Content creator partnerships are growing more and more every year. Let’s dive into some of the reasons why marketers plan to spend big on influencer marketing.
According to a Sprout Social report, 62% of brands prioritize generating more engagement with their target audience and 60% of brands want to reach new audiences.
Where are marketers promoting their businesses in order to widen their reach?Instagram is their top pick, followed by Facebook and TikTok.
Since influencers and content creators are the new social media phenomenon, these platform preferences encourage the use of creators as a vessel for new audiences. According to Sprout Social, 45% of brands have influencers post on their own accounts on behalf of the brand.
What do these creators post, you may ask? Brands are looking for creators to build an authentic approach so that they can show consumers the specifics of the product and know what to expect after they potentially purchase. Also, given the popularity of these influencers, this type of content can encourage their followers to be interested in what they are using.
Finding the right influencer can be tedious work, but we recommend you stick to your target audience and find whoever they follow (quick example: if you sell tennis rackets, you might want a sports influencer with a big audience to promote your product).
Although Instagram and Facebook are the top tiers, as far as the content format, stories are usually what marketers prefer as a main form of communication.
Do you have any influencer in mind to promote your brand? Let us know in the comments below.
If you consider that you have the budget to invest in a good partnership with an influencer, this can help your brand gain followers, engagement, and above all, customer trust.
As always, we will be investigating and looking into how these influencer marketing strategies work for brands, and we will keep you posted. Stay tuned!
About Quantikal
Quantikal is a data-driven performance marketing agency based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We help clients scale their business through profitable digital ad spending by constantly obsessing over clients’ key metrics. Quantikal’s experience working in diverse online companies in marketing roles including media buying allows us to provide solutions in the ever-demanding increase of marketing performance, doing more with less thus becoming a strategic partner.
Creators will be able to find and partner with independent businesses easily. If you want to know more about this launch, keep on reading.
Shopify announced a new Shopify Collabs on its platform, allowing creators to connect with merchants and give them a new way to make money.
How to get started? First, creators need to apply for an account to be able to browse for merchants that align with their audience. Once they find a brand, a partnership can be created in order to list the products to share on social media via Linkpop. If someone purchases a product using the shared link, creators will receive a payment.
Linkpop, which launched earlier this year, allows creators to sell products directly from their page, include important links, and launch storefronts to sell directly on their platforms where they engage with followers.
The company also offers a mobile-friendly option that can be used to share links to their communities on Instagram, Tiktok, Spotify, and other social media platforms.
Would you apply for a Collabs account? Do you think this can help independent brands?
Collabs can be a good way to make stores and products more visible, and it can also help manage relationships between creators and merchants.
This launch is available to all merchants in USA and Canada, and they can apply for access on Shopify’s website.
We will be gathering further information about Collabs and we will let you know if creators are happy with this integration or not. Stay tuned!
About Quantikal
Quantikal is a data-driven performance marketing agency based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We help clients scale their business through profitable digital ad spending by constantly obsessing over clients’ key metrics. Quantikal’s experience working in diverse online companies in marketing roles including media buying allows us to provide solutions in the ever-demanding increase of marketing performance, doing more with less thus becoming a strategic partner.
At their latest event, Google showcases recent Search updates that could help marketers unlock its full potential.
Google is stepping out of the traditional search box by combining new inputs and developments in computer science. From text searches to phone camera pictures and voice-overs, Google has been optimizing its search engine toward a more natural way of exploring information.
Earlier this year, Google introduced multisearch. By searching images and text simultaneously, multisearch will be available in over 70 new languages in a few months’ time.
Also, Google intends to make searching a more visual experience. Google Maps will include more immersive capabilities with 3D images using advanced computer vision. This visual approach is beneficial when it comes to shopping, where people are looking for the most accurate display of products.
With the recent launch of landscape images available on the mobile results page, advertisers can now be more in control of how images appear, making it easier for them to get noticed and drive in more results.
Google also mentions the addition of Business Messages, where customers will be able to message brands through Search ads. With a 30-day response window, advertisers could create relationships with customers, before and after sales.
If you want to read more about what Google has to say about the latest Search On event, you can keep on reading here.
Google seems to be moving in a more direct and easy way of searching, leaving the infamous search box behind. This new mindset could especially help Shopping ads, but any advertisers that prefer a more visual approach will be intrigued by these potential innovations. We recommend all marketers try these out as soon as they roll out.
As always, we will let you know when Google announces these launches officially and we’ll keep an eye out for any new features coming your way. Stay tuned!
About Quantikal
Quantikal is a data-driven performance marketing agency based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We help clients scale their business through profitable digital ad spending by constantly obsessing over clients’ key metrics. Quantikal’s experience working in diverse online companies in marketing roles including media buying allows us to provide solutions in the ever-demanding increase of marketing performance, doing more with less thus becoming a strategic partner.
If you want to learn about this new alliance, keep on reading
YouTube recently announced new shopping features to its platform given the recent integration with Shopify. Now, creators will be able to link their store to their own YouTube channel so that users can complete purchases without leaving the platform.
It looks pretty straightforward: in YouTube Studio, with the monetization tab, creators can add their Shopify account through the Shopping tab. This gives advertisers more control over how their products appear across their channel. Also, YouTube enables tagging on live streams, making it easier for users to stay within the platform while having access to the product.
Shopify has a real-time inventory syncing that will operate in YouTube’s live shop, so users will never be able to click on a product if it’s out of stock.
Will you link your Shopify platform to YouTube Shopping? Do you think this is a good integration? Let us know in the comments below
Our Take
This is an easy way to bring products directly to your audience. Many smaller advertisers that don’t have the means to set up Google Merchant Center to its full potential, and do not typically run Shopping or Video ads will enjoy this as an imagery complement to display their products through their own YouTube channel. We can also see how YouTube is understanding the value of influencer marketing, which has proven an increase in number of conversions. It also gives influencers the opportunity to work with brands that they support or see fit for their own image. We hope this integration can help all advertisers increase sales and aid user experience.
As always, we will be following this alliance and we’ll let you know if any updates are coming your way. Stay tuned!
About Quantikal
Quantikal is a data-driven performance marketing agency based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We help clients scale their business through profitable digital ad spending by constantly obsessing over clients’ key metrics. Quantikal’s experience working in diverse online companies in marketing roles including media buying allows us to provide solutions in the ever-demanding increase of marketing performance, doing more with less thus becoming a strategic partner.
Now that third-party data is saying goodbye, learn about Google’s new privacy approach
As many of you know, third-party cookies have been the typical source for digital marketing over the past years. However, user privacy and new regulations are making advertisers reevaluate their ways. Now, Google is actively testing new ways to engage with audiences.
Google announced a few key steps that they are taking to replace third-party data’s common identifiers:
Build a strong first-party data organization
Invest in durable tagging solutions that meet measurement needs
Start your shift as soon as possible
First-party data is now your best ally. However, not all Google products use first-party data for advertising, so for those that do, it is crucial to honour user privacy while making the most out of the data provided.
Also, accurate insights in measurements are a top priority for Google’s team. This can help reach more people in the cookieless future and give a better view of conversion activity and a good tagging method based on customer preference.
Even for a huge company like Google, building a strong foundation for first-party data takes time, so it is better to start your efforts ASAP. Google’s automated processes ensure that user peivacy is taken into account while making the most out of this new shift.
What will you do about this new privacy shift? Are you optimistic about the cookieless future? Let us know in the comments below.
About Quantikal
Quantikal is a data-driven performance marketing agency based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We help clients scale their business through profitable digital ad spending by constantly obsessing over clients’ key metrics. Quantikal’s experience working in diverse online companies in marketing roles including media buying allows us to provide solutions in the ever-demanding increase of marketing performance, doing more with less thus becoming a strategic partner.
Better ad experience, creative support, new insights, and more. Keep on reading to find out!
Google is launching new features for Discovery ads to help keep audiences engaged with your ads. The new features include better ad experiences, improved creative support, new insights, and enhanced campaign management.
Let’s be honest: the feature that caught our eye is the new audience insights and management. Now, advertisers can create and reuse audiences across all your campaigns using a new audience builder, Google Ads Editor, and API for managing large campaigns.
Also, the insights page can give you more data about those segments that have the biggest interaction with your ad. Using asset reporting and optimized targeting, advertisers can view performance and compare between assets to decide which ones are worth turning off, editing, or changing.
What does Google mean by “improved creative support”? When creating the ad, advertisers will be able to see quick recommendations on ratios, headlines, and text overlays for images. This will also include feedback on your ad strength and an optimization score with further guidance. Feedback rating will go from “poor” to “excellent” so that you can figure out what is in need of improvement.
With all this being said, Google says that they will be focusing on the Gmail user experience. They aim to build a browseable Social and Promotions tab that will include more details, with images and prices. How? Google will use its machine learning algorithm to target audiences at the proper time.
Lucky for you, we include the link to the official announcement here, in case you want to read the full official statement.
Our Take
Although these are not jaw-dropping features, it is always a good addition if it means more tools and creative opportunities to help advertisers properly showcase their brand. It is nice to see them put in the work to perfect their ad platforms and user experience, especially if it makes it simpler for users to browse. However, we recommend you test these features before applying and have a defined audience or segment in mind so that these assets can work their best.
As expected, we will review these specific features and let you know if anything new is coming your way. Stay tuned!
About Quantikal
Quantikal is a data-driven performance marketing agency based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We help clients scale their business through profitable digital ad spending by constantly obsessing over clients’ key metrics. Quantikal’s experience working in diverse online companies in marketing roles including media buying allows us to provide solutions in the ever-demanding increase of marketing performance, doing more with less thus becoming a strategic partner.
As you may know, this year’s EcomWorld event was filled with important CEO’s, brand founders and marketing specialists giving their best advice on e-commerce strategy. There were more than 80 speakers from companies such as Coca-Cola, Shopify, Amazon, Meta, etc., that gave exclusive intel on their businesses, and Quantikal was there to hear all about it.
We gathered the best of the best, and we are ready to share the highlights of each one of them. So, keep calm and keep on reading!
Gracey Ryback (DealCheats): Supercharge Your Brand’s Growth with Influencers, Amazon Live-Streaming and TikTok Trifecta
Perfecting social media marketing as a business is critical to success.
Influencers are similar to online celebrities. These influencers are considered to be more authentic and connect with their audiences to a greater degree, offering greater conversions along with strong brand support.
There are many things to contemplate when choosing the best influencer for your brand.
Quality of content
Audience base
Engagement, click, and conversion rate
Budget
Brand messaging → how the influencer presents themselves and how this relates with your business
Live streaming is set to become a $25 billion market by next year. Video is bigger than ever; brands that deploy video marketing have converted 85% of sales.
Amazon Live-Streaming is easy for shoppers to search, with lots of pop-ups and ways to one-click purchase
Amazon Live offers an abundance of insight into leveraging all facets of digital marketing, including influencers, social media, shopping, AND live streaming.
Use social, video content, and short-form media to connect with your audience easily and authentically. If you’re aiming to go that extra mile and work with influencers, make sure they’re genuine and already have a strong audience base that trusts them.
Kate James (The Coca Cola Company): Supercharge Your Shoppable Social Channels
It’s all about the marketing fundamentals that will get your business seen and keep those conversions rolling in.
Always listen to the customer and what they are looking for out of your brand. It’s a well-known fact that consumers are more comfortable buying products from a brand that can be found on social.
Digital Shelf: Include best-in-class brand content across all channels to drive conversions
Search + Display: Invest strategically across brands to drive discoverability and conversions
Partnerships: Leverage joint programs with retailer and delivery networks, or influencers, sports, and entertainment to amplify the scale
70/20/10 Rule: Spend budgets efficiently for maximum ROI, but reserve funds for test + learn pilots to continue growth
The digital landscape is constantly developing. Now is your time to improve and evolve your marketing to leverage ALL kinds of media in a variety of unique ways. Don’t let NFTs and the Metaverse stop you from growing into a new and growing space.
Ted Buell (Google): Craft Top-Performing Ads with Machine Learning
Nowadays, there’s dramatic shift in the way people use digital to work, shop and explore the world around them. There have been changes in consumer behavior and higher expectations for the shopping experience and the way digital advertising works in the face of privacy regulation
Over half of shoppers begin their research on Google, and consumers are showing consistency in their shopping patterns, giving all brands an equal opportunity to influence shoppers
Impact across all of your sales channels
Nowadays its harder to trap conversions across your channels, browsers, and devices → Brands optimize every dollar invested to the right sales
Use these signals to inform Google’s automation solutions and conversion models, which help report conversions in places where traffic is limited
Supplement first-party conversion tagging with transaction data with Enhanced Conversions → see the full picture of conversions
Track and optimize your offline conversion in addition to your e-commerce conversions → complete picture of campaign performance
Use first-party data to track and optimize beyond conversions → use offline conversion reports
Reach audiences that are most valuable to you
This is a way to gain a competitive advantage where you can use your own knowledge of customers to inform the marketing strategy.
Customize first-party audience data based on specific scores, beyond just the conversion or sale
Audiences to inform automated solutions, like automated bidding to create more effective campaigns
Use your knowledge of your customers, like segments already defined, to create first-party audiences for your digital campaign
Use customer match to create these audiences and apply them on top of your campaigns
Implement automated targeting to expand your reach: use optimized targeting for customers that are more likely to convert
Use ML-powered audiences to reach in-market shoppers: reach audiences that are strong-likelihood to purchase based on activity
Attribute value within and across media channels
Adopt a data-driven attribution model to attribute credit across the consumer journey: use Google’s DDA model to automate attribution across all google campaigns
Triangulate impact: use the trifecta of attribution solutions to evaluate impact across media channels: Google’s DDA, marketing mix modeling (MMM), and incrementality experiments as a holistic view of media performance to understand the impact across channels
Explore emerging attribution tools and methodologies: attribution in Google Analytics or regression based attribution to measure the impact of digital channels
Alex Fedotoff (D2C Brands): Build a Profitable Brand with Digital Products
Some of e-commerce’s biggest challenges include increasing competition, shrinking profit margins, supply chain issues, front end acquisition is an expensive costs in the business
Ecommerce is thought out as a hybrid model, including physical and digital products. Physical products are great to build affinity with the audience, repeat purchases, consumables, and retail expansion opportunities. Digital products bring instant delivery, more consumption of the main product, therefore, more attachment to your brand and more margins.
The product customer acquisition channel
Acquire customers with information and digital products, sell the physical products on a backend
Sell bundles of the physical and digital products
Sell physical products on a front end, have paid membership on a backend
How To:
Define key result: “Loose X weight in X days”
8-40 minute long, informative videos with actionable tips, relatable real person, aim for 35-45 seconds average view
Profit maximizers: if the goal is 1.1X ROAS to breakeven, order bump, and bundle products
Throughout the challenge (7-day challenge): videos, PDFs, homework that makes a daily follow-up with customer
Email follow-up: physical process sequences, now you can contact customers with your products: the real difference between a lead and a real customer
Maxx Blank (Triple Whale): Building D2C Brands
Third-party data is the use of multiple data sources stitched together for a more robust data profile of individuals
Today, we are experiencing the ending era of third-party analytics due to increased pressure to regulate privacy on the web.
What does this mean? Tracking will get harder, so merchants have to be more transparent and more sophisticated, self-relying on their own data. For example, Apple’s App Tracking Transparency forces developers to give users the choice to opt-out of being tracked.
Also, in-channel metrics are no longer reliable, volatility with online advertising, get sophisticated (post-purchase surveys, for example), focus on fundamentals (things the advertisers can control), diversify channels, and centralize data.
What will the advertiser need? First party data, which is the information a company collects directly from customers and owns it. Track what your customers are doing once they get to your website by using an attribution platform.
Merchants didn’t use to worry about tracking the multichannel attribution, but with strict privacy policies, its something marketers now need.
First-party data allows merchants to track ad platform-to-website activity by stitching together purchase data collected from customers to the traffic source. With a more holistic view and all metrics under one roof, you can scale with confidence. The first-party data provider will make you understand the customer journey
What does Maxx Blank conclude? Scaling Ads
The first touches of deployment and optimization used to be coupled, but now its deploying on-platform (Facebook, Google Ads), but optimizing on a first-party data platform. There are strong fundamentals, with amplification and data centralization to scale similarly to before. Data quality is diminishing, but its still there!
We will continue gathering every detail of these type of events and we’ll get back to you with the most important news. Stay tuned!
About Quantikal
Quantikal is a data-driven performance marketing agency based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We help clients scale their business through profitable digital ad spending by constantly obsessing over clients’ key metrics. Quantikal’s experience working in diverse online companies in marketing roles including media buying allows us to provide solutions in the ever-demanding increase of marketing performance, doing more with less thus becoming a strategic partner.
Google’s latest offering for e-commerce businesses is an option to list deals within search results. The tool is free for all merchants and takes advantage of the fact that today’s consumers are looking for ways to save money when they shop.
This launch may sound like a win for brands, but is it really? Google is almost universally beloved by consumers as a search platform, but as a merchant or advertiser, the story is a little bit different. Because Google’s focus is providing a positive search experience—and increasing its own revenue—it doesn’t always favor businesses on the other side of the equation.
With each new feature, it’s important to look beyond the initial praise to understand what the change really means for businesses. Here’s what we know about the free deals listing so far.
First, the deals will show up in the regular shopping tab, allowing consumers to monitor one single location for all relevant products. The difference is that the tab will now show product listings that are discounted, highlighting the savings with a green tag in the top left corner of the listing.
Google also announced that in October, it will use this same feature to highlight the best deals for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other significant shopping moments throughout the year.
Unfortunately, even with a discount loaded into your product listing, there’s no guarantee that Google will display your offer to consumers. Its algorithm will still take into account other factors like the product’s popularity, your site’s popularity, and how significant the discount is. This could mean that despite taking the time to update your listings, you won’t see any results from the change.
With all this in mind, here’s our take: Because the tool is completely free for merchants to use, there’s very little downside to running a few tests and monitoring how the deals tool performs for your products. If you already have shopping campaigns set up, setting up the deals feature for a few of your bestsellers should be a simple update. Just make sure to test a variety of products and discounts to understand what works best for your brand.
If you decide to go this route, now is a great time to get started. You may still be able to take advantage of early adopter benefits before the tool is widely used by your competitors. You’ll also have time to learn how to optimize your use of the tool before we hit holiday shopping booms. At that point, you’ll be in a prime position to capitalize on your (hopefully) increased return.
We’re really hoping this tool gains traction and Google delivers on its promise, but we haven’t forgotten how Google’s first organic search tool was affected (and organic results were diluted) when it expanded from three paid search results to four.
So, will this remain a free deal listing, or will it just be an experiment for a future paid extension? Only time will tell. Drop a comment bellow on your thoughts.
In the meantime, since it’s free to implement, try it out and see what you find. We’d love to hear from you if you have any interesting takeaways from your experiments. As always, we’ll continue to monitor the landscape and report back with any updates or changes over time.
It has been some time that I wanted to sit down and write this post. I cringe every time I see incorrect use match type in a client’s account.
As of today you can choose from four type of match types:
Exact
Broad Modified Match (BMM)
Generic broad
Phrase
Care to guess which ones are ok and which are not?
Explaining this concept to my clients, I always like to do a small exercise of the imagination. It goes somewhat like this: imagine a car. This car is similar to any other car but the difference is each time you press on the gas pedal, the windshield wipers begin working. Every time you hit on the breaks the right doors open. Each time you signal left or right, your car seat reclines. Now imagine trying to drive this imaginary car on your daily commute from home to work. Yes, it will drive you crazy!
Managing and trying to optimize an account with most of the keywords are generic broad or phrase match is like driving that car.
So now you know that Exact and BMM match types are ok, the other two, not so much.
So the begging questions is why?
There are two major concepts on selecting keyword match type, coverage and linear independence.
Coverage is the ability of having a small set of keywords that cover an important amount of user search queries of the interested category you compete in. Coverage is lowest with Exact match as the probability to match a certain user search query is lower than other types of matches. In the other extreme, the Generic Broad has the highest coverage. However, this high coverage comes at a price. A very steep price indeed as you will see below, the price is low independence.
Linear independence is the ability for one keyword of behaving independently of other keywords in the same account. We can think of it as low interdependence or low cannibalization of searches between each keyword. For those of you that remember some algebra, it is similar to the concept of avoiding the co-linearity of vectors. Now, keywords and semantic objects are not vectors. However, organizing an account as clean as possible is the first step to been able to optimize the account in the future through keyword bidding.
Why then do broad generic keywords have low independence? And why should it matter? There two main problems with broad generic keywords:
1) Not all the keywords needed to be present in the query to activate the match. What we call the partial match.
2) Google allows the use of synonyms on broad generic.
This generates many search queries that may not be aligned to your business offerings or there is a lost opportunity of handling a generic keyword as a mixed bag of intentions. Let’s take one example from the auto industry. One might say that the adjective “used” car and “pre-owned” car means the same and Google might interpret them as synonyms. However, I can tell you from experience that keywords +used +car and +pre +owned +car do not behave the same. For a used car classifieds site, generally, the “pre-owned” term usually has a higher conversion rate. Because of this conversion rate difference, it is important to have these terms separated using BMM structure instead of a generic match type. This will allow to bid separately for each term optimizing the account better.
So remember, every time you use a generic broad match a SEM fairy dies. Joking aside, I recommend using a mix of 5%/10% exact match keywords and 90%/95% BMM keywords.
Think about building a good structure and keyword base for account optimization through keyword bidding.
