Now Pinterest appears to be taking a big, albeit tentative step towards adding features more aligned with traditional social media formats, announcing the availability (in beta phase) of a new "communities" feature, that lets users share both pins and general commentary amongst a group of Pinners with like-minded interests.

Activating the Pinterest Communities Tab

Because the scheme is still in beta, pinners will find that it is not natively enabled - you'll need to receive and accept an invitation to a community in order to access the feature.

So, today, we're opening up two of our communities to help all Pinners out there get started. Some users are reporting that you need to follow these links first on a MOBILE DEVICE and then log in to your Pinterest app to accept/join, others are reporting they've been able to do so on desktop - if one doesn't work try the other, basically.

Pinning up from Down Under - Australian Pinterest Users Community - https://pin.it/sdn2lciz4fvvw7

Melbourne Heritage Buildings, Architecture & History - https://pin.it/aj6u7xrlri6pkt

If you wish to enter and then leave either group just to get the service enabled, who are we to stop you, but obviously please stick around, we aim to make these some very active spaces shortly.

Once you've accepted your first invitation, you will find a new tab at the top right of screen which should look something like the following:

Creating Your Own Pinterest Communities

You are able to create your own new communities, but BE WARNED! Pinterest have already stated that they have found users creating crazy numbers of new communities and this is NOT the way they want the service to be used. So BE WARNED Pinterest have specifically stated they are DELETING all these communities and they will in future be restricting the maximum number of communities you can create probably to five.

To create a community, all you need to do is give it a clear explanatory title, a more in-depth (presumably SEO-optimised) description, and upload a cover image. Pinterest are recommending images at least 1440px width to look great on mobile and desktop, but it looks like the images display at different aspect ratios of mobile v desktop, so designing these cover images may prove something of a challenge. For now, if you have text on your cover image, try and keep that letterboxed to the middle of the image to be safe.

To be perfectly clear, users are advised NOT to create more than five new Pinterest communities, or they risk having ALL their communities deleted.

Communities are searchable, with the search box positioned just above the 'recommended communities' section in the communities tab, and there appears to be no restriction on the number of communities a user can join.

Pinterest have also created a kind of "meta-community" for members to list their new communities once created, so we recommended joining up and making sure you broadcast your presence there too - Pinterest Community Finder - https://pin.it/ffqmx6i3gwrnu6

Very little formal information exists at this stage about the new communities feature, but Pinterest staff have issued some general advice on how to build a successful community on the platform, as follows:

Pinterest Communities Best Practices

"I would recommend having a good cover photo, community name, and description. Create a post that provides the "rules of the road" and describes what the community is for and make it "sticky" (tap the "..." menu at the bottom the post).

Then start inviting people! You can invite people by pressing the invite button in the community header (person with + icon) and either invite people on Pinterest or you can get a link to share on other channels."

You do have some creative options in terms of managing your community - you are able to pin or 'make sticky' an apparently unlimited number of discussions to the top of the community - handy if your community is branded or you want to announce some community rules, or just to add a 'welcome' post'.

User management is kept fairly simple, you are automatically joined to any community upon request, but community administrators (initially just the CREATOR of the community), have the option of banning anyone or promoting them to moderator. Administrators also have the ability to remove any content that is posted to the community.

And that's about all we know for now. Once you've created your own communities, don't forget to come back here and drop us a link in the comments - let's make sure this excellent new facility for connecting with like minded (and particularly LOCAL networks) makes it OUT OF BETA!

The post Pinterest Unveils New 'Communities' Feature appeared first on Rattling Tram Small Business & Retail Marketing.

Google has recently rolled out availability of Adwords In-Market Audiences for SEARCH marketing campaigns, and anyone in e-commerce or bricks and mortar retail in particular should be paying attention. This development was first announced by Google in May 2017, but it appears to have taken them a while to roll this out, however all Adwords users should have the facility enabled as of today.

Google's In-Market audiences have been available since 2013 under various guises, but for advertisers who are unfamiliar with Adwords Display advertising, this will be an entirely new concept, as the audiences have until now only been available for display (and YouTube) campaigns.

What are Adwords In-Market Audiences?

If Google notices a web user has changed their search behaviour to visiting or searching for a large number of topically similar and product or service oriented websites, it deems that user to be "in the market" for that particular type of product.

The science behind exactly how this matching works is as obscure as everything else about Google's big data, but Google themselves say "In-market audiences uses the power of machine learning to better understand purchase intent. It analyzes trillions of search queries and activity across millions of websites to help figure out when people are close to buying and surface ads that will be more relevant and interesting to them."

How Can I Make the Most of this?

The answer here will depend slightly on whether you've got some experience under your belt with in-market audiences for display yet. If you've been using these audiences in your own display campaigns, you are recommended to examine their historic performance, and strongly consider adding the most relevant such audiences to your search campaign audience targeting.

What you are looking for is traffic that performs significantly better on site than other audiences or targeting methods. You will be able find this evidence either in Adwords itself or otherwise in your Analytics.

For the vast majority of advertisers, you're recommended to simply add ALL your existing in-market display audiences to your search campaigns, and set bid adjustments based on how much better these audiences appear to be performing than others.

Comparing Relative Traffic Quality - Adwords

To answer that question, you might look at your conversion rates for these audiences in Adwords against your Adwords average conversion rate.

This screen shot is from one of our retail client accounts, you will find this report in your own Adwords accounts under "Display Campaigns> Audiences". On of our favourite metrics here at Rattling Tram is the perhaps arcane-sounding "all conversion value/click". We are RELIGIOUS about making sure all our conversions are given MEANINGFUL dollar values relative to their worth, because this methodology means you can do all sort of clever comparative analytics while knowing you are comparing apples with apples.

"All conversions value/click" roughly translates into English as "conversion value per click". For anyone familiar with Analytics, this metric is roughly analogous to "per session goal value". Neither of these are very commonly reported metrics, but we urge any advertiser who is ever looking at comparative traffic quality to get very familiar with both.

The screen shot indicates that our traffic from these two in-market audiences is performing around 20% and 10% respectively better than the site average, so we would set our bid adjustments to +20% and +10% for these audiences with confidence in these cases.

Note that if we had just focussed on the conversion RATE rather than value, the results would look very different, with results only 1-5% better than the account average, which would recommend only small bid adjustments.

Comparing Relative Traffic Quality - Analytics

We see a similar result in analytics (view this report in Audiences> Interests> In-market Segments), where the standard reporting metric - conversion RATE only indicates one significantly better performing audience. Instead, we strongly recommend building yourself a custom report a la the following:

Here, we see the per session goal value metric adds another dimension to the picture, indicating that we actually have THREE in-market audiences performing well above average, and we would look to add all these audiences to all our relevant campaigns, with bid adjustments conservatively set around +20 and +40%.

What If I've Never Used In-Market Display Targeting?

Never fear, Analytics has your back. Audiences> Interests> In-market Segments is not a very commonly run Analytics report, but we recommend all website owners - particularly anyone in e-commerce or local services to keep a fairly constant eye on this one. You are receiving this data whether you've been running ads targeting these audiences or not for as long as you've had analytics installed on your website.

You will usually see only about 50% of your total site traffic in this report, which gives you some idea how many users on average Google is able to flag as being "in-market" for some product or service. This makes sense, not everyone on the web is currently shopping for a major purchase.

How Good is the Data?

Advertisers have traditionally been dubious about the merits of these in-market audiences. However, at Rattling Tram, our experience has been almost universally positive. It's our strong belief that these audiences ARE highly effective for generating action-ready traffic PROVIDED your product or service is one that potential customers are likely to research extensively online in advance.

We do a lot of work with retailers and local service businesses, and our experience is that for higher priced or larger purchase decisions - the sorts of purchases that potential customers WILL spend a bit of time researching online in advance, then you will almost certainly see benefits in using relevant in-market audiences for your ads targeting.

If you're selling fidget spinners, apparel or FMCG, chances are you will see less success with these audiences.

How do I do This?

In Adwords, navigate to Search Campaigns> Audiences, and click the blue pencil at the top of the page. You will then have the choice of adding your targeting at either campaign or ad group level.

Remember, with Adwords selecting "Targeting" ALWAYS narrows your ad reach. You ads will ONLY serve to users who meet one or more of the criteria you specify here if you select this option. There MAY be instances where you would consider doing this, but these would be very specific contexts that only experienced advertisers should really be contemplating, and a whole other blog post to themselves. For most advertisers, you should select "Observation". This expands your campaign reach to include this targeting in ADDITION to your existing setup, and allows you to set bid adjustments as necessary.

Once you've saved your targeting, you'll see it all presented in a neat table. Make sure you remember to set your bid adjustments by clicking on the "Bid Adj." column of the relevant row.

At this stage, it appears there's no intention to make these audiences available for Shopping Ads, although that would seem to be the final logical extension, as they are now the only Adwords ad format without these targeting options.

The post In-Market Audiences Now Available in Adwords Search appeared first on Rattling Tram Small Business & Retail Marketing.

Nonetheless, with the recent announcement form Bing that it was closing its equivalent of Google Adwords' Display Network, the new format "Intent Ads" they have announced today appear to be an interesting play at mirroring some of Adwords Display's more powerful big data-based audience monitoring capabilities.

Before you ask yourself "why is he nattering away about some obscure ads platform aping the only one I need to worry about", it is worth returning the mantra that regular readers will already be discerning issuing from the Depot ...

"If you are finding success on Adwords, particularly with an older demographic, your next highest ROI, easiest advertising spend is almost certainly Bing advertising."
-Rattling Tram Mantra

You won't find the same VOLUME on Bing that you do on Adwords, but Bing have a LOT of data that shows you can expect better quality, and often cheaper traffic with Bing Ads versus Adwords.

Bing Intent Ads Open Beta Phase for Australia

The Open Beta phase of the new platform starts for Australian users on 16 January, 2018. The new ads will show own MSN websites and Microsoft Outlook in Australia, U.S., and the UK, depending on campaign targeting settings.

During the first 30 days of this open beta, there will be no charge for any Bing Intent Ads clicks that occur in Australia. However, advertisers will be charged during the first 30-day period for any Bing Intent Ad clicks on campaigns that target the U.S. and/or the UK. After the first 30 days, advertisers will be charged on a cost-per-click basis for all Bing Intent Ads campaigns.

Bing say they are expecting average click volume for Intent Ads during the open beta phase to be less than 1% of total click volume, although this will vary campaign to campaign.

What Are Bing Intent Ads?

Bing Intent Ads are like a hybrid of search and display advertising. An Intent Ad is a native ad placement on the above mentioned networks, overlaid with intent signals from search. The networks themselves obviously don't have huge reach compared to Adwords, hence the 1% traffic estimate Bing are providing.

Bing Intent Ads optimally integrate search ads naturally into page content using Bing Ads data-based user intent modelling. Bing Intent Ads are matched to user intent through search history, content signals and web activity to deliver engaging ad experiences across Microsoft’s premium publishers.

It appears, though this remains to be clarified, that the ads will be dynamically generated - meaning Bing will generate the actual advert itself, based on the directions you give it. Bing has stated the ads will rely on "Image Extensions" (see below) to source images for the creative.

What Are the Main Benefits of Bing Intent Ads?

Highly Convertible Traffic: This of course, readers is somewhat hypothesis - we know nothing of the quality of Bing's modelling here, and they have been fairly vague on the signal factors they are using, but the intent is obviously to mimic Adwords' In-Market audiences, which many display advertisers know can be a sneaky and cost-effective source of purchase-ready traffic in certain niches.

If you've got the type of product for which users undertake an extensive RESEARCH phase, In-Market/intent advertising will be a good option for you. These people will usually have been searching around lots of websites. We know Adwords has a reasonably good concept of when these types of buyers are showing purchase intent for a particular product.

Channel Expansion: Reach beyond the search box to millions of monthly unique users across MSN and Outlook around the world

Easy to use: The Bing Ads interface has been designed to be as familiar as possible to those already used to Adwords.

How Do I Get Started?

If you already have a Bing Ads account, any search campaigns will be automatically opted in to the pilot on 16 January 2018.

To get the most out of Intent Ads, Bing recommend using Image Extensions. You can define your Bing Intent Ads imagery by associating Image Extensions to your campaigns and ad groups ahead of the launch date.

We'll be sure to post back in January with some how-to's once we've had the opportunity to test the system.

If you'd like any assistance, guidance or strategy with Bing or your digital ads more, CONTACT US, here or page right to pick our brains. We'll usually get back to you same business day.

Here's an article Bing have posted previously for UK customers of the service, which gives you some idea what the ads look like.

Who isn't eligible?

If your product is in the gambling, adult, pharmaceutical or personals (dating) - you'll be used to this by now - you are unfortunately ineligible for Intent Ads, and will not be opted in to the beta phase.

The post Bing Says HNY Retailers with new Intent Ads, Ideal for Ecommerce appeared first on Rattling Tram Small Business & Retail Marketing.

And FOUR facts in particular really leap out of the data in helping us walk Australian retail brands through the argument here.

1. 55% of Pinners say they use the platform to shop for and find products, more than four times the rate of other digital platforms

While people go to Facebook to eavesdrop on their friends' lives, very few perform searches on the platform, which is why at Pinning Up from Down Under, we argue Pinterest has an ability to generate purchase ready ecommerce traffic that is equal to or better than Adwords, and for similar reasons.

This is borne out in the in-depth Analytic Partners study of five advertisers, which showed that Pinterest outperformed other marketing channels for ROI on average by an impressive 45%.

Based on the study, Pinterest is delivering a benchmark return for its advertisers of $2 profit for every $1 spend. You read that right, that's PROFIT, not REVENUE. The actual ROI of these campaigns is 200%. This is the most easily scalable advertising decision a marketer will ever be faced with.

2. More than 200 million people performed a search on Pinterest in 2016

So while it can't generate Adwords' sheer volume of traffic, it can generate a higher organic traffic volume because the general and the ads traffic is all mixed into an infinite news feed, where on Adwords you are competing with other advertisers for just three small bits of advertising real estate.

Most ecommerce vendors who have invested heavily in the platform have found Pinterest has quickly become their highest ROI major traffic source. Where your Facebook post will have disappeared within a day, your Pinterest pins will continue serving and remain discoverable potentially infinitely. Pinning work these retailers did two years ago is still bearing purchase ready traffic fruit for them today.

3. Pinterest has seen a whopping 45% increase in mobile searches over the last year

Pinterest was designed from the ground up mobile-optimised in its preference for vertical format images. As the world becomes ever more mobile-first, Pinterest is arguably positioned than any other social media platform to ride this wave.

And retailers will know that consumers are becoming ever more mobile first in their purchase behaviour. Smart retailers should already be joining the dots as to which platforms they should best be investing their social media efforts in TODAY to plan for future growth.

4. Pinterest should be in the future social media plans of all ecommerce retailers

So, Australian retailers not yet on Pinterest, ponder this one moment. Your competition is running ad campaigns on Pinterest that are generating significant purchase-ready traffic for them, and they are doing so at 200% ROI. And the prospects for this platform just look brighter and brighter.

Find out more:

The post These 4 Facts Explain Why Every Retailer Should be on Pinterest appeared first on Rattling Tram Small Business & Retail Marketing.

We remarked recently here at Pinning Up from Down Under about what a damn Yankee-Doodle accent the platform tends to speak with.

And the data backs this up, revealing that fully 50% of Pinterest's users are based in the United States at present, but the rest of the world is quickly catching the Pinterest bug.

The same data shows 75% of NEW signups to the platform are now from non-US markets.

America Highlights Pinterest's Potential

Pinterest has become a YUUUGE driver of traffic to North American niche blog and ecommerce sites. Female bloggers in particular have flocked to the platform and built huge audiences there, and it's proven a great platform for many to supplement their income with affiliate promotion links.

Where Pinterest was experiencing exponential user growth earlier in the decade, the pace appears to have slowed recently as the platform has approached saturation point in the US. Pinterest is now clearly looking to new markets for the next phase of its expansion.

The data in the table above is FORECAST from 2016. Pinterest have just reported their actual growth figure for the past year at around 20%, so it does appear as if the rest of the world is moving in to cover the decline in new North American signups.

At this stage, "Buyable Pins", which allow users to purchase your products ON THE PLATFORM remain confined to ecommerce vendors with a US address and who invoice in US dollars.

Australian Shopify users in particular should be warned - Shopify does NOT inform you that you require a US address before you can waste a lot of time getting your buyable pins application set up. Do not bother adding Pinterest as a Shopify sales channel if you are in Australia until further notice, even if you are invoicing in US dollars.

But as Pinterest has steadily rolled its ads platform out now globally, and where buyable pins are really nothing more than a specific rich pin setup, which pull live product data from your ecommerce site, Rattling Tram believes the only thing stopping Pinterest is hiring the necessary staff to vet all those new ecommerce sites.

Australia in Particular Shows Huge Upside

At Pinning Up from Down Under, we have done some general crunching of some survey data to look at how the Australian landscape compares. Worldwide, Pinterest is globally the number six social media platform in daily popularity, but in Australia the platform ranks eighth, and with a significantly lower market share.

Pinterest usage rates in Australia, on our data are approximately two thirds LOWER than the global average, and appears to indicate the enormous growth potential the platform is poised for locally.

Of particular interest to social media marketers will be the relatively low Australian Twitter usage rates. As usual, we urge advertisers to approach this platform with caution. We believe this is increasingly now a platform where you must genuinely participate as a regular user in order to achieve any real success.

Advertisements quickly disappear quickly without a trace in Twitter's content-heavy news feed unless they achieve real virality, whereas your promoted pins on Pinterest will continue circulating throughout the platform, delivering return on investment even years after they were first promoted. A little ad juice on Pinterest can go a LOOOONG way.

LinkedIn, Tumblr and Flickr are all more popular platforms with Australian social media users than Pinterest at present, where globally and in the United States, Pinterest has a higher market share than all these. Google Plus was the other platform where Australian usage rates are significantly below global averages.

Of what might be described as the 'second tier' social platforms, Pinterest remains the one that is showing strongest and most consistent growth.

For Australian retailers or bloggers, and PARTICULARLY any ecommerce vendors, Pinterest remains the social media platform that you are MOST recommended to turn your attention to next. For information on Australia's first and finest Pinterest VA service, CLICK HERE.

Top Ten Social Media Platforms in Australia with Approximate Market Share, Aug 2017

The post Pinterest Growth Strongest in Non-US Markets appeared first on Rattling Tram Small Business & Retail Marketing.

For those who aren't clear, Google Shopping Ads are those IMAGE+PRICE+PRODUCT type entries that will often appear in your Google search results (see image).

Google Shopping also has its own rather prominent search tab. And so it should. We are advising ecommerce advertisers that some of your best ROI advertising results are almost certainly to be found in this space, and if you're seeing results there, then Bing Shopping Ads are almost certainly your next best option.

As always, we martyr ourselves here at Rattling Tram on your behalf. We've sat through the entire occasionally very tedious half hour so you don't have to, and distilled all the juice from it to save you half an hour of your life, with some added Australian perspective for vendors down under.

Key Findings

The shift to mobile shopping continues unabated, with mobile ecommerce predicted to this year clock over $100bn in sales worldwide for the first time. Over half of christmas holiday related searches, and over 1/3 of Black Friday purchases are now happening on mobile, with Home and garden as well as toys and games being two particularly strong categories on mobile search right now.

And the growth in Google Shopping ads continues, with users clicking shopping ads around 50% more this year than last, and with the ad unit seeing a stellar 70% growth on mobile.

FREE SHIPPING is also becoming an increasingly strong motivator for shoppers, becoming ever more ubiquitous as an offer from ecommerce vendors, and heading in to Black Friday/Cyber Monday this year it is becoming increasingly EXPECTED by shoppers. Rattling Tram is predicting that within a likely ten year timeframe, free shipping will become the standard mode for ecommerce.

Showcase Shopping Ads are the Future

Showcase Shopping Ads are a new feature that allows advertisers much greater control over how their products are presented. Showcase Shopping ads tend to show on more general or lower intent searches, where the user is searching on a more general term like "electric guitars" rather than "Fender Stratocaster".

These are similar to Showcase or Carousel type ads from other platforms, and these ad units tend to attract higher engagement, so are recommended a look for ecommerce vendors. It's an opportunity for you to present your products as a series of "ranges" or "collections", and advertisers are seeing good results from strategic investment here.

Introducing ATIS

Google recently announced an important new metric that will particularly inform your Shopping Ads campaigns - ATIS - auction top impression share. This new metric can only be viewed in the NEW Adwords interface, but Google are recommending that you keep an eye on this metric for your BEST PERFORMING products. You want to see that those products are the ones that are performing best against this metric to ensure your best products are the ones being served most frequently.

How do I get Started with Google Shopping Ads?

Google Shopping Ads require advertisers to set up a Google Merchant Center account, to which a product feed from your website is added. Most common ecommerce platforms offer an easy plugin solution for providing a regularly updated feed, and this is the recommended approach for most retailers.

Importantly for dropshippers, Shopping Ads require products to have a unique MPIN or GTN, which is really just a fancy way of saying "a properly registered barcode". If you are selling products from Alibaba, you will almost certainly need to purchase a package of these codes to add to your product feed. Every product variant you wish to promote via Google Shopping will require its own GTN or MPIN.

Advertisers should be taking note of the new "Opportunities" section in their Merchant Center. The look and the language will all be very familiar to Adwords advertisers. It's a user friendly section that suggests practical improvements to your campaigns, and the recommendations are usually pretty on the mark. Vendors are strongly advised to look carefully at any recommendations Google provides here.

Slightly more technically, Google are now recommending that advertisers implement Schema.org markup on their site advising product price and availability, as Google will use this data to inform price and availability on Google Shopping in between any regularly scheduled feed updates.

Christmas Holiday Planning for Shopping Ads

Retailers should be thinking about seasonal promotions for their products already, and its important to be planning now to implement those promotions through their Shopping Ads, not merely in-store. Google remind advertisers that where implementation and approval of their time-limited promotions can take up to 24 hours for approval through Google, to plan for these promotions well in advance.

You can use the Sale Price Effective Date field in your feed to limit the timeframe of your promotion, so promotions can actually be loaded up well in advance of the actual sale date.

The video shows advertisers how to use their Adwords reporting to gain insights from last year's seasonal sales to inform your promotional decisions for Christmas 2017.

And if you need any help setting up or strategising your Shopping Ads campaigns or merchant feed, we love to help. Please 'Contact Us' via either the sidebar on the right of this page, or the top menu.

You can view the complete video here:

The post Google Shopping Ad Tips for Retailers for Christmas Down Under appeared first on Rattling Tram Small Business & Retail Marketing.

We feel your pain. Are you tired of ...

• MUST READ new articles on preparing for holidays you've never heard of.
• Essential seasonal Christmas activities that feature SNOW as a prerequisite.

Pinterest is just about the best thing the internet ever invented, and you've caught the bug, but you really can't help but notice what a YANKEE DOODLE accent the entire site seems to speak in (when the hell actually is Kwanzaa, anyway?)

Support for Australian and Southern Hemisphere Pinners

Pinning Up From Down Under is here to provide Pinterest strategy, news and advice from a uniquely Southern Hemisphere perspective, and hopefully we'll all congregate over at the Facebook group too, and pool our collective antipodean Pinterest wisdom.

Step two, please take a second to check out and join the Pinning Up From Down Under Pinterest Group Board.

Step three, what would we be without a Tailwind Tribe to match, so please accept the tribe invitation here.

Strategies for Southern Hemisphere and Aussie Pinners

The key one is that while Americans and Europeans are posting about snow and roast christmas dinners, the Pineterst airwaves are much clearer for you to target your niche close to home by pinning beach holiday activities, seafood feasts and so forth.

We'll be presenting some more granular data about all this in future posts. Suffice to say that as we approach the Christmas season it is worth thinking about niche content relevant to climate and tastes that are closer to home.

For online retailers in particular, two key days are approaching - Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and both also recommend some tactical pinning. The beauty of being 'southern' is that we can still play with the pack and target content for North America while simultaneously pursuing our niche strategy with other content. The high volume nature of the Pinterest platform lends itself to this sort of approach.

We recently posted up about how for example, fashion and beauty retailers can use Pinterest insights to better optimise their pins to get found and drive traffic.

Coming Up ...

So that's just a brief taste of the sorts of things we'll be talking about. Be sure everyone to sign up to all the support networks listed above, and let's get our regional Pinterest content revving together.

Up next we'll be looking at the differences in Pinterest usage rates for Australia versus the US, and it's hard not to conclude there remains a lot of upside for Australian brands and bloggers in particular in moving to take advantage of the steady stream of daily organic traffic that the platform can provide.

See everyone back here shortly!

The post Seasonal Strategies for Southern Hemisphere Pinterest Users appeared first on Rattling Tram Small Business & Retail Marketing.

The crew at AI Target did some crunching of Facebook's publicly accessible big data recently and found Australia was the planet's fourth most expensive Facebook ads market.

Australia sits towards the top of a list of similar OECD countries with relatively low population bases. The obvious takeaway here is that is that the demand for Facebook ad space is highest in the more advanced economies, but the amount of Facebook ads real estate available in a given country is a function of its population base.

So countries with the lowest population bases have the least advertising real estate available, and therefore incline towards higher levels of competition.

There are a few misfires in the report, the authors stating that "interestingly enough, some most competitive yet ineffective (i.e. lowest converting) regions include Svalbard and Jan, Mayen, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Pitcairn Islands, Christmas Island and Iceland."

I'm not sure that really is very interesting at all. The populations of all those countries could virtually be counted on my fingers and toes. The small sample size is very obviously skewing this data, and it its practical usefulness to anybody without a supply chain to Christmas Island - fully 1,540 kms from the Australian coast - is unclear.

Nor is it clear why an Australian territorial island has been assessed as if it were an actual country.

The report also fails to recognise the significant differences in non-English language markets. You CAN use Facebook to reach consumers in Japan or Hong Kong, but very few advertisers are doing so. And these are the markets that Facebook's penetration is lowest. We seriously doubt regionalised auction factors are the real drivers here.

But the results overall show that there remains good value in generating Australian traffic via Facebook, with Australian users the EIGHTH MOST CONVERTIBLE on the planet.

So Australians are amongst the most receptive peoples in the world to receiving advertising messages via the Facebook platform. At that means that most SMEs should be looking to implement at least some activity in this area.

Find Out More about Rattling Tram social media advertising HERE

The post Australia is the world's fourth most expensive market for Facebook ads appeared first on Rattling Tram Small Business & Retail Marketing.

The Tailwind blog has today broken the news that hashtags, once a solid gold rule never to be used on Pinterest, have been re-enabled on the platform (they did supposedly once work back in the day).

This means that the once golden rule is now completely out the window. Pinners SHOULD start using hashtags on their pins from today onwards. It appears that hashtags now do enhance the keyword discoverability of your pins.

The change it is being suggested has been driven specifically by marketers, who have grown accustomed to working with hashtags on other social media platforms. Pinterest's standalone "no hashtags" position has rendered content sharing between other high volume platforms like Twitter and Pinterest problematic to automate.

Should I Add Hashtags to Existing Pins?

Tailwind are advising in their article that their may be some worth in adding hashtags to existing pins. However Rattling Tram would advise that until there's some evidence Pinterest is actually re-indexing existing content, that would potentially be a huge waste of time.

We are recommending adding 4-5 search relevant hashtags to all of your new pins, starting immediately, and we will be monitoring the development of this new feature closely.

Have you had any experience with hashtags on Pinterest in recent weeks? Share what you've learned in the comments below.

Curious about what Pinterest can do for your retail brand?

Adam Ford is helping Aussie retailers RIGHT NOW to get ahead of their competition and leverage the free, purchase ready traffic that is available to them from Pinterest.

Visit Adam Ford's Pinterest for Aussie Brands homepage to find out more.

The post Breaking - Hashtags are BACK on Pinterest appeared first on Rattling Tram Small Business & Retail Marketing.

Pinterest's "Pinsights" team is responsible for mining the social media platform's huge treasure trove of user interest data, and their annual style report is the motherlode of actionable insights.

What is this Pinstyle Report?

We'll let Pinterest explain the methodology in their own words:

"The Pinsights team looked at top queries to identify the most popular questions Pinners have as it relates to wearing certain articles of clothing, trying makeup looks, and styling outfits-- both for everyday wear and life moments.

"This represents the top queries associated with key terms like “how to wear”, “what to wear”, “style”, “outfit” searches associated with top saved articles of clothing, and top searched colours and looks in the beauty category. Data is ranked based on volume of global searchers (number of people searching) in the full year 2016."

So why do I care?

People are always looking for hot "hacks" for social networks. Well, on no other platform, and in no other niche does the offical social media network provide anything that is anywhere near this clearly a "Handbook to succeeding on this platform, backed by all of our own research".

Fashion and beauty retailers and bloggers need to take heed. And sit back now as Rattling Tram digests for you all of the key actionable items.

This research is all about what sort of content is "most discoverable" on Pinterest. So the actionable dimensions are all about optimising your content for discoverability. And those who have been paying attention will know that is really ultimately about ONE variable that's under your control - PIN DESCRIPTIONS.

These recommendations are all about answering the question - "what keywords should I be using in my pin descriptions to ensure maximum success for my fashion or beauty site".

It's important to remember that on Pinterest your pin descriptions are there to make you discoverable, but ALMOST NOBODY on the platform actually reads them. So your language doesn't need to worry so much about grammar and MORE about SEO.

Hitting all the right keywords with unintelligable garbage for your pin description is perfectly acceptable behaviour on this platform in a way that would be VERY NOT COOL if you tried it on say Instagram.

Key Findings

Overall, there's lots of tips for some common and some more unusual keywords that fashion and beauty retailers and bloggers should be trying to hit as often as possible in optimising their pin descriptions for discoverability on Pinterest.

But there's also plenty of gold in here not just for marketers but buyers and product planners alike on what's trending in their marketplace right now.

"How to wear" searches dominate.

This is an unusual keyphrase to see here for any marketers used to working with Google Adwords. People aren't "Googling" these sorts of terms anywhere near the volume as they are "Pinteresting" them. Pinterest users tend to be on the platform looking for helpful and handy general tips more than they are looking for a specific end product.

Pin description text for fashion garments should where possible include the phrase "how/what to wear". So a women's bomber jacket might have the pin description "lightweight women's bomber jacket in red - what to wear to rock the perfect street style" or "how to wear a women's bomber jacket - this model rocks the perfect street style".

The finding: "What to wear" searches are also strong, and are closely correlated to life events. People are searching terms such as "what to wear to a wedding, concert, bar mitzvah, etc." So your descriptions should veer towards describing not just the objects/garments but the CONTEXT in which they are the perfect attire. So "this tuxedo is the the perfect thing to wear to a wedding..."

Similarly "how to" searches are very strong. Pinners like to use Pinterest as a great accumulated "hive mind" of advice. So if you can take your content to places that are more information rather than sales-oriented, then you're maximising your chances of success.

Instead of just posting up your product image and description, why not "how to wear a double breasted suit" that just happens to use your product as the example? Now you're helping people. Now you're giving to the community. I prefer interacting with you versus the next retailer who is just shouting sales slogans at me.

"STYLE"-based SEARCHES are strong

A lot of pinners display a tendency to search on terms related to a particular fashion style with which they identify. The hottest such searches for 2016 were Street, Bohemian, Hippie, Classic, Hijab, Grunge, French, Preppy, and Casual. So any importers of classic French hijabs are fully HYPE right THIS SECOND and you heard it here first!!! Triple points for retailing them as menswear ...

For most fashion and beauty retailers the "styles" relevant to your own niche are going to be fairly obvious, and it's perfectly acceptable on Pinterest, and now recommended by the data to end say a clothing description a la "bohemian style, boho style, hippie style, Yoko Ono, etc."

Remembering again that the Pinterest search engine is blind to hashtags (DO NOT USE HASHTAGS ON PINTEREST), you can and should add comma separated terms to the end of your description as you would hashtags on Instagram or Twitter in exactly this way.

"OUTFIT" is probably the keyword you are missing

This one leaps out of the report. Pinners are very commonly searching not just for "FASHION PRODUCT TYPE X", the more common search is "X OUTFITS". So for fashion retailers, it is not just a pantsuit, it is a WOMENS LIGHT BLUE PANTSUIT OUTFIT on Pinterest. OK?

Style trends in women's dresses

Maxi, Shift, Midi, T-shirt, and Slip are the most commonly searched styles of women's dresses for 2016. So common searches here are a la "women's T-shirt style dress", and your descriptions should where possible seek to match these phrases.

Style trends in outerwear

Leather jacket, Bomber jacket, Jean jacket (including oversized, blue, white and patches) - nb this is a North American term that won't be prevalent in Australian searches, Green jacket, Camo jacket.

It's interesting to note that the search term is "Camo", not "Camouflage". Retailers should where possible include common variant/shortened phrase terms along with full descriptions. So, "Mens camo camouflage bomber jacket" in this case.

Large/oversized sweaters and ponchos that can be easily draped/overlayered also appear to be trending.

Key Findings for Beauty Retailers

It's not ALL about the clothes. Retailers in the beauty sector also will find a treasure trove of data in the new report. And some unusual terms do pop out.

The top three haircut style searches were for "short", "bob" and "pixie"(!?!???!). It's interesting this term is is trending at the same time as others like "hippie" and "boho". The phrase "manic pixie dream girl" appears to have somehow acquired some sort of social cachet amongst milennials. If you're pinning anything that could reasonably be dubbed "pixie style", you're well recommended to include that phrase in your pin description (kill me NOW!).

The top searches for hair colour were even more revealing, given that as far as this reader is concerned the first two of these adjectives aren't actually colours : Ombre, Balayage, Blonde, Brown, Red, Black, and Purple.

Ombre, I will assume means you are Mexican coloured. And balayage is roughly the colour of rope. Am I close here?

And nobody in beauty sector probably needs a new report telling them that "smoky" eyes is the most commonly searched term of the moment, but here it is regardless.

Conclusion

So, the report's findings are a grab bag of the bizarre and the bleeding obvious.

What retailers should take away from it all however is that your pin descriptions do very much matter to your discoverability, and doing just a little bit of research can give you a LOT of actionable improvements to help you become a master of the Pinterest platform on which your customers are performing searches related to your products daily.

Curious about what Pinterest can do for your retail brand?

Adam Ford is helping Aussie retailers RIGHT NOW to get ahead of their competition and leverage the free, purchase ready traffic that is available to them from Pinterest.

Visit Adam Ford's Pinterest for Aussie Brands homepage to find out more.

The post New Research Reveals Top Pinterest Search Terms for Fashion, Beauty appeared first on Rattling Tram Small Business & Retail Marketing.