Author Archives for Jacob Young

In late 2020, Facebook made a splash on the eCommerce scene with the launch of Instagram Shopping in the United States. We’ve done a write-up on this exciting new feature set, so you can get acquainted and be on your way to massive sales numbers in 2021.

What is Instagram Shopping?

Instagram Shopping allows brands to sell products directly on Instagram, without consumers having to leave the app. They packed this product launch with tons of features (which we’ll get into below) including a dedicated shopping feed, product tags, in-app checkout, and more.

This takes a lot of the friction out of the funnel, and enables a smooth transition from discovery to conversion.

Some advertisers, like Barbour, are seeing a 42% increase in Instagram sales using some of the Instagram Shopping features.

Why does Instagram Shopping matter?

Instagram (and influencers on their platform) have massive sway when it comes to product purchases. 70% of shopping enthusiasts turn to Instagram for product discovery and 87% of people say that influencers have inspired them to make a purchase. That means Instagram’s already-powerful influence and discovery engine is now loaded with advanced features that enable businesses to sell products.

More shopping data collected. Instagram, of course, already collects massive amounts of data from their customers, including shopping behavior and interests. With this development, Instagram controls more of the purchase funnel, enabling them to collect even more data on customer purchases and preferences. This is likely to improve the performance of their advertising network.

Increase sales and ROI. One featured case study illustrates how a Korean skincare brand leveraged an Instagram campaign using a combination of ads with Shopping product tags and Branded Content ads. This particular advertiser achieved an impressive 1.8X higher return on ad spend, 45% decrease in cost per purchase and 42% decrease in cost per “add to cart.”

Compete with growing eCommerce platforms. In the era of Shopify and BigCommerce, visitors looking to purchase products they find on Instagram would typically have to navigate away from the app to buy. With Instagram Shopping, the platform takes more control of the greater marketing funnel and can capture additional sales data in the process. The release of Instagram Shopping coincided with this partnership between TikTok and Shopify, enabling advertisers to drive sales on the TikTok platform. So it’s probably safe to expect more moves by Instagram/Facebook to get further entrenched in the eCommerce space.

A more seamless marriage between influencers and brands. A lot of the marketing language for the product launch emphasizes deeper support for influencers on the Instagram platform, and many of the features address this too (product tagging and support for Instagram Live are a few examples). With over 500,000 active influencers on Instagram, there are no surprises here.

Key features of Instagram Shopping

Instagram didn’t hold back on this launch. They built a slew of powerful features to support brands. Here are some of the core features you should know about.

1. Instagram Shopping Page

This is a customizable storefront where brands can host their products, allowing customers to shop right from your brand’s Instagram profile without having to leave the app. Within the Shopping Page, brands are able to group their products into what Instagram calls ‘Collections’.

2. Instagram Shopping Feed

Think of this as a News Feed for products, tailored to you in the same way that content on your News Feed might be. This is where consumers can discover new products and brands.

3. Shopping Tag

The Shopping Tag allows brands to highlight products being shown in the Instagram Feed or Stories. Shopping tags can also be used within Instagram ads, allowing advertisers to drive traffic to their website or native checkout on Instagram.

4. Shopping Support for Instagram Live

Brands and content creators can now sell products through Instagram Live and form deeper connections with people in real-time.

5. Product Launches

This allows businesses to announce an upcoming product launch, so fans can view details and set reminders to buy as soon as it’s available. This feature supports a range of ad types including video.

6. New Audience Types

Advertisers using Instagram Shopping can now create custom audiences based on actions, like tapping on a product tag to view a specific product. This allows advertisers to re-engage these high-intent shoppers with an ad type of their choosing.

Lookalike audiences can also be created to reach new shoppers that have similar interests to your current shoppers.

Getting started with Instagram Shopping

Instagram packaged up their own guide to setting up Instagram ads, but we’ll summarize the key steps for you here.

Step 1: Confirm Eligibility

Review the requirements below to confirm your eligibility.

• Your business must be located in a supported market
• Your business must have an eligible product
• Your business must comply with Instagram’s Merchant Agreement and Commerce Policies
• Your business must own a website domain which you intend to sell from

Step 2: Convert to a Business or Creator Account

Follow these steps to convert to a Professional Account. Once your account is updated, you’ll be able to add details such as store hours, business address, website links, etc.

Step 3: Connect to a Facebook Page

Follow these steps to connect a Facebook Page to your Instagram Business Account.

Step 4: Upload Product Catalogs

A product catalog is the plumbing behind how Instagram Shopping works and associates with your product data. These are two ways to enable this:

1. Using the Catalog Manager within the Facebook Business Manager
2. Importing your feed through a Partner Platform (like Shopify or BigCommerce)

Step 5: Account Review

Follow the steps provided by Facebook to submit your account for review. It typically takes a few days to be approved.

1. Go to your business’s Instagram profile and tap
2. Select “Settings.”
3. Sign up for shopping.
4. Follow the steps to submit your account for review.
5. Visit “Shopping” in your “Settings” at any time to check your status.

Step 6: Turn on Shopping

Once you’re approved, you can follow these steps to enable shopping features. If you don’t see Shopping in your settings, it likely means your account is still under review or it hasn’t been approved.

Step 7: Start Tagging

Now you’re ready to start utilizing the shopping features! The first step is to begin using product tags to highlight products in your photos and videos across Feed and Stories. You can feature up to five products per image or video post, and up 20 products on multi-image posts. Good luck!

Want some help advertising via Instagram Shopping? Get in touch with Clever Zebo today.

LinkedIn Ads has finally started to introduce a Lookalike Audiences feature, and we’re going to tell you all about it.

If you’re familiar with Lookalike targeting, feel free to skip the flowery introduction and head straight for the good stuff below. But for everyone else, here’s a deep thought.

So you’ve got a customer — or even many customers — and you know a surprising number of things about them. You know their age and gender, their ballpark annual income, where they live, what they like to do for fun. You’re no stranger to basic demographics and behavioral data.

So you’re wondering: how do I reach more people like these people, and compel them to buy from my business?

This is where the idea of lookalike audiences feels pretty intuitive.

Why not use technology to study a company’s existing customers or target audience, and enable that company to reach a broader audience who fits similar demographic trends?

For many advertisers, Lookalike capabilities in the LinkedIn Ads platform aren’t a big surprise; they’re what is expected. Facebook, for example, has had this feature since early 2013.

LinkedIn has started to roll out Lookalike Audiences in their new dashboard to select advertisers and is aiming to have it live for all advertisers by the first week of April 2019.

LinkedIn is known for being slow to roll out new features. Matched audiences and remarketing only went live in 2017. Since the acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft, there have been a slew of updates to the platform, including a new dashboard, carousel ads, video, Lookalike Audiences and more.

Before this rollout, there has been a little-known hack advertisers could use in order to run a makeshift Lookalike Audience on LinkedIn.  This is done by adding a matched audience, targeting and excluding this audience in your campaign, then enabling the audience expansion option.  Not the most seamless approach, but it worked.

In this post, we’ll be digging into the new Lookalike Audience feature set and how to use it directly in the LinkedIn Ads dashboard.

How do Lookalike Audiences work?

Lookalike Audiences are a way to leverage your current customers/audiences (using either an email list of contacts, pixel-based data or a CRM data integration) to reach a broader set of potential customers who are demographically and behaviorally similar.

The LinkedIn Ads platform will identify trends across your existing target audience (using data like company, industry, job experience, skills and other info) and find similar sets of users on LinkedIn. You can also find companies similar to the ones you’re targeting.

These audiences can be added to your campaigns and refined through other LinkedIn targeting options.

How do I create a Lookalike Audience with LinkedIn Ads?

Starting in LinkedIn Campaign Manager, follow these steps:

1.  Set up a website audience, contact list, or account list from the “matched audience” page.

Tip:  Try to use a larger list size, as your lookalike audience will likely average 5-10x the size of your seed list.

2.  Check to see if your audience is in the ‘ready’ state, then select the ‘people’ icon pictured below to begin processing your Lookalike Audience.

Tip:  You’ll have to wait up to 48 hours from the time you upload your list – be patient!

3.  Select “create campaign” to create a new campaign that will house your new audience.

4.  Select your campaign objective from the list.

5.  Add your Lookalike Audience to the campaign.

Tip: You can refine your audience further using other LinkedIn targeting options.

Which data source is best for Lookalike Audiences?

LinkedIn allows you to generate a Lookalike Audience using an email list, pixel data or CRM integration.

Here are a few options and examples of good data sources to use:

A list of customers uploaded from your CRM, i.e. Salesforce

Website visitors who landed on the customer login page

Email addresses of leads who have downloaded an eBook

People who visited a key page (i.e. your company’s pricing page)

A list of target accounts handpicked by sales

A list of your top revenue-generating customers

Both list quality and quantity are important. Although a list of your most valuable revenue-generating customers might be of the highest quality, the list size might not be large enough.

The list size must have a minimum of 300 matched members.  The base list size must be larger than 300, as not every email address will be matched to a LinkedIn account (the number of matched members divided by the total number of imported emails is called your ‘match rate’).

Best practices for LinkedIn Lookalike campaigns

Test multiple audience types, as no two audiences will perform the same.

Test a website-based audience vs. list-based audience to discover what performs best.

Identify an audience for each phase of the funnel. Consider a homepage-based campaign for brand awareness and a lead page for lower funnel campaigns.

Review campaign demographics to discover engaging lists or website audiences.

Limit any additional audience refinements as this will lower your audience size.

Larger lists are better and you need at least 300 matched members to use Lookalike Audiences.

Considering Facebook Ads results across the board, Lookalike Audiences are a generally successful targeting strategy for B2C campaigns but have their weaknesses in the B2B realm (this makes sense as Facebook uses data less geared toward a user’s career). Since LinkedIn provides exclusive access to its users in a professional context, we expect Lookalikes via LinkedIn Ads to be a huge win for B2B advertisers.

Quora has proven itself a valuable source of knowledge, not only in online marketing, but across so many different categories. Now, the platform is finally hinting at its plan for revenue, having launched Quora Ads earlier this year.

As an advertising platform, Quora is young and far from feature-rich. But the audience it attracts and the targeting available is very interesting to potential advertisers. Anytime you have a website where people spend time reading, learning and thinking about relevant subject matter, advertisers want to be there. These are the traits of a highly engaged audience.

As a digital marketing agency, Clever Zebo has spent some time experimenting with the Quora advertising platform, and we wanted to share what we’ve learned so far. Here are some of the most important optimization strategies and tips we encourage Quora Ads advertisers to consider.

1.  Always split desktop vs. mobile

When you start optimizing Quora Ads, you’ll soon notice there are no device-level bid adjustments.

In cases like these, we usually recommend that you create separate campaigns for each device in order to give yourself maximum control around bids.

In some cases, desktop bids can be twice as demanding as mobile bids, depending on the audience you’re targeting.

If you don’t break up campaigns by device, you may find yourself bidding too high on mobile and paying more than you need to, or bidding too low to attract any significant volume of desktop users.

Quora provides a useful bid estimation tool, displaying a cost-per-click range and a suggested bid according to the platform’s best estimate. You can see how the desktop and mobile bids differ below.

Mobile bid estimates

Desktop bid estimates

2.  Granular targeting, low volume

Quora Ads allow for very granular targeting and we usually end up seeing an efficient cost per acquisition (CPA). However, when it comes time to scale our campaigns, we’ve found there is often limited volume available to grow.

Tip: Quora also has a handy reach estimation tool, which you can view on the right hand side of the screen while creating your ad set, as pictured above.

3.  Import keywords from your Google AdWords campaigns

An effective way to quickly build your list of topics for targeting on Quora is the AdWords keyword import.

We recommending using this tool to gather topic recommendations and increase the reach of your campaigns.

4.  Remarketing

Remarketing is a useful feature to explore in ad platform that offers it. Quora Ads allow you to install a site-wide pixel (to be placed between the between the <head></head> tag of your website), and using this pixel you can create your remarketing audience under the ‘Audiences’ tab.

Quora has some more granular options that can be leveraged for audience building, to create multiple segments:

Tip: You also have the option to exclude audiences (for example, some businesses may want to exclude those who already converted).

5.  Copy limitations

You’ll find that Quora Ads have stricter copy guidelines than other ad channels, and you may face ad disapprovals if you don’t adhere to their ad copy policy.

These are some of Quora’s ad copy restrictions to be mindful of:

• Too much capitalization (you can’t capitalize the first letter of each word, as you would likely do in Google AdWords)
• Incomplete sentences (you must write your ad in sentence form)
•  ‘Misleading’ copy/claims (superlatives such as ‘#1 provider’ or ‘top firm’ are not accepted)
• Abbreviations are not accepted (LMS must be spelled out as ‘learning management system’)

When you create ads on Quora’s platform, here’s what the ad builder looks like:

Tip: Add a relevant call-to-action (CTA) for best results.

6. App install campaign

Quora offers an ‘App Install’ objective, with conversion tracking through third-party mobile app measurement tools such as AppsFlyer, Adjust and others.

Here, you’re working with the same granular targeting options and ad copy specs as ‘Conversion’ campaigns, with the addition of a ‘Get the app’ CTA. Unlike other Quora Ads, app install campaigns don’t feature a Display URL.

If you have a mobile app to promote, this is a great sandbox to test your acquisition efforts.

Overall, we’ve been impressed with the Quora advertising platform in its infancy. The ad creation process is well thought-through, and the advertising on the site doesn’t distract from the core learning functions that have brought visitors flocking to Quora.com.

You’re likely to see advertisers getting increasingly clever with their approach in order to create relevance. For example, Wishpond phrases their ad headline below as a question, mirroring the organic site experience:

You can see TrenDemon below using the same strategy, which suggests that perhaps framing your ad as a question can improve clickthrough rates:

Quora gives advertisers the tiny but meaningful benefit of a “Promoted by” callout in advance of the ad, which announces that this is a sponsored listing, but also creates some light brand awareness. As with other ad platforms, “Free” is still a popular sell to lead with.

What do you think of Quora Ads so far? Let us know on Twitter @cleverzebo.

Looking for a marketing agency to help you test Quora Ads and find the right digital advertising strategy for your business? Talk to a marketing genius today.