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Bang! Facebook turns Pages into Stores
The devil might work hard, but Mark Zuckerberg works harder and his announcement yesterday made a bang!
- Facebook Shop.
- Instagram Shop to be rolled out this summer.
- Live Shopping features to help sellers tag products in their live videos and sell them right away.
But let’s focus on the big one: Facebook Shop.
What is it? Facebook Shop will allow business profiles to set up a native store on Facebook. This means that users can see your listing right within Facebook and complete the purchase without ever having to leave the platform.
The Good
- It’s free to set up.
- It’s easy to connect with your Shopify store (along with WooCommerce and others). That’s why Shopify shares saw a spike yesterday.
- Shorten the buying process and increase conversions.
- Improve the shopping experience, as the users can message a business through WhatsApp, Messenger or Instagram Direct to ask questions, get support, track deliveries and more.
- In the near future, Shops will use AI and augmented reality tech to create better shopping experiences and help businesses display the items that are more likely to sell. This post goes deep into the AI systems leveraged by Facebook Shop if you want to know more.
- Incredible amounts of data points for advertisers. This looks like heaven, but there is a disadvantage… …
- And this is how the market reacted:
The Bad
- Facebook monopolizes data. The company will add still more points to its burgeoning database. It’s unlikely to happen, but nobody could stop FB using it in the same way Amazon did with its private labels.
- It’s not 100% certain that people will trust Facebook with their payments data.
- You gotta follow Facebook’s strict policies. If Facebook doesn’t like what you sell, tough luck.
- Depending on a single platform can be lethal. You find clients on Facebook and you sell right within Facebook. What if Facebook fails? This could be unreasonable bans or glitches in the system, and it’s certainly not unheard of… See what happened on the last two Black Fridays.
Custom bidding & Outcome-based bidding for Display & Video 360 Campaigns
Say hello to two new bidding features that Google announced for Display and Video 360 campaigns, giving you more control over allocating your budgets through its programmatic process.
Custom Bidding
This will allow advertisers to set the parameters for their campaign budget allocation.
How will this work?
- Identify a key performance indicator (KPI) to optimize for, such as revenue or brand lift.
- Define the proxy signals that help predict success with your KPIs.
- Based on new goal parameters, you can build new KPIs for your campaigns that the new bidding system will then optimize for.
“For example, you might select transaction value as a proxy for revenue or creative dimension as a proxy for brand lift – you can choose as a signal anything that is measurable as a Floodlight activity or a goal in Google Analytics 360.”
While Floodlight activity uses HTML code to track conversions, Analytics 360 goals use a variety of signals based on your website data.
Outcome-based bidding
This will allow advertisers to pay only for the results that support their defined goals.
How will this work?
It supports your performance based campaigns to pay per click when you use either Target Cost per Acquisition (tCPA) or Maximize Conversions bidding strategies.
Eventually, Google plans to introduce Pay for Viewable Impressions as measured by Active View for all display and video campaigns. This will help you reduce budget waste and improve the performance of your branding campaigns too.
E-COMMERCE
Dude, where’re my conversions?
Scott Minker shared some hacks he used to reduce abandoned carts and boost conversions of his ecomm stores.
Let’s quickly dive in to what he has to offer:
- Transparency about added fees. Keep the pricing uniform across the product pages to the checkout process. Seeing unexpected prices added at the end leads to customers leaving your site.
- Guest checkouts: Yup, you will have to sacrifice a bit when it comes to customer data, but on the flip side you make things much easier for your customers.
- Trust Logos and payment options. As per Shopify, 61% of consumers reconsider purchasing if trust logos are missing. Use transaction forms to establish trust and offer a variety of payment options. Apple Pay and Google Wallet are becoming more popular.
- Save my cart for later. Allow your customers to save their cart while they go back to watching cute cat videos. Use email reminders to guide them back to checkout.
- Strong CTAs on checkout pages. Even if a prospective customer has added something to their cart, they still need an incentive to actually go through with the purchase. Use uniform and consistent CTAs across all pages.
- Effortless navigation. It is one of the most effective ways of reducing friction during the checkout process. Constantly strive to optimize the checkout experience and make it easier for consumers to buy more stuff.
Scott has some more pieces of advice too, which you can check out here.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
- GOOGLE: As Google now requires identity verification of all businesses running campaigns on their platform, they have updated their response timeline to a 21-day process.
- YOUTUBE: Announcing YouTube Select, a new premium advertising platform will allow you to target TV viewers for the first time.
- BING: Submit URL, Block URL and Crawl Control features in Bing’s Webmaster Tools have now been migrated to the new portal.
- FACEBOOK: Messenger Rooms, FB’s alternative to Zoom, are now live globally. Video calls with up to 50 participants will be supported and there is no time limit on call length.
- BROWSER: Chrome 83 is here and it comes with redesigned security settings, third-party cookies blocked in Incognito and more.
- BUSINESS: After spending a questionable $3.3B on Jet.com, here are four takeaways from Walmart’s Q1 earnings for ecommerce owners and marketers.
BRAIN TEASER
I never was, am always to be. No one ever saw me, nor ever will. And yet I am the confidence of all, To live and breathe on this terrestrial ball.
You can find the solution here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Spotify has a new experience
Spotify has made a big bet on podcasts by signing an exclusive contract for the Joe Rogan Experience show.
It was announced by Joe himself, but the reaction wasn’t entirely positive from his fans. It will still be free to watch, but they didn’t share the move.
How will we be able to watch Elon Musk smoking pot now?
The show will have a video version on Spotify and Joe Rogan’s channel will still share some clips.
It’s a huge loss for YouTube, but a big strike for Spotify. So big, in fact, that Spotify shares surged by 11% after the announcement.
What about Joe Rogan’s pockets? Rumors say the deal is worth $100M.
Nice move Joe, nice move!