E-COMMERCE
The numbers are in, and Cyber Monday was one for the books
Cyber Monday started slow for many e-commerce sites, but it finished strong with a push of sales coming through in the evening. How did things end up overall, though?
We’ve got the numbers, and while Cyber Monday wasn’t as big as some forecasts were projecting, it still managed to cement itself (for now) as the biggest online shopping day of all time. Here are the details:
- Total Cyber Monday sales were $10.8B. Previously, the one-day online shopping record was 9.4B, set on Cyber Monday in 2019. This year smashed that record, topping even Black Friday’s sales! Amazon reported that the Echo Dot and Obama’s new memoir were some of the top-selling products.
- Shopify stores topped $5.1B over the entire BFCM weekend. This is a big success for Shopify, which continues to see massive gains as e-commerce growth accelerates.
A few BFCM observations from marketers:
- Stills may have beaten out videos. Savannah Sanchez, among others, is reporting that campaigns with still images outperformed those with videos. Maybe a result of user burnout by being bombarded with videos lately?
- Cyber Monday didn’t top Black Friday for everyone. Jeromy Sonne mentioned on Twitter that Cyber Monday was about 10% slower than Black Friday for most of his brands. Andrew Foxwell observed that sales steadily increased throughout the day.
The Crew’s take: In a way, holiday season advertising is the opposite of the old “out of the frying pan and into the fire” adage. We’ve already passed the biggest, craziest sales days for most brands – but the next few weeks are still prime shopping time for people buying holiday gifts!
Polish and sharpen up those campaigns for an eventful few weeks…
SOCIAL MEDIA
Reddit boasts some big numbers, Google takes on Facebook
Reddit doesn’t always get thrown into the mix with some of the bigger social media advertising platforms, but it released some numbers yesterday that might peak your interest. Plus, Google’s taking on Facebook – here’s what you need to know:
- Reddit says that its platform had 52M daily users in October. This is up 44% from October in 2019, signaling that Reddit is benefiting from the dramatic growth we’ve seen on other platforms this year. Although its user numbers are still small potatoes in comparison to Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook, strong growth and a unique user base could be valuable for some advertisers.
- Google is adding a news feed to Maps. A new feed, called the Community Feed, is coming to Google Maps. It’s not in direct competition with the Facebook news feed, but there are some similarities. Google’s feed, however, will be mainly focused on updates from local businesses – at least to start.
It was a win-win with social media announcements yesterday. Advertisers got some encouraging news about Reddit, and local businesses have yet another way to engage with their community.
Oh, and a Stories-like feature didn’t get added to yet another platform. That’s a relief.
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YOUTUBE
Lessons from growing a Youtube channel to 1.6M subscribers
YouTube is still a great place to generate organic growth.
Eric Bandholz grew the Beardbrand channel to 1.6M subscribers. And in his opinion, if you’re willing to go through the learning curve and suffer the initial low viewership, you’ll generate huge exposure.
He recently shared what he learned growing the Beardbrand channel.
Read on!
Organic strategy
The most important things to consider are:
- If viewers click on your video when they see the thumbnail and title, how long do they watch the video?
- Do they watch more videos after watching your video?
Then there are the key metrics to consider:
+ Click-through Rate (CTR): To improve your CTR, you need to tell a story with your thumbnail and title and create a sense of curiosity. But some tips are:
- If you have a face in the thumbnail, make it as large as possible with an appropriate expression.
- Text generally takes away valuable real estate from images. Use it sparingly.
- Make sure that thumbnail content is in the video.
- Best practices for creating titles would be something that includes keywords and still has the hook.
+ Average View Duration: This is the hardest part. Don’t be afraid to create content anywhere between eight minutes and 30 minutes. The longer the content, the more ads in it.
+ Optimization:
- Playlists: These push the user to watch more videos, and they’re in line with YouTube’s goal: make the user stay on the platform.
- Interact with comments: If you reply to comments, users come back and comment again.
Paid strategy
Eric suggests to master organic growth first, so it’ll be easier to nail YouTube Ads. You need to create content that is better than the video the user was about to watch. Otherwise, they’ll skip it.
- Create a separate Google Ads account so you have a better grasp on attribution.
- The first five seconds of the video have to be the most engaging content you can imagine.
- Get the viewer to watch at least 30 seconds of the video. This will help your metrics and drive down the CPV of your ads.
- Engaging doesn’t mean “highly produced,” but it means interesting, unique, and like nothing else on the Internet. Remember those Dr. Squatch soap ads? Like that.
There was so much information in this post that we just scratched the surface with these highlights. If you’re getting your hands dirty with YouTube, you must give this a read. There’s plenty more great stuff for you to discover.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
E-COMMERCE: Shopping apps hit a record 2.8M installs on Black Friday, a signal that people are looking for great shopping experiences on mobile.
TWITTER: We’ve got a little more information about Twitter’s Audio Spaces, including that the company won’t be recording your conversations. Wow, thanks Twitter!
YOUTUBE: A new list of the top trending video creators from 2020 has dropped. The Crew here haven’t heard of most people on this list…Recognize any names?
GOOGLE: We got a few updates for Discovery ads yesterday. The best part? A 4:5 aspect ratio is now supported.
BIG TECH: Salesforce acquired Slack for $27.7B yesterday, marking the largest deal Salesforce has ever made.
BRAIN TEASER
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POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Libra? Novi? Diem?
Who knew there were so many possibilities for vaguely futuristic tech-ish names!
It’s been known for awhile that Facebook has been working on a cryptocurrency project called Libra. But, a series of recent name changes made it somewhat unclear what the cryptocurrency was actually called.
Social Media Today put together an article that breaks the amusing situation down, but here’s the deal:
The group that’s currently overseeing the cryptocurrency project has just changed its name from Libra to Diem.
But, their cryptocurrency is still called Libra.
And the digital wallet that you can keep your Libra in is named Novi.
That’s a lot to remember! Meanwhile, we’re just trying to keep our digital privacy acronyms straight…
Is it CCPA or CPRA? Or maybe GDPR? We’ll get back to you on that.