Snapchat Updates to Stories and Discover Will Massively Effect Advertisers

On October 13, 2016October 14, 2016 By redzmudzienIn SnapchatLeave a comment

Snapchat just made some huge changes that users may not initially notice, but advertisers definitely will. The Discover tiles have been moved down from their previous perch at the top of the Stories screen to somewhere much lower down the feed. Discover is where most big name advertisers buttered their bread with everything from ESPN and NFL updates, MTV hyping new artists or TMZ talking about the latest Kardashians news.

They were attractive and they were prominent. I found myself perusing Discover much more when it moved over to the tiles within Stories rather than when it was on its own tab originally. Now with the tiles moved much further down the screen it has many advertisers worried.

Oh well, these things happen. Remember how infuriated brands were when Facebook significantly pared down organic reach? Well then Promoted Posts came out and they became the biggest arbitrage advertising had seen in a long time. Then those got paired down and out came the massively underpriced Facebook Video and so on and so on.

Fear not though, Snapchat isn’t going to just abandon one of its best ad products without any kind of new features or improvements. And it seems like that may be coming as a result of Snapchat’s other update – Snapchat Playlist. Previously users could go to their Stories and just go through all their friends automatically, as soon as one story ended, Snapchat would automatically go to the next one. Now with Playlist, Snapchat is having users select which stories they want to see, rather than play them all at once. Does this make for a better user experience so you aren’t watching every person’s story, many of which you don’t care about? Maybe. But it also provides potential opportunities for advertising in between these selected stories. Now without the automatic jump to the next story, Snapchat has created an avenue to sell ad space like a commercial in between stories.

Expect more tweaks to the UI and UX as Evan Spiegel and team continue to grow the Snapchat ad platform and its potential. Especially now with competitors like Instagram Stories gunning for them.

Episode 001 of #RedZSeries

On October 4, 2016October 19, 2016 By redzmudzienIn Facebook, Google, Marketing, SnapchatLeave a comment

#RedZSeries

On September 29, 2016 By redzmudzienIn Facebook, Google, MarketingLeave a comment

Automate More, Worry Less with Automated Rules on Facebook

On September 26, 2016 By redzmudzienIn FacebookLeave a comment

If you’re like me and don’t want to double check your Facebook ad campaigns every day to monitor certain thresholds you’ve set, such as a target Cost per Acquisition, then you will be psyched to learn about Facebook’s latest feature: Automated Rules. Automated Rules allow you to automate your campaigns to turn off when they hit certain thresholds or meet certain conditions, as well as notify you.

For example, if you want to keep your Cost per Click under $1, but don’t want to check it every single day to monitor, using Automated Rules you can set your ad to turn off if the CPC goes over $1 as well as send you a notification about it.

Another example that could be especially useful for Remarketing campaigns revolves around Frequency. Remarketing campaigns are obviously great for a more targeted and interested user, but with that comes a smaller audience size. With this smaller audience, it is much easier to see Frequency numbers get out of hand and have users being served the same ads over and over again, which will kill your Relevance Score. So you can now set your target threshold using Automated Rules and have your ad shut off as well as alert you if the Frequency goes higher than you’d like it.

This could save marketers a ton of time if you manage a lot of ads and ad campaigns for larger clients, but don’t want to spend time double checking certain key metrics for every ad every day.

Facebook is rolling this feature out now as they do with all new updates, but I only first saw it last week. So if you haven’t seen it yet, keep your eyes peeled.

Snapchat Just Made it Even Easier to Create Custom Geofilters

On September 15, 2016 By redzmudzienIn SnapchatLeave a comment

Snapchat has just made it even easier for businesses to create their own custom Geofilters. Snapchat Geofilters are one of the best ways to quickly and easily get brand awareness. Of course just even making them for fun (or as a product to sell) works too. I recently made a Geofilter for a wedding, geofenced it to the block that the hotel was on and Bam, all my snaps had that extra flair. Plus these are super inexpensive if you are only targeting small areas, but they can get a bit pricey when targeting large parts of a city. So choose wisely as these may be better for specific events rather than an ongoing campaign based on your budget. The big update is that Snapchat now offers tools on the platform itself to create your own Geofilter without any design knowledge needed. So no more Photoshop skills necessary!

Go to Snapchat.com and click on the Snapchat Geofilter link at the top of the screen.

Click On Demand to create and schedule a Geofilter for a specific time and location.

Once you’re on the On-Demand Geofilter page click Create Now.

Review the guidelines Snapchat has laid out for best practices

Click Create Online (previously you would have had to build on one your own or use a generic template).

Welcome to the Snapchat tools section, now experiment and create something!

How to Uncover (Direct/None) Referral Traffic in Google Analytics

On September 9, 2016September 9, 2016 By redzmudzienIn GoogleLeave a comment

Have you noticed in your client’s Google Analytics that certain sources are not being identified clearly in Source traffic? One of the best ways to alleviate this issue is to use URL Parameters modifiers to essentially call out where the traffic is coming from. This helps GA tag the traffic coming in and sorting it into its own specific source, which allows you to identify and confirm the referral source.

This is an issue I know most marketers are aware of as (Direct/None) traffic can be a number of things. It’s not very likely that every one of your customers is typing in the long, specific URL every single time though. What’s more likely is that Google doesn’t know exactly how to sort the traffic or identify where it’s coming from.

I recently identified this issue for a website who’s Facebook tracking wasn’t firing and Analytics wasn’t reporting much referral traffic coming from Facebook, despite plenty of paid ad clicks. So looking through GA you’re likely to notice a large portion of traffic from Direct/None and while it’s unlikely to ever uncover 100% of the unknown traffic, you can tag URL’s from traffic that you know you’re driving, to help close the loop.

So how do you accomplish this? Below are a few quick steps to use URL Parameters to tag your traffic for GA to more easily sort. Note, this specific example was for tagging Facebook referral traffic.

1.) Identify that your ad traffic definitely isn’t being reported accurately in Google Analytics.

2.) Pull the URL of wherever you are driving traffic (i.e. example.com/product)

3.) In the case of Facebook, you’ll add the following URL Parameter at the end of the url:

?source=facebook (i.e. example.com/product?source=facebook)

4.) Copy and paste that URL into your browser to make sure it doesn’t cause any errors or unexpected reroutes.

5.) After sufficient clicks on your ad using this URL Parameter, go into your Google Analytics > Behavior > Content > All Pages. This will allow you to see what pages all of your users are landing on.

6.) Using the URL Parameter you set up earlier you can identify that specific landing page (example.com/product?source=facebook), which you’ve tagged as coming from a specific source. In this case it’s a Facebook ad, so GA will sort out that traffic and label it with the new URL so you can easily identify this traffic is in fact coming from your Facebook ad — breaking it out of the ambiguous Direct distinction.

You’ve now uncovered your referral traffic out of (Direct/None) in Google Analytics!

How to Create a Facebook Sales Funnel for Your Website

On August 24, 2016 By redzmudzienIn Facebook1 Comment

With the insane level of targeting and reporting that advertisers can access on Facebook, it would be shortsighted to not take advantage of everything available. I’m going to give a quick breakdown of an easy and effective way to create a Sales Funnel from your Facebook ad campaigns, so you can track how users are interacting with your site, what’s drawing them in and what’s driving them to convert.

We’re going to utilize the Facebook pixel and the various Standard Events in the code to measure people coming through the funnel all the way to shopping cart abandonment and ultimately a purchase.

So the 10 Standard Events in the Facebook Pixel allow us to identify and tag users based on what pages they’re visiting, how they’re using the site, as well as if they are bouncing out at a certain point or (hopefully) making a purchase on your site. These Standard Events are listed below:

Be sure to include the Standard Event line of code in your pixel for the corresponding landing page. If you want to double check or have any questions on how to edit and place the code you can refer to the Facebook Pixel Implementation Guide. The Facebook Pixel Helper is also a great Chrome extension that helps identify if your pixels are live and placed correctly on a page. Additional Pixel Troubleshooting from the Facebook developers.

What you’ll want to do is map out the path to purchase on your website so you know which Standard Event to place on which page.

View Content: This is most useful if there is a specific page on your site that you identify as a key page view such as the product page, the additional info page, a landing page with more details that could lead to a purchase etc.
Search: This will help identify if users are getting to your site and performing searches in your search bar. If they are, but you’re still not seeing sales you may need to revisit your targeting as users may not be finding the relevant content/product that they thought they would.
Add to Cart: Key step to track how many people are starting the checkout process vs finishing an order. Drop offs are useful for measuring shopping cart abandonment and retargeting, but can also point out red flags in user experience if people are not converting after adding to cart.
Add to Wish List: A great way to track extremely interested users who maybe weren’t ready to pull the trigger yet.
Initiate Checkout: The strongest indicator of purchase intent and one of the main steps to measure the path to purchase.
Add Payment Info: Again measuring drop offs here will be key.
Purchase: The name of the game; tracking conversions and using that data to optimize your ads further. You can also identify the value of a sale if you have different Thank You pages for different products
Lead: This is useful if you are having users fill out a form, redeem a free trial etc. rather than making a purchase.
Complete Registration: Useful for identifying users that sign up for a service or a subscription through a registration form.
Other: Use this to track any other key actions on your website that aren’t listed above.

Using these Standard Events as qualifiers, what you want to do is place the corresponding code on each page all the way from a Page View down to a Conversion. So you would have the standard pixel on the landing page, Add to Cart on the first step in the cart page, Initiate Checkout page gets its own pixel code, same for Add Payment Info and Purchase. Now if you have other relevant pages on the site then you’ll want to add the additional codes to those such as View Content for a key page view and the like.

In the end this will help you identify how many people came into the funnel at the top, how many came out the bottom with a purchase and exactly how many dropped off and at what part of the process so you can re-engage or tweak your campaigns.

Use the Amount of Time a User Spends on Your Site to Create a Custom Facebook Audience!

On August 3, 2016 By redzmudzienIn FacebookLeave a comment

Facebook is now offering a brand new method of creating a Custom Audience and it should excite you if you’re using landing page content to generate leads. Time Spent on Your Website is the newest method Facebook has unveiled to craft a Custom Audience! This could be huge for businesses that are driving customers to a specific landing page to learn/read/view more.

*Note, that this option isn’t available to all advertisers yet as Facebook usually slowly rolls new features out before they’re widely available.

Businesses can drive users to their website and flag them for remarketing, but what good is one giant audience if it doesn’t take into account how engaged that customer actually was? Of course everyone knows this, but if your landing page is educational content that a customer may read/watch and they don’t make any additional actions on your website then you’re kind of up the creek when it comes to segmentation.

Using this new Custom Audience segmentation though you can easily identify who actually spent the most time on your website reading/watching your content. Don’t waste any time, money or effort reengaging with users on Facebook who hit your page and bounced out or maybe stayed for a few seconds and decided they weren’t interested. Now you can actually identify the top percentiles of users based on Time Spent on Website, similar to how you can already do that with Facebook Video and percentage of a video viewed.

It opens doors for people producing one sheeters, white pages or any other tactic of capturing customers’ attention on a specific landing page to learn more. People may be interested, but not necessarily engaged. So identify who has devoted the most time to the content you produced and reengage. This is just the latest example of how you can narrow the funnel and sell on social.

Ambiguity is the Enemy of Attribution: Facebook to Roll Out Store Visits Tracking

On June 16, 2016June 16, 2016 By redzmudzienIn Facebook2 Comments

We’re getting closer to closing the loop on digital marketing. Ambiguity is the enemy of attribution. Facebook just announced it will soon begin rolling out its own Store Visits tracking functionality for ad campaigns.

Google started the trend when it launched a very similar program nearly two years ago to track Store Visits after a user saw or clicked a business’ ad. However, this is still something that requires a very large threshold of clicks and quite frankly geographical footprint. It’s not accurate enough yet for small business owners to take advantage of. It looks like Facebook may be identifying an opportunity to strike while the iron is hot.

Ask any digital marketer working with a brick-and-mortar business what the biggest challenge is and they will tell you attribution. I hear it all the time from clients that understand they need to run digital and social campaigns and may even acknowledge they are performing well, but what does that really mean to them? Without any real data on how much foot traffic these campaigns are driving there will always be that question mark. Unless of course you have a client where you can tie in with their in-house Point-Of-Sales (POS) system to track purchases, but that’s not always available.

So over the next few months Facebook will begin rolling out its own Store Visits tracking, which makes a ton of sense considering that its Local Awareness Ads are designed to drive this exact action. I think we saw the early glimpses of this with Local Insights, which can be found in your Facebook business page’s Insights and then under Local. An incredibly effective tool that can tell you loads of information about which kind of people your ads are reaching nearby your location, what their demographics are, what times are most popular etc. to help optimize your local ads. You can actually narrow the radius down to as tight as 165 feet around the location!

The No. 1 biggest regret for Google in my opinion was the failure to launch of Google+. For any Store Visits tracking to work Google requires people to have their Location Tracking on their phone enabled, as does Facebook but so many more people allow it because as a social platform it provides that additional value (check-ins, local reviews etc.). If Google could have gotten G+ to take off like it hoped, combined with its treasure trove of data on user intent, they would have ran the world. So utilizing that location tracking information along with wi-fi signals, Facebook will be able to coordinate when a user sees or clicks and ad and goes within that business’ geo-fenced area.

If you tell a client that his Local Awareness ad got 850 Clicks and drove 100 Calls he may say that’s great, but if you’re able to tell a client this campaign specifically drove 250 people directly into their store? Now that is valuable data.

Facebook will also be rolling out the ability to connect Ads Reporting with a location’s POS system to track sales via the Offline Conversions API.

“Advertisers now have a way to connect transactions that take place in store or over the phone to their ads. The Offline Conversions API allows businesses to match transaction data from their customer database or point-of-sale system to Ads Reporting, helping them better understand the effectiveness of their ads in real-time. Businesses can work with partners such as IBM, Index, Invoca, Lightspeed, LiveRamp, Marketo and Square or with Facebook directly.”

Facebook says these functionalities will be rolling out to all advertisers globally in the coming months so start getting your clients prepared now.

Red Zmudzien

Tag: Digital Marketing

How to Uncover (Direct/None) Referral Traffic in Google Analytics