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AMAZON
Amazon’s Q4 Report pushed the company in the 4-comma club – for a few moments
Results beat expectations. How often do you get to hear or feel that in your business?
How about when the results are topping $1Tn? Never, probably…
So yeah, Amazon’s valuation briefly topped that $1Tn figure on Friday and received a big round of applause from analysts for two key events:
- The announcement of the one-day shipping.
- The performance of its cloud-computing business.
Shares surged at 9.9% for Amazon’s biggest gain since 2017 before they dropped back below the landmark threshold.
“Impressive quarter from top to bottom” is how most leading analysts summed up the whole episode, and the results sparked a rush on Wall Street to raise price targets for the stock.
Though they unfortunately missed the “comma-club” by a whisker. Had it closed above $1Tn, something that happened briefly in 2018, Amazon would have joined Apple, Microsoft and Google’s parent Alphabet on the exclusive list of US tech companies to have reached that valuation.
Check out what major market analysts had to say about this epic moment.
Privacy changes will affect growth
Okay, it looks like today is one of those rare days where we talk a little less about strategies and feature updates and more about the companies that help us run our businesses.
Moving on to FB, we already discussed their Q4 earning report a few days back and, like Amazon, the social media giant also reported growth this Q4.
However, what we did not discuss were a few key points FB brought up that closely affect marketers from all walks of life.
It’s the 4th consecutive quarter where the revenue growth was below 30% for Facebook. So, expect the Q1’20 growth to come in under Q1’19.
“Factors driving this deceleration include the maturity of our business, as well as the increasing impact from global privacy regulation and other targeting related headwinds.”
Targeting and measurement limitations introduced by browsers are limiting third-party signals further.
Not only that, but FB’s own moves such as the rollout of Off Facebook Activity controls and privacy regulations, GDPR, CCPA are yet to be managed. So…
“The majority of the impact lies in front of us.”
Also, COO Sheryl Sandburg mentioned that while the native Checkout functionality on FB and IG is in full force, it will require a full integration and will take its own course of time.
Facebook also rolled out Shopping Ads to all advertisers globally, but Sandberg cautioned that it will continue to move slowly in e-commerce.
That also means most advertisers will have to keep waiting on initiatives like the native Checkout to be integrated more fully.
SPONSORED
⁉️ Your most common CBO questions answered by Depesh Mandalia
These 3 letters put together give some FB marketers nightmares… See-Bee-Oh!
Sounds crazy, right? Changing something that works… But there are many pros for CBO. There are good reasons behind it. So, in a time when marketers are chaotically trying to find solutions, we invited Depesh Mandalia for an exclusive Q&A.
Depesh is the author of The CBO Cookbook, which is a thorough guide and reference point for transitioning to CBO-only campaigns.
We asked you ladies and gents what are your most pressing CBO questions, so we went through them with Depesh. Give the episode a listen and find out:
- Why Facebook moved to CBO from ABO (ad set budget optimization).
- How to move from prospecting with CBO to scaling with CBO.
- How many ad sets Depesh uses in CBOs and why.
- How to structure CBO campaigns to have less guesswork in your campaigns and ads.
- How to make sure FB does give all ads and ad sets a fair test in a CBO, aka how to make sure some ads aren’t “dead on arrival” and get zero budget.
- What is the trend from FB for 2020 when it comes to their Ads platform.
Watch on YouTube here.
Listen on Apple Podcasts/iTunes.
Listen on Spotify.
PS: If you want to get The CBO Cookbook for yourself, your team or a friend, head over here.
CONTENT MARKETING
How the heck do I set content marketing goals?
When a performance marketer makes a move into content marketing (one of the feisty ways to grow a brand), he often finds himself wondering this: How the heck do I set content marketing goals?
It’s not like defining the CPA of a campaign, right? So, here’s The Crew coming in to help with this task of setting goals.
The Databox team surveyed 50 marketers to try and understand the types of content marketing goals they set and how they do it.
The study found that there are 32 common goals they set, and different marketers had varying opinions on what their main goals are. Let’s see what they have to say.
Revenue: Viewability metrics are soft conversions goals. You should understand what your RPM (Revenue per mille impressions) is for every piece of content. This is the metric you should live by. Maybe your articles are generating tons of leads, but if those leads don’t convert… Sayonara, baby!
Lead Generation: This comes right after the previous one. Traffic spikes do not matter if you’re not picking up those leads. So, analyze your metrics and focus on the posts that generate the most leads. But, make sure that these leads are hot…. Which brings us to the next point.
Lead scoring: Not only do you have to measure the quantity of leads per piece of content, but you should be watching the scores of your leads too.
Brand awareness: This is one of the crucial factors in 2020, as Google is going to give priority to websites with a solid brand presence. Branding is everything in 2020 and we’re pretty sure this isn’t the first time we’ve heard this.sure this isn’t the first time we hear this. Moreover, these goals benefit other marketing goals such as networking, sales and revenue.
User engagement: For other marketers, this can count for more than the revenue: “One should prioritize the tracking of engagement rates over sales rates first because what they tell you is how well you know your customer”. People want to buy from a person, not from a business, so being able to personalize your business and generate high engagement will rake in more sales.
Alright. These are just the main ones, but you’ll find more ideas for different goals in the study itself. For now, let’s move on to another question: How often do you change your goals?
Most of the interviewed update their goals quarterly.
Just the tip of the iceberg here. So, if you’re interested, you should check out this post to get a deeper understanding of the topic.
ROUNING UP THE STACK
- SEO: According to this latest survey, Meta descriptions, business name and page title have the largest influence over whether users click through on SERPs.
- MARKETING: We already talked about this IG account focused on exposing fake gurus. One of their latest “victims” is Hayden Bowles, and here they shared some tips on preventing being duped by gooo-roooz!
- TIKTOK: If it’s everywhere, it has to be on TikTok. The social media newbie has hopped on to the Dark-mode theme” train.
- FACEBOOK: An interesting thread by Mahmood Talha on generating real estate leads with Facebook Ads.
- E-COMMERCE: As we saw already, the new coronavirus has seen a rising fear among dropshippers. If you want to know more on the matter, check Alex Fedotov’s take on it.
BRAIN TEASER
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Bob Sinclar, watch out!
There are some things you know about Elon Musk. But then, there are other things that you don’t.
For example, you already know he is a great marketer when it comes to product launches. But you didn’t know that he is an electronic music producer. Did you?
We discovered that he has a thing for rap when he released that rap song about Harambe, the gorilla killed in Cincinnati. But hey, also EDM?
Now, combine these two things with his passion for being weird on Twitter, and the result is this spectacular music single release that happened last Saturday.
Initially, he shared the song “Don’t doubt ur vibe”. Then, later on, he also changed his Twitter display name to EDM, which stands for electronic dance music.
Elon EDM Musk does have a nice ring to it. It sounds like the name of a big dj, uh?
He also shared some pics of him playing in the studio:
This dude rocks!