ANALYTICS
Analytics is getting easier, or harder – depending on where you look
If you’re using analytics tools (you are, right?), we’ve got some good news… and some bad news.
Google Analytics should get easier: You won’t have to worry that traffic data coming from the EU will violate any EU policies.
Google introduced additional domains ensuring EU-based data is collected through EU-based servers. Yay!
The company also announced that Google Ads manager integration with web data for Google Analytics 4 is now in open beta.
…but Firefox data collection may get harder: The browser is launching Total Cookie Protection by default, which should prevent browsing data “leaking” all over the web.
Firefox will confine all cookies to a “cookie jar” on the site where they’re created, allowing you to still gain enough on-site analytics data to, for example, improve user experience.
However, you can wave bye-bye to the browser tracking data from website to website, which can notably impair your advertising efforts.
Oh, and while we’re talking about advertising…
ADVERTISING
Choose your advertising platforms carefully
We all know it’s recommended to put your eggs in more than one basket when advertising online.
But it looks like there aren’t many effective “baskets” left on the market.
The Big Five supremacy: According to a new Axios report, the five biggest tech companies – Amazon, Google, Meta, ByteDance, and Alibaba – owned more than half, or 53%, of all global advertising revenue last year.
This is quite a jump from last year, when they held 46% of the market.
Zoom out, and the situation looks similar. Top 25 advertisers now account for 74% of global spend – a 6% increase compared to 2021.
It isn’t going to change soon: According to experts, the global advertising market is moving towards a “better safe than sorry” strategy to battle the incoming crisis.
This means less advertisers will allocate their budget to the likes of Pinterest and Twitter, and instead “consolidate the ad spend towards very few effective platforms like Meta and Google.”
What does this mean: On one hand, the crisis may push you to follow other advertisers and allocate most of your budget to most proven platforms as well.
But at the same time, less competition on smaller advertising platforms means lower ad costs and more exposure… Time for some big decisions?
SPONSORED BY PAID
Selling products on TikTok is easier than ever
Whenever a TikTok creator cracks the algorithm and makes a product go viral … the brand making the product earns hundreds of thousands of dollars immediately.
Not a channel to ignore.
Especially when finding the right creator is eaaasy.
You don’t need to scrape hundreds of TikTok profiles or pitch creators.
#paid matches your brand with a creator with proven sales records in minutes.
You get private access to first-party data and creator stats like average views, audience size, cost per engagement, and more.
No more doubts about their real performance. You can be sure you’re investing your money in a professional… Not a Kardashian-wannabe with zero experience.
And you can manage the whole campaign from #paid: admin, rates, legal, and all the rest.
Just add your brand information to #paid, pick the right creator from their customized selection…
… and watch your products fly off the shelves.
Why you should create a Facebook Ads dashboard in Google Data Studio and how to do it
The Facebook Ads platform allows you to create some good reports that give you deep insights about your campaigns. But it’s still with rather limited flexibility so many marketers want more.
And a single dashboard can elevate your reporting to a new level, and help you make better decisions.
That’s why a dashboard in Google Data Studio can be useful.
And as Andrea Atzori explains in this Search Engine Journal post, there are different reasons:
- Google Data Studio is easy to use, fast, and most importantly, it’s free.
- You can natively import Google Analytics data. This means you can easily compare your Facebook Ads results against other channels.
- Google Data Studio dashboards are easy to use. And dashboards are better than reports to analyze and compare data sets and data ranges.
That’s the “why”… Now let’s move to the “how”.
Importing Facebook data into Google Data Studio is not immediate. But the steps Andrea outlined in the SEJ post make it really simple.
First, you need to import the data. Then design and build the dashboards. It’s a total of seven steps and you can check them here.
You can try by starting with a simple dashboard, then create new richer versions with different views, tables, charts, and more.
SPONSORED BY YOTPO
Add a subscription model to your e-commerce business with none of the hassle
According to Gartner, by 2023, 70% of DTC businesses will have tried adding a subscription model… and 80% of them will fail.
While subscriptions offer your business steady cash flow and customer loyalty…
They’re hard to implement successfully.
Don’t be among the 80% of businesses that fail.
This guide shows you how to build a subscription model and skyrocket your sales—easily.
THE CREW’S INSIGHTS
Why Stephen King’s writing method works so well (and why you should try it)
Stephen King has had one of the most prolific writing careers of our time––of all time, really. If you haven’t read Stephen King, you’ve probably watched a movie or TV show adaptation of one of his books. Odds are, many of you have done both.
His writing method is a breath of fresh air: King doesn’t outline his books, nor does he go in with a solid idea of where the story is heading or how it’ll end. That would ruin the fun, he says.
Instead, King starts with an idea––a character, a place, a moment––and works from there. He’s written a laundry list of bestsellers with this routine.
Why this matters for you: Marketing can often be an intense, by-the-book, analytics-obsessed game. This results in cookie-cutter ads, templated blog posts, and marketers endlessly copying each other, praying for success.
But the most memorable marketing almost never arises from analytics-obsessed templates. It arises from somebody writing like Stephen King, starting with an idea, and seeing where the story takes them.
So, let this post serve as a reminder: Next time you write copy or brainstorm ad campaigns, take a step back from the numbers and the templates and the Twitter threads. Write like Stephen King for a while––it’s almost necessary if you want to create something truly memorable.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
CONVERSION RATE OPTIMIZATION: “A website without good copy is like Chuck Norris without a beard. Powerless. Unnatural. A tragedy.” This is so true. And this is also one of the 150 examples you’ll find in our Landing Page Deep Dive, along with analysis, breakdowns, and templates. Join Insights and make your website’s copy powerful.*
GOOGLE: It looks like Google wants to address third-party Google Ads reps, who are often popping in social posts giving out bad advice and often being plain rude. No offense to good Google reps… we know you’re out there as well!
TIKTOK: E-commerce startups have found their new promotional channel of choice. You’ve guessed it… New DTC brands are happy to allocate up to 50% of their social advertising budget to TikTok.
APPLE: Uh-oh…The German government started an investigation on Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT). The reason? German regulators believe that the feature is giving the company an unfair competitive advantage.
*This is a sponsored post.
BRAIN TEASER
What is black when you buy it, red when you use it, and gray when you throw it away?
You can find the answer here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Don’t want to buy it? Tattoo it!
Tired of buying a new pair of sneakers every season?
You can follow in the (bare and tattooed) footsteps of a certain man who decided to exchange his pair of boots with perfectly tattooed replicas.
Now, what other fashion pieces can you tattoo…
- Expensive jewelry?
- Trousers?
- A Stacked Marketer hoodie?
Hey, it might not be such a bad idea to save some cash.
The only thing we wonder is… what happens when it gets cold outside?