Month 5 – March Madness meets Twitter Policies
March Madness meets Twitter Policies
Been holding off doing a weekly review – then a week became a fortnight and then a month. It is so easy to get caught up with distractions and excuses and things to do that do not go that well.
My last review’s next steps were all about pushing along with Twitter ads. Increase click rates and build conversions. I was happy with the way click rates (when someone clicks a clickable card) were developing. February went from 0.99% to 10.79% on average. March was heading along really well with rates improving right up to 18%. I had narrowed down my best audience and remarketing from past campaigns was working to help it along. I tested out a few things – different copy for the weekly webinar ads and also steering to a longer form new opt-in page. Nice progress and really showing the power of retargeting. What could go wrong?
Tracking Clicks
My mentor, Dean Holland is very specific about adding in new capability just when it is needed – not before. It is a strong way to avoid shiny objects. This month, one of those areas was to improve tracking. I ran out of clicks on the free site I was using – upgraded for a modest fee and implemented a few tracking links to add to my own tracker. That does not work as easily as one would imagine. Example: Twitter shows the clickable link on the ads – one filled with mumbo jumbo numbers is not the go. And keeping track needs a good tracking coding mnemonic system. I have 3 layers on top of each other – hard to keep track. I did discover that the tracking system includes trackable banner rotators. Implemented that so I can rotate banners for Internet Profits products on all my properties. One link and it rotates the banners and no work needed in WordPress to do it. I also added it to my Staged stages, which previously only had static banners. Has it worked? Got 3 clicks in one rotation = 3 is better than 1. But I am tracking better. Next month – own domain for links. The image shows two banners – there are 10 in all and I am also using side banners on Staged.
Getting Ahead on Video
March was also video ads month. I wrote a script for Joe Fretful and his Plan A challenge. The idea was to get a short Video done with Explaindio ( I bought it in Shiny Object Days) and use that for a Twitter Video ad. Guideline length for a Twitter ads video is less than 2 minutes 10 seconds. I made a start – it took a while to get the learning curve in place. There are parts of Explaindio that are not that intuitive. Rather than wait a month, I did make a YouTube video (2 in fact) and posted one into my blog. I loved the comment from my cycling mate, Richard. Is there a TBC? Yes there is but not sure when. Key thing is I did get something up and it forced me to write a really good blog post about Joe’s retirement savings worries. Here it is again:
Retargeting Twitter Ads
The key to getting conversions is to retarget visitors where you find them. I spent a lot of march working on retargeting. Twitter pixels placed on this website, on all my landing pages and on my friend’s Affiliate Oracle landing page. That is what friends are for. Audience sizes are still too small but the journey is started. I also added the pixels to my Snip.ly pages. I was hoping to snip at least 5 pages a day manually – not really happened as methods on iPad are not as easy as on desktop – and that is where I browse stuff. The automatic stuff is working well – I curate content from RSS feeds and now add them as Snip.ly snips and post those. Talking of automated, I did have to review a whole lot of auto interfaces between platforms. These have to be checked to see what has stopped working. Example, LinkedIn cuts authorisation periodically. All well and good but I do not recall where all the links come from. Lesson: Document as you go and include login details.
Plan B for Autoresponder
Now Twitter ads has got great click rates but no conversions. Luckily, I committed to a large solo ads contract to deliver 5,000 leads to add to 1,000 bought earlier. These arrive in my autoresponder in batches of about 250 at a time every couple of weeks. I have added them into the email followup sequence and do get a few clicks. They are not very responsive and I did notice a gap between the leads they said they sent and what arrived in Getresponse. IT detective gets on the case and downloads two lists to compare. There is a gap – the two lists do not match up (about 5% are not lading into Getresponse. Sherlock plugs first the missing email address into Getresponse = blacklisted => bad quality emails that Getresponse will not allow onto the list. I also did a quick scan of country info provided – I doubt it is 75% tier one countries. I will bang some different offers at the list and see if I can smoke out some value. Open rates and click rates on this list is very low.
Another distraction was an email from a friend telling me she has bought the Fusion HQ business, which I use for some of my funnels. This is really good news as the business needs a kick up the jack to keep pace. It did give me a few days of distraction as I worked through why I would commit to a 3 year discounted renewal rather than go year by year as now or even just cancel. Part of that was to reconcile two autoresponder lists – their captured list and the one passed through to autoresponder. Gaps come from unconfirmed signups, API down or unsubscribes on one or other side. Why bother? Some of those emails are genuine and only a few months old. It also helps me to decide if the tool is worth working with. Now this brought in another avenue of work. It is also triggered by concerns I have about deliverability from Getresponse. The new list is getting very low open rates. I did send a few HTML emails – need to test a logo email too. I am thinking I might need to run my own emailer. Fusion HQ has an autoresponder but one has to provide an SMTP mailer. So I went looking and picked one that could double to replace Getresponse if I needed to. I picked SendPulse for that as it had a good wide free plan and a modest fee based plan for the type of usage I want.
March Madness Summary
What does that all add up to? An over-complicated month. Maybe too many tools added into the mix. I did get a steady flow of leads but not converting. Twitter ads showed great improvement BUT there is a twist to that. My account was ruled ineligible not long after I submitted my last round of ads. I have removed the ads and asked for a ruling – no reply after two days. They have since replied twice and confirmed the ruling. This is hugely frustrating as i do not know what I have done wrong – they refer you to a generic policies page and do not give any specifics. There is no way to know how to fix the problem or what could happen on another profile account. It costs me all my retargeting audiences – which was the true lever to getting improved click rates. I have other profiles I can use. My mentor did answer a partner question last week “why do you recommend a blog?” Because you might get closed down. That is exactly why I stayed away from Facebook ads. That ruling from Twitter knocked me for six. Why bother? Fuck them!! You know I can make a good living managing markets – the last 3 moths of ads were paid for by one winning trade on yoga pants.
This is a huge setback. What it did was confirm that one has to diversify one’s approaches. I am still getting traffic. I can learn another ad platform. I can try another profile on Twitter. I am building the platform for my own funnel promoting a copywriting product suite. It will run on FusionHQ and I have found a builder for that. And a few ideas more. Did I mention the book? No, I did not. I have agreed a co-branding deal on a book with my mentor. This will take my efforts up a big notch.
Lots to look forward to and today I head to Adelaide to go cycling and to find orchids. I will be cycling for charity – Guide Dogs South Australia this time. It takes $3,500 to fully train a new guide dog. Please donate here.
Resources
Tools referred to
Staged: A great way to grow Twitter following and auto post videos from YouTube with embedded call to actions. There is a free account but the paid account allows more Twitter profiles and more Stages. Try Staged for free here.
SMTP Mailer: SendPulse offers a strong free program with a well priced model for scaling usage. Use this referral link to receive a total $50 discount for any monthly plan (email or SMTP). The discount is $10 per month for the first 5 months. Try SendPulse for free
Fusion HQ: Want an integrated page builder, email funnel builder, membership site and affiliate program manager all in one? FusionHQ does it all. Sign up here for a free 30 day trial and try out one of the business in a box solutions as a trial.
