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How much is Facebook Shops?
There are some grey areas surrounding Facebook’s latest release, Shops. This is especially true when it comes to fees, so Shane Cicero had a talk with his rep to provide us with more info about Facebook’s latest feature.
Wanna hear about them?
- Costs: You can use Shops to showcase your products across FB apps for free. However, transactions that go through the native checkout do have a selling fee.
- How much is it? According to Shane Cicero, it will be 5%.
- Why? To fund the infrastructures that make the Native Checkout possible.
Back up: What is Native Checkout? Right now it’s the Instagram Checkout, but Facebook will add the feature to all stores that set up Shops.
Native Checkout: Worth it or not?
Well, this is likely something you’ll have to test. If the higher conversion rate weighs more than the transaction costs, it’s a deal!
If not, then you can limit Shops to just showcase your products and direct people to your own website for the actual transactions.
Side note: Remember that this info is coming from a rep. It’s not Facebook’s official communication channels.
Give your users an Amazon-like experience
One sure way to improve conversions without spending more budget is to optimize your landing pages. You’ve heard this a lot, right?
However, this post from Search Engine Journal focuses on just one kind of optimization: Using multi-product pages for your Google Shopping campaigns.
The problem: Visitors who land on single-product pages from search are more than twice as likely to bounce than those who land on other types of landing pages. Visitors need to jump back and forth between different pages to find the item that best suits their needs.
The solution? Multi-product pages.
Studies show that single product pages work best for social media traffic, but the story is different for search traffic.
The searcher mindset
Purchases on Facebook and Instagram may be impulse purchases, but that’s not the case for search traffic. A user doing product research on Google is in an active mindset, working to find a particular product and taking different items into consideration.
Personalization: Giving the user multiple options will improve his/her shopping experience, and your conversion rate. Simply put, users will browse your website as long as you can give them what they’re looking for.
The solution? Run Shopping campaigns to multi-product pages. After all, if Amazon does it, why shouldn’t you?
Definitely something to test, and the original post provides a bunch of stats to back up this theory.
AFFILIATE MARKETING
Affiliates, SEOs and politics: A case study
Here’s a rather unusual case study by Antoine Eripret involving affiliate marketing, SEO aaand… politics.
2017: French elections
Back in 2017, French politician Marine Le Pen lost her election campaign. Usually, these campaign websites are abandoned as they don’t serve any purpose anymore.
However, these websites usually receive a lot of backlinks during the campaign due to many news websites using them as a source to understand candidates’ programs.
2018: Unexpected changes
The domain name abandoned by Marine was registered by someone else in order to build a product comparison affiliate website – Marine Shopping. Genius!
Why? The smart idea here wasn’t to leverage on branding, but instead to trick the algorithm. Google would just see it as a website with decent content and lots of backlinks linked to Marine, which by now had turned into a company name and it ranked the website for its targeted search terms.
The result? Well, it’s not just that it worked. It was actually a huge success. The website started ranking for keywords like “meat grinder” in just a few weeks.
Although it’s important to note that this wasn’t just thanks to the backlinks. The newly added content was good and matched with user intent as well.
By May 2018, it generated 500k sessions per month according to SEMrush data, and it was probably even higher due to SEMrush usually underreporting long-tail keywords.
2019: Website disappears from SERPs
Around this time it looks like the owner tried to move the website to a new domain (for all the right reasons) and suddenly disappeared from SERPs, only to reappear after a few weeks but with a significant drop in visibility index.
Redirections looked to be correctly implemented, so why were the results so poor after moving to a new domain?
A logical guess would be that Google looked unfavourably upon so many backlinks using “Marine” as the anchor text, which had no relevance with the new content and the new domain name.
Hence, the migration was quickly reversed and, almost immediately, the website retrieved its previous position.
An unusual case study, but it just goes to show that sometimes you need to think outside the box and take a few risks to achieve results in SEO. But it’s also not certain that these results will last long…
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
- FACEBOOK: Facebook launched CatchUp, an app that facilitates group phone chats.
- YOUTUBE: The tube is testing Google search results integrated within YouTube video results.
- TIKTOK: ByteDance generated $17B in revenue in 2019 with $3B in margins. Some context? Instagram alone brought in about $20B in ad revenue the same year. The kiddo is becoming a man.
- FACEBOOK: Say hello to Novi, Libra’s new wallet. As Facebook said, new name but same goals. You can use it as a stand-alone app or through FB family apps.
- AMAZON: The company is moving into the local news and podcast world. Podcasting will complement its Echo devices, filling a niche now served by radio.
- GOOGLE: Retail category reporting feature in Google campaigns lets e-commerce advertisers see performance by retail category between search and social.
- TIKTOK: A new beta feature on TikTok will let you add location to your videos. Just like Instagarm, no surprises there.
BRAIN TEASER
What number and word combine to create a word that is a synonym of ‘everlasting’?
You can find the solution here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
You’re just a figment of your own imagination: Proved
If you’re a fan of TV shows like Fringe, Lost, Dark and several others and have found yourself fantasizing about the idea of a multiverse, you might not be too far off the mark.
NASA scientists have actually discovered evidence of a parallel universe.
Using a cosmic ray detection experiment, they were able to unlock new particles that could be from a parallel universe that started at the Big Bang.
A universe where the rules of physics are the opposite to our universe.
The explanation? During the Big Bang, two universes formed: The one we currently live in, and another which is apparently running in reverse.
Time goes backward in that parallel universe and, in that universe, time in our universe would appear to be going backward to them…
Has your mind exploded yet?