WebProNews

Category: EnterpriseCRMNews

EnterpriseCRMNews

  • 5 Ways to Use PopUps to Drive eCommerce Conversion

    5 Ways to Use PopUps to Drive eCommerce Conversion

    Popups – you either love them or hate them. But no one can deny how essential they are to eCommerce businesses. When used correctly, popups can give companies the conversions they need.

    Understanding PopUps

    While a lot of people find popups annoying and blame them for disrupting their website visits, successful bloggers, top SaaS companies, global online publications, and premiere eCommerce brands all utilize popups.

    The reason is simple – popups work really well. And one reason why they are so effective is due to today’s typical consumer attitude. Most consumers have short attention spans, minimal brand loyalty, and are often looking for products that give the utmost value. Popups can engage people in a compelling manner through visible call-to-action and incentives.

    The SkinnyMe Tea company is a prime example of the power of popups. The Australian-based business came up with an email popup that gave shoppers a promo code for a 10% discount, provided said shoppers subscribed to their newsletter. These customers clearly saw the value in the offer and email sign-ups increased by 758%. Aside from the padded email list, the company also saw a 50% rise in conversions for the duration of the campaign.

    skinnyme tea Shopify Plus email list growth

    5 Ways to Use PopUps to Boost Conversion

    Many other eCommerce businesses were also able to use popups successfully by thinking outside the box. Here are five ways to use this type of advertising to boost conversion rates and sales.

    1. Offer Something Extra With Your Welcome Popup

    It’s vital for eCommerce businesses to try and convert new visitors to either social followers or email subscribers. Even if the visitor doesn’t end up buying initially, the odds become better if you can get them to return, either with a newsletter or some form of social media interaction.

    One way to do this would be to have a well-designed popup that asks them to like the company’s social profile or to submit their email address. Once done, the visitor will be rewarded with a promo code for a substantial discount.

    1. Reduce Cart Abandonment Rates With a Catchy Exit Popup

    Cart abandonment slows revenue down and hinders conversion rates. But exit-intent popups can do a lot in deflecting customers from their intention of leaving the page without finishing their order.

    Related image

    It’s a good bet that most of your customers are interested in buying but are wary of clicking that final button because of the price. This could also cause prospective clients to check out the competition. If you want to prevent lost sales from these customers, try enforcing exit-intent offers that blatantly interrupt their leaving. Maybe you can prevent them from leaving prematurely by offering special discounts or giving away a free product if they continue with their purchase.

    1. Use Specially Triggered Popups to Upsell or Cross-Sell Products

    Amazon is a prime example of how beneficial upselling or cross-selling is to online retailers, and this technique could be enhanced further with the use of popups. You can design ones that are triggered when a customer searches for a particular product. For instance, a customer shopping for new Levi’s might encounter a popup suggesting boots that look good with that style of denim.

    You can make it even better by offering discounts for the cross-sell or upsell product. This gives the customer an incentive to buy another product that would go well with the item that they’re already purchasing. This is an inspired way to boost sales, as selling to current customers is easier than trying to convince new customers to buy something.

    1. Subtly Push Customers into Action with Time-Sensitive Popups

    Another useful strategy is to create time-sensitive popups that will give customers a push into taking immediate action. For instance, a company can implement a popup that offers a $10 discount and free shipping if the customer can complete their order at a certain time. Aside from providing a sense of urgency, it also gives the customer an incentive to complete the checkout process.

    1. Use Popups to Inform Customers of Shipping Policies

    Shipping is one of the main concerns of online shoppers. Unfortunately, customers are not in the habit of scrolling to the end of the page just to check out the company’s shipping policies. So if you’re shipping to their location, it’s best to use a popup to let the customer know that in advance. Auto geolocation technology can be used to detect and identify the customer’s IP address. Once that data has been ascertained, a popup can be triggered that informs the client of their shipping options.

    Image result for geolocation popup example

    Don’t drive your customers away with run-of-the-mill popups. Find creative ways to harness the power of these little windows and use them to enhance conversion rates and boost sales.

  • Salesforce Has a New Partner, and Its Name is Google

    Salesforce Has a New Partner, and Its Name is Google

    Google and Salesforce have come to an agreement, one that will see the former’s G Suites productivity apps directly integrated with the latter’s CRM service. The impressive partnership between the two companies was one of the highlights of this year’s Dreamforce event.

    While the two companies have been associated with each other for more than a decade, the new arrangement will see Google Cloud becoming Saleforce’s prime choice of public cloud provider, as well as becoming its key cloud provider for the global expansion the company is said to be making.

    Not only will this partnership see the integration of Salesforce’s service with Google’s G Suite software, it will also give Salesforce’s clients a free G Suite subscription that will be good for a year. This means clients who run G Suite will have access and be able to share information from their accounts in Google Calendar, Gmail, Drive, Docs, and Hangouts. It will also feed data from the CRM platform’s Sales and Marketing Clouds into Google Analytics 360. It’s expected that Google Analytics 360 will already be embedded in Salesforce’s Sales and Marketing Clouds by the first six months of 2018.

    The alliance between Google and Salesforce will also see Quip being integrated as a live app in both Google Calendar and Drive. This will permit users to work in those apps inside a Quip document. The feature will be available to Quip license holders by the first half of 2018 as well.

    Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff described the partnership as a way for customers of both companies to have the best of both worlds. He explained that it will make it easier for companies to manage their business in the cloud, whether its analytics and emails, sales, service and marketing apps, and even productivity apps. Benioff also promised that the deal between Salesforce and Google will assist in making clients work smarter and become more productive.

    The integration of Salesforce’s data into the Calendar, Drive, and Gmail has already commenced, and other integrations are set to be released next year. What’s more, the tie-up with analytics is reportedly scheduled to be rolled out next year and will be offered for free.

    Salesforce and Google do not have time to rest on their laurels though, as Microsoft has been determinedly targeting the two companies’ services through the Azure and Office 365 platforms. Luckily, Google and Salesforce’s new alliance means that they have their own means to counter Microsoft’s prime selling points.

    [Featured image via Salesforce]

  • Amazon Announces Cloud-Based Contact Center Service

    Amazon Announces Cloud-Based Contact Center Service

    Amazon has released Connect, a contact center as a service hosted in the AWS cloud. The service is based on the same contact center technology Amazon has built for their own use.

    AWS says that setting up Connect can be done in minutes with only a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. No specialized skills are needed to set up and operate Connect:

    “Amazon Connect’s self-service graphical interface makes it easy for non-technical users to design contact flows, manage agents, and track performance metrics…The service also makes it possible to design contact flows that adapt the caller experience, changing based on information retrieved by Amazon Connect from AWS services, like Amazon Redshift, or third-party systems, like CRM or analytics solutions. “

    Fees for the service are based on the number of customer minutes used and time spent on the phone. Calls cost $0.03 or $0.06 for toll free numbers. Amazon Connect offers direct inward dial (DID) numbers and toll-free numbers in the United States and 18 countries throughout Europe.

    IDC estimates that worldwide contact center application software revenues were about $5.8 billion for on premises and $1.9 billion for public-cloud in 2016; by 2020, on-premises will be $5.5 billion and cloud will be $4.3 billion, representing a compound annual growth rate of -0.8% for on-premises and 22.9% for the cloud over that time.

  • LinkedIn Makes Spamming Contacts Easy With Conversation Starters… Fun!

    LinkedIn added Conversation Starters to their messaging platform, making contacting people you never speak to so easy, even a fifth grader can do it! Let’s get started:

    Let’s say you’re a salesman and you want to contact someone you have never talked to before about buying your product. This is always a dilemma, right? Hmm… what should be my opening line? Well, LinkedIn has now made this easy by giving me handy conversation starters.

    All I have to do is click the lightbulb. Great!! 🙂 And it’s not creepy or spammy at all! Every executive will love getting tons of these kinds of messages:

    Click… Hi Suzi, I’ve noticed you’ve also connected with Mike Manuel. How did you…

    Click… Hi Suzi, I noticed you have 7 connections at Edelman. Have you heard…

    Click… Hi Suzi, I noticed you have 5 connections at Bateman Group. Have you heard…

    Click… Hi Suzi, I noticed you have 6 connections at Intelligent Energy. Have you heard…

    Click… Hi Suzi, I noticed you have 10 connections at Google. Have you heard…

    “With conversation starters, you can spend less time figuring out what to say, and more time having conversations that help you get ahead and reach your professional goals,” says Sammy Shreibati, LinkedIn Product Manager.

    Sheesh… give me a break! Helpful. No. Spammy. Yes. Seriously, this is not an authentic way for salespeople to contact prospects, especially because it is built-in to LinkedIn messaging where decision makers can be guaranteed to receive multiple versions of these in their in-box.

    All sales messages should be authentic, personalized to the prospect and provide some specific solution the marketer knows that the receiver of the message will relate to.

    Here are some prospecting tips.

  • Facebook’s Creative Hub Helps Businesses Make Effective Ads

    Facebook’s Creative Hub Helps Businesses Make Effective Ads

    Facebook has launched Creative Hub, a platform for its mobile advertisers to learn, create and share ad media. Creative Hub is billed as “a new way to create mockups for ads, share them with anyone and experience your work as though it’s live.”

    Creative Hub is already getting rave reviews from advertisers and agencies. “I am in no way exaggerating when I say that when I first used it, I sent an internal email to the whole department declaring (and I quote) ‘it is sick… IT WILL CHANGE OUR LIVES’,” exclaimed Ben Shaw, Head of BBH Live at BBH London.

    “We designed Creative Hub to be a faster, easier way to produce ideas that capture attention and delight people where they’re spending their time—on mobile,” noted the Facebook ad team in a recent blog post. “Today, the Creative Hub is available to the entire global advertising and marketing community.”

    Facebook has been testing Creative Hub since June with selected ad agencies and is just now making it available for all advertisers. They have since added a new Inspiration Gallery showcasing examples of inspiring mobile creative across Facebook and Instagram.

    “We developed Creative Hub in response to the needs we heard from the creative community, who told us they needed a tool to help them experiment with content creation on Facebook and Instagram—including trying new formats, previewing ideas on mobile screens, collaborating internally and sharing mock-ups with stakeholders,” noted Facebook.

    With Facebook Creative Hub advertisers can be inspired by a gallery of creatives from various brands and agencies in all available formats including 360 video, carousel, canvas and video. You can even mock up your own ideas within the various ad formats and save your work to view later, or even share and collaborate on your creative work with your team.

    Once you have mock-ups, you can preview your ad as though it’s live in a mobile feed, and you can also see how it might look on Facebook News Feed or Instagram feed, according to Facebook. The Hub will provide you with a URL of your work to share with staff and clients as well.

  • Google’s DoubleClick Bringing Video to Native Ads

    Google’s DoubleClick Bringing Video to Native Ads

    Google’s DoubleClick announced today the ability to include video with both mobile and desktop native ads. This is important considering that more than half of all ad queries on DoubleClick’s publisher platform are on mobile.

    “With the addition of video to our native ads solution, publishers can now capture premium video advertising budgets on their non-video content,” said Jonathan Bellack, DoubleClick’s Director of Product Management of Publisher Platforms.

    Chris Quinn, Head of Commercial Operations at Kijiji, which is a subsidiary of eBay, commented on their tests with native ad video:

    “The [DoubleClick] native video templates — content and app-install — enable Kijiji to give our advertisers an alternative to banner and static native. We were excited about the ability to run assets seamlessly without embedded video players, which will hopefully give us a jumpstart in the video space. Testing has just begun across our iOS app, and we look forward to seeing positive results and potentially incorporating into our greater offering in 2017.”

    DoubleClick Extends Exchange Bidding to Mobile

    DoubleClick has also expanded the beta of Exchange Bidding to include mobile apps.

    “Exchange Bidding helps publishers maximize demand for every impression by letting them put multiple exchanges into competition in real time without adding any new client-side code,” said Quinn. “Since we announced it earlier this year, the number of participating publishers has grown 4x, the number of exchange partners has doubled, and we’ve moved the product from alpha into closed beta in the US.”

    Christian Sieweke, Senior Product Manager at Smaato, commented on their use of Exchange Bidding:

    “By integrating directly with DoubleClick for Publishers, Smaato can compete in real time for ad impressions based on price and priority, in parallel with other exchanges. We’re delighted to be an early participant in Exchange Bidding and look forward to expanding this solution to all of our partners.”

    DoubleClick Extends Dynamic Ad Insertion To VOD

    They also announced that they were extending Dynamic Ad Insertion to video on demand (VOD). Dynamic Ad Insertion delivers seamless, personalized ad experiences to all screens, especially TV.

    “Publishers like A+E Networks are now inserting relevant, highly targeted ads into both long- and short-form VOD content across all devices, and delivering personalized ads while eliminating common pain points like buffering,” noted Bellack. “This feature will be capable of serving both direct-sold and programmatic campaigns – in both cases delivering smarter, data-driven ads that perform better.”

  • Skype Becomes More Seamless For Business–No Login Required

    Skype Becomes More Seamless For Business–No Login Required

    Microsoft’s Skype did something very smart today, it made it possible to use Skype in guest mode and with that eliminated a choke spot for using it as a business tool. Often meetings happen spontaneously, someone emails a request to talk about a potential deal and then the teleconference platform needs to be decided on. This decision is often made based on the communications tool that both are registered to use.

    Now anyone can use Skype without having to go through a registration or download process, making it much easier for business professionals to use for their deal making.

    “By joining Skype as a Guest, you can quickly chat, voice or video call without any hassle,” noted the Skype Team in their announcement. “Perfect if you’re new to Skype and want to quickly chat with someone, anywhere in the world, for free.”

  • Facebook Cancels Racial Targeting For Certain Advertisers

    Facebook Cancels Racial Targeting For Certain Advertisers

    Facebook announced today that it no longer will allow advertisers marketing products and services related to housing, credit or employment to target their ads based on race.

    Erin Egan, VP, US Public Policy and Chief Privacy Officer explained:

    Recently, policymakers and civil rights leaders have expressed concerns that advertisers could misuse some aspects of our affinity marketing segments. Specifically, they’ve raised the possibility that some advertisers might use these segments to run ads that discriminate against people, particularly in areas where certain groups have historically faced discrimination — housing, employment and the extension of credit.

    We take these issues seriously. Discriminatory advertising has no place on Facebook.

    Facebook is making changes as follows:

    Going forward, we have decided to make the following changes to our advertising products. We will:

    • Build tools to detect and automatically disable the use of ethnic affinity marketing for certain types of ads: We will disable the use of ethnic affinity marketing for ads that we identify as offering housing, employment, or credit. There are many non-discriminatory uses of our ethnic affinity solution in these areas, but we have decided that we can best guard against discrimination by suspending these types of ads. We will continue to explore ways that our ethnic affinity solution can be used to promote inclusion of underrepresented communities, and we will continue to work with stakeholders toward that goal.
    • Offer more clarification and education: We will update our Advertising Policies to be even more explicit and require advertisers to affirm that they will not engage in discriminatory advertising on Facebook, and we will offer new educational materials to help advertisers understand their obligations with respect to housing, employment and credit.

    Read the full announcement at Facebook.

  • Facebook’s Audience Network Ad Platform is All About Conversions

    Facebook’s Audience Network Ad Platform is All About Conversions

    Since Facebook’s Audience Network ad platform was launched, they have always been about differentiating themselves from Google Adsense by focusing more on conversions. Recently, they announced that they would start pricing clicks differently depending on where the ad was placed, with the idea that not all clicks are created equal.

    “Not all clicks are created equal, which creates a dilemma,” said David Jakubowski, who is Director of Publisher Solutions for Audience Network. “Marketers commonly pay the same amount for someone who clicks on an ad and completes a purchase as they do for an unintentional click. In both cases, publishers are delivering exactly what they are asked for – clicks – but advertisers find wide variations in value.”

    Facebook is doubling down on their conversion strategy announcing updates to Audience Network that will utilize the data they have from conversion signals to price ad spots based on their history of converting. Signal information includes app events, the Facebook pixel and other feedback touch points.

    Facebook sees higher converting ads spots as more valuable to the marketer and thus worth more. It’s likely that this will cause the price of clicks to go down on poor converting spots and increase on high conversion placements. It will also be a way for Facebook to rate the overall quality of their partner apps and websites from an advertiser perspective.

    “At Audience Network, we believe it starts with quality,” says Jakubowski. “We define quality as ads served to real people, on brand-safe properties, with engaging experiences that lead to real outcomes for advertisers and sustainable businesses for publishers.”

    If you’re unfamiliar with Audience Network here’s a great overview video:

  • Google Adsense Team on How to Stay Compliant

    The Google Adsense team posted this morning what they consider to be the 8 most important best practices for not violating Adsense policies and to keep your account in good standing. Most of them are rather obvious, like “don’t click your own ads” but they are worth reviewing if you make money from Adsense.

    1. Don’t click on your own ads
    There is no way to get your website banned quicker from Adsense than clicking your own ads. Simply don’t click them and don’t ask others to click them. “These kinds of clicks won’t count toward revenue and may get you suspended,” notes Anastasia Almiasheva of the Adsense team. “Even if you’re interested in an ad or looking for its destination URL, clicking on your own ads is prohibited. Instead, use the Google Publisher Toolbar.”

    2. Think like a user
    Write or create content for your users, not just to target certain types of Adsense ads. This is basic SEO as well of course, so they are simply saying good valuable and unique content that users enjoy consuming converts better than simply using copied content or stuffed keywords.

    3. Keep it family-friendly and legal
    Google promises their advertisers that their ads will not appear on adult sites or illegal sites, so it’s best to stay family friendly. There are plenty of adult ad networks if you produce that kind of content.

    4. Maximize content, not ads per page
    Keep ads, Adsense and otherwise, to a minimum. Your web pages should be about the content, not the ads. This is especially true above the fold, where Google actually has an algorithm that defines the percentage of ads and if it’s too high will penalize from an SEO perspective and will notify Adsense partners as well.

    5. Avoid deceptive layouts
    Google only wants their ads to be clicked when there is an intention by the user to click the ads. “Keep ads away from games, slideshows, and other click-heavy content and don’t place them near images,” says Almiasheva. “Publishers may not use deceptive implementation methods to obtain clicks. This includes, but is not limited to: placing images next to individual ads, placing ads in a floating box script, formatting ads so that they become indistinguishable from other content on the page, formatting content so that it is difficult to distinguish it from ads and placing misleading labels above Google ad units.”

    6. Create unique content
    As we said earlier, content is king with Google in general and especially when their ads are on your website. Don’t simply rewrite content and always attribute quotes properly. Make your content stand out by being uniquely produced by you or your team. Building a long-term relationship with your audience is what’s important, and you can’t do that by copycatting others.

    7. Track your traffic
    It’s up to you, the webmaster, to know that your traffic is real and is not bot produced or otherwise artificial. Also, you should make sure that your traffic is coming organically and not from spammy links or links from what Google considers bad neighborhoods.

    8. Follow the Code of Implementation Guide
    Never modify Google’s Adsense code and always follow the Code Implementation Guide.

  • Pinterest Grows to 150 Million Users, Up 50 Million in Last Year

    Pinterest Grows to 150 Million Users, Up 50 Million in Last Year

    Pinterest continues to grow in popularity, having gone from 100 Million monthly users in September 2015 to 150 million today. Pinterest is also losing its status as a platform that is primarily for women, with men now making up 40% of all users, which is a 70% increase over last year. Even more amazing is that over 50% of all millennials in the US are now on Pinterest!

    screen-shot-2016-10-13-at-1-36-16-pm

    “As a Pinner once said to me, “Pinterest is for yourself, not your selfies”—I love that,” said Ben Silbermann, CEO & Co-Founder of Pinterest. “Pinterest is more of a personal tool than a social one. People don’t come to see what their friends are doing. (There are lots of other great places out there for that!) Instead, they come to Pinterest to find ideas to try, figure out which ones they love, and learn a little bit about themselves in the process.”

    He added, “Personally I can’t wait to see what new ideas all these people bring to Pinterest, and find out what happens when they give those ideas a try. Thank you all so much for being here…each and every one hundred and fifty million of you!”

    Pinterest is a Huge Business Marketing Opportunity

    The company also noted that Pinterest now provides 10 billion recommendations daily, more than 150 million visual searches happen monthly, and there are more than 1 million businesses on the service with “tens of thousands” actively advertising.

    They say that they now have over 75 billion pins and an amazing 75% of them were posted by businesses.

    “Growing the number of people on Pinterest by 50% over the last year is pretty impressive especially when you consider that Pinterest is more a personal tool than a social one,” said Jon Kaplan, Head of Global Sales for Pinterest. “People don’t invite all their friends to join, and they don’t log in to see what their friends are doing (there are lots of other great places out there for that!). Instead, they come to Pinterest to discover and do the things they love, and learn a little bit more about themselves in the process.”

    Pinterest is now able to offer marketers precise information what products people are searching for the most and who those people are and they are willing to let marketers link into that data.

    “With so many people around the world saving and searching for ideas on Pinterest, we now know more about what’s trending—and with which audiences—than anyone else,” says Kaplan. “As a business, this means you have millions of new opportunities to connect your ideas and products to the people who are most interested in giving them a try.”

    Marketing with Pinterest

    Pinterest is a unique marketing opportunity for both large and small businesses. Pinterest can be used as a traffic driver like many other search and social platforms, but Pinterest can also uniquely be used to inspire and engage audiences with your brand.

    Babylist, a unique baby registry service that allows you to put anything on your registry from ANY store, used Pinterest to rapidly grow brand awareness and engagement with their exact targeted audience. To reach the 43 million people on Pinterest preparing for a baby, BabyList optimized their website for Pinterest and included Pin-worthy content in every blog post from the start, according to the Pinterest ad team.

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    “We were surprised at just how many new registries Pinterest drove for us,” said Brittany Murlas, former CMO of Babylist. “I would describe our overall success on Pinterest in two words: Explosive growth.”

    According to Pinterest, within the first 5 months of using Promoted Pins, they saw a 70% increase in account signups and a 40% increase in revenue and heir content has been saved by more than 50,000 people to baby-specific boards.

    What’s Next for Pinterest?

    According to Kaplan, Pinterest is evolving into a “truly worldwide (platform), with more men, more ideas and more sophisticated technologies to help get the right ideas to the right people.

  • Google Buys FameBit, Sees Branded Content as Essential to YouTube

    Google Buys FameBit, Sees Branded Content as Essential to YouTube

    Google has purchased FameBit, a technology and marketing platform that helps brands link up with social media stars on YouTube and Twitter. This is part of a growing trend where Google and others realize that preroll video ads are not the future and that marketing integration into content is the smart way to reach millennial’s and even younger audiences.

    Ironically, that’s how television started in the 1950’s, where every show was brought to you by a product and often that product was integrated into the content.

    “We believe that Google’s relationship with brands and YouTube’s partnerships with creators, combined with FameBit’s technology and expertise, will help increase the number of branded content opportunities available, bringing even more revenue into the online video community,” noted Ariel Bardin, Vice President, Product Management at Google.

    FameBit provides a modern version of this, telling marketers that it will grow your customer base via tutorials, comedic skits, mentions, routines, DIY videos, game plays, lookbooks, vlogs and hauls. What this means is that FameBit, and now YouTube, will connect your brand with YouTube stars and help popular YouTuber’s make additional revenue in the process.

    “Every year, more and more brands are making YouTube essential to their marketing strategy,” said Bardin. “In fact, in the last year alone, the top 100 advertisers have increased their spend on YouTube video ads by 50 percent.”

    Google knows that even though brands have increased their marketing on YouTube, what they really want are deeper connections with YouTube stars and through extension their fans.

    “As brands continue to embrace the value of YouTube, they’re also taking their investments one step further, partnering with creators on branded content opportunities such as product placements, promotions and sponsorships,” he said. “As we look to the future, we want even more creators and brands to come together and realize the benefits of these creative collaborations.”

    Unlike Google search, YouTube video is not inherently a lead generation opportunity, but rather is more like TV, promoting brand recognition and brand favorability. Fortunately for Google, that’s what Madison Avenue sells and Google wants to tap into more of their dollars.

    According to eMarketer TV ad spending will be $72.01 billion in 2016 with digital ad spending just slightly under that. But with advertising in video formats from YouTube, Facebook, SnapChat, Twitter, etc…, digital ad spend will increase as a percentage. By 2020, it’s predicted that digital ad revenue will be 37% higher than TV.

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    Of course, digital delivery of TV is also on the rise, replacing the cable middlemen and ultimately making digital the primary way to consume video content.

  • Facebook Expands Canvas Marketing Opportunities

    Facebook Expands Canvas Marketing Opportunities

    Canvas is Facebook’s mobile marketing platform for companies wanting to present a more immersive experience to potential customers. It’s a full-screen mobile ad that Facebook touts as loading nearly instantly and is designed specifically for Android and iOS devices. Using the same technology for loading photos and video quickly in the Facebook mobile app, Canvas can load up to 10 time faster than the mobile web.

    When Canvas launched back in February, advertisers had to have either a web click or website conversion objective. Making Canvas even more versatile for advertisers, especially for marketers looking to seriously gain brand engagement, marketers can now choose brand awareness or video view objectives. “This means brand marketers can use Canvas across their range of goals for their campaigns,” noted a Facebook post.

    The future of Canvas

    Facebook is seeking to make Canvas an extremely robust marketing tool, especially for companies looking for new branding and customer relationship opportunities. “The future of Canvas will include many more features designed to make this immersive, attention-grabbing format accessible to any business, regardless of size or creative resources,” said Facebook. “Recently, we introduced new metrics for Canvas to help marketers understand the performance of each component—videos, photos and buttons—within their Canvas. Marketers can now learn from each Canvas they run, determining which designs work best to achieve their campaign goals.”

    They plan to make Canvas simple for any brand to implement by providing advertisers with templates that immolate how other advertisers have used the new platform. Facebook says that the templates will be available over the next few months, but they provided one as an example:

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    360 Videos Coming to Canvas

    Facebook wants to make Canvas its most immersive ad format in order to attract the Madison Avenue brands. Soon they will be offering 360 videos that provide advertisers a unique way to engage people on mobile and interact with a brands advertisement. According to Facebook, ITAU, a Brazilian bank, used Canvas with 360 video in it to tell an immersive story for children, in order to let people know about the banks outreach and charity in the area of education.

    They are also offering the ability to link Canvas ads to one another via linked buttons and images, instead of just linking to a website. The allows advertisers to create a multi-Canvas experience. “By linking Canvases, Beats by Dre could invite people to explore differently colored versions of its iconic headphones, designed after different countries’ flags,” noted Facebook. “When people tapped on their different Beats options, instead of being driven to a slow-loading website, they got another Canvas, loaded quickly, that they could explore. Beats saw an average of 39 seconds spent in the Canvas, and 73% of the Canvas was viewed on average.”

    Brand Success on Canvas

    Facebook released some statistics from a couple of brands that have recently tried the Canvas marketing platform. Royal Caribbean used Canvas to promote a contest to win a free cruise where the last Canvas screen provided an access code and a link to enter the sweepstakes. Their cost per action was $0.17 and the average time potential customers spent on their Canvas as 72 seconds.

    They say that Canvas works for smaller localized brick and mortar businesses too. A company (Edifica) built a new condo complex (also called Canvas) in Peru and was looking to find buyers using Canvas. According to Facebook, they saw a 50% lower cost-per-click, a 15% lower cost-per-thousand impression, and a 2.3X click-through-rate versus their other link ads, and got a 46-second average time spent in their Canvas. It’s unknown how many of these clickers turned into condo sales.

  • 500,000 Businesses Now Advertising on Instagram

    500,000 Businesses Now Advertising on Instagram

    Instagram says that it now has 500,000 advertisers on its platform. “Today, we’re excited to announce there are more than 500,000 advertisers growing their businesses on Instagram,” they said in their blog announcement. “In just six months, the number of advertisers has more than doubled. And that includes a variety of businesses from around the world. In fact, the top five countries seeing advertiser adoption are the US, Brazil, UK, Australia and Canada. Businesses have been an important part of the Instagram community since the beginning. Here’s why Instagram continues to be an essential place for businesses to grow.”

    The Instagram community is more than 500 million strong, so it’s not surprise that consumer targeted marketing is taking off on the platform. What businesses like is their ability to become part of the consumer engagement experience, not just an advertiser butting into the conversation.

    Instagram Working for Business?

    Instagram noted that 50% of “Instagrammers” follow a business and their surveys indicate that 60% of Instagram users say they learned about a product or service on Instagram. They view their platform as passion marketing which businesses can tap into. They say that 75% of their users take action after being inspired by a post. Actions include clicking to a website, searching, shopping or telling a friend.

    There have been 1 billion actions taken on their ads just in the last 12 months since Instagram ads were launched. Internal surveys show that 70% of ad campaigns received “significant lifts” of online conversion or mobile app installs. Since Instagram made change to their link ad format in June, they saw ad performance increase by 45%. Additionally, an Oracle Data Cloud report concluded that Instagram ads drove a median 1.8% lift in in-store sales and a 2.1% lift in household penetration, across 12 US CPG campaigns that were measured for potential sales impact.

    Consumer Brands Love Instagram

    The handbag brand Dagne Dover, working with its ad agency Mason Interactive, effectively used the Shop Now call to action button in a recent campaign. They targeted students, mothers, professionals and women interested in fashion and travel according to Instagram.

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    The campaign doubled its traffic and increased its return on ad spend 13X over a two-month period, according to Melissa Mash, CEO at Dagne Dover.

    Virtually every major brand is now using Instagram to reach consumers in their niche markets. Brands such as Macy’s, Petsmart, Staples and Fossil are among the half million pushing their products on Instagram.

    Instagram Ads Work For Small Business Too

    Instagram is one of the few platforms that works just as well for small business advertisers as it does for the big brands. Since it is a Facebook company, it runs on the same ad backend as Facebook, with similar targeting and bidding options.

    Whether a business is promoting a sale, marketing an event or seeking Instagram followers, you can advertise for as little as $5 a day.

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    One online writer experimented by promoting an article she wrote for Entrepreneur and was able to obtain 2,000 likes for only 1 cent each! With that ultra low conversion cost it’s worth experimenting.

  • CRM MATCHING: What Advertisers Aren’t Being Told About Scale

    CRM MATCHING: What Advertisers Aren’t Being Told About Scale

    Given the “who’s who” list of platforms offering it, CRM matching has truly arrived. And why not? CRM matching is arguably the most advanced way for brands to connect the dots to their target audiences, and then help them deliver targeted messaging.

    Among its many selling points, CRM matching can help advertisers reactivate latent customers, prospect for new customers, or exclude current customers from new advertising campaigns. CRM matching can also assist in reaching customers where they spend their daily screen time, whether on desktops, tablets, or, as studies show, increasingly in-app on smart phones. The sad truth is, when it comes to matching customers on a massive scale, advertisers are led to believe that the only way to scale affordably is to use a hybrid combination of probabilistic and deterministic CRM matching. There’s got to be a better way.

    Probabilistic matching uses big data analysis to associate multiple devices to likely consumers or households. This approach, while generally viewed as delivering scale affordably, is akin to mathematical guesswork. As the name implies, deterministic refers to the ability to determine specific identities and therefore confirm a match. Deterministic methods include the use of proprietary systems, server-to-server, and/or third-party platforms. Each has its inherent pros and cons.

    1. Advanced proprietary systems offer a simple, rapid and secure way to use encrypted or hashed customer data in the matching process to ensure consumers’ privacy. Proprietary systems cut out middle men, making the process more efficient. Proprietary systems are not open, however, so advertisers should evaluate the transparency of the kinds of connections the partner is willing to make with the data within those proprietary systems.
    2. Server-to-server deterministic matching refers to advertisers who use a data management platform or DMP (e.g., Adobe, BlueKai, etc.). Ask the tech provider about setting up a cookie sync to target audience segments in real time. This allows for matching to occur at the cookie/device ID level, thus alleviating the need for email addresses while still identifying the desired matches. Because it’s hard to track across several platforms, server-to-server matching generally returns lower match rates.
    3. Third-party platforms are popular because they connect click-throughs with on-board, point-of-sale (POS) data, closing the loop between online and offline behavior for match lists. However, beware of any hidden costs associated with them, and factor these into the budget planning stage to avoid surprises once programs are underway.

    As consumers grow more comfortable with providing their email addresses to retailers–whether to eliminate an in-store paper receipt, or to track shipping status of online purchases,

    this CRM data fuels successful matching programs. This enables marketers to close in on reaching advertising’s holy grail: the better understanding of purchase behavior and lifestyle interests to inform ads that consumers will welcome, versus ignore, reject or ridicule.

    So, is CRM matching at scale only attainable via a hybrid approach? As sophisticated as today’s probabilistic matching algorithms have become, the combination of deterministic and probabilistic in a hybrid solution is ultimately still guesswork. On the other hand, publishers with access to millions of users logging in to their favorite apps are in a good position to determine who these users are, and secure higher CRM match rates. Why would you pay for something without knowing 100% what you’re getting? CRM matching should be thought of in the same light.

    In our age of big data and technical sophistication, it’s time to cease deploying “spray and pray” methods. When it comes to CRM matching and digital advertising, brands should stop settling, and pursue models based on deterministic data. The smarter we are about our targeting and measurement, the more successful our campaigns and ultimately, brands will be.

    Three key takeaways:

    • Anyone who has a mailing list or any retailers with transactional data should be using CRM targeting.
    • Publishers with millions of log-ins typically achieve higher match rates than those with smaller data sets and have the ability to reach consumers in mobile apps, where they are spending the bulk of their daily device time.
    • Factor ways to close the loop between on-line purchases and off-line sales for the greatest returns on CRM matching program investment.

    Article by Salim Tarazi, Director, US Ad Operations & Yield, eBay Advertising