Category: Growth marketing

Google Analytics 4 is here—but are you ready?

Posted on by Khubi Ali

Google Analytics 4 represents a fundamentally different way of collecting data, and signals the increasing overlap between web and mobile app content and development. Businesses that haven’t yet installed GA4 need to get conversant with it fast—there’s just a month to go before Google deprecates Universal Analytics and GA4 becomes the only data analytics service available on the platform.

On July 1, 2023, Universal Analytics (UA) accounts will stop collecting data, and a year later on July 1, 2024, Google Analytics 360 (GA360) accounts will also stop. They’re being replaced by Google Analytics 4 (GA4), a new Google product enabling users to collect web and app data separately or in one continuous property.

GA4 marks a major milestone in the tracking of web and app properties. Formerly called App + Web when announced in its beta stage in October 2020, GA4 builds on the foundation of cross-device unified measurement which Google introduced in July 2019. GA4 eliminates the need for manual stitching and workarounds between platforms, and ultimately quenches marketers’ thirst for unified data.

But if you haven’t implemented GA4 yet, read on and get ready—you don’t have long!

Have you seen the latest TikTok de-influencer trend?

This is basically where social media influencers slander a hyped up viral product and tells you exactly why you DON’T need it.

Is this going to be the death of influencing or another clever ploy to encourage you to buy a product. The double bluff?

What is Google Analytics 4?

GA4 isn’t a simple redesign of UA. It’s a whole new product, which until July 1, 2023 can be installed alongside your existing UA profile.

If you’re new to Analytics, however, GA4 is the default Google Analytics platform. It superseded UA in October 2020.

Google Analytics used to be divided between web properties—what we might think of as ‘traditional’ analytics—and Analytics for Firebase, which caters specifically to app needs.

GA4 unifies users’ data, and most importantly gives them flexible and powerful analytics tools within the bounds of cookieless tracking and consent management.

Universal Analytics vs Google Analytics 4: what’s changing?

Implementing GA4 doesn’t mean you have to get rid of your existing Analytics setup. For now you should keep that in place—its valuable historical data will be available for a further 6 months, and will complement the insights gathered from GA4. But as of July 1 next year, GA4 will become Google’s sole analytics platform.

If you’re setting up Analytics for the first time you can get started with GA4 right away, no need to create a separate UA profile. But if you’re transitioning from UA to GA4, a variety of changes are coming in the wake of growing data privacy restrictions.

Google Signals regionality
Launched in 2018, Signals is a Google product that collects data from users who’ve opted in to ad personalisation. The data is anonymised and made available to integrate into reporting and audience building. Signals can be disabled for specific countries and included for others. This level of control can be vital for political or socioeconomic reasons, because while not necessarily a GDPR requirement, it enables whole regions to be excluded from intake.

IP address logging
Google has deprecated IP logging; all processing for locations will now be passed through to GA. This meets GDPR requirements and mitigates any compliance issues that could arise during the transfer of personally identifiable information (PII).

Granular location and device data collection
Several data points are no longer default, including city, device information and browser versioning. Some companies may choose not to collect these data points for the sake of making sure they’re fully compliant with GDPR. Those data points that are no longer default can still be collected according to specified regions.

EU data
EU data was being moved to the US for processing, but this practice has been deprecated. EU data is now processed within the EU to comply with GDPR.

What new features does Google Analytics bring?

With GA4, a variety of metrics that users of UA are accustomed to have changed, deprecated, or been replaced.

From pageviews to views
GA4 prioritises views over pageviews because it unifies web and app properties: views encompasses screenviews and pageviews. But as was previously the case, repeated views of the same content are counted individually.

Identity Spaces
GA4 comes with four distinct identity methods, which together produce a unified view of cross-device user journeys:

  • user ID
  • device ID
  • modelling
  • Google Signals.

All data associated with the same user—that is to say, associated with the same identity—is assigned to the same identity space. Identity spaces are used across all GA4 reporting, enabling brands and advertisers to deduplicate their list of users and gain a richer understanding of their relationship and interactions with their businesses.

From average session duration to average engagement time
While the two metrics are calculated differently, average engagement time reports on what average session duration was always attempting to encapsulate: user focus on web- or screenpages.

New metrics
Goodbye outdated user behavioural measurements like bounce rate and average session duration. With GA4, new metrics for understanding behaviour include engaged sessions and engagement rates, which are both more impactful than the old metrics.

From goals to conversions
This change is mainly just semantic. It’s come about because of the deprecation of the category–action–label hierarchy of previous events. That being said, it’s still important to note that GA4 will count every instance of a conversion event, even if it occurs multiple times in the same session. For example, if the same user fills out a form three times in one session, that conversion is counted three times.

Multipurpose audience lists
When you create an audience in GA4, it’s automatically imported and becomes available for remarketing in Google Ads on YouTube and the Google Search and Display Networks. By contrast, advertisers using UA have to recreate audiences in Google Ads they’ve already created in Analytics.

From session to session start
GA4 slightly changes the definition of when a session is said to have been created. It’s now determined when a session start is triggered. This generates a session ID which is appended to each event that occurs within the session. Sessions end after 30 minutes or the defined timeout period. They can no longer restart at midnight or when new campaign parameters are encountered.

A different data display
UA’s data model is hit-based, characterised by sessions and pageviews. The latter are the starting point of data collection in UA, whereas in GA4 the key metric is events.

 

What are the business benefits of Google Analytics 4?

By leveraging AI and machine learning components for the near-cookieless future, GA4 is a step in the right direction in terms of giving businesses the insights they actually need.

Simplified and organised reporting
GA4 introduced several new reporting tools of interest to marketers and web analysts, and the existing web and app reports have been reorganised in the platform UI. The standout benefit from these changes is the unified user view between app and website, but it’s also worth noting that Google has revamped its custom reporting tool as an ‘analysis hub’. This offers more flexibility, with custom and ad hoc reporting.

Unified metric and dimension scopes
GA4 brings together the view between app and web, which is probably the single biggest advantage it brings. Previous iterations of Analytics required separate tagging and properties, which sometimes led to inconsistent metrics and dimensions. Just remember when you start out with GA4 that you won’t have any historical or 24-hour data, but you’ll soon start to see that populate.

New privacy-conscious data controls
Unified reporting and the user journey across platforms has been a perennial challenge since the dawn of app and web development. GA4 represents an acknowledgement of these needs and the fact that they’re growing increasingly complex in the face of exponentially more stringent data regulations. As privacy advocates criticise third-party data collection, Google is now ready to embrace anonymised first-party data instead, along with consented tracking. By unifying properties and collection scopes (and announcing significant server-side capabilities), Google is moving away from client-side dependencies.

 

 

What will my operations look like using Google Analytics 4?

Over the last few years we’ve seen users and sessions switch places in Analytics, a nod to a future in which analysts track users over session-by-session data. GA4 manifests this shift in full. Event-based tracking over hit-based tracking produces a degree of granularity in data that simply wasn’t possible before.

Meanwhile, old categories like action and label have been deprecated, and all interactions with a website are now ingested at the same level of granularity. A pageview happens at the same level of detail as a link click. This precise level-setting enables flexibility that would have been otherwise more limited. The question now is less “What happened in the session?”, more “How did the user behave in the session?” Fundamentally, data points are being translated into human actions.

 

 

How do I track my marketing data and create reports in Google Analytics 4?

You can set up a default attribution model for your reporting needs in Property Settings. You can also specify a lookback window, whose default is the last 30 days. This marks a stark evolution from UA, whose default was Last non-direct click, which couldn’t be changed across the account—different models were comparable only in a specific tab.

With GA4’s attribution models, direct visits are excluded from receiving attribution credit on all attribution models unless the conversion path was direct visits only. The models have been and will continue to be introduced on different dates, with their data available only from their start dates. If you select data outside the available window, you’ll only see some of it.

Analytics’ attribution reporting previously looked at how a website had acquired a user’s session, but GA4’s will focus instead on how the user was acquired in the first place, as well as how their subsequent sessions were acquired.

There’s also an exciting range of metrics exclusive to GA4:

  • event count: number of hits or triggered events
  • active users: number of users active in a 28-day period
  • engagement rate: percentage of total sessions that were engaged sessions
  • average engagement time: calculated summation of user engagement durations per active user
  • engaged sessions: number of sessions that lasted longer than 10 seconds and had a conversion event or at least 2 views.

How do I migrate to Google Analytics 4?

GA4 is a new product unto itself. You can’t just hit an Update button in your existing UA or GA360 property—you must create an entirely new property for GA4, and your site will need the appropriate tagging to start collecting data.

While Google is providing a mirroring service to translate UA tags to GA4, you shouldn’t rely on it—indeed Google itself recommends that you don’t. The inherent differences in data structure will likely confuse your setup, and any issues or errors from your old setup may get carried forward into your GA4. Much better to start afresh with GA4, and prime your business for success as we hail a new era in analytics.

3 simple questions to ask before implementing Google Analytics 4:

  • Should I migrate to server-side tracking?
  • Is my app running the latest version of the Firebase SDK?
  • Is my existing tag Tag Manager or gtag integration collecting all the data it should be?

Finally, remember that to have YoY data available in GA4 before the deprecation of UA and GA360, you’ll need to have fully implemented GA4 by July 1, 2023, the deprecation data for UA. Otherwise your GA4 will have gaps, and this will complicate your 2023 YoY reviews.

 

What if I don’t have time right now to learn how to use Google Analytics 4?

GA4 data is forward-facing from the date of installation—the sooner you get it, the more historical data you’ll have. For that reason you should add GA4 to your website ASAP.

Business owners are rushed off their feet—we get it. So even if you don’t have time right now to familiarise yourself with GA4, try to at least install it, as data capture will begin immediately. Leave it ticking along in the background. When you’re finally ready to learn how to use it, you’ll have a wealth of statistically significant information ready to go.

It may take a little time to get your head around GA4’s newly available insights. Historically, Analytics data has been driven by pageviews, providing metrics now familiar to us like bounce rate, the numbers of users and new users, and the number of sessions and their average duration. By contrast, GA4’s data is more oriented toward understanding the customer lifecycle, so includes information about retention, acquisition, engagement and monetisation.

Is it worth making the switch to Google Analytics 4?

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: hell yes!

If you still have two profiles—GA4 along with UA or GA360—it’s best to use them both individually and in tandem, with a view to seeing which metrics are related or influence one another. You’ll soon start connecting the dots. Moving forward, the understanding you’ll glean of how A impacts B and B impacts C will be invaluable.

Come the deprecation of UA we’ll see site owners who haven’t yet installed GA4 scramble to get it set up. There’s no sadder sight than a scrambling site owner. (Try saying that after you’ve had a few.) So start preparing as soon as possible. Export and maintain hard copies of historical data for your records—it won’t be transferrable from your UA or GA360 because of the differences in their data models and how their definitions function and operate.

Take all the time you can to get to grips with GA4. After all, ultimately you execute most of your business decisions according to Analytics, right? The data you work with moving forward must be as accurate as possible.

This is a seriously exciting time in analytics. Because GA4 introduces a whole new way of looking at your data. Of course that can feel daunting, especially if you’ve been accustomed to UA or GA360 for years—but once you see the myriad possibilities open up before you, you’ll wonder how you ever went without.

If you need some help or advice, whether with exporting your data from UA or GA360, or familiarising yourself with GA4’s interface and methodology, or understanding how to leverage its insights, reach out to us. We’ve been running countless clients’ GA4 accounts since the platform superseded UA as Google’s default back in October 2020, and we’d be delighted to help you as well.

De-influencing: What does it mean for brands and influencers?

Posted on by Khubi Ali

Have you seen the latest TikTok de-influencer trend?

This is basically where social media influencers slander a hyped up viral product and tells you exactly why you DON’T need it.

Is this going to be the death of influencing or another clever ploy to encourage you to buy a product. The double bluff?

When did influencing begin?

Influencing has been around since the dawn of time, I’m almost certain someone once saw Celopatra in a pair of earrings and thought ‘I MUST HAVE THEM!’ but it really hit its stride in 2009 when content creators such as Zoella and Tanya Burr Began to influence their followers into getting must-have products such as Morphe makeup brushes or an item from a large Primark haul.

So when did De-influencing start?

De-influencing has existed for longer than you realise: a great example (even if it was unintentional) is back in 2021 when Ronaldo moved a Coca-Cola bottle out of shot during a press conference and chose to drink water instead. This resulted in the brand’s market value dropping by $4billion. This highlights how easily influenced we can be, if our idol does or doesn’t want something, then suddenly neither do we.

Some creators such as Remi Bader (Remi Jo on Tiktok) have literally grown their channels purely from de-influencing their followers. Remi began creating content in 2020 and has now grown a huge following of 2.2M on Tiktok alone. As a curve model, Remi creates “Realistic” clothing hauls highlighting the sizing issue that exists in the fashion industry. Remi’s content typically consists of try on hauls from specific brands, in which she is brutally honest about the sizing, comfort and quality of every item she puts on, influencing and de-influencing viewers on which brands to purchase or not to purchase from. Remi’s honest and relatable content has resulted in huge brand deals, gifting and even a brand collaboration with Revolve Clothing.

Does influencing / de-influencing work?

Everyone has an idol, someone they look up and would do pretty much anything to be a little bit more like them. When that idol wears, owns or uses a product it immediately becomes more desirable.

Influencer marketing is a great way to ensure you are reaching your intended target audience. Influencers add authenticity to a brand, they prove to followers that the brand has clout and is worth purchasing from purely because a trusted person (influencer) claims to use it.

Products are often likely to sell out when influencers such as Mikayla Nogueira or Molly Mae are seen wearing, using or even owning them.

Although influencers are seen as trusted individuals, there have been scandals around them not even using a product when they promote it.

Some influencers have even been seen promoting products that are dangerous to their viewers’ health or encouraging people to buy a makeup product that has been tested on animals.

Influencers have a lot of power over their followers and often forget the responsibility that comes along with it. When money is involved it can really blur the lines on whose opinion you can really trust.

What does de-influencing mean for brands?

I would say… not a great deal, it just keeps them on their toes.

Obviously de-influencing could be incredibly dangerous for a brand if they are featured on the negative side of things. But, equally if your product makes it to the ‘I recommend this product instead’ side of the video, then you are winning.

De-influencing is simply just deceptive marketing, another sneaky way to sell a product, yet this way it seems less cliche. ‘Don’t buy this product, buy this one instead’ could be the new marketing strategy for a lot of brands, requesting that influencers recommend their product over another.

What does de-influencing mean for influencers?

Many influencers are absolutely loving the de-influencer trend. Beauty influencers are using it as a way to show off their favourite beauty products, by creating content such as ‘Get ready with me whilst I de-influence you!’.

It is really interesting to see the impact this is having on the beauty industry, how a viral product that has been trending for a while is now getting negative reviews and another major beauty brand product is being hyped up instead. 

In a way, content creators who ‘de-influence’ shouldn’t be a big crazy trend, it should be normal. Not liking a product or a product not working for you should just be seen as realistic. Maybe more influencers should share Remi Bader’s attitude to honesty.

If you look at the bigger picture… The idea of de-influencing can be seen as a positive, a way of reducing overconsumption. This could have massive benefits to our planet, as the fashion industry is one of the most damaging industries in the world.

Instead of telling viewers what to buy and what not to buy, should influencers be showing us how to make the most out of what we already have? But this way of influencing is of no benefit to brands, or influencers for that matter, as they would make no money this way.

It is hard to decide what de-influencing really means for the marketing industry, but it is clear to see that it has and will always be around, it just might take on different forms.

The Manifest hails Pixated among the leading creative agencies in the UK!

Posted on by Arham Khan

We’re a design and performance marketing agency committed to helping businesses reach their full potential. Our team of specialists craft high-converting campaigns focusing on our clients’ ROI, driving their growth and empowering them to reach their targets.

We’re delighted to announce we’ve been named as a top company on B2B guide The Manifest, which has recognised Pixated as one of the best creative agencies in the UK!

“We’ve been working extremely hard to deliver excellent results for our clients during these uncertain times, so it’s great to see the team has been recognised for their hard work.”

Arham Khan, Co-founder, Pixated

This is a prestigious achievement for the team here at Pixated. Since 2018 we’ve been working tirelessly to innovate solutions that surpass our clients’ every expectation. We’re proud of our many accomplishments—and this award is the cherry on top of another successful year!

Recent client feedback from GMACS demonstrates the quality of our projects. The careers service professionals hired us earlier in the year to design and develop their website. GMACS desperately needed a revamp of their old platform, and wanted a vibrant and visually appealing solution. We delivered an enhanced product with improved usability.

“Pixated quickly and efficiently built the website we needed and were very helpful with late changes to the scope.”

Simon Pook, Content & Systems Manager, GMACS

Now let’s talk about your digital strategy. Connect with us to start the conversation!

How SMS marketing improves cross-selling and up-selling

Posted on by Arham Khan

SMS marketing is the perfect and most effective tool for cross-selling and up-selling to customers. SMS not only boasts a 99% open rate but also provides the personalization and improved response times necessary to be successful in cross-selling and upselling to your customers.

Let’s explore the meaning of cross-selling and upselling and why SMS marketing should play a larger role in your marketing strategy.

What is Cross-Selling and Up-Selling?

Cross-selling and upselling are very similar. Regardless of which method you’re using, the goal is to help the customer visualize the benefit of buying an item that complements and fulfills a need not met by their original purchase; or committing to buying a higher priced item that meets their needs better.

Upselling is a strategy best used on long-term, repeat customers that have a history with the business. These customers tend to be more accepting of the recommendations given to them by the business due to the trust built over time. Showing other higher priced models or variations of an item they are already interested in purchasing, increases your AOV and helps the customer feel more satisfied after completing the purchase.

Cross-selling can be easily employed by giving suggestions of complementary items for the customer to buy along with the item they are already purchasing. For example, suggesting other cooking utensils or pots and pans to someone who just added a frying pan to their cart would be considered cross-selling.

How effective is SMS?

Take a look at these ecommerce SMS marketing statistics we’ve compiled and see for yourself:

  • 1 in 3 consumers checks their text notifications within one minute of receiving a text.
  • More than half of consumers (51%) reply to a text message within 1-2 minutes.
  • Text marketing is incredibly effective, with SMS open rates as high as 98%.
  • Unlike most marketing channels, SMS marketing continues to be a best kept secret; 61% of marketers still don’t use it.
  • SMS marketing click-through rates for ecommerce brands can be as high as 36%.
  • More than half of consumers check their text messages 11 times a day or more.
  • On an average day, consumers check their text messages more than any other app on their phones.
  • In 2022, 70% of consumers opted in to receive texts from businesses.
  • 61% of consumers say they want the ability to text a business back.
  • Customers don’t just want you to text them; 43% of consumers said they have proactively texted a business.
  • 33% of SMS recipients react to CTAs in SMS marketing messages, and 47% of them end up making a purchase as a result.
  • 60% of business owners who text their customers plan on increasing their SMS marketing budget in 2022.

Email versus SMS Marketing

Most ecommerce companies rely primarily on email to engage their clients. While there is still room for email in today’s marketing strategy, when comparing the effectiveness of email and SMS, the results provided by SMS are astounding.

SMS marketing click-through rates are significantly higher than email click-through rates are. Click-through rates between 20% and 35% are reported by many businesses. On the other hand, 64% of business owners report only a 1% to 10% click-through rate for email. The average click-through rate for email marketing is under 3%, though.

Many times, emails end up in spam folders or are simply ignored entirely. Unopened emails are wasted marketing revenue and time that your business could be directing elsewhere. Sure, you can continue to have email play a role in your marketing strategy, but SMS should be a main focus.

Product Suggestions: In this instance the customer has already chosen to purchase an item for your ecommerce business. Congratulations! Now a great way to cross-sell is by suggesting a complementing product that they may have already been contemplating purchasing. This drastically increases your customer’s lifetime value

You can accomplish this in many different ways, but some options are sending an SMS with a link to a tutorial video of the item recently purchased that includes suggestions of other complementing products. You can offer limited time discounts on a similar product or send click-to-buy links of items that the customer viewed, but did not purchase.

Customized Discount Codes : Discount codes sent with post-purchase texts are a great way to get customers to return while cross-selling and or upselling. You can choose what you want these texts to say, but here are a few examples:

“Bazinga! Now that was a great deal on those sunglasses! As a thank you for your very first purchase, here is a code for 25% off your next purchase!”

“Even sasquatch loves the fresh-smelling forest scents of Pine Tar & Co. Soaps! Now that you are using (and hopefully enjoying) the soap you purchased, ready to try out one of our other scents? Here is a 15% promo code for your next purchase.”

Subscription Offerings: A simple way to keep your customer coming back month after month is by offering a subscription. A gentle reminder can be sent through SMS to the customer each time they make a purchase encouraging them to take advantage of the 10% off every time this product is shipped when they have enrolled in your subscription.

As you can see, SMS is a powerful tool that you can use to keep customers informed while capitalizing on the strong open rates and attention of the consumer to also cross promote and upsell simultaneously. It’s really a no-brainer in today’s marketing world!

About the Author: Michael Lazar is an Executive at ReadyCloud, a multichannel ecommerce CRM software solution for online retailers with seamless returns software automation for today’s busy online retailer.

A leading SEO expert, Lazar has authored guides for countless companies and brands, helping online retailers improve their process, gain more traction and alleviate pain points and bottlenecks along the way.

How does data-driven marketing inform marketers’ approach to their campaigns?

Posted on by Arham Khan

You can’t know what’s working in your business if you can’t put some black-and-white figures on it. Only with defined metrics can you define success.

Some companies used to take the ‘spray and pray’ approach to marketing. But as customers demand ever more personalised experiences, data-driven marketing has come to the fore and revealed the enormity of its potential.

As long ago as 2013, a study by Janrain demonstrated that 74% of online customers felt frustrated when content appeared that didn’t align with their interests. And in 2016 OneSpot showed that almost half of customers wouldn’t read or even engage with content if it was irrelevant to them. So we can only imagine how much more pronounced these effects must be today, after a decade’s worth of data-driven marketing has exponentially increased customers’ expectations of bespoke online experiences. If businesses are to have any shot at competing in this incredibly competitive marketplace, they must therefore focus more on generating, analysing and applying data to their marketing campaigns.

What is data-driven marketing?

Marketing campaigns generate data in more ways than most people can imagine, so it makes sense to then draw on those insights and leverage them next time around. That’s data-driven marketing: using data to inform all marketing decisions. It prioritises customers’ data above all other kinds to ensure marketing efforts are relevant to their interests and behaviours.

Data-driven marketing makes it so much easier to get everything in place: your budget, your products, your creative team. Without customer data, your marketing campaigns will always be at least something of a shot in the dark. But with the right data-driven marketing strategies, you can start developing and releasing campaigns that speak directly to your target audience, resonate with their wants and aspirations, and build precious trust and loyalty among your customer base.

What are data-driven marketing best practices?

No matter your business, product or campaign, there are certain tried and tested ways to get the most out of your customer data when incorporating it into your marketing efforts.

Manage your data

Data-driven marketing is an iterative process. That means it’s always evolving, its scope always expanding. You therefore need not only excellent data collection, but also high-quality data management. This is critical to the success of your data-driven marketing efforts because it provides crucial customer insights, highlights new marketing and acquisition opportunities, and saves you both time and money.

Know your audience

The success of your data-driven marketing campaigns depends on the accuracy of your customer data. You could have the most advanced data collection in place, but it would count for nothing if the data didn’t actually reflect your target audience. So before you start applying data-driven marketing strategies to your business, make sure you’re exceptionally familiar with your customers. Research your ideal customers, build your buyer personas, and educate your teams on these profiles. Moreover, reach out to current customers to better understand who’s actually buying your products. You could even hold focus groups to question a live audience and receive raw and unedited feedback.

Stay compliant

Your data is worthless if it doesn’t comply with the law by respecting your customers’ privacy. In recent times organisations and entire countries have cracked down on how businesses can use their customer data, reflected in laws like GDPR and the CCPA. These protect customer data and therefore customers, and hold companies accountable. Complying with these laws therefore makes your marketing more transparent, trustworthy and effective.

What strategies does data-driven marketing involve?

Today, personalised marketing goes quite a bit further than just greeting a customer by name via email. Now it’s all about delivering the right message at the right time—and on the right channel. This is where data-driven marketing is simply unbeatable in its efficacy.

But it can be a little overwhelming trying to work out how to start, and visualise where data-driven marketing actually fits in with your broader marketing efforts. So let’s check out some surefire ways to effectively leverage your customer data—and without compromising on audience engagement. It should be noted, of course, that these methods complement one another, and when implemented in tandem can produce results greater than the sum of their parts. So consider combining a few as part of your bid to personalise your marketing efforts.

Retarget your advertising

Retargeting, sometimes called remarketing, is an imperative for all marketers, but especially those operating across multiple channels. It enables you to keep your brand front-of-mind among individuals who have expressed interest or in some way engaged with your products or services. If someone browses a specific product on your site, their customer data means you can then resurface that product to that individual through such strategies as social media advertising and abandoned cart email marketing.

Segment your audience

Different customer groups exist within your wider target audience, so it’s up to you to delineate those boundaries. Targeted and personalised messaging goes a lot further than a general broadcast, and segmentation helps you reach the right people at the right time with the right message. If your store sells both men’s and women’s clothes, you’d need two respective sets of messages. And if your store has multiple geographies, you’d then need men’s and women’s messaging for each location.

There’s really no end to how granular you make your segmentation, because of course your target audience differs not only by their demographics but also by their preferences and pain points, not to mention where they are in the buyer journey. Data-driven marketing empowers you to precisely segment your audience, as well as automate your segmentation efforts. You’ll find this especially useful for email and social media marketing.

Align your teams

Customer data has so many more uses than just those of your marketing team—it can be leveraged by your sales and support teams, too. Moreover, its versatility can actually help you bridge the gaps between these teams, aligning their efforts and solidifying an overarching company-wide strategy. For example, you might invest in a customer data platform (CDP), which aggregates customer data to create individual customer profiles to use across the business, which negate the risks of disparate teams working with siloed customer information. By centring your marketing, sales and support teams around a CDP, you ensure your entire organisation is working with the same data, and thereby presenting a logical, consistent and cohesive customer experience.

Optimise your content

Without customer data, your content creation processes remain largely guesswork. Data-driven marketing provides that all-important context for your content, helping you understand and serve your audience through your advertising and the content you publish. Whether your data is demographic or psychographic, it provides valuable insights into how to best craft your content such that it addresses customers’ questions, pain points and goals.

Delight your customers!

Shoppers are browsing on multiple platforms, multiple devices—but they don’t want to be treated as multiple customers based on these behaviours. They yearn for a seamless experience no matter the channel. Data-driven marketing means you can accurately identify these customers no matter which device they’re browsing on, and provide them with a superlative omnichannel experience. This doesn’t just save you time and resources, but also refines the customer experience beyond anything many shoppers will have known before, and demonstrates to your audience that you’re paying attention to their needs and recognising their behaviours.

What are some great data-driven marketing tools to get started?

If you’re not sure where to begin with your data-driven marketing, the following tools are renowned for being easy to use as you learn how to track, manage and apply your customer data.

Google Analytics

Analytics is a leading tool for tracking and reporting on website user behaviour, empowering you with a greater understanding of your traffic, visitor sessions, bounce rates and customer demographics. Run reports on your conversions, acquisitions and user behaviour flows, and connect it to your Google Ads account to track and report on your ad performance. Best of all? It’s free!

Hubspot Marketing Hub

Whether you want to start out with the free version or go all the way with the premium, Marketing Hub is a brilliant tool for businesses looking to take a deep dive into the world of data-driven marketing. It connects to Hubspot CRM so you can track, analyse and deploy your customer data all from one place. Create optimised content, monitor social media activity, run retargeting ad campaigns, and launch segmented email campaigns.

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is a paid-for tool that enables you to track your digital brand performance, optimise your web content, and better understand the competition. Leveraging your customer data, Buzzsumo researches leading keywords, content types and published content to throw light on trends that could inform your content strategy. You can even track key metrics around your competitors’ content to see how it compares to yours.

Are you ready to put your data in the driving seat?

Your customer data has the power to transform generic broadcast-based marketing into poignant and personalised messaging that truly resonates with your audience. As cofounder of Pixated, a performance marketing and web design agency, I know that understanding your customers not only allows you to grab their attention and provide myriad solutions for their needs, but also boosts your revenue and unites your teams like never before. In that way you give ambitious brands the tools they need to build sustainable and scalable growth, enhance their visibility, and revolutionise their sales and lead gen. It’s a seriously rewarding endeavour!

Why do I keep seeing the same ads on every streaming service?

Posted on by Arham Khan

No matter your streaming service of choice, you’ve almost certainly come across the same ad. Over, and over, and over again. Repeated in every break, till you vow never to buy from this company in your life. No matter how fabulous the deal, or how much you secretly covet their products. And the company haven’t even done anything wrong here. If anything, kudos to them for such an insanely catchy jingle.

Some would say Hulu and Peacock are the worst offenders. But others have noticed this endless repetition of ads on TikTok as well. And if it’s not the same ad, it’s a plethora of ads for the same thing. It’s enough to make you throw your phone across the room. (Or maybe that’s just me.) What does this all mean for the future of ads on streaming services?

Advertising is coming for the streaming world in a big way

Many streamers, especially those with linear TV legacies, embraced advertising from the start. Yet more recently, giants like Disney and Netflix have adopted ad-supported business models, and both intend to roll out new tiers soon.

But while ad-supported streaming might sound like a great idea, it comes with risks. Most people can’t afford to pay for every streaming service, and ads enable users to access more content without breaking the bank. It’s win–win when done right. But done wrong, it’s a headache inducer.

Ad-based streaming is already mired in complicated ethical debates surrounding user data, viewer tracking, and who gets to know what you’re watching and when. But among all this philosophising, might we pose a humbler suggestion of our own: Can we make the ads themselves a tad more bearable? After all, if I’m going to binge an entire season on Hulu, I’m looking at four ad breaks a show, two ads apiece, for eight episodes straight. That’s 64 ads. If I see the same two ads 32 times each, you can bet your bottom dollar I ain’t purchasing either product or service. On principle. (And that’s not to mention that I might struggle even to reach the end of the season.)

Repetitive ads are seriously annoying, but there’s actually a sound rationale behind them

It all comes down to ad targeting. At a certain level of granularity, there aren’t many people whose interests, living situation, and budget all closely align with yours. Yet what are Peacock to do if they’ve promised an advertiser a certain number of ad impressions? If there were a million people who fit the bill for the target audience, no worries. But if there’s only a thousand of you, and a million impressions to serve, well—prepare to be singing that jingle for weeks on end. And yet there’s evidence to suggest that people are actually less likely to buy from a company if they’ve been repeatedly exposed to the same ad.

It’s a surprisingly tricky problem to solve. Even for a single show on a single platform, ads can come at you from a variety of sources: the network itself, the set-top box you’re watching on, potentially even the manufacturer of your TV.

But it doesn’t have to be like this—and some services are embracing change

A few networks have started embracing the idea of showing a single long ad at the beginning of a show, and then nothing for the duration. Ads on the pause screen are also an unobtrusive way to let me know how to save money on my car insurance without annoying me.

The number of streaming services is growing, and ever more platforms are vying for your cash. Yet there’s still no technology spanning them all to ensure you don’t see the same ad on Netflix, TikTok, YouTube, Disney+. Which means you absolutely will see the same ad in those places. The TV ad business is colossal, and that money is now being funnelled to platforms. So without some change in the way that cash flows, the resultant ads may slowly render those streaming services vaguely unwatchable for more and more people.

Deflation comes to ecommerce: online prices fall 2% in July

Posted on by Arham Khan

According to the Adobe Digital Price Index (ADPI), online prices were down 2% in July compared to June, and down 1% compared to 2021. This is the first drop since January 2020, pre-COVID, and follows three consecutive months of slowing price increases.

In July American inflation hit a 40-year peak, topping 9%, a rate driven by rising ‘real world’ costs. For example, the petrol index fell 7.7% last month, offsetting increases in the food and shelter indexes, which in turn resulted in the all-items index going unchanged over the month. The energy index fell 4.6% over July as the petrol and natural gas indexes declined, but the electricity index increased. The food index continued rising, increasing 1.1% over July as the food-at-home index rose 1.3%.

It’s been a momentous month for online prices, too—especially when it comes to electronics

The ongoing inflation online reflects the price of digital purchases. 14 of the 18 categories tracked by the ADPI saw monthly price drops. Electronics, the largest eCommerce category, with 18.6% share of spend in 2021, saw the second biggest category price drop, down 9.3% YoY (2% MoM). That’s close to electronics’ pre-COVID level: prices fell 9.1% YoY between 2015 and 2019. This also marks the category’s third straight month of price drops.

Computers lead all categories, with a 10.2% drop YoY (3.2% MoM). Apparel had the biggest monthly price drops, down 6.2%, but dropped only 1% YoY. This has been apparel’s first notable YoY decrease. Last month prices fell only 0.1% YoY. Prior to that they’d been rising for 14 months straight.

Seven categories saw YoY price increases while dropping MoM: personal care, furniture, medical supplies, office supplies, appliances, home and garden, and flowers and related gifts. Groceries saw the biggest yearly price increase of 13.4%, and the second biggest monthly increase of 1.4%.

In July people spent $73.7bn online, $400m less than in June. But on a YoY basis, eCommerce spend in July grew 20.9%, driven by both Prime Day and record online sales for the overall retail industry. This year so far people have spent $525.4bn, growing 9.2% YoY.

What are the implications of these price decreases across the board?

On August 10 the news of a slowing American inflation rate was a potentially hopeful sign for the economy—but possibly not, too. Online prices might simply have dropped because people couldn’t buy electronics in light of increasingly expensive necessities such as food. Ditto the overall growth in online spending. Is it up because prices are up, or just because people are confident enough to spend more on items that are less expensive?

There’s another perspective, of course: perhaps we’re just adding more debt. Over the past year credit card debt has jumped by $100bn (13%), the biggest percentage increase in over two decades. Last quarter, with interest rates rising, credit card balances increased by $46bn. The impact of inflation has been apparent in the high volume of borrowing. And while seasonal patterns typically include an increase in Q2, the 13% cumulative increase in credit card balances since Q2 2021 represents the largest in 20 years.

According to Joelle Scally, Administrator of the Center for Microeconomic Data at the New York Fed, ‘While household balance sheets overall appear to be in a strong position, we’re seeing rising delinquencies among subprime and low-income borrowers, with rates approaching pre-COVID levels.’ Moreover, the share of current debt transitioning into delinquency increased modestly for all debt types, but still remains historically low. The delinquency transition rate for credit cards increased by 0.5%.

How should you approach SEO in a disrupted world?

Posted on by Arham Khan

Good SEO reflects what people are actually searching for—not what you wish they were searching for. And that’s perhaps never truer than during periods of global turbulence.

But how can you gain traction with your pivots when you don’t know what huge change might occur in the next 24 hours?

Take the past two years: COVID, seesawing economies, the invasion of Ukraine… But what these events have taught us is that even the most effective and logical SEO strategies remain subject to reevaluation if the online search landscape demands it. Even if your industry isn’t directly tied to world events, you’d probably benefit by shaping your SEO goals more closely to current affairs.

So with that in mind, today let’s explore how marketers can pivot and adjust in times of change and crisis.

What is the role of SEO when the online landscape is so volatile?

SEO’s fundamental purpose is to add value by providing information relevant to people’s searches. That value becomes even more imperative when we find ourselves in a state of acute disruption.

SEO strategies focusing on transactions will generally be far less effective than those that provide users with the expertise your company is uniquely qualified to convey. Let’s say you manufacture car parts. In a crisis, why not focus on supply chain issues and ideate solutions for the problems your target audience of distributors are facing, rather than building a landing page expressing sentiments about an ongoing war unrelated to what you do?

How does turbulence affect your SEO KPIs?

The economy impacts different B2B and B2C companies in different ways. Tech firms scramble for funding, or find themselves under pressure from anxious investors even while their target audiences cut budgets. Retail and eCommerce companies experience tightened customer spending, exacerbated by higher cost of goods. And this is relevant right now, today: people aren’t throwing their money around as they did even just one year ago, in 2021—so your SEO KPIs need to reflect that change before it’s too late.

Let’s start with your SEO conversion rate. While it should still be a KPI, it might not actually be the most helpful optimisation benchmark at present. Instead, why not focus on more upper-to-middle–funnel KPIs:

  • time on site
  • traffic
  • percentage of returning visitors
  • number of touchpoints
  • number of pages visited.

These KPIs can then accommodate two key strategies:

  • Nurturing and engaging users with valuable information until they’re ready to spend again
  • Enhancing your purchasing funnel with content that reassures people they’d be spending their money wisely were they to buy your product or service

There’s a silver lining for SEO in all of this. Disruption leaves gaps in the funnel because of decreased paid media budgets. SEO can fill those gaps. So maintain a holistic view of your marketing goals, and continually analyse how your SEO can contribute to them.

What resources can you draw on to inform your SEO pivots?

While you should always keep a close eye on the macroeconomy and global trends, there are several tools you can use to inform your strategic adjustments as well.

Google Trends and keyword research tools

Understand the topics and queries users are searching for, or those they’re not searching for as much as they did in the past.

Data from paid search

Aligning with your paid search team can gain you access to realtime information on user search behaviours. They can inform you about keyword demand and whether their campaigns are converting more or less without competitive shifts. Either change could indicate an adjustment to the customer journey.

Customers and leads

Cancelled subscriptions and repeat purchase slowdowns are red flags that your target audience’s needs are changing. When you see the signs, consider sending out surveys to collect feedback on their priorities, then incorporate that information into your keyword and content strategies. (Your product and promotional teams will appreciate the free data as well!)

Traffic and impressions

If traffic and impressions are increasing or decreasing despite your rankings staying the same, people’s interests are broadly and swiftly shifting. Cross-reference your data with Google Trends, and look specifically for historical trends (including seasonality) to ensure you’re really looking at the bigger picture.

How can you get instant traction with your pivots?

It can be tough getting your head around the idea of quick results on a long-term channel. After all, SEO is all about trust and authority, so momentum often has to build over time.

But if you focus on long-tail and low-competition keywords to gain interest in your brand, you can actually build that authority with relative speed and boost your backlink volume at pace. For example, while you won’t be able to start immediately ranking for supply chain, you can certainly make headway with why is there a supply chain shortage.

Organic social media can also gain you rapid feedback on topics that resonate with your network. If a post generates a load of constructive engagement across your channels, you’ve likely hit on a subject that would benefit from a deeper dive. Try a LinkedIn poll to surface sentiment, then feed this data into your SEO programme.

However your audience responds, and no matter the information they provide you with, all that data is useful for honing your SEO campaigns. So grab the topics and responses from this pivot and build a keyword list accordingly. This is a great way to think up new blog titles or ideas for guides to optimise your existing marketing pages. And once you start seeing progress on those terms, you could turn your attention to more competitive and higher-volume keywords closely related to the long-tail terms you’d worked with initially.

There are other paths besides SEO, of course

In a time of global turbulence, it’s important to return to your roots with SEO. Depending on your perspective, marketers doesn’t exist only to grow brands and businesses, but also to provide searchers with high-quality answers to their queries and solutions to their problems. And even if SEO’s not the realm you want to focus on right now, that’s okay too—and we can help.

5 ways to avoid over-automating your marketing

Posted on by Arham Khan

The age of automation has well and truly arrived.

Whether online or at the supermarket checkout, automation technologies have become the standard tool for streamlining workflow and operations. They are undoubtedly one of the greatest business development tools ever invented. But as with the adoption of any new technology, there’s a risk of companies growing too dependent on it. If you’re not savvy with how you implement automation, it could cost you not only your profit but your business, too.

1) Don’t forget to continually optimise

Automation relieves a lot of stress for business owners, but don’t fall into the trap of ‘set and forget’. Optimising your automated systems is a manual process, but digital marketing is a fluid and ever-evolving environment. You can’t turn your back on it for a moment.

Make sure your automated systems are optimised for the current online climate, and that they meet the criteria of the most up-to-date search engine algorithms. If you have a dedicated development team, direct them to build in automated tools and advantages as they construct your systems. Remember, though, that to capitalise on that effort you must then maintain your systems well, and optimise your automation for best results.

Automation will only do what you tell it to, so treat it like an employee who needs observing and managing rather than like a consultant who can be left to their own devices. Pay attention. Automation exists to make you a profit, not cost you exposure.

2) Beware the pitfalls of automated bidding

Automated bidding automatically sets your bids on your ads based on their likelihood of getting clicked and achieving a sales conversion. The system can be customised for a specific sales goal or business objective, and saves hours of effort for business owners.

As we saw above, it’s appealing to just ‘set and forget’, and assume your approach to sales and lead gen is one-size-fits-all. But running automated ad campaigns unsupervised is unwise to say the least, and could cost you profit if you get complacent. Many algorithms aren’t (yet) as smart as humans, so your AI won’t be able to outperform a sales professional in this arena. Don’t shy away from automated bidding, of course, but use it as a tool, not a crutch. Marketing still demands human interaction, albeit online.

3) Keep your brand message front-of-mind

A perennial focus in digital marketing is customising your customer’s experiences. AI and automation can be hugely helpful in making this happen, but there’s a fine line between automation technologies helping you run your business and totally disregarding your customer’s existence. After all, you are your brand. So if you let automated systems do all the talking for you, eventually your customer will feel neither seen nor heard.

This doesn’t apply only to customers. Your brand is an employer, too, and adopting this mindset helps you attract the best talent. Because while automated software is useful for recruitment, when you’re marketing for candidates you need a human touch. So leverage your automation more for behind-the-scenes efficiencies, when candidates are less likely to see it.

4) Be mindful of over-messaging

Automated messaging systems can be a saviour for a business owner trying to optimise their customer service and comms. They help build and maintain rapport with the audience—but you can overdo it. Sending too many automated messages can be disastrous for your business. Over-messaging negatively impacts your recipients, damaging your engagement and client relationships, and it adversely impacts your app or website, too.

It takes years to build a brand. It takes seconds to burn your reputation. With automated messaging, it’s all about quality over quantity. Strike that balance.

5) Never automate what shouldn’t be automated!

There are so many ways automation technologies can improve your sales and branding, but there are certain aspects of your business that just shouldn’t be automated—even if they can be.

  • Cybersecurity: Thieves and hackers constantly find new ways to break through cybersecurity systems. Manually ensuring yours are optimised maximises your business’s security and protects your customers’ data.
  • Customer engagement: People want to know they’re dealing with a real person. They’re not naive, and will often pick up on when they’re talking to a bot.
  • Social posts and messages: There are plenty of automation systems for social media engagement, and they’re a godsend for those who find marketing on these platforms to be tedious. But if you are such a person, it’s worth outsourcing your business’s social media marketing so it can be optimised in a human way. That’s not to say you shouldn’t use systems to automatically post your content at particular times, of course, only that you shouldn’t rely on automation and AI if you want to enhance the impact of your marketing.
  • Marketing proposal templates: Digital marketers must ensure their marketing proposal templates come direct from them or one of their team, and include personalised comments relating to the specific prospect. Sending automated proposals may insult your client, and a pitch is far more likely to succeed if it’s customised to their needs.

Moderation is the key to successfully implementing your automation technologies

Marketing automation is a brilliant way to optimise and streamline your business, but it’s still just a tool like any other, and therefore has limitations as to how and when it should be implemented. Automation is no substitute for graft and passion. So use your raft of automation technologies as a complementary utility in growing your business, not as a business model unto itself. Find that balance—hard as it is—and you’ll reap the rewards.

Amazon and the One Stop Shop: What sellers should be aware of

Posted on by Arham Khan

The One-Stop-Shop is a new set of regulations concerning VAT duties in the European Union that was introduced in July 2022. The OSS offers a lot of opportunities and other steps on the way to EU-wide VAT compliance for online sellers and included changes concerning

  • Delivery thresholds in the EU
  • Taxation of goods sold in B2C distance selling
  • VAT registration duty

This is especially true for entrepreneurs selling goods via Amazon and delivering with the help of FBA programs, as they tend to sell their products on a variety of marketplaces in Europe and in several European countries. However, the usability of the One-Stop-Shop for Amazon Sellers is greater than the usability for Amazon FBA sellers. Find out why below.

One-Stop-Shop for Amazon Sellers

Previously Amazon Sellers had to register for VAT in their home countries and in all countries to which sales exceeded the delivery thresholds, which were set by each country and usually set at 35,000€ or 100,000€. In all countries in which Sellers registered for VAT, they had to submit regular VAT returns.

Following the filing of returns, VAT needed to be paid separately to each tax authority, following differing deadlines and format. Furthermore, all sales prior to the crossing of the threshold limit were taxed with domestic VAT rate, which was paid to the domestic tax office, while all sales after the threshold was exceeded were taxed with foreign VAT rates and the VAT liabilities paid to foreign tax authorities.

All of the processes detailed above changed with the introduction of the One-Stop-Shop. While participation in the OSS happens on a voluntary basis, the introduction of the One-Stop-Shop was also accompanied by the abolishment of the former country-specific delivery thresholds in favour of an EU-wide applicable threshold of 10,000€. This new delivery threshold is reached by all cross-border deliveries combined and, therefore, crossed much earlier, leading to an increased urgency for foreign VAT registrations. This is why the OSS is a good option for many Amazon Sellers.

With the One-Stop-Shop, an OSS registration and the submission of an OSS return  in your home country replaces the foreign VAT registrations and returns. From the beginning, foreign VAT rates need to be applied to cross-border sales, through all VAT liabilities are paid collectively to the domestic tax authorities who then redistribute the amounts.

However, the OSS only applies to cross-border transactions. A VAT registration in your home country and the submission of domestic VAT returns are, therefore, still necessary. For the same reason, Amazon Sellers using Fulfilled-by-Amazon programs to deliver their products to customers EU-wide are facing a challenge, as products are stored in warehouses located in various countries and might not always cross borders when being delivered.

One-Stop-Shop and Amazon FBA

Within the PAN-EU FBA program, participant’s products might be stored in England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and the Czech Republic. Just based on storage, VAT registrations are mandatory in all of these countries. However, participation in the One-Stop-Shop is still possible.

Deliveries from the home country to foreign countries are taxed with foreign VAT rates and appear in the OSS report, as detailed above. Deliveries from foreign warehouses to customers in the same country are settled in a froeign VAT return, while deliveries to third countries are again appearing in the OSS report filed in the home country. Lastly, deliveries from foreign warehouses to customers in the Seller’s home country appear in the domestic VAT return.

As evidenced, the usability of the One-Stop-Shop for Amazon Sellers using FBA is smaller than the advantages of the OSS for pure Amazon Sellers selling only from their home country. However, the new scheme can still be advantageous. This depends on the delivery volume, the chosen FBA program, and the customer base and is best decided on a case-by-case basis.

Technical solutions for the One-Stop-Shop

If you want to or have to use the OSS to fulfil your VAT duties in Europe as an Amazon seller another challenge facing you are the different VAT rates. This is especially true if you sell products from several niches or Amazon product categories to which country-specific reduced VAT rates apply. A solution comes in the form of the hellotax OSS full-service package.

This VAT service provider specialised on the Amazon and FBA E-Commerce business offers their proprietary OSS software in combination with an OSS registration. The software automatically calculates VAT rates and compiles reports which aid in the creation of OSS reports. The hellotax team of local tax accountants then regularly files your OSS returns.

The OSS service can also be used in conjunction with the regular VAT services, which include VAT registrations EU-wide and the submission of regular VAT returns. All your VAT duties are therefore taken care of by one service provider and you can concentrate on scaling your Amazon business while staying worry-free and VAT compliant across the European Union.

6 best ways to use stock photos in your ads

Posted on by Arham Khan

Images add an attractive element to a display ad. And with 65% of the world’s population termed as ‘visual learners,’ pictures play an important role in conveying the information to the audience.

However, not many of us have the time or the resources to curate professional, customised images for each display ad that we run. In fact, many reading this blog are busy business owners and marketers who are looking for ways to run their ads without spending most of the day at a photo studio. This is where stock photographs come to the rescue.

Yes, most marketers might cringe at the name of stock photographs, but in reality, these assets are valuable in bringing your ads to life. Besides being readily available, they are cost-effective and available in a variety of categories to fill in the visual gap of your ads. However, you should know how to use them correctly, and this is where we come in!

In this guide, let’s review some practical ways to use stock photos in your display ads that will make them stand out.

Avoid Getting Sued

The first and foremost rule of using stock photos is to avoid getting a lawsuit. Yes, you may hear it rarely, but this does happen in the stock industry world when businesses get sued for using images that weren’t licensed for commercial use.

To avoid getting caught in a law infringement, it is essential that you educate yourself about the different licenses before you start searching for a stock photo to use in your ad. Generally, the stock photo licenses are divided into three categories:

  • Public Domain: As the name suggests, the public domain is the property of the public – that’s you! The stock photographs that fall under this category are free game, and the users can use them without any license or permission. You also don’t need to attribute the author and can utilise the Public Domain images without giving credit.
  • Royalty-Free: Another standard license that you will see in the stock photography sector is the royalty-free license. This type of license requires the users to pay a one-time payment that will allow them to use the photograph across several platforms without needing to purchase the license. However, want to make sure that you read the terms and conditions carefully to understand the legal requirements, especially for attribution.
  • Rights Managed: The Rights Managed license gives the marketers one-time permission to use the stock image. This means that you will have to purchase a license each time you utilise the same image on a different platform. Because of this, Rights Managed images are not preferred for use in ads as you will have to repurchase the license each time you decide to run the same in a second ad or on a different platform. However, Rights Managed images are unique, and you will rarely encounter the problem of seeing the same picture on a competitor’s ad with the use of this type of license.

Avoid Cliches

ModCloth ad example

One of the things that make marketers so wary of stock photographs is that some of them are too generic and cliche. If you look closely at the database of stock images, you will see hundreds upon thousands of photos that look over-posed or unrealistic.

A woman dancing with a bowl of salad, men striking a pose in business suits, and a businessperson hugging a briefcase are just some examples of cliche stock photographs that you should altogether avoid in your display ads. Not only that, but these kinds of stock photographs are often overused in display ads and will make you look lazy in front of the audience.

When choosing stock photographs for your ads, your goal is to find images that resonate with the core message of your ad. Consider how well a photo will compel the viewer to click and move down the sales funnel. Instead of going with the first photograph you see, search thoroughly to find the one unique visual that portrays your brand’s message in the most efficient manner.

Be Relevant

While this should go without saying, we are going to say it anyway: Aim for relevance! When scrolling through your newsfeed, you may have seen countless examples of display ads that don’t seem related to the content of the ad. These types of ads misleads the viewers who often become confused as to what the ad is really about.

Ultimately, this will reduce their trust in your brand and negatively impact their purchasing decision.

Food chains do a great job at avoiding advertising pitfalls. In their Facebook ads, they use their primary product in the ads in order to display relevancy to their content. Just take a look at the example by Domino’s Pizza. They use a clear picture of their offering – a pizza to advertise their newest deal. A clear image to portray what you will be receiving at their stores.

AirBnB ad

Be Candid

As we mentioned above, the biggest problem with stock photographs is the unrealistic appearance of people as the main subject. Not only do posed images of people look unauthentic but cheesy as well – completely turning off the viewers.

However, humans relate to humans, and adding pictures of them having fun or enjoying your brand is one way to get the attention of the audience. When possible, use original photos of people using your products/services. You can also use behind-the-scenes footage of your employees working in the background.

But if it’s not possible to get customised shoots of people, look for stock photographs that appear candid and not over staged.

Edible Blooms Facebook ad example
‘Unstock’ the Stock

Adding your own touch to the stock photograph is another way to make them personalised for your specific marketing campaign. Something as small as cropping the photo or adding a small amount of text can help make the photograph more contextually relevant to your ad.

However, remember to check the licensing details of the stock photo provider you choose to ensure they are allowed for modification. While most stock photo agencies allow editing of their photos, it won’t hurt to recheck the fine print to make sure you are not breaking the law.

Here is an excellent example from an ad by Little Spoon. They combined a generic stock photo with their own ad copy and call to action. They even added their own logo to the ad copy to make it look more personalised.

Edible Blooms Facebook ad example

Test Your Ads

There are millions of stock photographs on the internet, and most marketers become greedy when they see the plethora of images available. Well, when it comes to ads, it is ok to be a little greedy. This is because you don’t have to limit yourself to one image per ad. You can create various versions of the same ad and test to see which one works best.

Yes, through A/B testing, you can run two ads simultaneously to the same audience to see which one resonates with your audience the most. However, I would recommend that you only use a different stock image and use the same ad copy in all your ads. This way, you will be able to see the difference in reaction to each image.

Final Words

These were just some tips to get you started with stock photographs in display ads. As you can see, stock photographs are a great way to add a visual element to your ads. With these tips, you can now turn your ads into engaging and effective tools. Good luck!

Top tips for scaling your app acquisition campaigns using Facebook ads

Posted on by Arham Khan

In this era of apps, we see an ever more significant need to utilise the tools and processes aligned to digital marketing in a way that ensures the market you’re focusing on is targeted correctly and the ROI is maximised through Facebook ads.

  • Here are some tips for your next app acquisition campaign through Facebook ads
  • Facebook ads have great potential to maximise your app acquisitions, so make sure your social media ad strategy is working for you, not burning through the ad budget
  • With practical tips on how to create Facebook app acquisition campaigns, you’ll learn the key aspects of creating successful Facebook ads

Facebook ads are the number one source of paid traffic to generate app downloads. But due to its success, Facebook can also be a highly competitive place to run campaigns and you must do so with knowledge of how to get your app noticed with the correct targeting, messaging and budgets.

In this guide, you’ll be given a full introduction to ensuring your Facebook ad campaigns are optimised to ensure your app acquisition can scale quickly and profitably. We want you to spend time focusing on ensuring maximum visibility by understanding the foundations.

Let’s get straight into it. You have an app. You have spent time designing and developing it. You’re proud of its functionality and design, but let’s be realistic – you haven’t spent all that time and money as a hobby. Here’s the step by step guide to fulfilling your app acquisitions potential.

How to Build Your App Acquisition Campaign

1. Make sure your goal is clear.

  • Are you looking to raise more awareness for your brand?
  • Are you trying to retarget and therefore remarket to expired users?
  • Are you seeking to attract new users?
  • Is there a need for you to increase engagement in your app?
  • Have you got a special offer that needs to be promoted?
  • Are you needing to market your app’s website URL?

ModCloth ad example

When you create your campaign in Facebook Ads Manager, make sure you select ‘App Installs’ as the primary objective, as this will give you the functionality and tools you need to create the right type of campaign and allow you to add your app as your final URL, taking potential users directly to the download page.

2. Know your audience. This is by far the most important part of your ad campaign set up. Knowing your audience ensures that you can target the right people out of the over 1.5 billion users, which means that you will need to be as precise as possible in this part of the campaign setup. As you would expect, finding the correct audience reach is intricate at every level from age, location, interests, job titles etc. Spend plenty of time on this step.

AirBnB ad

A tip here would be to look at Facebook’s Audience Insights tool as this will help you narrow your targeting down.

3. You are spending good money on your ad, so it’s only right that you make it count! Your ad needs to be really good… Obvious? Not at all. It is essential. Your success is absolutely dependent on this to be successful with your campaign. Do not underestimate or race through your ad creation. The ad is your brand and your brand is the ad. They are not separate and therefore the design and content must be consistent and aligned. You have only a few seconds, not even as many as 10 seconds to grab a user’s attention, so the key is to draw the eye and the focus as quickly as possible.

A creative asset is a key aspect. Worth a thousand words, to use the old adage, so your ad needs to use the best possible storytelling picture possible for your app. Depending on the type of app you are advertising, it might be a better idea to consider a carefully thought through video to show people how your app works and what they’re going to get from downloading it. Don’t try to save money here, employ someone to make it who really knows what they are doing.

Edible Blooms Facebook ad example

Like every single piece of literature we see on the newsstand or internet, a headline is an opportunity to convince your audience to read the whole ad. Words need to be well chosen to strike the right note. It’s a good idea to include a call to action in your headline. Tell the reader what you want them to do. Use Facebook’s preview tool, which will appear on the right hand side as you develop your advert, to make sure your headline is short enough to be seen across all devices. Don’t use the word count up for the sake of it, make it short and snappy.

Your ad copy needs to inform your audience quickly of the value your app brings or what your offer is. You don’t have a lot of room to get the key message across, so – as above – keep it short and sweet. Think impact, think what’s the point of using our app, think how can I write this and present it in a clever and creative way.

And then there’s the essential component – your Call-to-Action (CTA). If it’s not automatically set to encourage users to install or download your app, make sure you change it. The power of this tool is the key to unlocking the full potential a download of your app.

Scaling Your App Acquisitions Requires Constant Testing and Optimising

In summing up, it is essential that you test as much as you can as part of the ad creation process. Different audiences may actually yield different results, so it’s best to test these separately. Visual assets are the essential draw. If your creative assets aren’t eye catching enough, then you must be willing to change them for better alternatives. Remember, the whole purpose is to get as many people as possible to take your desired campaign action, and your Facebook ad campaign cost has one function – a higher return on the investment you’ve made.

Key Takeaways

  • Use the ‘App installs’ campaign objective during the Facebook Ads Manager campaign set up phase
  • Knowing your audience ensures that you can target the right people out of the over 1.5 billion users
  • A creative asset is a key ingredient to a good app acquisition campaign
  • A headline is an opportunity to convince your audience to read the whole ad – make it count
  • Your ad copy needs to inform the audience quickly of the value your app brings
  • Don’t forget your Call-to-Action