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- This Tiny Tweak Can Boost Conversions 12%
This Tiny Tweak Can Boost Conversions 12%
This one change to your online store can have a huge impact... YouTube's ad department comes out swinging... Meta is set to introduce a custom audience option for its Advantage products... And more!
The “Perfect” Quantity Field
So many tiny decisions go into the design of a product page:
The colour of the call-to-action button
Where the reviews are placed
How big the photo should be
Among those decisions is one factor that most marketers haven’t given a lot of thought to: the way the quantity field is displayed.
By default, most e-commerce platforms either make it a field the consumer has to type, or a slider, or maybe it’s not even on the product page at all and quantities are only presented at checkout.
That tiny decision could be the difference between making a sale and missing one. Some new marketing science has found that there is a right way and a wrong way to do this.
Kristin Duke is an Assistant Professor of Marketing and a Research Fellow at Behavioural Economics in Action. Dr. Duke teaches at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.
I spoke with her earlier:
Our full conversation covered many other important findings that everyone who runs an ecommerce business should know about, including:
What impact this has on the design of a store
Whether implementing this on a product that most people only buy one product at a time, like shoes, would backfire?
Whether cheaper products or more expensive products are most affected
and a lot more.
That full deep-dive interview is coming tomorrow exclusively to the Premium Podcast.
You can sign up and get this interview, plus more than 20 others, and get ad-free episodes of our daily podcast by subscribing to the Premium Feed at https://todayindigital.com/premium.
YouTube Makes Power Moves
YouTube is coming for TikTok. The video platform is reportedly getting ready to announce aggressive monetization for Shorts.
Starting next year, Shorts will be a part of YouTube's Partner Program, meaning those who qualify can start receiving ad revenue from their short-form video content, The Verge reports.
👏 It's About Damn Time
YouTube will also bring ads to Shorts, and creators will receive 45% of those earnings. Which is less than the 55% creators currently receive from regular YouTube ads.
YouTube's VP of creator products said that part of that extra money will go to paying for music licensing.
The company is also trying to make it more accessible for brands and creators to get into its Shorts Partner Program. To qualify you will need:
1,000 subscribers
And either 10 million Shorts views in the last 90 days
Or 4,000 watch hours overall
Quoting The Verge:
The goal is to offer more and better monetization options than TikTok and potentially win over (and win back) many of the creators flocking to the rival platform.
Reply to Comments with Shorts
In another move to push short-form video content, YouTube announced yesterday that it has added a new option to reply to video comments with Shorts.
💡 How it Works
From the watch page of your video, tap 'Reply' on a comment.
This will transfer the comment to a sticker with the Shorts camera
Which is basically TikTok’s video reply option. Nonetheless, it's still a welcome update, since it's an easy way to engage with your customers and answer questions.
👀 More Shorts, More Ads, More problems?
Meanwhile, as YouTube ramps up new advertising strategies, some users are complaining about excessive ads.
The platform is showing as many as 10 unskippable ads during a single break, 9to5Google reports.
According to multiple Reddit threads, ad breaks are also occurring every few minutes during longer videos.
Quoting 9to5Google:
This doesn’t appear to be happening with all videos or even all viewers, but these longer breaks appear to be more and more common lately. More frequent than seeing 10 ads is seeing users with around five ads per break.
The good news? These ads aren’t super long. From what we’ve been able to see from user reports, these ads are largely only five or six seconds each, meaning that even an ad break with 10 unskippable ads would only be around 60 seconds.
In response to a user's complaint on Twitter, YouTube said these are "bumper ads," which appear at the beginning of videos and show more since they're only 6 seconds long.
hmm...this may happen with a certain type of ad format called bumper ads, since they're only up to 6 seconds long. if you'd like, you can send feedback directly from YouTube via the send feedback tool
— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube)
8:22 PM • Sep 7, 2022
No deliberate increase in ads was acknowledged by the company.
Image: YouTube
Meta Brings Custom Audiences to "Advantage"
An update of Facebook's Marketing API was released yesterday, highlighted by the addition of custom audiences for its Advantage ad products. Those are the ad options which are driven by machine-learning and generally provide a hands-off approach for media buyers.
Meta says it will begin rolling out Advantage custom audiences on Monday.
Quoting the company:
Advantage custom audience uses an advertiser’s custom audience to guide delivery and help find more people who are likely to achieve their expressed optimization goal. This means we will deliver ads beyond their Custom Audience if it’s likely to improve performance.
So yeah, basically a more AI-driven approach to that checkbox that used to say 'Expand audience if it looks like we can get better results.' (You know, the one you usually uncheck.)
Meta confirmed that the new option will be automatically turned on when new campaigns are created. Advertisers can opt out by unchecking the "Advantage custom audiences" box in the custom audience section of its ad creation tool.
Is Alexa Your Brand's Next Spokesperson?
A couple of new ad placements to report from tech behemoths.
🗣️ Alexa Spits Out Ads
With the first, you'll be right in consumers' homes directing them to your product or service. Amazon announced a new feature which lets brands answer consumers' questions with audio ads that play through Echo devices.
The feature called "Customers Ask Alexa" lets brands submit their answers to questions and link the inquirer to their Amazon storefront, The Verge reports.
Before selecting the most appropriate answer, all answers will go through the company's content moderation and quality check process.
Initially, the feature will be available to a select group of brands in Seller Central beginning next month, with plans to expand to all eligible brands in 2023.
The Verge noted placing ads in top search results is nothing new, of course. It's a huge part of Google's business, and Apple has become more aggressive with advertising within the App Store, which brings us to our next placement.
🚀 Apple Expands Ad Offering
Apple is planning to release new search placements on its app marketplace.
The company sent a message to developers that said, "With new opportunities coming to Apple Search Ads, you can promote your apps across the App Store to engage even more customers this holiday season," CNBC reports.
Apple didn't give any specifics, however, in July the company announced it was planning to expand ads to the App Store's front page, and another sponsored unit on app product pages under the banner “You Might Also Like.”
Get Paid By DM
Your brand can now accept payments via DM.
Instagram recently announced that eligible sellers with professional accounts can receive payment with direct messages at no additional cost.
💡 How it Works
Visit your professional dashboard, and tap Get paid in chat
Open a Message with a customer and tap the dollar sign $
The customer will enter their personal information and bank account details
The platform noted that purchases are protected, and they can use Meta Pay to pay with:
Debit
Credit
PayPal
You’ll get paid once the item is sent to the customer, and Instagram doesn't take a cut.
Image: Instagram
Cuts To Analytics Teams Looming?
As the cookiepocalypse nears, analytics teams have become an essential part of many marketing departments.
However, a new survey from Gartner has found that despite an increased emphasis on data marketing, analytics are only responsible for influencing a little over half of marketing decisions.
By 2023, the consulting firm predicts that 60% of CMOs will cut the size of their analytics departments in half due to "failed promised improvements."
Meanwhile, the survey found that barriers to using analytics in decision-making aren't always caused by data, but rather by employees.
A third of respondents said decision-makers cherry-pick data that supports their opinions.
Cognitive biases were cited as a major barrier to marketing analytics influence.
Furthermore, when information was provided, it wasn't always used, roughly a quarter of respondents said decision-makers either:
Don’t review the information provided
Reject recommendations
Or rely on gut instincts to ultimately make their choice
(Data has been provided by Gartner’s survey of over 350 marketing professionals)
⚡ Lightning Round
TikTok Growth Slowing
We knew this would come eventually; TikTok's growth is starting to level off. Some new numbers from Sensor Tower found that last month's watch time was up 9% from the previous year, but that's a big drop compared to the 45% year-over-year growth rates the app showed before. YouTube's watch time in August increased 5% year over year. Facebook and Instagram: both in negative numbers.
Facebook NPE Group's New Job #1
Facebook’s New Product Experimentation team has new marching orders: Stop experimenting with new products. And instead, all hands on defeating TikTok. Platformer News is reporting Meta's Chief Product Officer has directed the team to focus entirely on innovation in short-form video.
Adobe Buys Figma
Adobe is acquiring the popular design platform Figma for around $20 billion in cash and stock. Figma was a big competitor of Adobe’s XD products. Both companies claim not much will change, but expect this to be piled into Adobe's Creative Suite at some point.
Agencies: It's Harder to Land Business
Landing new business has become more difficult for agencies this year. A survey of more than 150 American agency executives found that 43% of agencies reported it was more difficult to obtain new business than the previous year. That number was just 28% in 2021.
I'm Sorry, They're Doing WHAT?!
And finally, file this under WTF — GQ reports that the hottest trend among software engineers is getting a painful leg-lengthening surgery that can extend people's height by 3 to 6 inches.
In the procedure, the doctor literally breaks the patients' femurs, or thigh bones, and inserts metal nails into them. Then, every day for three months, those nails are extended a tiny bit using a magnetic remote control.
It's said to be terribly painful. One software engineer told GQ he spent the first three months after his surgery alone in his apartment, eating only delivery food, and went from 5-foot-6 to 5-foot-9.
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