YOUTUBE
YouTube wants to build a next-generation shopping experience
And we’re live! YouTube has just kicked off their “Holiday Stream & Shop,” a series of live shopping events with popular YouTube creators.
The company has also published a blog post outlining their plans to become the go-to platform for live shopping in 2022:
- Interactive livestreams. YouTube plans to offer creators the ability to launch live product drops, exclusive discounts, and poll fans during their live shopping streams.
- Connect with a shop. Creators will be able to link a Shopify store to their YouTube channel, tag their favorite products and then create a live shopping stream. Creators will also be able to create trailers for their upcoming live events, allowing fans to set up reminders.
What this means for you: More chances if you do influencer marketing.
When you work with influencers, for example, you can tell them not only to mention your product, but also to connect with your store and provide product links where viewers can click and purchase right away.
With the way things are going, it looks like the livestream shopping craze will be in full swing in 2022.
Google Ads makes Customer Match widely available
Google’s “Customer Match” is the Google version of Facebook’s “Custom Audience.” And now every advertiser can use it, as long as they’re policy compliant.
Policy compliant? Your Ads account must have a good track record of policy compliance as well as payment history. To be more specific, you must have 90 days of policy compliance history and a lifetime spend of more than $50,000 to get access to everything.
How “Customer Match” works: Simple. You upload your customers’ emails and/or phone numbers, and Google attempts to match them to actual Google accounts. Then you can show ads for those people on Google and its properties (like YouTube).
Happy retargeting!
SPONSORED BY PROPELLERADS
This alternative monetization format can help you make +72.5% more money from your website traffic
$155 in profit per day. 72.5% higher CPM. No work spent optimizing.
If you monetize your website traffic with ads, this case study shared by Propeller Ads will show you an alternative format that can let you drop all the mountains of extra work, while making more smackeroos.
The results we mentioned came thanks to MultiTag, which lets you effectively combine several formats into one single tag.
This comes with a wide range of benefits:
- You don’t need to add separate tags for every single format. With MultiTag, you can add only one tag on your website code.
- You need less time to find the best combination of formats and optimize them because it automatically shows the best format.
- You still have control over each ad format that shows up on your website.
And we can’t forget the best benefit of them all: better profit!
But hey… don’t just listen to us. Go here and read the full case study yourself.
E-COMMERCE
Tiny piranhas, giant sea monsters and other challenges for e-commerce in a post-covid era
Covid-19 has been a tidal wave for e-commerce stores. When retail shuttered and travel halted, the e-commerce machine roared to fill the void.
However, after the tidal wave there will probably be a rough tempest. And Taylor Holiday listed five dangers impeding on your sailing.
Watch out:
1) Broken compasses: In 2020, global e-commerce growth hit its largest single-year gain ever, 27.6%.
The expansion will continue, although it will be hard to replicate the same results of 2020, as well as predict the growth.
2) Sirens calling: So far, only 36% of Americans fully returned to normal activities.
When the whole population returns to normality, online shopping will likely suffer in favor of traveling, offline shopping, and so on.
3) Slacked sails: The period from March to May 2020 was golden. Facebook still had its targeting power and CPMs reached the bottom.
But the crumble of cookies and iOS14 attacked Facebooks’ fortress.
There’s a giant incentive to solve Facebooks’ new problem, but we don’t have a solution yet.
4) Giant sea monsters waking up: In 2020, Adidas unveiled a new five-year strategy to shift the focus to a DTC-first model. The goal is to double their revenue. Unilever opened an online store for Ben & Jerry’s. Nestlé launched an online shop called KitKat Chocolatory.
Covid woke up a nest of sleeping sea monsters competing for our same social media feed, ad impressions, search engine rankings, influencers, and wallets.
This is not the end of the game, but it’s certainly getting tougher.
5) Hordes of piranhas causing death by a thousand bites: Every 28 seconds a brand new entrepreneur makes their first sale on Shopify.
Not every new entrepreneur will survive the e-commerce tempest, yet each one of them will bite your margins.
Despite how Taylor Holiday painted quite a scary scenario in true Jules Verne fashion, he’s still bullish on the future of e-commerce.
His piece of advice to go through the storm and find the golden shore is to band together with fellow travelers, and anchor yourself in data that is deeper, wiser, and more solid than year-over-year modeling.
SPONSORED BY MAILMODO
Marketers have reported conversion rates increase of 300% and higher using this tool
Now you can plug your marketing call-to-actions or CTAs like forms for lead generation, webinar invitations, and demo requests right inside the email body. This leads to a surge in responses to your campaigns.
How? With Mailmodo – where emails meet interactivity. Insert your surveys, forms, or widgets directly in the email body, increasing engagement, sales, revenue, and ROI.
Test drive Mailmodo today for free and bring life to your emails.
THE CREW’S INSIGHTS
When you don’t need SEO
E-commerce is one of those industries where everyone feels like they need SEO.
But…is it really true?
We’ve spent hundreds of hours diving into the marketing practices of e-commerce companies, and there’s a common thread: Most of them don’t rely on SEO.
In fact, most great e-commerce companies don’t create SEO-focused content at all. Here’s why:
- It’s a slow channel. SEO takes time, and startup e-commerce brands usually don’t have 6 months or a year to spend sitting around waiting for results. Budget usually gets allocated into things that can give instant results, like social ads.
- It’s too competitive. Most e-commerce brands are in competitive spaces. And most competitive spaces are hard to break into with organic content. So most e-commerce brands decide to forget it altogether.
- It’s usually higher up in the funnel. Most people finding your site organically won’t be searching for your products. Which means it will take longer for an SEO-discovered customer to buy than someone who found you via social ads.
The bottom line: If you’re in e-commerce (especially a competitive space), don’t focus on SEO as your primary growth channel. Scale with ads or otherwise, create a system and expand to SEO once you’ve built that foundation.
If you liked what you read, feel free to check us out on Twitter.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
MEDIA BUYING: Improve your marketing ROI by getting up to 2.25% cash back on your advertising costs and 1.75% on everything else with Ad Spend from Divvy. This is not an introductory offer, so you can depend on these rewards for the long term. Get started here.*
MICROSOFT: If you’ve ever wanted to learn more about Microsoft Ads, here’s your chance. Microsoft has just released a set of “foundation-level” courses on Microsoft Advertising, Conversion Tracking, and (obviously) importing data from Google.
GOOGLE: Have the costs of your Google Shopping ads skyrocketed in the last week? You’re not alone. Fortunately, this was a bug and Google has addressed this issue.
TIKTOK: 1.5 billion. TikTok will surpass this number of users by 2022, according to AppAnnie.
YOUTUBE: More and more people are unhappy with YouTube’s dislike count decision. Here’s one initiative that uses a Chrome extension to try to restore the dislike count.
ADVERTISING: Google Merchant Center now allows the sale of medical test kits.
*This is a sponsored post. T&C apply see offer page for more details. Foreign transactions and late fees may apply. Card issued by Cross River Bank, Member FDIC.
BRAIN TEASER
What can you catch but never throw?
You can find the solution here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Here’s Taylor, just breaking records…
This time there was no pun intended, because we haven’t used the word “record” for a music album for over 10 years.
Taylor Swift is breaking streaming records with her new album Red (Taylor’s Version).
It picked up over 90.8 million streams on day one. That’s according to Spotify. She beat her own record from just 16 months ago.
The question is: Do you have her album on repeat while working?