An ever-evolving business model

Facebook has not got where it is today by luck. By constantly adjusting its focus, diversifying its business model and making some strong decisions around the consolidation of media, price decisions and data into a single closed environment with a powerful algorithm, it is today able to weather the political storms in which it is swept up. By weighting its revenue stream towards SME businesses, Facebook has generated a huge volume of long-tail clients and consequently seen minimal impact from the big-name ad boycott. And now Google is taking note and pushing YouTube in a similar direction, though arguably the model is first created by Google within search. 

It is their move to consolidate that has allowed Facebook to open up a platform to more longtail budgets; they have actively closed off outside data, inventory and integrations to create a more uniform environment. This allows for simpler UIs and stronger algorithmic learning. Ultimately, with the overall move to online, big brands have to be used to seeing these challenger brands as competition in a much more real way.

Big brands should look to SMEs for social direction

Social is the playground of challenger brands, and they are well suited to it, being close to the data and quick to respond with content. For the large brands, however, it feels that this is a media owner in control who won’t make changes on their behalf, and over whom their budgets have little sway. They have been slower to adapt to this environment.

First steps, big brands need to get digital first, to push legacy content production processes to catch up, and embrace the steep change to media mix that Covid has brought about, to counter the smaller more agile brands who have proven they can also capitalise on a more consolidated media space online.

Major brands may hold less power when it comes to hurting the likes of Facebook, but they do have ample ability to make the tech giants work as efficiently as possible for them. A large part of this is the tactical use of independent tech stacks and close relationships to more traditional publishers.

Advertisers must avoid the one-size-fits-all approach

Consumer behaviour has driven a huge shift during COVID-19, from retail to online, and increased time available through digital channels over traditional. Brands with a strong online presence and an ecommerce approach have responded well, using this to push forward a transformation they have long been driving.

However, with pricing of traditional channels – particularly TV – very reasonable due to fluctuating spend, marketers shouldn’t dismiss offline out of hand as it can become much more cost-effective when used tactically. Advertisers should be viewing the potential of their ad campaigns across the total media mix and planning spend based on two key criteria: desired outcome and the ability to react quickly to market changes. 

Data is king – so long as it’s from a trusted source

And it is here we reach the nub of the issue. Any advertiser should be considering the role of their agency partners through a dual lens: Their ability to use data at scale to understand both macro and micro changes, and their ability to deliver an agile campaign to respond quickly to this information.

Marketers understand the value of the numbers and are becoming ever more confident when it comes to putting their faith in data. They know, too, how important it is to evaluate individual channels as a part of the whole picture of media success. The danger comes, however, when measurement is done by those media companies who also decide media price and optimisation. This is where brands have to be careful to have independent measurement based on numbers they trust.

Facebook and Google have nothing to fear when it comes to the loyalty of advertisers. They have shown they are immune to a global boycott, and are savvy enough to be adjusting their businesses to remove any reliance on one income stream. 

Technology and partners are best kept fluid

Personally, I favour more of an independent tech stack approach – the idea of media, price decisions and measurement all sitting within a closed algorithmic environment does not sit well. With the challenge of a reduction in cookies imminent, plus Apple’s restriction of the IDFA, we are getting ever closer to closed network models across owned and operated inventory for the big tech giants – something we are already seeing with Facebook. Now more than ever it is key to work closely with independent technology and partners to understand these numbers in a wider context.

The question currently is whether businesses of all sizes can adjust their own behaviour quickly to respond effectively to the challenges thrown up by 2020 and prove the age-old saying: If you can’t beat them, join them.

The post Will 2020 End Well for Facebook and Google? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

So she was well positioned to provide some interesting views on how retail has transformed over the course of the lockdown and what we might expect in the coming months and years. 

Sure enough, she described her belief that we are now entering a new phase in the shopping cycle that she labels the ‘Kindness Economy’. It’s a concept she’s discussed before, most notably in a TED Talk she gave in London at the start of the year. In it, she explains her belief that people (she emphasises that we do not reduce everyone to being just ‘consumers’) are increasingly taking into account the moral values of a brand when choosing who to buy from. 

This represents a significant departure from previous eras. Where previously a brand’s products were the chief signifier of your status (you were what you wore), now the brand’s values are the signifier. Who you buy from matters in what it says about your politics. “Every £1 is a vote, a vote for how we want to live”, she explained. 

Outrage as a driver of profit for Facebook

It struck me while listening to Mary describe this philosophy, that it’s one currently playing out across the advertising industry amid the #StopHateForProfit Facebook boycott. At the time of writing, over 500 major brands have pulled their advertising on Facebook and Instagram including the likes of Unilever, Verizon and Reebok, as they seek to coerce the social giant into taking a more active hand in moderating the hate speech and extremist views that frequently appear on its platforms.

In doing so, these brands are taking an active political stand against Facebook’s inaction and publicly signalling their values as companies to wider society. This, it seems, is the Kindness Economy in action. 

Mark Zuckerberg claims Facebook is not in the position of a traditional publisher and therefore shouldn’t be the ultimate arbiter of truth for its users. In this sense it portrays itself as providing its users with access to all of the available information so that they can make an informed decision for themselves about a topic. 

But that’s a disingenuous take on how his platform works. Users’ feeds and the content that appears in them are dictated by Facebook’s algorithms and their interpretation of what each user is most interested in. In this sense it does arbitrate reality, but on a mathematically modelled basis rather than a moral one.

And, given that its success as a profitable company is based on its ad revenues (well over 90% of Facebook’s revenues derive from advertising), its business model has a clear incentive to incite more user engagement. More time spent on the platform increases the attraction of advertising there. 

Unfortunately, on a platform where success is measured in terms of attention, it’s the most divisive and emotive content that tends to be more effective. As The Washington Post recently put it, “outrage is built into Facebook’s ability to profit.”  

Neglecting the nuances of context and control

Similarly, it has been the company’s algorithms placing ads against this content that have provoked many brands to question their presence on the platform. 

In this respect, advertisers are suffering in two senses. Not only are they funding the continued success of Facebook by investing in the platform’s outrage-based ad model, but they are also having their brand name and ads automatically placed in contexts that are disreputable and damaging to their public perception.

Boiling this dilemma down, it seems to be fundamentally one about control. 

First, Facebook’s decision to not control the content it amplifies to its massive global audience, and second, advertisers’ inability to control precisely where their ads are placed. This latter point is particularly ironic. After all, Facebook offers almost unparalleled precision in terms of individual ad targeting, but a lack of nuance when understanding the wider contexts of ad placement that are of at least equal importance from a brand safety perspective.  

This is not a problem that is exclusive to Facebook. Every major social media platform with its own automated ad model faces similar issues which is why some brands have taken the decision to temporarily cut ad spend on them entirely.

Where might such advertisers be better off investing that spend? It comes as no surprise that I’d advocate for our own channel. But for legitimate reasons. If the fundamental issue is one of control then affiliate partnerships are a far more attractive proposition. Here is a mode of marketing that places you, as the brand, in ultimate control.

You choose who can promote you and how those partners go about it. You dictate how that partner is rewarded for their efforts in promoting you. You decide if the actions they generate for you are worthy of reward. And all of these facets are adaptable to your objectives, whatever they might be.

That ability to configure your partnerships and how they operate naturally insulates you from the concerns that the current boycott is raising awareness of. Affiliate marketing might not offer the same scale in terms of audience reach that a Facebook, Instagram or YouTube might offer, or even the same level of precision in terms of targeting individual online users. But it does offer something that every brand in the world right now appears to increasingly value in this new economy of kindness; control.

The Facebook boycott raises big issues about social media platforms that are complicated. It’s an oversimplification to say these spaces are only filled with vitriol and hate and don’t perform a valuable function in terms of free speech. 

The video postings of George Floyd’s death to social media brought the attention of millions around the world to the tragedy and may yet contribute to long-term positive social change. But the scale and reach of these platforms is also something of a Pandora’s Box. For advertisers participating in the boycott, their participation is not just a political statement but also a chance for them to reassert some control over their marketing.  

The post The Kindness Economy vs Facebook’s Outrage Ad Model – an Issue of Control appeared first on PerformanceIN.

A new year always brings new opportunities and this year affiliate publishers have the chance to easily bring their data tracking and analysis to the next level. Analysing and optimising campaigns will no longer be a long and problematic task and automating budget and bid adjustments will become a norm, allowing affiliates to use their time for creative tasks. The outcome of this is increased revenues, lower costs, more efficiency, higher ROAS and finally higher profits.

Why will 2020 be different than the years before? It is because the sale to traffic attribution no longer is an “impossible” task! We Can Track is here to take the pain of programming a sales attribution and integration feature away from affiliate marketers. 

By placing a small JavaScript tag on the website most of the installation work is already done. All that is left to do is connect the affiliate network accounts to the system by filling in API credentials that are easy to find. 

The outcome is indispensable: Sales integration in online marketing tools like Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Microsoft Ads (Bing Ads), Data Studio, BigQuery and more.

This finally gives affiliate publishers the means to connect all their online marketing tools together, enabling them to track any conversion, use ad platforms’ machine learning to automate campaign adjustments and create audiences to properly target the right people.

Moreover, logging into every affiliate network to check the performance and manual reporting is no longer required. All affiliate sales are registered in one sophisticated dashboard, containing all the traffic, click and sales data connected with one another.

Time for an upgrade

It is about time that the technology in the affiliate industry gets an upgrade! Due to the lack of tracking capabilities, most affiliates did not even dare to test new channels. Competition keeps increasing, search engine algorithms keep changing, commission rates keep decreasing and partnership terms are becoming stricter. This is the brutal situation affiliate publishers are facing at this point. Because of that they have to be very creative and test new traffic channels that make them less dependent on SEO in order to gain more control. And in order to do that, proper tracking needs to be in place.

Since We Can Track launched their tool only recently, they offer a two month free trial for new users that come in through their product hunt post.

We Can Track values customer satisfaction and their support is very present and quick. Missing affiliate networks are gladly added and also other feature and customisation requests are often implemented.

The time has come to give affiliate publishers the tools to automate their services.

The post Integrate Affiliate Sales Data to Google Analytics & Facebook Ads with We Can Track appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Facebook has introduced some additional brand safety measures for advertisers using its ad network, allowing brands to choose where their messages appear before the ads go live via whitelists that pre-select the publishers and video makers they support, as reported on AdAge.

Announced on Wednesday (November 20), the safety measures include the ability to form whitelists, which replaces the previous standard safety feature blocklists. According to Facebook, whitelists allow a more proactive way for brands to manage where their ads run on Facebook Audience Network — a wider hub of websites and apps that carry ads from the social network.

As part of the new measure, advertisers can pre-approve websites and apps they want to run ads on, allowing greater control over the platforms they want to avoid.

“This week’s announcement is part of a two-plus year journey that we’ve been on to ensure that we provide advertisers with as many controls as possible to help their brands feel safe and secure being on our platform,” said Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s VP of global marketing solutions.

Furthermore, Facebook has introduced new mechanics for reporting to advertisers running ad campaigns, providing a better rundown of exactly where the ads appeared from start to finish. Advertisers can also apply brand-safety settings to all the campaigns for a given brand, instead of having to adjust the settings for every campaign.

“We will allow advertisers to do it at the account level, versus campaign [level],” Everson explained to AdAge.

“If I’m Pampers or Starbucks, and I want to ensure that my brand-safety controls are in place for everything I do, I can just do it once at the ad-account level and not have to go into the campaign-specific level, which was  a big burden.”

Facebook is currently working with advertising technology firm Zefr in addition to Open Slate, Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify as partners of the social platform to help brands manage their brand-safety regimes.

These developments follow Facebook’s recent brand safety certification from the Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards, which aims to reduce the risk of brands running ads adjacent to inappropriate content.

The post Facebook Introduces New Brand Safety Measures for Advertisers appeared first on PerformanceIN.

There is a profound shift happening in performance marketing right now. The fastest-growing businesses are moving from highly targeted campaigns, which are optimised manually by people, towards signals-based marketing, powered by machine learning and underpinned by automation. 

The days of manually hacking your way to ad success are no more. Top direct-response advertisers are now leveraging a specific set of automated ad tactics to unlock new phases for growth. 

Put simply, the machines are coming for your marketing plan.   

The marketers who will win on Facebook and Instagram this Christmas will embrace this approach and set themselves up for success before we get to the craziness of peak season.

The shift

In recent years there has been a lot of talk of “precision marketing” where we layer in data from different sources to “build” highly specific target audiences. Director of Emerging Disruptors at Facebook, Jake Bailey, points of that performance advertisers have used this approach to manually hack their way to success. By learning a lot about their customers’ demographics, they’ve been able to target highly-specific audiences, find pockets of efficiency and relish in the success and control they have to manually optimise their campaigns. This was all good for a time. But times have changed, and this approach is no longer best-in-class.

This approach has limitations. The fact is, this manual, reactive approach just isn’t sustainable anymore, and it’s never been scalable in sustaining long-term growth. The problem is that audiences become very saturated with the same messaging, and gradually, marketing performance starts to plateau, and growth begins to decelerate. That’s because advertisers have created campaigns that are so granular there’s no room to further test or identify new customers. Many marketers have simply optimised themselves into a box, and it’s limited their potential to grow their businesses in a big way.

The fastest-growing companies recognise this and embrace the potential of machine learning to take the manual constraints of targeting off campaigns and automate their media and focus on more strategic opportunities. Many marketing activities can be simplified and performed through machine learning. Through automation and algorithms, machine learning is simplifying account management, driving better campaign performance, and scaling the business more quickly by finding new growth opportunities across different channels and placements.

It’s time to let go of old fashioned targeting

The new path to success on Facebook is to leverage as much signal data as possible, not as much targeting as possible. Your marketing team will simply never be able to pull levers or act on intent signals the way an algorithm can. It’s time to put your trust in machine learning.

That means letting go of the reactive approach to marketing where your teams manually perform reporting and optimisation. It means replacing it with automation that optimises campaigns in real-time based on hundreds (if not thousands) of intent signals and user behaviour to put the right message in front of the right person. Here, machine learning is simply better and faster when it comes to gathering insights, testing your ads, learning what works, and optimising for the best result.

The fastest-growing companies are combining what they know about their customers with our machine learning capabilities to match the right message to the right user at the right time. It’s unlocking new phases of growth at scale by automating advertising, audience selection, and placement for the best possible result.

Targeting is like salt; a little bit can make things better.

But you’ve already got a marketing team to do optimisations for you…right?

Whether you run marketing in-house or through an agency, consider all the time your marketers spend analysing and reporting campaign results. Many advertisers have 10s if not 100s of ad accounts on Facebook and often are optimising budgets separately. Add in manually changing creative, building out separate campaigns for each platform, allocating ad set budgets or creating redundant ad sets.

All of this effort can be eliminated by letting machine learning do the work. A better question to ask is, “What could your marketers be doing in place of this extensive manual effort?”

Where machine learning meets human creativity with brands

Machine learning is great at optimising what you have based on signals. It does this faster and more effectively than people can, but machine learning struggles to make leaps of creativity that take ideas into new and original areas. 

This is the preserve of human beings. 

No machine would come up with the idea to change the KFC logo to FCK delivering the best apology in corporate history, or take the iconic image of Colin Kaepernick and combine it with the words, “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything”. These big creative leaps that are the bedrock of big brands and marketers.

Ways to embrace machine learning in marketing

The emerging disruptors team at Facebook looked at more than 100 of our top disruptive advertisers and identified the marketing tactics on the Facebook platform that are driving the best performance. Each uses machine learning, and each is impactful on its own.

Though, when used together, they are accelerating the growth of our top disruptor advertisers, driving better account performance, boosting return on investment and lowering CPA’s. Here are the key lessons for any marketer looking to transform direct-response efforts:

1 – Trust in automatic placements

You would never run separate TV campaigns for ITV, Channel 4 and Sky Arts, and yet advertisers continue to create separate campaigns for Facebook, Instagram and our other platforms. Certainly, there are differences between our platforms just as there are differences between TV channels, but there are more similarities and for most advertisers, most of the time automatically running across both dramatically improves performance. By running separate campaigns you essentially put guide rails in place that restricts the ad delivery systems opportunity to run advertising in the most effective placement. This also reduces the collection of signal data. This inadvertently drives up CPMs, lowers reach and increase the cost per sale. Smart marketers are using automatic placements to find the right person with the right message in the right place.  

2 – Campaign budget optimisation

Rather than creating lots of individual campaigns, marketers should bring them together under one objective and let the machine determine the most efficient use of budget to get you the overall best results, spending less on underperforming ad sets. With campaign budget optimisation, advertisers can set one central campaign budget to optimise across ad sets and continuously distribute budget to the top-performing ad sets in real-time. 

3 – Creative is still your competitive advantage

It is shocking that over 40% of video impressions delivered on Facebook are not optimised for a Feed environment. Spend time on craft. You can now upload different creative assets for Facebook, Instagram, Stories, Messenger, and In-stream. Building creative that works for the environment it’s served in, and the mindset that your target customers are in whilst they use it is paramount to any successful campaign. Equally, marketers need to think about how best they show people products that are tailored to their interests, whether or not they’ve been to your site or app. Using machine learning to find the correct people for each product, and always using up-to-date pricing and availability is driving real results for many brands.

This Christmas leave the machines in the office

Once set up – the temptation we all have is to meddle, particularly if we see our costs going up. This human intervention massively holds performance back. 

When campaigns are set up they are initially in the “learning” phase. During this period the ad delivery is purposefully very broad, which allows data from many different audiences to be collected. 

Once a reasonable number of conversions (around 50) have happened the ad delivery starts to optimise and performance rapidly improves. When someone intervenes during the learning phase, it resets and the learning phase has to be conducted again. Instead of meddling make sure your campaigns are set up in an optimal way and then relax and enjoy a mince pie.

To learn how you can achieve breakthrough performance with machine learning (and a whole lot more), read our Disruptors Annual Report, Build to Break: The State of Disruption.

The post The Machines are Coming for Your Marketing Plan appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Both Facebook and Instagram have been awarded brand safety certification from the Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards (JICWEBS). 

The certification comes following an independent audit of the platforms’ advertising processes against JICWEBS’ DTSG Good Practice Principles – which aim to reduce the risk of brands running ads adjacent to inappropriate content.

Facebook and Instagram have come under fire in recent months around the misplacement of ads on both platforms exploiting inappropriate user-generated content including violent videos, racism, trolling and child abuse.

Last year the House of Lords Communication Select Committee urged all industry bodies to commit to signing up with JICWEBS and to date over 130 organisations have done so.

Facebook and Instagram’s certifications closely follow Amazon, who received theirs in July.

“Advertisers want greater trust and transparency in the digital ad chain. JICWEBS’ certification shows advertisers who are making a genuine commitment to protect their investment. We hope all parts of the supply chain will share the same level of detail through our certification scheme,” said Jules Kendrick, CEO of JICWEBS.

“Digital advertising builds brands, drives growth and creates jobs. It is vital that advertisers can trust where their ads are appearing, and we are fully behind the industry’s desire to raise standards in digital advertising,” commented Steve Hatch, VP of Northern Europe at Facebook.

“We support JICWEBS’ robust standards, rigorous verification process and the industry transparency it provides, and are delighted to have achieved DTSG Brand Safety Certification.

The post Facebook and Instagram Awarded JICWEBS Brand Safety Certification appeared first on PerformanceIN.

What are Libra and Calibra? Why do they matter for performance marketing?

Libra is a stable-coin because it is backed by a basket of currencies and other assets. It is administered by the Libra Association, a not-for-profit membership organization, based in Switzerland. Each member has one voting right. Facebook is one of the members, and it is expected to keep a leading role at the launch of Libra. 

Calibra, on the other hand, is a subsidiary of Facebook, whose first product is a digital wallet for Libra, that will be available as a standalone app, plus as part of Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. It will comply with KYC requirements, and financial info available to Calibra will not be transferred to Facebook to target ads.

Both Libra and Calibra are promising minimal transaction costs. Both seem to put unbanked people around the globe, and emigrants who need to remit funds back home, as their first priority. For the longer term, they aim to become a ubiquitous form of payment and micro-payments. In my opinion, Libra will change the performance marketing industry at a speed never seen before. It will create scalable growth opportunities for innovators, including the birth of an “involuntary” affiliate network to profit from and bring us legions of casual affiliates to expand our base of performing affiliates. But it can also affect the success of some of the current players in the industry. How to tell the difference between winners and losers apart? The former is already preparing for this, the latter will be in denial until it is too late for their business or career.

What’s Libra likely impact on affiliate networks?

While Libra does not need to be connected to one specific Facebook profile, each Facebook user could get its own wallet on Libra. There is a growing consensus that sees Libra being used by Facebook to give rewards to users for certain actions, and for members of the Association to give a small cashback when their services are paid through Libra. For example, pay Spotify with Libra, get X% rebate.

It is not hard to imagine that one Libra user can write a review about a product, then post links (embedding her/his public address through a UTM) to sites, or even to individuals, selling it. If the merchant supports Libra (and/or it has the Facebook pixel installed), as soon as a purchase is done, the funds would move from the referred customer into the merchant’s Libra wallet, and a commission would be paid automatically into the affiliate/referrer account. So instant payment to the affiliate, without waiting for the next payment cycle. And negligible transaction fees for all. 

Take this scenario, multiply it by the power of Instagram (“feature a product on IGS or IGTV, link to it, get paid as affiliate”), whose linking policies are decided by Facebook, and all the other apps/channels that can be connected to Libra (including Smart TV to purchase what people see as PPL while binge-watching Netflix), and we get an idea of the direction things may take.

Can all of this happen anyways, without Libra? Sure, but right now I do not see any other alternative with the same users-base, easiness to share, and stable coin value. Libra brings in one place all the pieces needed to create an “involuntary” affiliate network. The differences between being an affiliate, consumer, or seller become blurred, on a scale that no referral program has been able to achieve so far. Yes, Etsy may need to do some thinking, too. eBay already made a decision: “if you can’t beat them, join them” (as a member of the Libra Association).

What’s Libra likely impact on affiliates?

Libra will create instant ways to monetize one’s traffic. And can turn Facebook into the biggest, global super-affiliate. What will happen to affiliates doing arbitrage through Facebook? How good will their funnels need to be to keep performing, when Facebook is in the same space? What will happen to technological solutions that add (sub)affiliate links to the content produced by major media companies?

Same affiliates will be able to tap into the combined reach of Facebook and Libra, a one-stop-shop that covers all the sales process, from identifying a responsive audience to collecting commissions. Other affiliates will see the value they deliver to their users is dwarfed by what Facebook offers.

What’s Libra likely impact on performance marketing careers?

The distance between CPC/CPM ads and performance-based models may become thinner, at least for advertisers that convert well and on big volumes. The data available will be substantial, and so will be the number of long-tail affiliates: every Facebook, or Libra in general, a user could become an affiliate whose commissions can be credited in real-time. Having direct, personal contacts with top affiliates will still be vital, but the same can be said for the ability to work on scale.

Is Libra’s success guaranteed?

Libra has already attracted the attention of lawmakers, media, competitors, etc. Many have already spoken critically about Libra, probably even before understanding it. The satisfaction of Libra’s users will not be kept easily. As long as people identify Libra with Facebook, each time a potential issue arises on one of them, we’ll be bombarded with warnings, crying how fragile they are etc. Then once users go back to transferring money easily to a friend abroad, or making a purchase online, or receiving funds/commissions/cashback when needed, most of these concerns will disappear. 

Libra also has to keep a harmonic vision among its own members. The Libra Association looks very solid because it brings together giants from various sectors, including financial (like Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, PayU, Stripe), blockchain (like Coinbase), marketplaces/services (like eBay, Lyft, Uber, and the already mentioned Spotify). The present interests of its members are aligned, but what happens if they diverge: will they consider Libra part of their core business or just a side bet? The voting rights of each member of the Libra Association are capped, so one member can’t control it, but Companies can still decide if/how to interface their other services with Libra.

At the top of this, Libra will not be available in US sanctioned countries, or countries that have outlawed cryptocurrencies. WeChat and AliPay do not have to worry about this while they conquer more and more users abroad: the mighty market of Mainland China is out of reach, both for Libra and, as we know, Facebook in general.

How can you grow with Libra?

Should you wait and see how Libra goes, before preparing for it? If you read this far, you probably already know the answer: yesterday was the best time to get ready for Libra, but today is better than waiting. Even if Libra would not go ahead at its full potential, we all know other players are already working to disrupt the industry. Wise affiliate networks will keep running reliable, independent analysis of where they stand in the upcoming industry landscape. They will keep improving the value and variety delivered to publishers and advertisers. Value in terms of sales, reach, reliability, flexibility and friendliness, at all levels. Variety, in terms of types of merchants and, especially, affiliates recruited. The Pareto rule will stand unchallenged, the majority of the sales will still come from a limited number of affiliates. But long-tail affiliates can also contribute value, including content that ranks well, SEO-wise, and brings a steady amount of sales over the months. Endorsements that may not bring big sales, but add value to brands (yes, affiliate network fees on this will not be substantial, but consider it an investment in keeping both publishers and advertisers happy). The times of the undifferentiated affiliate networks are almost gone, Libra will just give the final blow.

Performance marketing professionals will likely benefit from Libra. As long as they welcome change, it will expand their affiliate base substantially. Many of these affiliates will not even see themselves as such, and in many cases very little will be known about them. So scalability becomes the key: in a few years, Python will be a required skill for affiliate managers. At the top of automation tools (to monitor TM+ bidding, flag fraudulent patterns in traffic, etc.) that are already widely used, new SaaS solutions for performance marketing will become part of each affiliate manager’s toolbox.

Affiliates will need to understand what the Libra ecosystem offers them. Does it make sense for them to build upon it? For example, how will a loyalty site add value to the life of its users, when Facebook may be offering or facilitating, cashback for each transaction done through Libra? Should it build a wallet of its own, topping up the percentage of cashback through direct deals with advertisers?

For everyone interested, there are white papers describing the Libra Blockchain, its programming language and the other technical aspects. 

Conclusion on Libra?

Overall, I look forward to contributing, as performance marketeer, to the success of Libra. In general, I welcome systemic changes. Industries start, full of innovation. Systemic changes ensure innovation keeps going, with no temptation to rest on old glories. That’s part of how we evolve as a society and as individual people

The post How Performance Marketing will be Transformed by Facebook Libra appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Tech giants Facebook, Google and Twitter have launched the first industry-wide initiative with global advertising agencies and brands in a bid to “rapidly improve digital safety,” as tech platforms increasingly face scrutiny from regulators.

For the first time, some of the biggest ad agencies including WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, GroupM and Dentsu, and brands such as Unilever, Bayer, Mastercard and Adidas along with Teads, YouTube, Unruly and Verizon Media have teamed up to address harmful and misleading content.

The organisation, called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, founded by World Federation of Advertisers members, will host its first formal meeting at Cannes today to discuss how it will go about sustaining a healthy ecosystem and taking responsibility.

The announcement was made at Cannes Lions festival and although what the alliance will actually do is still up in the air, the initial steps the organisation will take will be to “form and empower an inclusive working group charged with developing a set of initial ideas and prioritising next steps.” The group said its work will be “transparent” but did not outline when it would reveal what was agreed. Those involved will meet regularly and work collaboratively to identify protocols and processes that will protect consumers online.

Facebook’s VP for global account partnerships Will Platt-Higgins told Ad Age: “they and we believe that building an alliance of leading advertisers, leading agencies, media companies and industry bodies is the best way of doing that versus just the clients or just the agencies.”

Meanwhile, Procter & Gamble’s global media director Gerry D’Angelo said a collaborative approach is the only way to solve brand safety. “Until now, advertisers have been having a whole series of one-on-one conversations with platforms and I don’t think they’ve been as productive as they can. Collaboration is probably the most realistic thing to aim for,” he said in a panel session at Cannes on Monday.

The collaboration comes at a time when social media platforms are being called out by regulators for publishing harmful and damaging content and brands are becoming increasingly concerned about where their ads appear online.

“Now all the measured platforms have measurement and verification in place for viewability, audience reach and anti-fraud, we’re moving to transparency 2.0, which is auditing of brand safety and control over content quality,” Procter & Gamble’s marketing boss Marc Pritchard told Marketing Week.

The post Tech Giants Team Up With Agencies and Advertisers to Improve Digital Safety appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Facebook has announced it will be making some drastic changes to its advertising platform following civil rights groups, such as National Fair Housing Alliance and American Civil Liberties Union, accusing the company of allowing advertisers to wrongfully discriminate against minorities, women and elderly people by using ad-targeting tech to exclude them from seeing legal protection ads (housing, jobs and credit).

Furthermore, Facebook has agreed to pay out around $5 million to settle five lawsuit cases and take measures to prevent discriminatory advertising on its platforms as part of an agreement with civil rights groups.

The settlement resolves claims that Facebook’s ad-targeting technology allowed advertisers to exclude groups from seeing housing, employment and credit offers. It also establishes a partnership with the National Fair Housing Alliance, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Communication Workers of America union to work more closely to prevent discrimination on Facebook in addition to Instagram and Messenger.

“It is a game-changer,” said Lisa Rice, the executive vice president of the National Fair Housing Alliance; “The settlement positions Facebook to be a pacesetter and a leader on civil rights issues in the tech field.”

What’s been agreed?

As part of the agreement, Facebook will assemble a designated portal for advertisers to create housing, employment, and credit ads, which will not allow them to target users by age, gender, address or other categories covered by anti-discrimination laws. 

Micro-targeting options that relate to these protected categories will be off limits as well, and Facebook’s lookalike audiences tool will also incorporate these restrictions. Any advertiser that wants to run an ad on Facebook will be required to indicate if their ad is related to housing, employment or credit.

Furthermore, Facebook will build a tool which will let you search for and view all current housing ads anywhere in the US, regardless of who is targeted or where they live. According to Facebook, the changes will be completed by the end of the year.

“Housing, employment and credit ads are crucial to helping people buy new homes, start great careers, and gain access to credit. They should never be used to exclude or harm people,” Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said announcing in a blog post; “Getting this right is deeply important to me and all of us at Facebook because inclusivity is a core value for our company.”

The post Facebook to Revamp Ad-Targeting to Avoid Discriminatory Ads appeared first on PerformanceIN.

When it comes to connecting with e-commerce consumers, all social media platforms are not created equal. 

For example, did you know that 80% of users follow businesses on Instagram? Or that over one million store visits are generated by ads on Facebook?

As two of the top social channels in the UK, Facebook and Instagram hold a lot of potential for online brands and retailers. The more you optimise your social media advertising on these platforms, the better positioned you’ll be to reach the right consumers.

Based on experiences with more than 2,800 sellers worldwide, the e-commerce experts at ChannelAdvisor have identified several key strategies you can use to get ahead with Facebook and Instagram advertising.

1. Be dynamic

Successful sellers know to make dynamic ads a central component of their Facebook and Instagram advertising strategies. Because they’re designed to entice and engage, well-positioned dynamic ads tend to drive strong results. 

We’ve seen online retailers experience as much as a 36% increase in average order value after implementing a dynamic ad strategy.

These retargeting ads are ideal for brands and retailers — and not just because they automate the process of connecting people to products that have already captured their interest. In addition, dynamic ads can be optimised so they really stand out in news feeds.

For example, some sellers use dynamic ads for retail to close the gap between mobile searches and high-street shops. By showcasing nearby inventory and pricing, you can easily guide consumers further down the path to purchase.

Or, if you’re already using a product feed with Google, you can use your Google feed in combination with Facebook dynamic ads to further target your audience.

2. Tell stories

As social sites first and foremost, Facebook and Instagram are used more for discovery than transacting. For this reason, success hinges largely on leveraging a range of strategies that start with social media advertising and extend to sales outside of social platforms — whether that means clicking an organic post to buy on a brand’s website or transitioning over to look at Amazon listings.

On the one hand, 17% of digital buyers have purchased products directly from Facebook (and 4% have done so on Instagram). But when you look at how many product discoveries are influenced by these platforms, those numbers more than triple. As much as 59.4% of millennials name Facebook, Instagram and other social sites as their top resource for discovering products.

It’s little wonder, then, that stories sell. 

When leveraging Facebook and Instagram Stories ads to garner more interest in your products, remember that these promotions use the same targeting tools as ads that run elsewhere on the platforms. This means you can capture new audiences by showing ads in stories before following up with additional advertising in news feeds (and vice versa).

3. Communicate often

According to Facebook’s own research, 53% of people are more likely to shop with a business they can message directly. So if you haven’t yet tapped into the potential of Instagram Direct and Facebook Messenger, now’s the time to start. Incorporating these tools into your social advertising strategy can be a great way to develop interactive experiences around consumers’ individualized needs.

You might try integrating Messenger with other Facebook ad formats to guide people further down the path to purchase. Or engage with your most active Instagram followers by using Instagram Direct to offer personalized promotions. Whatever method you choose, this is one area where it pays to get creative and spend some time on customisation. 

With Facebook and Instagram, it’s possible to connect with customers in ways that aren’t possible on other advertising channels. The above tips can help shrink the path to purchase from weeks or months to days or hours. The more you focus on getting Facebook and Instagram advertising right, the better positioned you’ll be to reach the right consumers at just the right time.

The post Three Proven Ways to Optimise Your Facebook and Instagram Advertising appeared first on PerformanceIN.