As excited as digital marketers get about the shiny new thing (we’re looking at you, AI), one of the first and most-established forms of online marketing – email – remains the backbone of most companies’ programs.
This isn’t your grandfather’s email marketing, though. Marketers have embraced capabilities for data-driven personalization, multi-channel campaign management, audience segmentation, testing and more – some of these driven by AI and machine learning.
MarTech’s “Email Marketing Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide“ examines the current market for enterprise email marketing platforms and the considerations involved in implementing them. This 59-page report is your source for the latest news, trends, opportunities and challenges facing this market as seen by industry leaders, vendors and their customers.
Also included in the report are profiles of 10 top vendors, pricing information, capabilities comparisons and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing. Visit Digital Marketing Depot to get your copy.
On Tuesday, Amazon initiated layoffs within its advertising division as part of CEO Andy Jassy’s efforts to control costs.
It is unclear exactly how many employees in the ads division will be affected.
What’s happening. Amazon is currently experiencing the largest layoffs in its 29-year history, following a hiring surge during the Covid pandemic. Amazon’s global workforce grew to over 1.6 million by the end of 2021, up from 798,000 in the fourth quarter of 2019.
The aftermath. As a result of the recent layoffs, Amazon will reallocate resources, which include shifting team members, slowing down or stopping certain programs, and recognizing the need for different skill sets to address priorities. Consequently, role eliminations occurred for a small percentage of the organization. Affected employees were notified via email on Tuesday morning, with the layoffs scheduled to commence on June 20, or July 17 for workers in New York and New Jersey, following a 60- to 90-day transition period.
Transitioning to other roles. During this transition period, affected employees will have the opportunity to search for another role within the company. The exact number of layoffs within the advertising unit remains unclear. Last month, Jassy announced that Amazon would lay off 9,000 employees in addition to the 18,000 cuts previously announced in November and January. Those earlier layoffs primarily targeted retail, devices, recruiting, and human resources groups.
Jassy is also examining the company’s expenses on a larger scale as it faces an economic downturn and slowing growth in its core retail business. Amazon has frozen hiring within its corporate workforce, discontinued some experimental projects, and slowed warehouse expansion. By announcing layoffs in the advertising and Amazon Web Services divisions, Jassy has indicated that even Amazon’s largest and most profitable businesses are not exempt from cost-cutting measures.
What Amazon said. In a memo sent to staff, Paul Kotas, Amazon’s Senior Vice President of Advertising, IMDb, and Grand Challenge, informed employees of the job cuts. The memo emphasized that throughout the 2023 planning process, Amazon has been rigorously prioritizing resources to maximize customer benefits and ensure the long-term health of the business.
“Hi Everyone,
I wanted to share that this morning we took the difficult step of informing Amazon Ads team members who were impacted by role reductions in the U.S. and Canada. In other regions, we are following local policies which require additional time and process steps, including consultation with employee representative bodies. We will communicate with affected employees in other regions in accordance with those policies and timelines. We recognize that this news is significant for all our team members and, therefore, want to provide you with additional context on both the decision to eliminate roles and how we are supporting our impacted colleagues.
As Andy shared a few weeks ago, throughout the 2023 planning process, we’ve been scrupulously prioritizing resources with an eye toward maximizing benefits to customers and the long-term health of our business. For Ads, this process has involved reallocating resources by shifting team members, slowing down or stopping certain programs, or concluding we didn’t have the right skills in place to address our priorities. As a result, we have made deeply-considered decisions about how best to move forward, resulting in role eliminations for a small percentage of our organization.
Importantly, I want to acknowledge and thank our impacted colleagues for the work they have done on behalf of Amazon Ads customers. Our immediate focus is supporting our team members through this difficult transition and, to this end, employees whose roles were eliminated will have a personal follow-up meeting with a leader from their team explaining next steps. Those affected will receive full pay and benefits for the next 60 days (90 days if in New York and New Jersey), plus an additional severance package and outplacement support to help with finding their next role outside of Amazon.
Looking ahead, I remain very optimistic about the opportunities in front of us, even in an uncertain economic environment. We’ve built a strong foundation and I’m personally very excited by the invention and building happening across our organization. I also want to thank each of you for showing one another empathy and support during this time. Please reach out to your team leaders or MyHR with any questions.”
Paul Kotas, Amazon senior vice president of advertising, IMDb and Grand Challenge
Layoffs hitting the tech industry hard. Meta also announced its own plans to lay off employees across Facebook, Instagram, Reality Labs, and WhatsApp starting today. Meta employees in North America were notified by email between 4 am to 5 am PT Wednesday morning. Outside of North America, the timelines will vary country to country, and some countries will not be impacted.
Why we care. Aside from Layoffs signal a shift in the Amazon’s priorities and resource allocation. These changes could impact the advertising landscape on the platform, affecting the tools, services, and opportunities available to advertisers.
Additionally, getting laid off from a job is never easy. The affected individuals from Amazon, Meta, Google, and all of the other tech companies going through tough times, have valuable experience and expertise within the ad industry. Hopefully, their insights and skills will be an asset to other companies looking to strengthen their advertising teams.
We know that schema helps harness the power of your content by making it more discoverable in search results.
Our last article, How to deploy advanced schema at scale, covered the schema deployment and maintenance process. The next step is to track the performance of your schema.
This article will discuss the KPIs for measuring the impact of schema deployment, ways to monitor schema errors, and how to analyze your content’s SERPs performance.
Setting up the right measurement steps and metrics
These two steps are critical when it comes to measuring your schema performance:
Schema analysis: Assess the schema deployed on various high-performing assets such as URLs, images, videos, FAQs, etc.
Identifying the right KPIs to measure: This includes impressions, clicks, CTR, SERPs saturation, and potential cost savings.
Analyzing deployed schema
Schema analysis is essential for identifying the right assets for large websites. Ideally, schema should be deployed on critical assets like images, pages, videos, FAQs, menus, etc.
Schema opportunities need to be checked constantly because of the dynamic nature of URLs. Keep in mind schema can only be deployed if your pages are accessible.
I suggest running a ScreamingFrog crawl to find all the URLs returning 200 OK codes.
As part of schema analysis, ensure it covers all essential available assets and URLs on your website.
Constant completeness checks
Schema deployment should never be a one-time activity.
As a large site’s content gets updated, so should the schema being deployed.
All redirects, broken URLs, and pages that are missing schema should be constantly reviewed to ensure your content is discoverable.
Below is a robust dashboard that helps understand the important schema analysis and tracking stages.
Dashboard view which can track critical steps for schema analysis and tracking
Catching schema drifts and errors
If your schema is flagged for errors, address them immediately to avoid manual action from Google.
Schema drifts are errors due to schema vocabulary changes in schema.org or Google’s rich result guidelines, website content changes and other technical issues.
If the schema drift is caused by website content or vocabulary changes, the schema deployed must be changed before search engines index those pages.
Analyzing content changes and setting up triggers or notifications as a reminder to change schema can be helpful.
Once you’ve analyzed your schema deployment strategy, it’s time to track your schema KPIs.
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Identifying the right KPIs to measure the impact of schema deployment
Below are strategic KPIs you should use to gauge the performance of your schema and the effectiveness of its implementation:
Impressions
With schema influencing rich results, content discovery becomes accessible.
High-value content is discovered easier in the SERPs.
As a result, you will see higher impressions for all your zero-click results and all other results relevant to the user query.
Content targeting long-tail queries is also easily discovered, providing the most valuable results on the page.
Clicks
Are you driving traffic to your business profile or website?
Clicks determine how many users decided to take action after discovering your content.
A good KPI to gauge is the total clicks you earned post-schema deployment.
It is necessary to assess to see if the schema is helping content discovery and driving relevant results for your content over time.
Note that whenever your schema drives rich results, this will spike your impressions more than your clicks.
If your clicks are not increasing as much as your impressions, you should not worry because your content is helpful and gives the right results based on the query type.
In the image below, you'll see that after deploying schema, KPIs such as clicks, impressions, CTR and average position also went up.
Google Search Console report showing the impact of schema on CTR, clicks, impressions and average position
Click-through rate (CTR)
CTR is also an important KPI to watch as this is a division of the clicks your content has earned from search by the total number of impressions.
High or low CTR is based on your content strategy.
If the content is written for awareness, then CTR will be low, and if the content is written for conversion, then CTR will be high.
Average CPC
You’re probably wondering why cost per click, a measurement for paid campaigns, is required here.
Knowing how much your business will need to spend to drive the visibility of keywords is essential.
It will help you determine the amount your business saves organically just by deploying schema.
Potential cost savings
Calculate the CPC of those keywords to see if you've saved money using schema implementation instead of opting for paid campaigns.
This will help you gauge the value of implementing schema on your website.
SERPs coverage / rich results
SERP coverage refers to the types of universal search results you’ve appeared in.
Once you’ve deployed schema for your various assets, the easiest way to gauge its impact is to measure SERP coverage in universal results.
Measure different types of SERPs (based on the schema you've deployed), including images, FAQ, video, content, People Also Ask, etc.
Universal search results after deploying schema
SERP coverage can inform your content strategy.
If the content pieces you created and tagged do not show up in some of these results, the content might not be relevant or helpful.
Suppose you've deployed FAQs or HowTo schema for the visibility of conversational content.
In that case, you'll need to watch the performance of your FAQ, People Also Ask, and even Featured Snippets rich results after deployment to see if there is a visibility lift.
Similarly, look at the rich results that don't appear in the SERPs.
For example, your images aren't performing as well as you'd like.
Formulate a schema strategy to drive the visibility of those entities or assets on your webpages.
Performance of each schema type and combinations
Schema types are not equal. Some are used to give search engines context, while others drive rich results that can impact performance significantly.
It is important to drill down and see which schema types are most effective based on your content strategy.
Use Google Search Console to see which schemas are showing up and driving search visibility.
Evaluating the impact of schema deployment on your website
Schema maintenance and performance measurement go hand in hand. It’s a cyclic process.
Once you know how your schemas fare, it's time to expand schema deployment across other parts of your website.
Now that you know which schemas work to boost your search visibility, you can finetune your overall schema strategy.
Are you wondering how much you should spend on your Facebook and Instagram ads?
Setting your ad budget can mean different things to different people. It’s impossible to answer in a one-size-fits-all way.
This article tackles how to approach your Facebook and Instagram advertising budgets, where to set up your ad budget in the ads manager, and some key settings that will impact your results.
Considerations when setting your Facebook and Instagram advertising budget
When we talk about ad budgets, several elements come into play.
What is your overall budget for Facebook ads vs. other parts of your marketing?
Sometimes business owners aren’t even sure what percentage of their marketing budget should be allocated to Facebook and Instagram.
This will depend on how well you can track your results to ensure your campaign is profitable.
If you are new to Facebook ads, I would suggest starting slow to get a baseline of results.
How much money should you spend on particular initiatives or segments of your funnel?
Again, this will come down to experience, tracking, and your business model.
I typically suggest that:
60-70% of your budget is spent in the lead generation phase.
10% of the total budget at the top of the funnel or with brand-building ads.
20-30% in retargeting sales ads.
This is just a guideline and will be different for different industries like ecommerce.
How do you optimize the budget settings on Facebook?
Facebook has a variety of settings that can be confusing, including Advantage campaign budget (formerly campaign budget optimization) and daily budget vs. lifetime budget.
How to approach your Facebook and Instagram advertising budgets
If you are new to Facebook and Instagram ads and don’t know how well your ads convert, calculate where your costs should land to be profitable.
Start with the product cost and how you sell it, then make some assumptions based on general performance ranges. Ramp up your ad budgets slowly to test out these assumptions.
For example, if you give a free webinar where you deliver some great content, and at the end of the webinar, you sell your product for $1,000.
If you know that, in general, approximately 10% of the people convert into sales, and you have 100 people register with Facebook ads, you’ll convert 10 of those people into sales, earning you $10,000.
Do some math to calculate how much it would cost to get 100 people on a webinar (generally $5-15/registration).
You might start with the assumption that you have $1,000 to invest, which will cost $10/registration, giving you 100 leads.
If 10% of those leads then purchased the product, you can calculate that your gross revenue would be $10,000 and your net revenue would be $9,000.
In general, sales conversion rates can typically be anywhere from 2% to 10%, but again that depends on the price point, the effectiveness of the sales page or the sales process, and other factors.
Start slowly so you can test your assumptions. Even if you were to sell just one product in this example, you would break even.
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When starting your campaign, set your budget at the ad set level rather than using the Advantage campaign budget option.
In the testing phase, it's better to have more individual control over the budgets for each target audience to ensure your results have significance.
Advantage campaign budget means that Facebook spreads the budget across all the ad sets and ads under that campaign.
Thus, the algorithm may not deliver any of the budgets to one of the audiences you want to test.
You can set minimum spends on the budgets, but this is often better in the scaling rather than the testing phase.
Make sure Advantage campaign budget is off, and then select Next.
At the ad set level, you need to choose between Daily Budget or Lifetime Budget.
I typically choose daily budget because it allows for a more open-ended campaign and is easier to scale.
Choose lifetime budget if you have a definite end date and won't want to continue running the ads past that date.
Lifetime budget also allows for ad scheduling which means you can control the hours in the day the ads are shown.
This is a good option for someone who wants to respond to leads during work hours or is trying to get phone calls during office hours.
The next section at the ad set level is Placements.
If you want to control your budgets individually for Facebook and Instagram, you must create separate ad sets for each placement.
Otherwise, Facebook will unevenly distribute the budget between the two platforms.
To dedicate a specific budget to either Facebook or Instagram, select Manual placements and only check that platform. Then create a new ad set with the other platform checked.
This can be good practice in the testing phase so that you can scale up the platform that is working better.
Another budgeting optimization setting to watch for at the ad set level is the Optimization & delivery section.
Cost per result goal sounds like a good option to control your costs. But if you set it too low, your ads will not get any delivery.
This is also known as a cost cap, and Facebook will only show the ads to people that may come in at that “cap” you have set.
For beginners, leave Cost per result goal blank, but for more advanced users, try testing this setting out once you know your campaign's average cost per result.
Once you have these settings at the ad set level, create your ad as you would at the ad level and launch your campaign.
Then duplicate your ad sets to create new tests with different audiences and possibly different placements.
Monitor your results for the audiences at the ad set level to see which audience is giving you the best results.
Facebook Advantage campaign budget optimization
Once you see which audiences and ads are working well, you can either scale your ads up by adding to the daily budget at the ad set level or with the Advantage campaign budget option.
The best practice is to use similar size audiences in this campaign and then increase the budget at the top level. Typically have 3-4 audiences under that campaign and 2-4 ads for best results.
Get the most out of your Meta advertising efforts
There is no one-size-fits-all approach when budgeting Facebook and Instagram campaigns.
It takes some math and experience to figure out what works best. But when you get that high-performing return on ad spend, it's all worth it.
