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E-COMMERCE
Amazon launches “Storefronts”
We think the best way to describe this is by using Amazon’s words from their announcement.
“We’ve created a custom, one-stop shopping experience for customers looking for interesting, innovative and high-quality products from American businesses from all across the country”
In other words, they’ve created a dedicated section for local small to medium businesses. For now in the US, but will expand over the world.
How does this help the businesses, you might be wondering. Well, two ways come to our minds.
First, they don’t compete for space with all the international big brands on Amazon, so they have a bit less competition there.
Secondly, people who go and shop there are probably in a different mindset than when buying from regular Amazon listings. They are also there to support local, small to medium businesses!
What is Facebook’s PRO Partner Program?
Dave Granfield told the Facebook Ad Buyers group about this notification he got. It said he’s been invited to the PRO Partner Program.
What is it?
It’s a way for Facebook to offer more hands-on support for agencies. It’s early days for it so we can’t really say if it’s good or bad.
It has a relatively long list of features. Judging by previous hands-on approaches from Facebook, we’re not too optimistic about it.
Anyway, check the thread to see all the features and what others have to say about it.
Apple wants to stop Facebook stalking techniques
You’ve heard about this before probably so we won’t go too deep into it but it’s worth reiterating.
Apple’s Safari browser will try to automatically distinguish between useful and tracking cookies, and block the latter. This includes FB and Google too.
Firefox is also planning something similar. No need to panic yet but keep this in mind. We’ll definitely have a closer look on its effects in the coming weeks
Pages updates for GDPR
We somehow missed this update last week but better late than never, right?
Facebook is rolling out updates for page admins in the EU and EEA, as a consequence of a court ruling.
“The CJEU found that, in certain circumstances, admins of Facebook Pages in the EU or EEA should be considered joint data controllers (“joint controllers”) with Facebook over data used to provide Page Insights.”
There’s a policy update that sets legal responsibilities under GDPR and more transparency for page visitors.
That’s it in short. And if you are an admin of such a page, you should get a notification to check all of this out. We didn’t get it yet, so it might take a bit more time.
The $6.85 million Black Friday case study
Or, what Common Thread Collective learned from spending that money on Facebook Ads for Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM).
This is not the first case study we feature from these guys. They also did $4 mil with PupSocks, some readers might remember.
Just like then, this case study is quite detailed, so we can’t actually feature it all.
Here are the 5 lessons that are taught in the full post.
1. Know In Advance How BFCM Conversion Rates And Click Prices Will Rise And Fall
During BFCM, people buy more, so conversion rates will increase compared to your average day! For CTC, it doubled, from around 2.7% to 5.5%!
CPM also increases, of course.
2. Ramp Up Your Traffic 3 Weeks Before BFCM
People prepare their “shopping lists” in advance, then return to your website when you have the discounts ready. Run ads before to make sure you’re on their list!
Check the article for how to calculate ROAS on your ads.
3. Build A BFCM Bundle Offer To Increase Your AOV
Kind of self-explanatory, right? Make people buy more stuff. Three points from CTC on this topic.
- At least 20% off (anything less than this tends to be ineffective unless your discount is at least $100 in raw dollar amount).
- Don’t bother with coupon codes. Just mark down your site (or a particular collection, if that’s your style). This makes it easier for your customers, especially on mobile.
- If you don’t discount much, you can keep that sale discount down to 20%. If you give people 20% often, you probably need to go higher to get people to take advantage of the offer.
4. Run Ads To Your BFCM Bundle Offer One Week Before BFCM (Then Advertise Your BFCM Sitewide Offer)
Again, quite self-explanatory. You should definitely not measure on a 1-day attribution window only. This is something you prepare for weeks in advance!
5. Get Your BFCM Weekend Spend Plan Right
The article explains in detail how to do that.
OK, we’re done. Really, if you run ads on these days, just go and read the whole thing. It’s a very detailed analysis, much better than we can do in this limited space newsletter.
Yep, Instagram Shopping is happening
There are 2 announcements regarding your Shopping experience on Instagram.
First is that the app has expanded Shopping in Stories. They’ve rolled out in June initially and now they are expanding it to businesses in 46 countries. Basically trying to go global with the feature.
In case you didn’t know, this lets brands tag their products in Stories so when users like an item, they can go to its page with one tap.
The second feature announced is a Shopping channel in the Explore tab. Topic channels launched in June too, and well… Just like with the other one, Instagram adds shopping to the mix.
There you have it – you can now spend money in more sections on Instagram. Or well, we think in your case, you can SELL in more sections of Instagram 😉
SPONSORED
The goldmine affiliates must find out about!
It’s called ADSUM. It’s the event where some of the best online retailers meet and up until this year, it’s been pretty quiet on the affiliate front – and we wanna change that right now.
Here’s why it’s so valuable and a no-brainer to attend this 3-day event on October 14-16, 2018.
This is where people who have exclusive products, own branded e-commerce stores, direct offers, etc. are hanging out. So, this is where, as an affiliate, you can get a direct connection for all of the juicy physical products offers out there.
That’s why we think affiliates absolutely get the best of it, but if you’re doing anything in online marketing, this could be something for you. So it’s also for you if you’re:
- An affiliate network
- A marketing agency
- E-commerce store owner
- Offer owner/Advertiser
- Merchant
And here’s our special treat – a mega-discount for VIP Vendors!
Using the coupon code WTAFFSUM45 you will get 45% off your VIP Vendor ticket.
To be clear though, this is only for VIP Vendors as defined by ADSUM– representatives of companies that provide services to online retailers: manufacturer, affiliate, affiliate network, ad agency, processing provider, fulfilment company.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
When moon? 2023, apparently!
Nope, it’s not about crypto.
We’re talking about the moon in the sky and about sending a private passenger to take a trip around it.
SpaceX announced that the one going on a trip in their Big Falcon Rocket is Japanese billionaire entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa.
OK, so 2023 is the plan if things go well. SpaceX still needs to do quite some development on their BFR… And this literally is rocket science. It might not work out as expected.
Oh, and if you’d also like to take this trip… Nobody said exactly how much Yusaku paid. The quote from Elon Musk is “a lot of money”.
So if a billionaire says another billionaire paid “a lot of money”, it’s probably really a lot!
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