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Google lends a hand to ecomm stores: Grab this juicy fruit
Big tech companies are engaged in a gruelling battle to control e-commerce market share, and Google’s latest move could give them the upper hand in this war. Their aim is to improve organic search results with product listings.
The company has now officially announced the rollout of “Popular Products” for retail products such as apparel, shoes and other similar items in mobile results.
How is this helpful? Powered by organic feeds, it picks popular products from e-commerce sites and shows them all together in a single spot, allowing users to filter by style, department and size. Users who click on these listings in Search are then taken to the retailers’ websites.
That’s not all Google has been up to. It quietly acquired Pointy, a hardware solution for capturing product and inventory data from small e-commerce stores, which then gets used in search results and even ads.
So, what can you do to make your products show up in this feed?
- The simplest thing you can do is to adopt product schema markup for your sites by adding support for it in Search and Image search results.
- Use Merchant Center to submit your product feed to Google in real-time, making your products eligible in search results.
PS: Merchant Center has been made available to everyone, regardless of whether you are running Shopping campaigns or not.
That’s about all. Now, please go and implement these two action items without delay. It’s a juicy, low-hanging fruit that you should grab with both hands.
Zucc is offering Benjis if you spend more with him
Here’s something that was brought to our attention by Depesh Mandalia and will definitely bring a smile to the face of you FB marketer pros.
What is it? An appreciation for increasing the spend on your BM accounts.
How can you unlock it? It’s simple – your BM’s qualified spend should grow by more than 5% Q-o-Q.
PS: The opt-in window for these offers will begin in April 2020 for all qualifying agencies.
The amount FB will give you back is calculated as 20% of the spend (Feed and Stories placements), and there is a limit of $10k per quarter, per account.
Sweet!
SPONSORED
🔮 19 Affiliate Marketing Experts unveiled what verticals and ad formats will thrive in 2020
Affiliate marketing is ever-changing. And chances are that as this new decade started, you probably asked yourself “What will happen in 2020?”. You probably hit up your marketing comrades and asked their opinions as well, right?
Well, PropellerAds took things further and gathered the expertise of no less than 19 affiliate marketing experts. Super affiliate marketers, affiliate managers, networks’ CEOs… In other words, from the people really in the trenches daily!
And they limited it to 2 big questions:
- Which affiliate marketing verticals would thrive in 2020?
- What would be the top ad formats in the coming year?
Sooo, will Facebook keep being the number one traffic source for affiliates? How many affiliates are shifting to native ads?
Betting niche is growing steadily, but what about dating? Did Facebook’s own dating service shuffle the cards on the table? And will nutra be the big comeback of 2020?
Servando Silva, Amy Cheung (aka vortex on STM), Erik Gyepes, KJ Rocker, Luke Kling, Frank Ravanelli, Emanuel Cinca and many more shared their take on this.
They don’t have a crystal ball, but they’ve been around the block enough to be able to catch the trends. And with this PropellerAds free report, you’ll keep on top of developments in the affiliate sphere. Who knows what major key insight you get that makes your year?!
Get the Affiliate Marketing Trends & Predictions of 2020 for free.
Striking back at FB’s and Google’s high CPAs with… Virality
Razi is a SaaS company that offers an alternative to building resumes. The company, like many others, was struggling with the skyrocketing costs of Facebook Ads. They were spending around $100 to acquire each client, which isn’t great considering the AOV was just $37.
So, James Kim did what any marketer worth his salt would do: Tried to find a solution.
The solution was an Ask Me Anything post on Reddit. It turned out to be a hell of an idea, bringing in 47k visitors in under 10 hours. Not only that, but the increase in visitors thanks to the Reddit post gave Razi a serious boost in SEO juice.
Enough talking about the results, let’s see how they managed such a spike.
The AMA, started by the founder of Razi, went a bit like this: “When I graduated college, I had interviews at Google, Dropbox, Goldman Sachs, and others because of my resume, despite a 2.2 GPA. Now we build software that creates such resumes. Ask me anything about resumes”
Why did this post go viral?
Headline: It was a shocking one.He basically used the story talked before. Getting a response back from Google is impossible, but I did it.
A hero story. The story frame followed the classic hero story where the customer use the product as a fix to his problem encountered in the journey.
Trust: This comes down to building a relationship with leads and prospects. Here, James Kim shared a Reddit post screenshot to show exactly what he means.
Viral coefficient: To give the post an initial spike, they bought 50 upvotes on Reddit to make sure people would start to see the post. In addition, they got in touch with a Reddit moderator to ensure that the post would not get banned. As James said, 50 upvotes doesn’t cost a lost and they indirectly led to 31.7k organic upvotes.
Timing: January is the month where people start work on their new year plan. They roll up their sleeves and go on the hunt for a position. Perfect scenario for a company like Razi, right?
That is all. Not the usual type of case study you find on this newsletter, but it’s definitely interesting to see alternative ways of growing a business. Obviously this isn’t ideal for e-commerce or dropshipping businesses, but it’s replicable for a marketing agency.
ROUNING UP THE STACK
- LINKEDIN: LinkedIn Live, which debuted almost a year ago, is now live for all company pages. You will also find a new option to invite personal connections to follow your business page.
- MARKETING: Are you into podcasts? If the answer is yes, add this playlist of digital marketing podcasts to your list. Just like us, they are straight-to-the-point, actionable, no-fluff pods.
- MICROSOFT: Following in Google’s footsteps, Microsoft has announced that it will deprecate average position starting this April. Check the new metrics that will replace this.
- FACEBOOK: If you are in one of these three special categories, you must comply to FB’s new ToS by March 31.
- E-COMMERCE: If you are marketing to both B2B and B2C verticals, here’s how you can modify your campaigns to get the most out of your marketing efforts.
- GOOGLE: A follow-up post regarding the recent news about Google replacing third-party cookies. Who stands to benefit, who will lose, and what comes next?
BRAIN TEASER
I am white when I am dirty, and black when I am clean. What am I?
You can find the solution by clicking here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Are AirPods such a good business?
When Apple released its iPhone without an earphone jack back in 2016, AirPods understandably went viral. They are super useful, especially when you want to make one of those ‘on a business call’ pics for the Gram… They’re almost as important as Lambos for those guru shots!
Since then, Apple made $8B on AirPods alone, and every other tech company has jumped into this business. Samsung, Google, Huawei, they all started making wireless headphones and jackless smartphones.
And, of course, even dropshippers started selling these items. Apple truly created a new whole industry.
However, some YouTubers are going a bit mad because dropshippers are using popular YouTube channel review footage to sell their products.
This is the case of Marques Brownlee, who complained about this phenomenon on his channel.
He literally showed the stolen footage used by some dropshippers to make FB and Instagram Video Ads to push their dropshipped wireless headphones.
Totally understandable. Creatives really matter in the Facebook game, so best to use high-quality videos from Youtubers…. (Ironic piece)
Everybody copying these AirPods… Now everybody’s copying videos about AirPods!