights Facebook gathered from its studies.

1. Make It Relevant

Facebook found that Instagram Stories ads that perform well, on average, contained content that was relevant. When developing your creative for Stories ads, make sure it’s relevant to your product or brand. If you’re selling shoes, for example, using pretty visuals of sunsets or tasty meals are not helping the relevance of your ad. You want to include visuals of shoes, of course!

2. Keep It Short

Users don’t want to spend a lot of time viewing a Story that’s trying to sell them something. Their attention spans are going to be shorter when viewing your ad, meaning you have to make that time frame count. That means establishing branding and showing products early on in the Story. Facebook’s studies found that Stories ads that incorporated these two time-sensitive elements performed better than those that didn’t.

3. Use Fast Paced Videos

For ads containing more than one scene or clip, edits to make the video faced paced make better ads. Facebook found that top-performing Stories ads, on average, included brief clips with quick scenes.

4. Include Product Demos

You can make users feel confident in your product by showing it in action. Although only half of the ads Facebook analyzed included product demos, Stories that did had better performance results. If you’re trying to decide whether or not a product demo will benefit your campaign, the answer is a resounding yes.

5. Optimize for Mobile

In addition to formatting ads specifically for Instagram Stories, you want to keep a mobile-sensitive perspective when putting together the creative. For instance, Facebook found that ads taking too long to communicate key messages performed poorly. Since Instagram Stories is a mobile format, users expect to get to the point quicker. Optimizing for mobile means taking the lifestyle of mobile users into consideration.

6. Experiment

You never know what small tweak could make the difference between a mediocre ad and a successful campaign. Facebook recommends experimenting with different elements, such as filters, emojis, and stickers, as well as video lengths. You may also want to play with different colors, text sizes, and phrasing. Just keep testing different design elements, and when you find something that generates great results, stick to it.

“Stories open a new world to marketers because they come with a new set of creative tools,” Kay Hsu, Global Instagram Lead, Creative Shop, says in a Facebook IQ post. “My advice? Design for how people consume and don’t be afraid to experiment.”

Now that you know how to tackle the Instagram Stories advertising game, you can get to what you do best: telling your story. You do the work, and your audience will listen.

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New Facebook Ad Feature Helps Travel Brands Reach Prospective Travelers

March 20, 2018
Anna Hubbel

New @facebook ad feature helps #travel brands reach prospective travelers. #digitaladvertising #socialmediamarketing #facebookads
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Wouldn’t it be great if Facebook ads could convince prospective travelers to travel, to go on an adventure? Sometimes these prospective travelers need a little nudge to convince them to take the leap and book that flight or hotel room. In some cases, they simply need inspiration on where to go for their adventure.

According to Facebook, users often turn to Facebook and Instagram for travel ideas and inspiration, especially millennials, with 68 percent getting ideas for their most recent trip from Facebook and 60 percent from Instagram. To help advertisers reach these individuals, earlier this month Facebook introduced Trip Consideration, a new feature for Dynamic Ads. Trip Consideration allows advertisers to showcase deals and popular destinations to give users that extra push to book.

Currently, Trip Consideration is available to reach users across Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network. It’s also accessible through Adphorus, Koddi, MakeMeReach, Smartly.io, and StitcherAds, all of which are Facebook marketing partners. Facebook says it will be extending the feature as an objective for building brand later this year.

What Is Trip Consideration?

Unlike Dynamic Ads for Travel, which showcases relevant ads to users already planning to travel, Trip Consideration helps advertisers reach users who are interested in traveling, but who have yet to make plans. It functions as a targeting feature, delivering travel-inspired ads to the right users at the right time.

For example, a bride-to-be may indicate interest in honeymoon spots through browsing activity across various travel-related pages. However, her activity also indicates that she has yet to make a decision on a specific destination. Using Trip Consideration, advertisers can push the bride-to-be to book a flight or a hotel room by showing her ads for flights or hotel promotions to specific honeymoon destinations. Facebook created Trip Consideration to help advertisers reach prospective, indecisive travelers and help them plan their dream adventure.

For advertisers, there are specific benefits to enjoy with the Trip Consideration feature. First, it’s simple to set up. Advertisers don’t need to put together a catalog, as they do with Dynamic Ads for Travel. They just need a static creative. Second, advertisers have creative flexibility: they can choose which creative they want to use. Third, the feature is optimized for intent, meaning ad content is pushed to reach users who have already expressed interest in traveling. Finally, Trip Consideration allows advertisers to enhance their existing audience by combining it with other audience targeting to further refine reach.

According to Facebook, advertisers are finding Trip Consideration to be very useful in their campaigns already.

“Facebook is one of our biggest sources of traffic and is crucial to scaling our efforts without diminishing our effectiveness,” says Nick Schaulsohn, director of marketing at EF Ultimate Break, in a Facebook blog post. “We added trip consideration into our acquisition strategy and used it to drive people with travel intent into our funnel while continuing to leverage Dynamic Ads to drive users to book. The powerful combination of these solutions improved our conversion rate by 49 percent.”

“Our True York City campaign was the first time we tested trip consideration,” says Jason Berman, managing director of brand marketing at NYC & Company, in the same post. “We were extremely impressed with how easy it was to use, but even more so with the results it drove. This new solution enabled us to deliver 61 percent more video views and 58 percent more link clicks, all at a 29 percent more efficient CPC. This has been our best performing strategy to date on Facebook, and we look forward to using trip consideration for future campaigns.”

How to Set Up Trip Consideration for Dynamic Product Ads

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to set up Trip Consideration for Dynamic Product Ads.

Step 1: Select the conversions objective

Step 2: Select your audience

Step 3: Choose your placements

There are two placement options: automatic or manual (“Edit”). With automatic, Facebook chooses the placement. With manual, advertisers can choose which placement they want to use.

Step 4: Toggle the option “Prioritize delivery to people who plan to travel”

When choosing your budget and schedule, optimize for conversions then toggle the option “Prioritize delivery to people who plan to travel.”

Step 5: Add your identity, format, and links

When choosing media, advertisers should use creatives that showcase top travel deals, popular destinations or inspirational destination, or brand-building creative. After you’re done, submit your ad for review.

 

Trip Consideration for Dynamic Product Ads Best Practices

According to Facebook, to get the most out of the Trip Consideration feature, advertisers should keep in mind the following best practices.

Target Audience-Set a broad audience because a narrow audience may not deliver the best results. Advertisers should, instead, set their audience size to seven million or more. As a simple rule of thumb, bigger is better in this case.

Optimization-Optimize for search, initiate checkout, or purchase events under the website conversion objective.

Bidding-Begin with autobid to maximize delivery then test other specific bid targets after three days of good performance on the autobid.

Campaign Period-To reach new users expressing intent for travel, set your Trip Consideration campaign to an always-on basis. That way, every time a new user begins expressing interest in travel, advertisers can ensure their ads are delivered to that user from the get-go.

Measuring Success-Measure Trip Consideration success by evaluating the impact on the optimized event. If search events are the optimized event, for example, advertisers should use cost per search and search volume to measure success.

Creative-Advertisers have the opportunity to test various creative formats with the Trip Consideration feature. The options include static image, carousel, single video, or collection. Giving users a taste of what they can experience, photos of beaches, mountain views, or European cities, help nudge them to make that booking.

With Trip Consideration, advertisers can become part of the adventure that a prospective traveler has always dreamed of. Other marketers have already experienced success with the new feature, as it helps refine reach to deliver ads to those individuals as soon as their social media activity reflects an interest in travel.

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Facebook’s Changes to News Feed Algorithm Increase Ad Costs

March 18, 2018
Anna Hubbel

Facebook ad costs are increasing, according to @AdStage , and the culprit is Facebook iteself. #socialmedia #facebookads #digitaladvertising
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Photo courtesy of Entrepreneur.com

Digital advertisers everywhere felt a lump in their throats when Facebook announced the changes to its News Feed algorithm two months ago, the change that prioritizes posts by family and friends over those by brands and publishers, that makes organic reach on Facebook just that much harder.

As CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted, users are spending less time on Facebook as a result of the change. Naturally, less time spent scrolling News Feed means fewer users seeing ads. And consequently, fewer ad impressions means ad costs are going to spike. According to Recode, that’s exactly what’s happening.

Data Shows Decline in Impressions, Spike in Costs

Although it’s still very early on in 2018, data collected by Ad Stage, an official marketing partner of Facebook, found that ad impressions in News Feed were down year over year in January. Although the data also indicates a slight increase in February, the rate was still smaller compared to that of the past months.

As it normally would in the economy of digital advertising, ad costs are going up in response to the decrease in ad impressions. Ad Stage’s data indicates that the cost of a thousand ad impressions (CPMs) was up 122 percent year over year in January and 77 percent in February. Looking back at the last 14 months, Recode says these CPM numbers reflect the two highest year-over-year ad cost jumps. There are a couple of flaws to this data that Facebook is no doubt already considering:

Will advertiser demand remain consistent?
Because it’s still very early, is this data an accurate result of the algorithm change?

Will Advertiser Demand Remain Consistent?

Advertisers have historically been willing to pay top dollar for Facebook ads. However, as new challenges such as the new News Feed algorithm and increased ad restrictions continue to present themselves, Facebook advertising may eventually hit a little bump in the road.

Back in September 2017, for instance, Facebook announced it was removing self-reported targeting in response to discriminatory purposes it was being used for by some advertisers. In January, Facebook announced it was reducing the amount of news sources in News Feed.

Additionally, research is showing that younger users are migrating from Facebook to Snapchat. Advertisers targeting that demographic may not be far behind.

Although there hasn’t been any sign as of yet that advertisers will lose interest in advertising on Facebook as a result of changes like these, it isn’t a possibility that should be disregarded entirely.

Is This Data Really an Accurate Result of the Algorithm Change?

Recode points out that the data presented by Ad Stage only shows trends from over the past two months. It could be that the decline in ad impressions and the spike in ad costs are merely part of an existing trend outside of the influence of the algorithm change, which came into play merely two months ago. It may be a bit longer to determine the actual direct effects the change is having on impressions and cost.

However, as previously mentioned, the demand for Facebook ads does not show signs of a drastic drop anytime soon. In fact, according to Facebook’s fourth quarter earnings report, ad revenue reached $12.97 billion by the end of 2017.

It will be interesting to see what new Facebook advertising patterns emerge as we continue on into 2018.

The post Facebook’s Changes to News Feed Algorithm Increase Ad Costs appeared first on AdvertiseMint.

What Is Amazon Advertising?

March 17, 2018
Jennifer Storch

What is Amazon advertising? How do you advertise on Amazon? Your questions answered here. #amazonadvertising #digitalmarketing #ecommerce
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Amazon.com, known most commonly as, simply, Amazon, routinely sets unprecedented heights for the e-commerce industry. An estimated 54 percent of online shoppers go directly to Amazon to purchase products. Amazon began as a humble online bookstore. Today, it’s the single largest e-commerce website in the world, a veritable source of potential customers for advertisers. How can you get a piece of Amazon’s large audience? Two words: Amazon advertising.

Amazon Advertising in a Nutshell

Although Amazon is mainly an e-commerce site where merchants sell, Amazon also allows advertisers to serve ads to its website. The ads appear within product searches, as banner ads, or as suggested products.

When advertising on Amazon, you only pay for your ad after a customer clicks on your product. Views are free. Once shoppers click to see more, you’re officially charged for your ads. This system enables thousands of people to see your product while you only pay for those who directly express an interest. How much you pay, however, is up to you. Amazon ads are auction-based, which means you decide the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for each click. The more you’re willing to pay, the more likely Amazon will display your ads.

What Are the Benefits of Amazon Advertising?

As an advertising platform, Amazon delivers the holy grail of marketing: massive traffic. Business owners who advertise on Amazon enjoy direct access to an immense number of people. If you’re on Amazon, your product displays for a lot of eyes to see. This online window shopping lead to clicks, and these clicks lead to sales.

Not only does Amazon deliver massive traffic to your websites and views to your products, but it also delivers customers who are more likely to convert. Customers on Amazon have high purchase intent: they visit Amazon with a product in mind that they want to buy. Because they have high purchase intent, because they are already at the bottom of the marketing funnel, it is easier to convince them to buy. Here are the other benefits of Amazon advertising.

You can sell more during the holiday season: Customers buy billions of items on Amazon during the holiday season.

You have access to millions of customers: 144 million customers find, discover, and purchase new products across all devices on Amazon.

How Does Amazon Advertising Work?

Everything from gardening tools to groceries, clothes to computers, even cars and houses are available for sale on Amazon. What does this mean for your ads? Your ads can appear in a large variety of placements among these products, including the context of complementary or competitive products and a buyer’s purchasing history.

When buyers search for a product, your product can appear alongside your competitor’s, enticing them to purchase your product instead. This marketing strategy instantaneously reminds customers of other options on the table. If shoppers search for a product similar to yours, your ad appears to remind them that your product might complement their purchase. For example, Joe Smith shops for a digital camera, and your SD card displays on his screen automatically.

This complementary product matching can give customers more options by introducing your product. Cross-selling is typically the work of a sales rep in a brick-and-mortar store. On Amazon, your ads automatically appear to shoppers when relevant. The customers simply decide if they want to buy.

Types of Amazon Ads

Amazon offers a variety of ads to fit your marketing strategy. Here are a few things to keep in mind about Amazon ads.

All advertisement packages are cost per click and based on an auction model.
You choose the highest price you’re willing to pay for each click.
The higher the price, the more likely your ad will appear.

Sponsored Products: These ads appear around or within search results and on product detail pages. Because these ads are keyword targeted, you can choose the keywords yourself or let Amazon automatically target your ad with suggested search terms.

Headline Search Ads: These ads also appear within search results, an area of high visibility, perfect for promoting brand awareness.With this type of ad, you can create a custom headline and logo and target keywords. When customers click on your ad copy, the ad will direct them to a customized page that showcases a collection of your products.

Product Display Ads: These ads appear in merchandising emails and on product detail pages towards the end of the shopping experience when the customers review their order. With this type of ad, you can target customers based on their interest in certain products and categories. You can choose which products these ads will appear alongside of, including your own products for up- or cross-selling and a competitor’s products to offer an alternative.

The algorithms that determine ad placement rely on more than just the customers’ current shopping experience. Amazon tracks buyers’ history to offer additional products they may be interested in. The customers receive options based on specific previous preferences.

This individualized advertising experience sets Amazon apart from other social media advertising platforms. Amazon, as the middleman, expertly arranges your products in front of the people are oh-so-willing to buy.

What Do You Need to Advertise on Amazon?

To advertise on Amazon, you first need to set up a seller or vendor account. You can sell as a professional or as an individual, depending on the number of items you plan to sell each month. Your products will appear on countless desktops, phones, and tablets all around the world. Here are the ways you can sell on Amazon.

If you’re a novelist or an app creator, Amazon can strategically release your brand new product into the digital universe. Check out Amazon Marketing Services and Web Services.
Amazon Advantage is a consignment program. Amazon will operate all of your product sales for a 55-percent fee. You can source your product to Amazon, and it does all the rest. Amazon will order your product from you and then pay you when it’s shipped to Amazon customers.
Amazon Stores offers you a complete on-site Amazon web page to highlight your products and brand. You design the page, tailor-made to your own unique style and seamlessly integrated with the entire Amazon platform.
The Amazon Associate Program is a bit of the reverse. You advertise Amazon products on your separate business website. When your viewers click on the Amazon products, you receive payment for the clicks. You’re generating traffic from your website for Amazon products.

No matter how big your business gets, with Amazon, you’ll always have the manpower to keep growing. You ship your products to an Amazon warehouse (no need for your own storage space), and they’ll distribute it for you. Amazon also takes care of your customer service in case of shipping errors or returns.

What if you don’t sell products that fit into Amazon’s categories? No problem. Off-platform advertising is available for products and services that aren’t sold on Amazon. Amazon’s audience will still see your ads, and clicks will be immediately directed to your off-platform business website. With off-platform advertising, your ads will pop up in the right places and grow your business with the benefits of Amazon’s marketing expertise.

Proven Success: The Burt’s Bees Story

Burt’s Bees is a prime example of the transformative power of Amazon advertising. As an established brand, Burt’s Bees sought to enhance its customer base by improving its online marketability.

It was instrumental that Burt’s Bees marketed directly to customers who had an existing interest in their niche product line. By using Amazon’s advanced marketing techniques, Burt’s Bees discovered that 68 percent of their current e-store customer base was shopping on Amazon.

By identifying the shopping habits of current customers, Burt’s Bees extrapolated those habits to target other Amazon shoppers with similar purchasing histories. When Burt’s Bees began marketing to Amazon shoppers based on the preferences of their current customers, they quadrupled their ROI.

The advanced capabilities of Amazon leads to constant research and development in the marketing industry. When advertising with Amazon, you know you’re in good hands (and the biggest according to their market share of e-commerce).

Regardless of the size and structure of your business, you can propel your advertising strategy by aligning with the irrefutable progress of Amazon. As Amazon continues to revolutionize the retail industry, your business can flourish in the fast-paced development of new marketing techniques.

In the new age of advertising, stay in the spotlight with Amazon advertising.

Jennifer Storch is a freelance writer and editor-in-chief of Free Lances, Ltd.

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How to Get Your Posts at the Top of Instagram’s Feed

March 15, 2018
Anna Hubbel

Learn how to beat #instagram 's algorithm. #socialmedia #contentmarketing #hacks
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You post and post on Instagram, hoping that the frequency of your posts will increase the chances of your content appearing in your followers’ feeds. You schedule posts to publish often, and you’re feeling on top of your game.

I have some sad news for you: you can post as often as you like and still not appear in your followers’ feeds if you’re not posting the right type of content. Why? Because Instagram’s new algorithm no longer works chronologically. Relevance is the new driving factor.

How Does Instagram’s Algorithm Work?

Instagram’s new algorithm displays content in feeds that is relevant and meaningful to the individual user. This wasn’t always the case, however. Previously, before 2016, Instagram’s algorithm ordered posts chronologically in feeds; it did not prioritize content based on relevance. With the old algorithm, the frequency of your posts did matter because the algorithm functioned as a first come, first served system.

Instagram found a flaw in this chronological system, however: users were missing the posts that they cared about because incoming, chronological posts were pushing them lower and lower in feeds. To solve this issue, Instagram altered its algorithm to prioritize posts that are considered more relevant and meaningful to each individual user based on previous activity and engagement with certain types of content. For example, if you have a history of liking posts by your mom, Instagram will show content published by your mom in your feed over posts by a distant friend with whom you rarely interact, even if that distant friend published a post prior to the time your mom published hers.

But what specific information does Instagram’s new algorithm consider when prioritizing content in users’ feeds? It all comes down to these four factors:

Number of Engagement on Posts (likes, shares, and comments)
Relationship with the Instagram User
Time of Post
Profile Searches

By understanding these four factors, you are well on your way to moving up on Instagram’s feed.

Number of Engagement on Posts (Likes, Shares, and Comments)

If quality pushes your content up in feeds, you may think that you simply need to polish your content. Well, it’s a little more complex than that. Engagement plays a big role in what Instagram’s algorithm considers relevant for users.

Say you post a photo. Instagram will first show it to a small percentage of your followers. Then Instagram looks at specific engagement activity, such as likes, shares, and comments, that your photo receives, as well as how quickly people engaged with it. Next, Instagram compares your photo’s engagement performance with that of posts you published previously at similar days and times. For example, it will look at a photo you shared at 5 p.m. on Saturday and compare its engagement performance with a previous photo you also shared at 5 p.m. on a Saturday.

The more engagement your photo has, the higher it will appear in the feeds, the more exposure it gets, and the longer it will stay on the top of users’ feeds. In contrast, if your photo receives little to no engagement, it will drop to the bottom of feeds, if it’s even shown at all.

Posts with high engagement appear higher in feeds.
Relationship with the Instagram User

Instagram places such importance on engagement, including shares, because it strongly indicates the relationship between you and your followers. Instagram’s new algorithm shows users posts by those they care about, those with whom they often interact with. The more a follower engages with your content, the stronger Instagram perceives the relationship between the two of you. If you want to appear higher in users’ feeds, you want to focus on establishing relationships with your followers.

Time of Post

Yes, the new algorithm is no longer chronological, but that’s not to say it’s going to display weeks-old posts at the top of feeds simply because it identifies a strong relationship between you and a follower. The new algorithm still considers the time the content was posted, but it only does so for users with strong relationships and high engagement.

Once a relationship is established, you want to focus on when you post, concentrating on times when your followers are online. Just as you would in any interpersonal relationship, you want to give users the time of day needed to foster the relationship.

Profile Searches

When a follower searches for your profile, Instagram sees that action as an interest in your account because the follower is intentionally seeking posts from you. Instagram then concludes that your content is relevant to that follower and will consider displaying your posts higher up in that follower’s feed.

Users can search for profiles using Instagram’s search engine
How to Get Your Posts at the Top of Instagram’s Feed

Now that you know how Instagram’s algorithm works, it’s time to use the information to push your posts higher in your followers’ feed. Here’s a breakdown of how to do that.

Gain more engagement: Post photos relevant to your followers and photos that are visually appealing. You want your photos to catch followers’ attention and cause them to pause mid scroll. To do this, you want an image that looks great and bears some meaning to your followers. For example, if your account is dedicated to cats, you may want to post photos and videos of cats.

Instagrammers should post content relevant to their accounts. Cats of Instagram does this well.

Learn from the best: If you are struggling to create new posts that generate high engagement, look back at previous posts that performed well. Replicate the most popular posts, using Instagram Insights to identify them.

Post when your followers are online: Post at times when the majority of your most engaging followers are online. If you do not know when that is, try Squarelovin, which can help identify peak times of your followers’ activity.

Post on Instagram Stories: Users enjoy viewing spontaneous and personable Stories, and Instagram takes engagement on Stories into consideration when determining relevant relationships.

Humanize your brand: Post content that feels less like an advertisement and more like an opportunity to socialize and connect. Using the cat account example again, instead of creating a post that says “Buy new cat toys today,” you would likely get a better response saying “Nala is enjoying her cat toy,” with a photo of a gray tabby cat playing with her toy.

With all this in mind, maybe now posting Instagram content for your business or brand will feel less like you’re fighting a losing battle. Maybe now you will coast along with high engagement, stronger relationships, and an overall meaningful connection with your audience.

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