One thing we always tell our web design clients: the introductory paragraphs on the home page should first have some kind of interesting hook or angle, then it should summarize the business or organization in a few sentences. What is it you're really all about? In a nutshell.youtube.com This introductory section will be the core of the rest of the website.webtekcc.com Ok, here's what Wilford Design is all about: first and foremost we are designers. We design websites, we design and program applications, we design traditional graphic design and marketing materials. We don't farm out our design or custom programming, we design and build our websites in-house, generally custom and from scratch. We know what we're doing and we think we're pretty good at it.
We are both a technology company and a design firm. We approach all our projects as design challenges. We like to make beautiful things. We build our websites with the best technology from our own designs and utilize an advanced responsive framework. We can program custom functionality throughout a site. We also program custom client business applications, whether it's a custom catalog, order system or customer management system. We also enjoy collaborating with our clients as we build their websites or market their businesses. If your business or organization needs to present itself professionally to the world, we can help you. That's our job, to help our clients be successful.
Video works for engagement on social in a large part because of the motion. That doesn’t mean all your ads should be motion ads — just the ones early on in the customer’s experience with your brand. Motion catches your eye, which is why CTR with video ads is 100% higher than still ads. In social advertising, CTR is everything. Platforms like Facebook are under constant anxiety that they’re going to lose audience eyeballs to the next shiny object app out there. So they set their algorithms to amplify content that gets clicks, comments, and shares, and silence anything that doesn’t. Kinetic Social published this result back in 2015, showing that CTRs on video content were 2X over still and text-only content.
I can tell you from getting literally hundreds of millions of impressions on ads on Facebook for VIPKID this is ABSOLUTELY true. Which one of these sucks hold of your eyeball? Or the moving one? OK both are amazing but be honest, you were spending most of the time looking at the movey one weren’t you? We loved using video pattern interrupts at VIPKID with our ads. We’d get them to wave at the screen, point their finger into the lens, use extreme facial expressions. They were naturals at it!youtube.com Because they were used to teaching a foreign language (English) to 5 year-old Chinese online via iPad.
In other words, think of scrolling audiences who have never heard of your brand as bored 5 year-olds with no language skills. Bright, simple patterns, motion, and unexpected "peek-a-boos" are critical. Short: the sweet spot for VIPKID video ads short: 5-10 second length. Any longer, and the audience wouldn’t wait around for the CTA at the end. Succinct: We also found that we couldn’t get cute with the message. Our audience needed to see in the first 0.5 seconds what was going on. "There’s a teacher. At home. Teaching a class to a computer. There’s a kid on the other end.
In videos where you followed the teacher waking up… brushing her teeth… putting on her headphones to teach… and then teaching… the audience would have scrolled past long before they knew what was going on. That wastes our ad budget. Special: we had huge problems with ad fatigue. Our audience very niche — not very large. Only about 5 to 10 million total Facebook users are qualified to teach for VIPKID. So we were constantly reaching a Frequency (number of times your audience has seen your ad) of 3.00 and more, which is right around where an audience gets tired of looking at the same ad. We would do brainstorm sessions every quarter with teachers to think of new ad ideas, which helped. But making creatives for VIPKID was a constant need that never got any easier.
Our amazing partners at Facebook — Andy Hsu, Brian Zhang, and Robert Feng — really brought these points home to us. They made the point that Facebook News Feed ads are not like TV — you don’t have a captive audience for 30 seconds who’s forced to watch your whole ad. So you have to drive home the idea and value of why the ad is important to the viewer from the first moment. At VIPKID, it was 93% watched our videos with NO AUDIO. And we weren’t that special. As reported by Sahil Patel of Digiday, about 85% of videos Facebook-wide are watched without audio. So it kills me thinking how much time I wasted obsessing over perfect audio quality and voiceovers.
I remember one day I went to the Japanese tatami mat resting room in our co-working space in Beijing and spent like 2 hours doing the perfect voiceover for a promo video. If you’re spending more than 10 seconds choosing the backing track for your Instagram video, you’re spending too long. Be like Dave Chaffey from Smart Insights and use the Pareto principle (the 80/20 rule) on this one. Focus on finding killer pattern interrupts and don’t work too long on your audio. You could literally have NO sound and get basically the same results. Remember, 85% of people who see your videos won’t use audio on them.
I used to spend 30, 60 minutes making my own .srt files for captions. They are awesome. Use them! 1 per minute, and the order is usually done within an hour. Despite video ads having 2X engagement rates over still ads, they actually can lead to higher CPLs in some verticals. AdEspresso pointed this out in a cool A/B test they ran with a still vs animated ad Facebook. Leads for their animated ad actually cost MORE — 60% more — than the still ad. This is counter to our experience at VIPKID. All our video ads — like Nancy Taylor’s above — got lower CPL than still ads.
I believe this is because they were using animation. One important note here — the ads they were testing were not videos. ⚠️ They were still ads turned into animated ones by an animator. We had the same result with animated videos at VIPKID. This is an interesting finding. Because we already learned before that audiences engage more with video ads than still ads. But still ads are great for retargeting — after the audience has already been exposed to your brand/core concept. We ran millions of dollars of them on Google’s display network. One new platform I’m keen to use more in retargeting is LinkedIn for Dynamic Ads, which dropped in 2016 but are now finally available as a self-serve advertising option. Dynamic ads can include the person’s name, profile photo, and role in them, which is a nice pattern interrupt.
These ads will be a perfect in B2B retargeting campaigns where the salesperson needs our brand to be at the lead’s Top of Mind. The phrase "multi-touch attribution" probably won’t win any awards for most exciting marketing topics, but it’s so important. John Wanamaker, the father of modern advertising said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. Attribution tries to solve this problem. And it’s getting better. It means "which channel, website, whatever" gets credited with the desired action you want your visitors to take. If you’re an eCommerce business, it might be a Google ad that brought the visitor.
So "Google ads" gets credit for all the purchases that customer makes. But what if the visitor came back to your website multiple times before eventually completing that action? She might have originally come from a Google ad, then came back from an email, then again from a blog that linked to your website, then finally from your Facebook Page. Which one of those sources should get credit for the purchases now? The Google ad, because it was the first to bring the visitor? Your Facebook Page, because it was the last one? Some mixture of all those sources? If so, what % credit does each one get? Do you split the credit equally?
Give more to the first and last? This is the problem that multi-touch attribution tries to solve, and it’s critical. Because if you decide the Google ad should get all the credit, your marketing budget will all go into Google ads. But then you might only get visitors who come once and never again. If you decide the Facebook Page should get all the credit, then you might put all your effort into the Facebook Page. But then you might only get return business, and no new customers. Worse still, most companies are not aware of the journey visitors take at all, because they only track the last source the visitor came from.
If they track at all! This was a huge problem at VIPKID. We had a super long funnel that would take weeks to get through. Throughout that time, visitors would go all over the web researching us and being reminded by our retargeting ads. Allocating budget became a real pain. Bizible solves these issues by tracking visitors from the first visit all the way to the sale and beyond. Then, rather than relying on you to manually set the % share each touch should receive, it uses machine learning to automatically set the % for you. At VIPKID, we used Google Attribution, with very mixed results. As of now, G2 Crowd ranks Bizible by far at the top of the stack for attribution. Lots of new Facebook advertisers puzzle over the difference between "Link Clicks" and "Landing Page Views" data in their Facebook Ads Manager.
The difference comes from people who weren’t patient enough to wait for your landing page to load.shopify.com This gets even worse when servers get slow from big media buy campaigns or some well-intentioned marketing assistant gets ahold of your Google Tag Manager account and loads a ton of slow-loading non-asynchronous scripts on your landing page. Pro tip: put JUST the pixels on a blank HTML page. This way, even if they don’t stick around long enough to load your full landing page, you still know they’re interested in your product and should be retargeted. Speaking of page load times, the data out there on how quickly visitors will bounce if your landing page doesn’t load is shocking.
In 2017 Google announced that, "as page load time goes from one second to five seconds, the probability of bounce increases by 90%" and that they would be penalizing the SEO rankings for slow web pages. This study from Pingdom suggests that a page load of 7 seconds vs 3 seconds will result in losing 40% of your visitors just because of that. ’re probably wasting 40% of your ad budget. 4k a month by not improving performance. For that kind of money, you could probably hire one person and justify making fast page load times their only job. In truth, though, this probably isn’t necessary. Normally just removing slow tracking pixels, optimizing Javascript and image sizes, and moving to a CDN like Cloudflare is all you need. And page load speeds are easy to track.
If you have Google Analytics running for your site, you already have all the data you need. For some reason WhatRunsWhere is still not in the "I must have this" playbook of every digital marketer in the world. If you’re in a competitive niche for display like weight loss or travel, there is no reason not to use this.lynda.com They recently added Facebook ads too. Unfortunately only still ads, but still, amazing! There were some hacks I thought about not including because they’re too easy to use and too helpful, and this was one of them. But their director of sales, John Kim, was has been too cool and too helpful over the years to not give them some love.
Tell him I sent ya. This tip will have some marketers saying, "yeah, duh," but I only just found out about it. You can now see all your competitors’ Facebook ads just by going to their public Page. This helps make up for WhatRunsWhere not showing your competitors’ video and motion ads. Again, this would be a Day 1 thing for me if I was running the ad buying for any brand.youtube.com It will show you their design, voice, and style. I would just screen capture all their ads, make a PowerPoint for my CMO or CEO or whoever I was reporting to, and tell them each strategy and ideal buyer persona so we could build our own in contrast.
Emojis and gifs in personalized marketing have a huge impact. One of them was Larry Kim, the founder of the great PPC tool, Wordstream. One of his pieces of advice stuck with me — "Use emojis. When I started running hundreds of millions of Facebook ad impressions ad VIPKID, I A/B tested a few large campaigns — with emojis and without emojis. The emoji campaigns got about 20-30% higher CTR and engagement rates with no other differences. To this day, all VIPKID Facebook ads have emojis. There’s a reason for this! Those ads perform much better. Larry’s right. Use emojis in your Facebook ads. In my follow-up message to new connections on LinkedIn, I send them a ⚡️ or a or a 👏. When a new connection replies to my follow-up message, I like to send them a fun gif. I learned that trick from Rachman Blake, who uses comedy for marketing.
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