Let’s Talk About Why Personalized Ads Ads Matter

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Ecommerce Core Web Vitals Study - Top 500 Retail Brands

To get a good picture of which brands will be affected by the Core Web Vitals ranking signal update in May, we audited the homepage of every ecommerce website in RetailX’s 2021 Top500 Retail Brands league table. By using this list of top online retail brands, we get a more varied and typical view of the UK's ecommerce landscape, unlike sources such as Alexa, SimilarWeb and SEMRush, which would bias towards brands already performing well in Organic Search.

Some helpful benchmarks if you are concerned with how your site will measure up on Core Web Vitals.

🗣 Social

Facebook for Business Status

Facebook for Business Status

Facebook launched a new status page for Ads Manager. Although the Ads Manager UI bug that keeps it from totaling columns has existed for about a month, the status page says there are no known reporting issues.

What more would we expect from Facebook?

62% of People Say Customer Photos Influence Purchase Decisions via @MattGSouthern - WP Guy News

Consumers are receptive to user-generated content, Goldman adds while describing it as “cheap, easy, and quick” to create.

“Why would brands spend more time and money on large-scale productions when this option exists, particularly in a world where content must be created and shifted quickly?”

If user-generated content is part of your social or SEO strategy, don’t forget those ugc tags.

Twitter announces paid Super Follows to let you charge for tweets - The Verge

Twitter announced a pair of big upcoming features today: the ability for users to charge their followers for access to additional content, and the ability to create and join groups based around specific interests. They’re two of the more substantial changes to Twitter in a while, but they also fit snugly into models that have been popular and successful on other social platforms.

The payment feature, called Super Follows, will allow Twitter users to charge followers and give them access to extra content. That could be bonus tweets, access to a community group, subscription to a newsletter, or a badge indicating your support. In a mockup screenshot, Twitter showed an example where a user charges $4.99 per month to receive a series of perks. Twitter sees it as a way to let creators and publishers get paid directly by their fans.

Snap Drops a Bombshell Filter - WSJ

Advertisers, of course, want to be where today’s money is. Snap said on Tuesday that the “Snapchat generation” makes up 40% of global consumers, noting that 80% of its reach is above 18 years old. Snapchat says it now reaches more than 70% of 13 to 24-year-olds in countries that generate more than half of the world’s digital ad spend.

Don’t sleep on Snap.

Let’s Talk About Why Personalized Ads Matter - About Facebook

We’re introducing Good Ideas Deserve To Be Found, an initiative that highlights how personalized ads are an important way people discover small businesses on Facebook and Instagram, and how these ads help small businesses grow from an idea into a livelihood.

Facebook is still upset about the upcoming iOS14 changes.

The more information released about these upcoming changes, the more I am (surprisingly) siding with Facebook on this tech Cold War. In short, Apple is working on its own ad network, and it will utilize a different (more lenient) API, giving them an edge over the Facebook’s of the world.

That said, Facebook’s attempts to defend its case continue to feel uninspired and fall flat.

I mean, what the hell is this?

📈 Reporting & Revenue

Covid-19 Shopping Makes Card Fees a Bigger Burden for Merchants - WSJ

Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. are planning to raise swipe fees for some types of credit-card purchases in April, adding to the squeeze felt by restaurants, retailers and other merchants already struggling through the Covid-19 pandemic.

What’s more, customers’ switch to online shopping during the pandemic—a trend heralded for keeping businesses afloat when people are reluctant to venture inside stores—is also creating extra costs for merchants. Swipe fees, which merchants pay when a customer pays by card, are often higher on online purchases.

The swipe fees, known as interchange fees in industry parlance, are a perpetual source of contention between merchants and card companies. Though invisible to consumers, they are glaring to merchants, which often end up paying fees of about 2% of their customers’ credit-card purchases. The fees are set by the card networks, such as Visa and Mastercard. Merchants pay them to the banks that issue the cards.

🛍 Marketplace

What Retailers Can Learn From Estée Lauder’s DTC Brand Incubation Strategy

In this article, we’ll dissect how ELC’s prophetic acquisition and incubation of several modern, direct-to-consumer brands hedged them against the accelerating decline of malls and department stores. First, we’ll define the difference between classic and modern brands and then, discuss why classic retailers who have hundreds of millions—or billions of dollars in sales—should pay attention to up-and-coming brands.

Everything on Amazon is an Ad - Marketplace Pulse

Over the past year, “Sponsored products related to this item,” “Four stars and above” and “Brands related to this category on Amazon” advertising sections have all but replaced organic “Customers who bought this item also bought” and “Customers who viewed this item also viewed” suggestions. The last remaining recommendation functionality is “Frequently bought together.” Everything else on the product page, including additional display advertising, is an ad.

📦 Distribution

California's congested ports expose the root problem of shipping delays

Seroka said that, while the LA port’s overall import volume for 2020 was only 1% higher than 2019, that includes a four month period between February and May when imports virtually halted. The second half of 2020 saw 908,000 shipments processed per month, an increase of more than 50% from the first half of the year. Over Christmas, the Port of Los Angeles took in 94% more imports than the previous year.

“There are a few factors at play,” Seroka said. “Everyone is spending money on tangible goods instead of services. Because of Covid, we have fewer workers on the floor, which means we sort through cargo slower and there’s a lack of exports out of the country, which makes it harder for the shipping companies who rely on round trip economics.”

Amazon Announces Three-Wheel Electric Delivery Vehicles in India

Close to 100 of the electric rickshaws are in circulation so far, but Amazon India expects to ramp up that number for use by its delivery service partners. Amazon's betting big on e-comm in India, and these EVs are part of the strategy.

🤷🏻‍♂️ Just For Fun

Iceberger

Draw an iceberg and see how it will float.

The Davis Family Reviews Their Baby

Just good.

Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long? | Paygo

I would recommend to the 2013 me to not try and innovate within but rather focus on exiting the company as fast as possible and building the right team/structure/succession plan to make it happen instead of fighting the nature of the beast. This is easy to say but extremely hard to do if you love your company and mission. When you decide to sell a company, you need to be honest with yourself that this is the end of your era, and not pretend that you will be able to continue to build the company but with a different shareholders. This will make the selling decision harder and looking back, would have forced us to be more honest about what selling means.

The founder of Waze tells of his experience being acquired by Google and why he is glad to be gone.

👋 Holla!

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