Twitter Update Sets Goal To Be “Best Place To Share Media”
Twitter announced an update to multimedia sharing that, together with another update, makes it easier to discover videos and in essence transitions Twitter toward becoming a multimedia sharing platform.
The announcement states clearly and without ambiguity that its goal is to become “the best place to share media” and posted examples of the new functionalities.
Starting today any Twitter app users can upload up to four videos, images, and/or GIFs within a single tweet.
This change partners with another important update that adds a video carousel to the Explore feature.
The video carousel allows users to discover more videos to watch.
Twitter’s announcement is clear that their goal is to transition their platform from mostly a text based social media destination into more of a multimedia sharing platform.
The focus of this update is to provide a way for creators to express themselves while the updates to the video carousel helps users to discover the new videos.
Examples of New Format
Twitter posted examples of new and creative ways to share media and tell a story.
One example is a side by side tweet juxtaposing an image and a tweet.
This kind of tweet provides the ability to juxtapose an image and a video and to also play the video while retaining the side by side formatting.
Big Changes at Twitter
Twitter has made numerous changes to its platforms to encourage monetization for creators.
But none of those updates caused a substantial change to the platform itself.
These new updates are significant because they profoundly change what Twitter is, going from a mainly text-based sharing platform to a multimedia sharing social site.
Source: Twitter Update Sets Goal To Be “Best Place To Share Media”
Amazon advertising optimizations to crush Q4
When it comes to online shopping, there’s an undisputed leader.
Boasting a 37.8% share of the ecommerce market, Amazon is far and away the biggest online retailer in the U.S. – and poised to surpass Walmart as the number one retailer overall by 2024.
With so many people shopping for everyday goods on Amazon, setting aside a chunk of your advertising budget to take advantage of the site’s commercial traffic is a smart business strategy.
What you sell isn’t terribly important. People buy everything from Legos and binoculars to jewelry, clothing, and kitchen appliances on Amazon.
Focus instead on how to sell your products and you’ll end the fourth quarter on a high note.
Use sponsored campaigns to attract shoppers
Sponsored product campaigns are easy to create and allow you to control your costs by setting a price on how much you’ll spend per click. They work well with:
- Sponsored brands that focus on your overall business rather than a single product.
- Sponsored display campaigns – interactive ads that can reach shoppers not just on Amazon, but on other sites as well.
Data offers a bigger payoff than blind luck
When creating a sponsored product campaign, don’t just rely on luck. Sales and performance metrics tell the true story.
Getting cozy with data will help you understand your advertising cost of sale (ACoS) – an important tool in formulating a successful ad strategy.
To calculate your Amazon ACoS, divide your advertising expenditure by the total revenue earned.
If you spend $20 on advertising and sell $100 worth of products, then your ACoS is 20%. Breaking it down further, this means you spend $0.20 for every $1.00 you make.
Obviously, the lower your ACoS, the higher your profit.
While ACoS is an important metric, it isn’t the end all, be all.
Don’t miss out on opportunities
Ad campaign optimization ensures you are targeting the right audience and utilizing the right platforms and tools. It allows you to create personalized content and can go a long way toward reducing your customer acquisition costs.
There are several things you should look for when optimizing your ad campaigns.
Underperforming SKUs
In most cases, underperforming SKUs should be paused. But the work doesn’t end there. Research the reasons why they were underperforming by asking yourself the following questions:
- Which SKUs are performing better and why? Is it the budget?
- Are the keywords in the campaign not as relevant?
- Is that SKU simply not as good compared to the products it’s competing against?
- Is the product detail page not optimized enough?
Bids
Since bidding on keywords is an auction-based format, you are never operating in a silo.
Raising and lowering your keyword bids will make a big impact on your ACoS and overall results. The following tips can help:
- Look for keywords that aren’t relevant or are not converting.
- Review the targeting. Are you using phrase/exact match for the high-converting gems?
- Don’t forget about automatic targeting types. Loose match, close match and product targeting are all areas of opportunity.
- Make sure your inventory levels are high and you are maintaining the buy box.
- Use negative keywords to your advantage. This is great for all campaigns but especially effective in automatic and broad acquisition campaigns.
Use coupons and promotions
Everyone loves a deal – especially in this economy and during this time of year.
Even if you aren’t participating in Cyber Monday, you can still offer coupons and promotions to help boost conversion rates and sales.
When used with sponsored product ads, this is a great way to bring in more sales.
Study the search query performance dashboard
If you are a brand registered seller, this report gives you valuable insights into:
- Your customer’s shopping journey in comparison to your competitors.
- Each search term’s volume and rank.
Manage your budgets properly
Web traffic will increase in the next few months and advertisers will be raising their budgets. The downside?
You risk using up your budget allocation much faster than usual. This is true even on normal days, not just special events like Cyber Monday and Black Friday.
If your budget won’t allow ads to run all day, make sure you are using dayparting.
This strategy involves scheduling your ads for certain days of the week and certain times of the day when you get the most conversions.
Now that you’ve learned how to optimize your ads for Amazon, it’s time to make some great impressions!
Source: Amazon advertising optimizations to crush Q4
Google Analytics Discontinues Store Visits Reporting
Google advises publishers it will no longer report on store visits data in Google Analytics. Data will stop generating at the end of October, though historical data will remain available.
This announcement was quietly rolled out via an update to a Google Analytics help page.
The update was spotted by Charles Farina of Adswerve, who shared his discovery on LinkedIn
Store visits in Google Analytics is an estimate of the number of people who visited a physical location after visiting its website.
Google tracks store visit data by following the activity of people with location history enabled on their phones.
Reports on store visits are only available to businesses with their Google Analytics property linked to a Google Ads account.
That means businesses aren’t losing the data, as Google Ads will continue reporting on store visits after it’s discontinued in Google Analytics.
Source: Google Analytics Discontinues Store Visits Reporting
Google can now automatically create your ad assets
A new setting in beta allows Google the ability to automatically create additional ad assets (header and description). The feature uses the creative content from the following sources:
- Landing page
- Relevant web pages
- Existing text ads in the same ad group
- Keywords in the same ad group
How auto-created assets work. If you have access to this new feature, you’ll instruct Google to generate the assets from eligible sources based on relevance and predicted performance.
Performance reports. Advertisers can view the performance of their automatically-created assets by navigating to the reporting section of their ads account.
Asset Report. You can see which assets are being used in the RSAs by navigating to “Asset report” from the Ad level to “View asset details” and viewing all of the assets used.
- You can use the “source” column to distinguish between automatically created assets vs advertiser-created assets
- Automatically created assets will show impressions and performance ratings
- On the channel-level asset report, auto-created assets are visible like advertiser-provided assets
Combination report. The actual combinations and ads that are served can be viewed by going to “combination report” and viewing all the ads that are served.
Opt-out. You can choose to opt-out of automatically generated assets by going into your Google Ads account, navigating to Settings, then clicking Automatically created assets, then selecting Off: Use only assets I provide directly for my ads.
Source: Google can now automatically create your ad assets
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