FACEBOOK

“Why am I seeing this” gets a whole new meaning

Facebook is putting its money where its mouth is. They said they care about their users’ privacy? They released an update right about that. Though, it could hurt some advertisers.

It’s about users’ information sharing: Facebook will require advertisers to assure that they had the permission to upload users’ phone number or email address for ad targeting.

In other words, while creating a Custom Audience, you must be authorized to use users’ emails or phone numbers.

Who will control this? Users themselves… Right! But how?

So far, Facebook only revealed which brand was using your contact info for targeting, not who actually uploaded it and when.

However, starting February 28th, Facebook’s “Why am I seeing this?” button in the drop-down menu of feed posts will reveal more than just the Page name that paid for the ad. In fact, users will also be able to know:

• Biographical targeting of the ads.
• If the advertisers uploaded the user’s info.
• When the info was uploaded.
• If the info was uploaded by the brand or an agency.
• When the access was shared between partners.

So, when you upload an email list to create a Custom Audience and retarget your list, the leads you re-target will know if you used their information. And how you used it.

With this update, Facebook aims to give its users a better understanding of how advertisers use their data. And what caused a brand to hold their contact info.

The Crew’s Take:

Users will have more and more control over their data exchange and utilization. The game is getting harder. Over time, they will become more aware of their data sharing implications.

And it will be harder to use email lists to build Custom Audiences and Lookalikes, especially if they’ve been gathered in shady ways. So, the next time you buy a list, be careful.

Facebook hasn’t revealed what happens if you upload contact info you’re not authorized to. But, don’t expect them to go soft on these kinds of violations. Does anyone else hear a (ban) hammer?

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PPC

Tracking troubleshoot for all your pixel problems

This post is about the most common cause of every marketers’ headache: Pixel problems.

So, we want to give you some solutions for troubleshooting your tracking for Google and Bing Ads. Though, these solutions even extend to other pixels, like the Facebook one.

Let’s see what the Search Engine Land team has to suggest about it.

To start, you have to make sure of these two things:

• Tag Management: This is the basic suggestion. You can use tools like Google Tag Manager, a free tool.
• What actions trigger your conversions? When troubleshooting, the first thing you have to do is to understand how you’ve configured triggers to fire the conversions.

Now, lets’ jump to the problems you can stumble into, and how to solve them:

Problem: No conversions are being recorded.

Possible reasons:

• The trigger is being locked or has not been set up correctly. Review within Preview mode to see if any of the rules mismatched.
• The trigger isn’t firing due to a tag sequencing issue. A delay in site load can cause an issue if the user closes the page before your tag firing.
• The tracking IDs are incorrect and the data is getting passed on to some other account.
• The conversion is firing but before the conversion data is available in the dataLayer.

Problem: No dynamic data (revenue) is being captured.

Possible reasons:

• The conversion pixel is using the wrong dataLayer variables (i.e. there is a mismatch).
• No dataLayer variable has been created to push dynamic data.
• The confirmation page has been changed, causing the data passing into your dataLayer to break.
• The data object used to push conversion data into the dataLayer is broken or has been removed.

Problem: Too many conversions are being recorded.

Possible reasons:

• Transaction ID is not unique and is unable to be deduplicated if the conversion is triggered multiple times.
• The confirmation pages transaction data isn’t session based, causing duplication when you reload the page in a different session.
• The same conversion pixel exists on both a hardcoded state on the site and within your tag management platform. (Platform should deduplicate if transaction IDs match.)
• There is no form validation in your trigger to limit conversions to only full form submits.
• There is no rule set to limit your conversion pixels to only fire once per page load.

Well, we really hope that this will help you solve your tracking headaches. If you want to go deeper, you can still check the post here to uncover the details.

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So, how do you know your YouTube campaigns are running successfully? Is it just based on the number of conversions they drive?

What if you have 2 separate campaigns running. One is focused on website traffic and another one is focused on brand awareness. And both generated 10 leads at a 25% View Rate. Which one would you consider a success?

Well, we don’t have an objective answer to that question. Sure, the end goal is always about conversions. But that’s not how you should measure your campaign success.

Here are the 3 basic factors to keep in mind while evaluating your campaigns.

Analysing campaign objective (Goals)

You guessed it! Just like Facebook, YouTube offers various campaign goals such as Leads, Brand Awareness & Reach, Website Traffic, and Product & Brand Consideration. Each campaign is optimized for that specific purpose.

Hence, base your KPIs on the objective you set for your video campaigns.

• Want to boost rev for your e-commerce business? Conversion volume and ROAS should be the best KPIs to measure success.
• Want to increase brand awareness? Pay attention to View metrics.

Analysing creatives

Comparing two different video ads is more complicated than comparing two text ads. Focus on these points when measuring the performance of your video ads:

• Video length: A 30s video vs. 2-minute video will perform drastically different, even if they are essentially the same creative.
• Message: New promotion, brand history, customer testimony, etc.
• Sound, voice-overs.
• Text overlays, CTAs.
• Creative tone: comedic, serious, appealing to a specific emotion.
• Actor type (if applicable): Gender, race, age, physical appearance, etc.

Analysing targeting – audience, funnel stage & location

• Prospecting audiences: Topics, In-market and Custom Affinity Audiences.
• Remarketing audiences: Targeting all site visitors or visitors of a specific page? What’s the size of each audience?
• Funnel stage: Top, Middle or Bottom? Make sure you are comparing similar aspects.
• Location targeting: Every industry is different so it’s important to take learnings from each creative and apply them to specific markets. For example, if you are targeting a global audience, the same ad may perform really well in the US, but perform terribly in the UK.

YouTube earned actions

Measure how engaging your video ads are to the audience. Also, a great way to retarget your audience is through Earned Actions. These metrics include:

• Earned Likes
• Earned Playlist Additions
• Earned Shares
• Earned Subscribers
• Earned Views

Out of the hundreds of factors and metrics involved, these are some of the key factors to help you analyse TrueView video performance across campaigns. Don’t just follow some case study that told you how it used TrueView ads to increase ROAS by 200%. And then you test it on a brand awareness campaign and see no results.

Get into the specifics. Create realistic goals for yourself and test out as many videos as you can. The more data points you have, the more answers you will have.

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CONTENT MARKETING

How much is your piece of content worth?

Content is the King! But Context is the Queen and she wears the pants in the house! – Gary Vee

We all know how valuable content creation is for our business. It can be used to drive loads of traffic, qualify them under various funnels and to drive leads and sales on automation while we sleep.

But how do you measure what really matters? The revenue impact of your content? Which gives you confidence in your data. And help you make smarter data-driven decisions?

Here are the steps to achieve that!

Measuring high-level revenue distribution

This is the simplest and most basic way to measure the content you have placed at the top and middle of your funnel. Someone visited your website and downloaded an eBook, watched a webinar, went through the slides of your PPT etc. Using attribution analytics, you can assign revenue credit to those assets/actions.

Now you have the monthly sum of revenue attributed to these content assets. A great KPI to have, as you can track it over time, set goals, and drive the growth of content’s influence on revenue.

How can you optimize and grow your content revenue further?

For this, you need to know what type of content generates the most revenue, which content type is performing better at which stage of the funnel. You will need 2 things to measure this:

• Count of content assets by content type.
• Revenue attribution by content type.

Cool-tip: Looking at overall revenue numbers could mask the fact that some content types are more efficient at influencing revenue than others. It might be just because of higher volumes. So, to avoid any bias in the data, calculate revenue per asset based on the 2 factors above. Simply divide total revenue by the number of assets for each type.

Even though you now have a clear revenue-per-asset, it’s still not clear what actual revenue will be in advance of creating the next round of content assets. So, here’s the next and final step of content optimization for revenue.

Setting expectations for future revenue from content

Rate of success: Understand what portion of each asset type is generating revenue. How to find it? Measure the number of assets getting revenue credit compared to the number of assets that don’t.

Revenue Variance: If some assets generate a lot of revenue, and many other assets have low or zero revenue attribution, then your content return is highly varied. Compare the revenue distributions of different content types. The shape of the distribution will tell you how varied the returns are, and what revenue number content assets are centred around etc.

Time Dependence: The time passed since the publishing date should be taken into account when looking at revenue data. Some assets may simply have accumulated more revenue due to being older.

There are many tools like PowerBI that help you measure your content revenue efficiency. If you’re a revenue-focused marketer, you can find more details here about analyzing your content marketing performance.

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POOLSIDE CHAT

Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.

When your office is a mess, but you can’t miss that call

Maybe you haven’t cleaned in your room since Christmas 2017. Maybe you are in a club, but you told your client that you’re at work, and now they is Skype-calling you.

Maybe you are on the beach chilling, but your Mom thinks you’re studying for your last exam. And suddenly, she wants to hear from you.

Whatever is the reason to hide your background during a call. And keep the person on the other side obscure of where you are… Skype has your back.

They released a feature to blur your background during a video call. Well, maybe it’s not so effective to completely hide your location as we hoped. However, it’s totally worth it when you have a business call and don’t have time to clean up your office.