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Acquisition Channel Opportunities: Twitter, Ad Costs, Amazon

Want to get more paying users? I've analyzed over 3200 marketing/tech news over the past week and identified the top 3 opportunities to help you with that:

1. Want to create Tweets that work? Twitter has some advice for you

The news: Twitter has published its Agency Playbook, a checklist on how to run a successful campagin on the platform, with some pretty interesting insights on creating Twitter ads. Some of these insights were about Twitter in general but can be used when creating organic posts as well. Here are some of Twitter's best practices:

  • Keep tweets short with not many hashtags. That means try to stick between 50-100 characters per tweet.

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  • Mix the types of posts you create. Variety is rewarded by their platform. Twitter has provided an interesting calendar with tweet ideas you can use:

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The opportunity: According to Twitter, their users are 53% more likely than the average population to buy a product first (i.e. they're early adopters). If you want to get started on the platform but don't know what to post, these are some good ideas directly from Twitter to start with.

2. If you want to pay less for ads, choose a less popular platform

The news: Business Insider has published an interesting article on the rising ad costs across platforms. They talked with various agencies, trying to estimate the year-over-year increases of various platforms:

  • Google: 108% increase.
  • YouTube: 108% increase.
  • TikTok: 92% increase.
  • Facebook: 89% increase. The average CPM was $11.
  • Amazon - 20% increase between the first and second quarter, so we could estimate around 80% per year.
  • Snap: 64% increase.

The bad news: Yes, ads are getting more expensive.

The opportunity (and good news): There's an interesting correlation between not-so-popular acquisition channels and the increase in cost. Amazon and Snap were at the bottom of the list, for example. I couldn't get any data for Twitter or Microsoft, but my guess is that it's between 50 and 80 percent as well.

If you want to pay less for ads, it might be a good idea to include a less popular platform in your mix if you're a bootstrapper. We'll cover one "less popular" platform in the third post, which is actually way bigger than you think...

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3. Amazon is bigger than LinkedIn, Snapchat and Twitter combined in this area

It's not retail. It's not the cloud. It's ads.

The news: Amazon's ads business has grown by a whopping 87% year-over-year and netted more than $7.9 billion last quarter. Just for a comparison, here's how much Snapchat, Twitter and LinkedIn made in ads last quarter:

Amazon made more than all of these 3 combined in the last quarter. Think about that.

The opportunity: Amazon Ads is a huge paid acquisition channel. Fortunately for us, it's self-serve (available for all to register) and most of it is performance-based, meaning we can directly measure the ad performance after creating an ad.

Can you use Amazon to promote digital products? Yes. Just type "antivirus" or "learn German" into their search bar and you'll see a bunch of sponsored posts. A lot of (e)books also promote themselves using Amazon Ads (just type 'self improvement' for example).

You could create a combo, for example, where you sell a small kindle e-book along with a software license. When people buy the e-book, then they get the license for free. You can then promote the e-book using Amazon Ads, bidding for relevant keywords in your niche.

  1. 1

    Thanks for sharing Darko. It's so interesting to see the dynamics of creators economy shaping the platforms "sales playbook" - now that the stickiness of their solution relies heavily on the success (monetary) of its users, they are basically putting out there as much resources as possible to increase the possibility of success rate of content creators. We saw the same thing happening with quora and Linkedin recently.

    I'm particularly excited with the whole disruption in the digital environment these platforms are bringing!

  2. 1

    According to Twitter, their users are 53% more likely than the average population to buy a product first

    Interesting they say that, I remember going through the guides from some growth agencies and they all discouraged Twitter ads (similar to Reddit). Usually much higher CPA compared to other platforms.

    1. 1

      I'm actually curious if anyone doing reddit advertising was satisfied with reddit.
      I've actually stopped advertising on reddit a few days ago, and I don't think I'm ever coming back.
      Not only is it hard to get people to click on your ad, but they very seldom click 'Download' once they get to the site (for google ads, I have something like 1 out of 2.1 people will click Download, for reddit it's less than 1 out of 12)

  3. 1

    As far as I know, all these Amazon ads redirect you to Amazon Website or Product listed on Amazon only.

    Can we advertise our website/SaaS on Amazon ads?

  4. 1

    Thank you so much for sharing the insights you have!
    I love the twitter calendar, I will use it for sure, cos I feel stuck in the same content for a while.

    Definitely is time to mix it up, starting today!

  5. 1

    Wasn't aware Amazon has such a huge ad network...

  6. 1
    1. is predictable if you take into consideration the law of shitty clickthroughts.
  7. 1

    Haven't seen much growth advice about Twitter, thanks!

    1. 2

      Yep, that's why I included it under #1.

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