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AMAZON
Q1 Earnings release
This Q1 is turning out to be quite positive for the giant companies out there. Everybody’s crushing forecasts and expectations. Hopefully, you all had a Q1 as optimistic as these guys had!
Even Amazon broke market analysts’ earnings expectations. All this, despite the fact that revenue growth seems to be slowing down.
Let’s dive straight into the report.
- Revenue: $59.7B. +17% y/y.
- Net Income: $3.6B. +225% y/y.
- Earnings per share: $7.09. +216% y/y. Analysts predicted a mere $4.72.
The revenue growth slowed down considering that the last year the growth rate was 46%.
Even the advertising business slowed, with “just” a 34% revenue growth to $2.7B. This comes after five consecutive quarters of at least 60% growth.
Cloud services continued their solid growth with a +41% revenue increase.
However, investors seem to be very happy with this quarterly update. This is probably because, despite a slower growth rate when compared to the last few years, the net margins are still wider.
How come? Simple, continued growth in businesses like cloud, advertising and third-party seller services, where net earnings are bigger.
Other highlights
- Amazon announced Fire TV now has more than 30M active users.
- Amazon now offers Apple Music via Alexa on Fire TV, Echo, and Sonos devices in the U.S. and U.K. In addition, Amazon announced the Apple TV app is coming to Fire TV devices.
- Amazon and Google announced that, in the coming months, the two companies will launch the official YouTube app on Amazon Fire TV devices and Fire TV Edition smart TVs, as well as the Prime Video app for streaming to Chromecast and Chromecast built-in devices.
- Amazon Day, a new innovation in delivery that gives Prime members the option to choose a day of the week for their packages to arrive, became available to all U.S. Prime and Business Prime members.
Zoom In
It looks like Amazon’s growth in online sales is slowing down, which will come as good news to the people running e-commerce out there. Although it’s quite early to say anything definitive on this matter. This is just figures from the past three months, after all.
Although, they’re expanding in other services and business that help them drive higher net earnings.
The advertising business saw a slow growth rate too. It is still growing though, with more and more businesses starting to advertise on Amazon.
Easy way to clone ad rules from one account to another. 3 different regulators spoil FB’s Q1 party with investigations.
We’ve got 7 easy steps to help you clone ad rules from one account to another.
Meanwhile, was FB’s Q1 party stopped early? Right after the Q1 report was released, FB was hit by three different investigations, from three different countries.
Clone rules to ad accounts
Looking for an easy way to copy ad rules from one ad account to several others? Eslam Sam Omar shared an easy 7-step procedure which takes less than 10 minutes to set it up.
You can have a look at the post here to check out all the steps.
To more efficient work hours!
1 Day, 3 New Investigations
Yesterday, FB looked all blooming after their Q1 report release.
Then, on the same day, the social network was hit by a looming trio of investigations regarding, as usual, its privacy practices.
It seems like the regulators were jealous of FB having a happy moment, so they decided to spoil the party.
What happened?
First, the Irish data protection authority looking into the breach of “hundreds of millions” of FB and IG users’ passwords that were stored in plaintext on its servers.
The investigations will go as per the GDPR law, so the fines could go up to the 4% of FB’s global revenue
Second, the Canadian authority confirmed the Facebook broke its privacy law. The authority said it wants to take the company to the federal court and force the social giant to correct its “serious contraventions” of Canadian privacy law.
Last but not least, New York attorney general Letitia James is looking into the recent “unauthorized collection” of 1.5M email addresses, which Facebook used for profile verification. However, they also scraped users’ contact lists without their consent.
You might now think that this ended yesterday euphoria.
Definitely not! Facebook still closed the market with a +6% mark!
Thug life!
Connecting freelancers and business owners: New feature testing
More than 56M users in the US alone are working or seeking work as a freelancer. Are you a freelancer or a business owner?
Good news if you are! You can now showcase the services you offer to find new clients…on LinkedIn.
For Freelancers or Agency Owners: LinkedIn is testing this feature where a new text field is appearing at the top of the profile for some users “Add services you offer”.
For Businesses: Similar to the above feature, LinkedIn is also testing a feature for business owners to help them “Find a service provider”.
We’re expecting that these features will become very popular with users when they’re rolled out for everyone, so we’ll keep an eye on the situation and update you further.
We are up to some quiet lab tests on LinkedIn too. Watch and Follow this space for more updates…
REPORTS
Microsoft Q1 ‘19 earnings report
While every other tech giant is at it, Microsoft Corp also released its earnings report for Q1’19.
Here are some quick highlights from the report:
- Total Revenue: $30.6B (14% increase) .
- Operating income: $10.3B (25% increase)
- Net income: $8.8B (19% increase)
- Diluted earnings per share: $1.14 (20% increase)
Advertising highlights:
- LinkedIn revenue increased by 27% with a record level of engagements highlighted by LinkedIn sessions growth of 24%.
- Search advertising revenue increased by 7% to $127M. Excluding traffic acquisition costs, search ads revenue increased 12%, driven by growth in Bing, due to higher revenue per search.
Other Highlights:
Revenue in Productivity and Business Processes was $10.2B, an increase of 14%.
Revenue in Intelligent Cloud was $9.7B, an increase of 22%.
Revenue in More Personal Computing was $10.7B, an increase of 8%.
Check out the whole report here.
TOOLS
Using Google Data Studio to analyze your FB Ads
Do you know that Google can help you improve your FB campaigns? Seems a strange team doesn’t it? Well, the two giants might be huge competitors in the advertising space, but you can make them work together to your benefit!
Ever heard about Google Data Studio? It’s a free tool released by Google that can power endless variations of charts to showcase information from a variety of sources.
You can actually use this to create visualizations from the Facebook Ads Manager as well.
Whether it’s a basic report or a more advanced chart, you can use it to better understand your FB campaigns. You know, data is king. However, if you don’t work the data (you don’t analyze it enough), your empire will never grow.
Given that the process is pretty long, you can head here to follow the step by step procedure to implement Google Data Studio.
You’ll even find the steps to build charts with the Google Analytics data.
Long live the King!
SEO
Block your search competitors. Make the most of your Images
Protect your organic web presence with these simple steps to keep the competitors away. Google wants you to focus more on Images, looks like it’s hinting at something.
Let’s get some more sneak peeks into these updates.
Stop your competition from spying on you
You already know the hacks/tools to spy on your competitors’ ads, and they use pretty much the same methods to spy on your ads. That’s how it rolls!
But you can surely stop them from using bots to spy on your websites and PBNs for some critical information such as backlinks, keywords and loads of other juice.
It hurts bad when someone goes nuts and hits you with some negative SEO, draining you of months or even years of hard work.
PS: This method is completely AdSense safe and doesn’t affect your account status.
Here are some ways to do that:
Using Google command. Enter the following command in Google search.
“www.your webesite name.com” -site:www.your website name.com
This will reveal all mentions of your domain name except those that originate within it. These are the naked backlinks to your website.
Blocking major (and some naughty) bots. You can manually insert simple lines of code to your robots.txt and .htaccess files. (You can find these in the root document of your websites.)
Add the following code to your robots.txt file save it to your FTP root folder.
User-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: Alexibot
Disallow: /
User-agent: MJ12bot
Disallow: /
User-agent: SurveyBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: SemrushBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: Xenu’s
Disallow: /
User-agent: Xenu’s Link Sleuth 1.1c
Disallow: /
User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow:/
Add the following code to your .htaccess file.
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*rogerbot.* naughty_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*mj12bot.* naughty_bot
SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*ahrefsbot.* naughty_bot
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=naughty_bot
There you go! Hope it helps you keep the roaches at bay.
Google winks at SEOs
As per the latest data trends reported by SEOClarity and Mozcast, the number of times images show up in Google SERPs have increased to one-third of all search queries.
What does this mean?
It’s Google winking at SEOs to start focusing more on image SEO. With Google now showing even more image search boxes in the main search results, it might be another source of traffic you don’t want to miss out on.
Make sure to optimize your images for Google Image search!
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Thanos unleashes hell on web
It looks like a supervillain is taking on the web.
You don’t believe us?
Here’s the proof:
Step 1: Do a Google Search for Thanos.
Step 2: Click the infinity gauntlet that appears on the right.
Step 3: Put your headphones on.
Step 4: Enjoy the end of the interwebz.
PS: Keep an eye on the count of search results to show you the magnitude of Thanos’s actions. For us, they declined from about 90 million results to just 45 million.
If seeing half the galaxy’s population dissolve into dust with the snap of a finger wasn’t sad and frightening for you, imagine half your search results vanishing just as quickly.
Or imagine your website being destroyed by the villain. All the traffic is gone!
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