Some Big Players Get Serious About Small Business

📰 The News You Missed

Shopify Releases Its 2022 E-commerce Report

The report highlights a few important trends Shopify is seeing in its community. First, the impact iOS 14.5 has had on CPA's:

“The cost per click for paid search ads increased by 15% between the second and third quarters of 2021 alone.”

Worse still, some of the hope that came with segmenting audiences to better target ads has failed to materialize. The report states that when the Harvard Business Review tested the accuracy of the digital profiles data brokers sell, the results were “dismal”: “The age tier was only correct 23% of the time, and gender was properly identified in well below half of cases.”

Additionally, budget allocation has shifted due to poorer ad performance:

In order to counter the rising cost of acquisitions, the Shopify report suggests brands focus less on short-term returns and more on long-term brand building.

While the pre-existing brands have an advantage in that respect, using growth marketing techniques can potentially counter the diminishing return on ad spend: the report specifically recommends a 60/40 split between brand building and short-term performance marketing. | via // thedrum.com

Introducing Twitter Shops

When you go to the profile of a merchant that has Twitter Shops enabled, you’ll see a “View shop” button just above their Tweets. When you tap the button, it will open up that merchant’s shop, where you can scroll through items. When you’re ready to purchase, you can click on the product of your choice which will open an in-app browser where you can learn more about the product and checkout on the merchant’s website. | via // blog.twitter.com

Could iOS 14.5 Be Hurting Apple Too?

Today AppsFlyer said in a report that in-app mobile gaming purchase revenue declined 35% globally in 2021 following Apple's App Tracking Transparency update. | via // gamesindustry.biz

The app category that generates the most revenue for Apple is games, with Apple getting a 30% cut of the in-app purchases of gems and tokens.

🥊 Quick Hits

A great collection of TikTok Ad Recipes

Google is testing Buying Guides in SERPs

Instagram’s Boomerang and Hyperlapse apps disappear from app stores

A week after Instagram confirmed its plan to shut down its standalone IGTV app in order to better focus on initiatives, like Reels, the company confirmed it’s pulled two more of its older apps from the app stores. This includes its timelapse video app Hyperlapse, first launched in 2014, and looping video app Boomerang, launched in 2015. | via // techcrunch.com

Google is trying to pull a fast one on Editor users

USPS is finally getting serious about eCommerce with new Connect program

She said that USPS Connect’s goal is to give businesses, especially smaller businesses that are looking to take advantage of e-commerce opportunities but are straddled with high shipping costs through FedEx, UPS and others, a path to profitable sales. | via // freightwaves.com

Google Shopping has a new filter to show you products sold in "smaller stores."

via // seroundtable.com

🤪 Just For Fun

The rise of Canva 🤯

Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht trudged unhappily through a park in Redwood City, California.

It was May 2012, and the Australians, both in their mid-twenties, had flown from Sydney to Silicon Valley six months earlier to raise money from investors on Sand Hill Road. The couple had met as teens at the University of Western Australia in Perth. Neither had formally studied the discipline of design (Perkins had majored in communications, Obrecht in education), but Perkins had tutored other students in Photoshop in her spare time and had become fascinated by tools that made design more accessible to, well, self-described Luddites like Obrecht. Together, they had launched Fusion Books, an online yearbook-design product that was chugging along back home. They’d come to California with a simple pitch: They needed funds to build a platform that would allow anyone to design just about anything, all within a single interface.

Instead, they received more than 100 rejections. That afternoon, the final name on their once-promising spreadsheet of VCs had turned red. So, the usually optimistic pair went on a “misery walk,” recalls Obrecht, to decide if they had run out of options. After three hours of soul-searching, they determined they hadn’t. “We got up the next morning and just started back at it,” he says. Within a few months, they raised the first part of what would become a $3 million seed round. A year later, they launched the online design and publishing tool, Canva. | via // fastcompany.com

The bottom has dropped out of the NFT market

The average selling price of an NFT has dropped more than 48 per cent since a November peak to around $2,500 over the past two weeks, according to data from the website NonFungible.

Daily trading volumes on OpenSea, the biggest marketplace for NFTs, have plummeted 80 per cent to roughly $50mn in March, just a month after they reached a record peak of $248mn in February. | via // ft.com

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