Snapchat+ Reaches 1 Million Subscribers & Adds New Features - Snapchat+ launch was covered in Episode#115. And now it seems that in 6-weeks, Snapchat+ has crossed 1 Million subscribers. FYI: Snapchat+ is a premium membership tier available for $3.99 per month that grants access to exclusive features. At launch time, it had the following features:
A Snapchat+ badge.
And now here are the new features that Snapchat has added:
Snapchat+ seems to have better features than the comparable subscription service Twitter Blue. And Twitter Blue is about a $1 more per month ($4.99). While Twitter hasn’t revealed how many premium subscribers it has. However, there’s evidence suggesting the service isn’t doing well. According to Twitter’s Q2 2022 earnings report, revenue from ‘subscriptions and other’ sources is down 36% year-over-year.
Prior to hosted checkout, when shoppers wanted to shop from a product Pin, they has to click the Pin, visited the retailer’s own site and go through extra steps to add products to their cart, enter payment and shipping details, etc.
With hosted checkout, shoppers will pick the exact product they want—think colors or sizing. Then, they tap “Buy” to enter the hosted checkout experience via Shopify where they will enter details like shipping and payment.
In my opinion, it does eliminate couple of steps in the checkout process. The hidden benefits of this integration are:
a.) The time delay from transferring a shopper from Pinterest to Shopify store is eliminated
b.) Better conversion data that would otherwise be lost due to Apple’s ATT update.
3 New Types Of Shopping Ads On TikTok - Advertisers can now run shopping ads on TikTok with three different formats to choose from. They are:
Video shopping ads - Video shopping ads allow advertisers to create shoppable videos for display on the For You page. This ad type combines features from existing TikTok ads — collection ads and dynamic showcase ads. Video shopping ads will dynamically combine video creative and product cards into different variations. The format can be either product-specific to drive sales or a broader brand message to drive consideration. As TikTok gathers data, it will optimize a campaign’s performance by dynamically choosing the top converting combinations. When a user taps on the ad, TikTok will create an in-app landing page to better determine a user’s intent to buy. These pages let shoppers learn more about products and redirect users to a retailer’s site when they’re ready to purchase. Collection ads and dynamic showcase ads will remain available until the end of the year, then TikTok plans to phase them out in favor of video shopping ads.
The new advertising formats are accessible in TikTok Ads manager through buying objective ‘Product Sales.’
Advertisers can utilize these new shopping ads with or without an e-commerce store on TikTok. Access to shopping ads requires advertisers to reach “level one” status by integrating advanced signals and linking their product catalogs. TikTok has a PDF guide that outlines the whole process. Advertisers are not required to utilize TikTok Shop, an in-app ecommerce solution, to run shopping ads. Although TikTok Shop can be used with shopping ads, advertisers can direct shoppers to an external site.
Now in a new tips post, TikTok also says that “Instant Page” can be great for providing additional contextual detail and insight, in order to boost campaign performance.
“Instant Page is especially useful for informing, educating, and engaging users on complex topics where ad creatives can’t go into the necessary detail e.g. for finance brands. With added vital information about the product and service clearly listed on the Instant Page, it provides prospective users with the necessary consideration points in order to make more sound judgments before purchasing. This, in turn, shortens their decision-making time.
Campaign results from our platform prove this again and again. Campaigns that use an Instant Page reduce their cost per acquisition up to 75%, compared to campaigns that don’t use the feature. Not only that, these campaigns also achieve a 25% to 35% higher click-through rate on call to action buttons within the Instant Page. That means out of every three or four people who view an advertiser’s Instant Page, at least one person will engage with the CTA button.”
If you are considering “Instant Page” as a potential addition for your ads, TikTok has also shared some key best practice tips and notes:
You can learn more about TikTok’s Instant Page tools here.
IG/FB Reels Update - Here the updates to IG/FB Reels:
Crosspost Instagram Reels To Facebook - If you have accounts on both social networks you can post a Reel on Instagram and have it post on Facebook at the same time. The next time you create a Reel on Instagram you’ll get a prompt asking if you want to share it to Facebook. After opting in to crossposting all reels created on Instagram will automatically share to Facebook unless you indicate otherwise at the time of posting. Meta’s also expanding its Remix option to Facebook Reels also. Keep in mind the default privacy setting for Reels is public. Even If you have a private Facebook profile, people you’re not connected to will be able to see your Reels.
Schedule Reels On Facebook - Using Creator Studio you can schedule Facebook Reels content in advance, and manage all your published Reels in one central location.
Meta’s “Foundations of Performance” Guide Provides Tips To Mitigate ATT Impacts - Since Apple’s ATT update went live, most brands are simply not getting the same bang for their buck as they once were. May be this is why Meta has published a new guide to help brands realign with the latest changes, and get their ad performance back on track. The new 21 page guide outlines key points of focus for advertisers. I skimmed through the guide and the 2 points that jumped out are:
Use Conversions API - Enables brands to use their own marketing data for improved retargeting and measurement. Meta claims that Advertisers who followed best practices while sending events redundantly via the Meta Pixel and Conversions API received an 8% CPA improvement on average. The Conversions API lets advertisers plug their customer information directly into Meta’s system. That alleviates the need to rely on the data that Meta itself can (or more effectively can’t) collect, which can help to mitigate the impacts of ATT on your ad targeting.
You can download the full Meta ‘Foundations of Performance’ guide here,
John responded on Twitter saying, "Sure. There are a lot of great & old websites on HTTP. It's not a requirement to be on HTTPS."
But do keep in mind that HTTPS is one of the ranking signals that Google uses. Just spend the extra dollars and get the https (SSL certificate).
John wrote "It doesn't really matter what happened, but yes, any URL can drop out of the index over time." What this means is that, you need to periodically check your Google Search Console and make sure that your pages are still indexed and if you find that a page has been de-indexed then go ahead and request a re-indexing manually.
Previously, Google would automatically disapprove Google Merchant Center feed listings that either is missing a return policy, refund policy and/or containing insufficient contact information. Going forward, that is no longer the case. Google said these free listings with these issues will remain active however it may have limited visibility due to how the policy enforced. Google said, “free listings accounts with these issue statuses will remain active, but their products will have limited visibility on Google.”
Google defines “Insufficient contact information” as “Websites that are missing required contact information, have unverified business information in Merchant Center, or both.” Examples include the Website is missing contact information (e.g. no social media link, contact email address, or phone number); Merchant Center account has missing contact information, such as a physical business address or a verified phone number; contact information is missing from both the store website and Merchant Center account.
Google defines “Missing return and refund policy” as “Websites that are missing return and refund information.” Examples include the Store return policy pages that are empty or don’t state all the requirements for return; refund policies that aren’t clear or easy to find; no return or refund policy is clearly stated.
Google wants to reward sites with useful content that was written for humans and to help users. And penalize sites where the content was written for the purpose of ranking in search engines – what you might call “search engine-first content” or “SEO content”.
Unlike other Google algorithms that get applied on a page-by-page basis, this new helpful content update will be sitewide. That means that if Google determines your site is producing a relatively high amount of unhelpful content, primarily written for ranking in search, then your whole site will be impacted. This will not just impact individual pages or sections of your site, but rather, it will impact the whole site.
Google won’t say exactly what percentage of the pages on your site need to be helpful versus unhelpful to trigger this classifier but they did say it is sitewide and will impact the whole site, even if you have many pages that are helpful. Again, if you have helpful pages but a relatively high amount of your content is unhelpful, even your helpful content or sections of your site will be hit by this update. Google said “removing unhelpful content could help the rankings of your other content.”
If a site gets hit by the helpful content update, it can take several months for the site to recover. A site needs to prove itself over time that it no longer publishes content with the sole reason to rank in search engines, a search engine first content experience, and that takes time. Here is what Dan Sullivan from Google wrote: “Sites identified by this update may find the signal applied to them over a period of months. Our classifier for this update runs continuously, allowing it to monitor newly-launched sites and existing ones. As it determines that the unhelpful content has not returned in the long-term, the classification will no longer apply.”
Google is using a new machine learning algorithm that looks at a variety of signals about the page and site to determine the ranking of a page and decide on the quality of the content. Google engineers tweaking and improving the overall algorithms on a regular basis so the algorithm should get better over time. While these algorithms do not specifically target any specific niche, Google said these types of content may be impacted the most:
Here is an example from Google search where the helpful content update would make an impact:
To write better content, Google shared these questions around building human-first content:
And when it comes to avoiding search-engine first content, Google laid out these questions: