Show Notes
1.
Shopify Shares BFCM Sales Figure - Shopify’s 2021 Black Friday / Cyber Monday data is based on sales by its more than 1.7 million businesses in approximately 175 countries around the world from November 25th
11:00 UTC to November 30th
08:00 UTC. 2021 Black Friday / Cyber Monday Global Highlights.
- Black Friday saw the highest shopping volume during the weekend, with peak sales of more than $3.1 million per minute at 12:02 PM EST on November 26.
- 47 million consumers globally purchased from independent and direct-to-consumer brands powered by Shopify.
- Top selling countries & cities where shoppers made purchases from the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, with the top-selling cities on Black Friday including London, New York, and Los Angeles.
- Globally, 71% of Black Friday / Cyber Monday sales were made on mobile devices compared to 29% on desktop.
- Top product categories: Apparel and accessories followed by health & beauty and home & garden.
- Average cart price: $101.20 USD, which is up from last year’s Black Friday average of $90.70 USD.
- Black Friday / Cyber Monday continues to be a worldwide phenomenon with cross-border sales representing 15% of all orders globally, with the most popular cross-border routes being U.S.-Canada, Canada-U.S., and United Kingdom- U.S.
2. LinkedIn Adds Live Video & Newsletters To Creator Mode - LinkedIn’s beefing up its ‘Creator Mode’ features with the addition of LinkedIn Live access for those with Creator Mode turned on, as well as a new newsletter option for creators to help maintain the connection with their audience.
First off, on LinkedIn Live – initially only available to Members and Pages with more than 150 followers and/or connections who met certain criteria, LinkedIn is now giving creators access to the option, providing another way to maximize audience engagement on the platform.
LinkedIn’s also giving Creator Mode users access to newsletters, which will also help you keep in touch with your audience.
“Whenever you publish a new article in your newsletter, your subscribers are automatically notified via push, in-app, and email notifications so they stay up to date with your latest content.”
That could be a good way to incentivize more creators to maintain a regular column on their chosen topics of interest, helping to boost their presence and thought leadership.
“To create a newsletter, click ‘Write an Article’ at the top of the homepage. This takes you to the publishing tool. If you have access, you’ll see the ‘Create a newsletter’ option here. We’re currently not accepting one-off requests for access to author newsletters.”
Finally, LinkedIn’s also improving discovery for LinkedIn Creators:
“With creator mode on, you're eligible to be featured as a suggested creator to follow.”
That could help to improve your on-platform presence and following, with LinkedIn looking to highlight relevant creators, based on topics and activity, to interested users.
3. LinkedIn Kick-Starts Privacy-Friendly Approaches to Data Collection and Ad Targeting - As explained by LinkedIn:
“With Group Identity for B2B, we leverage our first-party data to group members together based on shared professional identity attributes, such as seniority and industry. This process helps you reach your intended audiences across channels, like the LinkedIn Audience Network, without the need for individual-level tracking across sites.”
In essence, the process enables you to use LinkedIn categorization to reach users with your promotions on third-party sites that are part of LinkedIn’s Audience network. The actual benefits of this will vary, but it could be a good way to reach, say, ‘IT managers’ across the web with promotions based on their LinkedIn profile information.
In addition to this, LinkedIn’s also testing new machine learning models which will estimate and report campaign conversations across channels “with a high degree of accuracy by using data from across our platform”.
LinkedIn’s also working on the attribution of offline or offsite conversion events to LinkedIn campaigns.
4. Twitter Bans Sharing Sharing Images & Videos Of Private Persons Without Consent - As explained by Twitter:
“Sharing personal media, such as images or videos, can potentially violate a person’s privacy and may lead to emotional or physical harm. The misuse of private media can affect everyone, but can have a disproportionate effect on women, activists, dissidents, and members of minority communities.”
In line with this, Twitter says that, now, when it receives a report that a Tweet contains unauthorized private media, it will take action in line with its existing privacy enforcement options.
5. Meta Loosens Restrictions On Cryptocurrency Ads - With cryptocurrencies gaining momentum, in line with the broader Web 3.0 push, Meta has today announced an update to its ad policies around cryptocurrencies, which will open the door to more crypto advertisers on its platforms.
As per Meta:
“Starting today, we’re updating our eligibility criteria for running ads about cryptocurrency on our platform by expanding the number of regulatory licenses we accept from three to 27. We are also making the list of eligible licenses publicly available on our policy page.”
Essentially, in order to run any crypto ads in Meta’s apps, that currency needs to adhere to regional licensing provisions, which vary by nation. With crypto becoming more accepted, Meta’s now looking to enable more crypto companies to publish ads on its platform, which will provide expanded opportunities for recognized crypto providers to promote their products, while also enabling Meta to make more money from crypto ads.
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Previously, advertisers could submit an application and include information such as any licenses they obtained, whether they are traded on a public stock exchange, and other relevant public backgrounds on their business. However, over the years the cryptocurrency landscape has matured and stabilized, and experienced an increase in government regulation, which has helped to set clearer responsibilities and expectations for the industry. Going forward, we will be moving away from using a variety of signals to confirm eligibility and instead requiring one of these 27 licenses.”
6.
TikTok Introduces Monetization Options Tips, Video Gifts - Creator Next, where
eligible creators can easily unlock new and existing tools to be rewarded for their creativity on TikTok. And TikTok continues to expand its creator monetization tools with the addition of
video tipping and virtual gifts for regular uploads, in addition to live-streams in the app.
To be clear, live tipping and digital gifts have been available for selected live-stream creators via its Creator Next program since last year. This new expansion brings the same functionality to regular TikTok videos, which will add another way for users to generate direct income from their TikTok videos.
To be eligible for the new Creator Next program, users will need to have at least 1,000 followers and will need to have generated more than 1,000 video views in the previous 30 days.
In addition to this, TikTok’s also lowering the threshold for those who can list their profiles in its
Creator Marketplace brand collaboration platform, which enables businesses to find TikTok influencers to partner with on in-app campaigns. Up till now, creators have required 100k followers to qualify for these listings, but now, TikTok is reducing that number to 10k, which will further expand available opportunities for both users and brands.
That could make it much easier to find relevant creators to partner with, in a lot more niches, which will add more considerations into your TikTok posting and engagement process.
7. Google’s Mobile-First Indexing Is On Hold - Google’s mobile-first indexing deadline is no longer a deadline and it decided to leave the “timeline open for the last steps of mobile-first indexing,” John Mueller of Google said on the company blog. Previously, Google postponed the deadline from September 2020 to March 2021, and that deadline came and passed.
Now, Google said there is no specific timeline, instead, Google said the search company “decided to leave the timeline open for the last steps of mobile-first indexing.” Google added currently Google does not “have a specific final date for the move to mobile-first indexing.”
8.
4 New Features In Google Ads Performance Planner - Google has added four new features to its Performance Planner forecasting tool, including options for previously ineligible campaigns, “suggested changes,” and more, the company
announced Tuesday.
Performance Planner’s new features are:
- The ability to add previously ineligible campaigns by using past performance or adding manual forecasts to plan across your entire account.
- The “Suggested changes” column, which displays budget and bid recommendations for a specific campaign.
- The ability to add secondary metrics to a performance plan, which may help advertisers understand impacts on performance beyond their most important metrics. “For example, if you create a plan to maximize conversions, you can now also add a column that shows the changes to clicks as well,” Dean Chen, product manager at Google Ads, wrote.
- The ability to select a specific time range for historical conversion rate. This enables advertisers to use a historical conversion rate that may be closer to what they’re expecting for their plan’s date range.
These new features expand Performance Planner’s flexibility, making it potentially more useful for advertisers in more situations.
Now, advertisers can add campaigns that may have been previously ineligible, enabling them to generate forecasts for those campaigns.
Suggested changes may help improve campaign efficiency and secondary metrics can help you anticipate the impact of changes on metrics that are important but aren’t your key metrics. And, being able to select a specific time range for historical conversion rate may help advertisers get more accurate predictions, which may be especially useful since the pandemic has shifted consumer behavior and introduced supply chain challenges.