The Growth Newsletter

How do you sponsor YouTube influencers cost-effectively?

Based on insights from Bjarke Felbo of Rune (LinkedIn). Lightly edited with permission.

Influencers often expect compensation proportional to subscribers, but conversions happen proportional to views. So go after the influencers with high views and low subscribers. That’s the trick.
We’ve had the best success with 30-60 second promo spots at the beginning of the influencer’s video.
We’ve seen success depend on the video it’s attached to and what time of day/week it’s posted, so we’re strict about setting rules around that. Or, we give them a bonus based on the video’s view count to incentivize them to put our spot on a high-quality video.
Be careful with repeat promotions with the same influencer. These haven’t yielded noteworthy returns for us — even after months. It’s likely that the audience becomes saturated.

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Validating New Ideas w/ Hiten Shah (FYI, KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg)
Growth Office Hours w/ Gustaf Alströmer (YC Partner)
Landing Page Critiques w/ Bob Sparkins (Leadpages)
Referral Programs w/ Thomas Maremaa (Brex) + Jeremy Gurewitz (Imperfect Produce)
Advanced Content Writing w/ Nat Eliason (Growth Machine) + Bernard Huang (Clearscope)
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What’s the best way to take over a Twitter account from an inactive user?

Based on insights from Andrew Ettinger of Atoms. Lightly edited with permission.

Someone has your brand name as their Twitter handle and their account is inactive. How do you get access to it?

Create an ads account with an existing handle you want to swap for the one you’re trying to claim.
Go to ads.twitter.com/en/help
Click on Account issues -> Claim an inactive username.
Submit a case.

You’ll then want your Twitter ads account manager to escalate your case (give them the case #).

This is not guaranteed. Your best chance of claiming that handle will be to have an existing Twitter employee escalate your case.

For SEO, how much does link building really matter in 2019?

From Nat Eliason of Growth Machine. Lightly edited by Demand Curve with permission.

Links are still important, but their importance is decreasing steadily. Google is getting better at evaluating content quality, and it's focusing more on that.
Consider this: Google doesn't want to be gameable, and domain authority and link building are very gameable. But content quality is not. You can't fake good content.
Many major blogs outside of high authority spaces have grown rapidly using less link-building. Much of their energy is instead spent on choosing the right keywords (low competition, but still acceptable volume) and writing useful content that satisfies the searcher's intent.
However, link-building can still speed up the process quite a bit if you're on a tight timeline, or if you've given content 3-4 months to rank and aren't seeing the results you want.

For your cross-channel ads, is it worth setting up Multi Touch Attribution logic?

Based on insights from Sam Ross of Kozu Labs. Lightly edited by Demand Curve with permission.

If you’re running several marketing efforts concurrently, it can be tempting to try to measure exactly where conversions are coming from using Multi Touch Attribution (MTA). The problem is that it’s extremely difficult to reliably measure, and is often a waste of time. To be candid.
Facebook has best-in-class cross-device/browser data for measuring other channels. You couldn’t get that data on your own. Yet even they couldn’t build a reliable model to help Airbnb’s attribution efforts when partnering with them. Further, as you shift the distribution of your ad channel spend as time goes on, your model becomes less useful because it was trained on historical data.
Instead, consider doing lots of one-off, incremental tests. Apply linear multipliers and use common sense estimates. Then, pipe everything into a database and write simple, editable attribution logic (e.g. discount conversions from search campaigns with “brand” by 8x) into summary tables for your dashboards.

Cool stuff

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