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New Google Shopping experience goes live in the US
What’s up, e-commerce owners? No doubt that most of you are selling in the US, and if you are, we’ve got a great piece of news that just might make your day!
Google’s new and redesigned Google Shopping experience is now available to US advertisers on mobile as well as desktop.
What’s new with Google Shopping?
Buy Directly on Google: The new super prominent and colourful shopping cart icons called “Buy on Google” allow your users to buy products using Google’s own checkout, which is linked to their Google accounts. It is Google’s cost-per-action program for retailers, currently called Google Shopping Actions.
Orders placed over Google Shopping are backed by Google’s assurance, meaning users will have access to Google’s own customer support when dealing with returns and refunds.
+ Pros: Quick and hassle-free. More sales. Increased trust from users due to them buying from a reputable and well-known source.
+ Cons: Users won’t visit your website, which in turn brings more negatives to the table. They won’t get much of a chance to interact with your brand, you can’t retarget them or build custom audiences etc. This is a bit like what happens when selling on Amazon. Basically, they aren’t your customers.
Price Tracking: The price tracking feature allows users to keep tabs on the prices of products on Google Shopping using “Track Price” feature. When this is enabled, users will receive notifications when the price of an item drops.
Personalized Recommendations: Users will now see shopping recommendations based on their shopping history, search history and lists.
They will also be able to filter for items that are locally available. Users can then either buy it online, or Google can direct them to the store so they can buy it in person.
Well, Google doing basic but useful stuff: Using their data to show the most compelling products to shoppers! One thumb up.
At the time of writing, Google has mapped more than 2B products to local retailers.
This sounds like a big initiative from Google to fight back against Amazon by partnering with retailers to offer a seamless universal checkout experience.
Check out the new Google Shopping live in action.
LinkedIn continues the ramp-up of its ad platform
Over the last year, LinkedIn has been ramping up its ad platform at a pretty quick pace. A lot of new and important features have been added to offer advertisers with sizeable budgets the tools they need to create and manage their ad campaigns.
Continuing with this trend, it announced several new features that will be rolled out to all advertisers over the next two weeks.
+ Audience Forecasting Insights: In a new and refreshed Dashboard, you can now find the make-up of their target audiences and even customize your forecasting panel to show specific targeting data, such as top industries, years of experience or company size.
“When combined with contacts you’ve uploaded to Matched Audiences, you can be sure that you’re not only serving ads to the specific prospects you’re trying to reach, but that you’ll have the demographic insights to deliver the content and creative mix that will resonate with them”.
+ Boolean Logic for targeting queries: You can now create targeting queries using Boolean logic terms such as and/or. This allows you to build larger audiences for your campaigns as you can target multiple profile facets, such as job function, seniority and titles under a single campaign.
+ Demographic Metrics: Demographic reporting has been one of the most popular Campaign Manager features, and the new roll outs to this feature include new metrics at the audience level for leads, Sponsored InMail opens and video ad views.
If LinkedIn is relevant to your business, there’s absolutely no reason to continue avoiding the platform.
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🎧 Here’s a little something you can listen to on the weekend
Our podcast, Stacked Marketing Show, has been able to get one some very interesting marketers, with various skills, whether that’s push traffic, Facebook, Snapchat, Google Ads, E-commerce and more…
We wanted to do a quick recap of some of the most interesting episodes that might make for a good listen over the weekend!
If you want to figure out push traffic, listen to Andrew Payne talk about how to monetize your own push list or check out how Erik Gyepes goes with the media-buying-only approach for this traffic type.
If Facebook has been haunting your dreams, Van Oakes tells us his experience with Snap Ads and when they can actually be a better option than Facebook.
Oh, of course, Google Ads is always there for you too and Jim Banks is one of the best people to tell us all about it.
Last but not least, if you want to build your own brand, how about quickly and easily setting up your own gaming app store? Daniel Tamas has a few thoughts on that!
You can also listen to each of these episodes on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!
E-COMMERCE
Yet another piece to kill it this Q4?
Really? Another Black Friday Cyber Monday post?
Ehhhm yes! But listen: At this point, we’ve covered pretty much everything you need for the holiday season. So, if you don’t crush it…. SHAME ON YOU!
However, today we came across another post about the holiday season that covers some points that are new to us.
Shall we move to it? Definitely…
- Set target goals for key metrics like revenue, ROAS, CPA and conversion rate: You should have these goals set all year round, of course, but it’s critical for Q4 success!
- Start testing bundles right now. We already discussed this, but start creating landing pages, ads and email copy specific to the bundles you’re going to push.
- Setup your store’s product catalogue so you can run Dynamic Product Ads.
- Segment your existing customers into key buckets: First time buyers, Repeat customers, discount buyers, customers who spent 2x average AOV. Personalize the angles and offers for each segment.
- Don’t neglect email, messenger and SMS: Paid traffic is critical, but you shouldn’t be placing all your eggs in that basket. Send at least 4 emails during BFCM, along with SMS and messenger broadcasts pushing your promos.
- Setup at least 1 backup ad account in case your main account goes down during BFCM. With the banning trend currently ongoing, the chances that you get hammered by Mark on November 29 are high.
- Add multiple backup payment methods to your account and contact your bank to inform them of higher than usual spending.
- Have at least 1 person live during BFCM to manage on-site chat, emails and phone calls. It’s an easy way to catch those extra sales.
- Incorporate genuine scarcity into your store, emails and ads. A bonus tip here is to create a special offer that is only available to the first 50 customers on Black Friday and promote this ahead of time. Hopefully, this will get people queueing up outside your virtual store, ready to buy as the clock strikes midnight.
- Use interactive content like surveys, quizzes and polls at the top of the funnel to develop warm audiences. Remember that you should be starting to build these audiences right now to ensure you have proven audiences to target on BFCM.
Finito! Thanks to Maxwell Finn for sharing the tips!
Have a flourishing Q4!
FAST FIVE
- FACEBOOK: After that Facebook employee leaked the audio of an internal meeting, Mark decided to fight back: He made those internal meetings Live on Facebook. Open to everyone on the planet!
- INSTAGRAM: Instagram is rolling out a new mode called “Restrict”. This will let account owners shadowban bullies who comment on posts with offensive or abusive language. Like: “This is already available for lesser price on AliExp” 😉
- SEO: Starting December’19, Chrome will start blocking mixed website content loading through http and https protocols. This happens when your website is loading with https but some of your content, such as scripts, styles, images etc load through an http protocol. Make sure all your content is loading through the https protocol.
- FACEBOOK: Introducing Threads: An image-centric messaging app that will allow users to share pictures and videos with their closest Instagram friends. Just another Snapchat copycat.
- TIKTOK: TikTok decided to learn from the mistakes of others. To avoid a Cambridge Analytica style scandal, the app will completely forbid political ads. Settling things once and for all…
BRAIN TEASER
What falls but never breaks? What breaks but never falls?
You’ll find the answer at the end of this email.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
When collecting gold bars is your thing…
You know when life is all about fun and games, but the next moment it starts pouring cats and dogs?
Yeah, that’s exactly how this bent Chinese politician is feeling right now.
What fun and games did life offer him?
Not much apart from 13.5 tonnes of gold, £30B cash and multiple luxury villas.
He had enough gold bars to build a studio apartment.
How did he accumulate all this moolah? Ecom? Nope! Amazon FBA? Not at all! Selling ecom courses to newbies? Nada.
How then? Bribes! That’s easy, no?
The (un)lucky fella is Zhang Qi, the secretary of the Communist Party Committee of Haikou, in the province of Hainan and also a member of the Standing Committee of Hainan Province.
His power was equal to that of a city mayor…
But right now, it’s that cats and dogs time for him.
He is currently under investigation by the country’s corruption watchdogs for violating the law and discipline.
If these allegations prove to be true, he would have been richer than the wealthiest man in China, Jack Ma, who is worth $37B.
BRAIN TEASER ANSWER
Night and Day!