Let’s try a Friday publishing schedule for a bit, see if that sticks.
This week: Pinterest shows off, the rise of BNPL, “old school” retailers learn new tricks, what your metrics (might) mean, and a bunch of stuff from Google, Microsoft, TikTok, and TikTok wannabes.
First, if you enjoyed last week’s Chasing Rabbbits about Wordle, you may enjoy this perspective and/or this perspective on its growth.
Now, on to the “news”.
Pinterest Presents
Pinterest just held their dog and pony show for advertisers, hyping all the new shiny toys they have for us. They also had pronouns, subtitles, and sign language interpreters.
They came out of the gate hard with the CEO basically positioning the platform as anti-social media and throwing the major players under the bus. They dream to “build the most positive place on the internet”. In part, by not dealing with “likes” and being a tool to project your life on others (a.k.a. what those other platforms do). Pinterest wants to center on people’s lives and be a place for self-discovery. They are, after all, the home of inspiration (more on this below).
They kept the modesty train rolling as they moved into Pinterest Trends (a tool I very much like). The focus was on using Trends as a predictive tool; not to look at what’s happened, but to discover what will happen. This is possible, according to them, because trends start earlier and last longer on Pinterest. To help serve this purpose they’ve expanded the Trends tool to include audience filtering to see what trends are most relevant to you.
The cornerstone content for Trends is their Pinterest Predicts not-yet-trending report. They’re batting .800 over the last 3 years on these predictions, so probably not the worst idea to take their trendcasting abilities seriously.
Here there was a cute dog interlude. He was a very good boy.
The Shopping surge continues with the rollout of personalized shops for users. These will be filled with curated product guides, shoppable creator content, and brand deals. They like to boast that Pinterest users spend 2x more compared to other social platforms so this could be a better-than-amazon-easier-than-etsy play.
But that’s not all! They’re also rolling out new merchant details to help inform this personalization. These will capitalize on values-based shopping with tags like eco-friendly, inclusive, and invested in good.
Even more?! Now you can checkout on Pinterest. Or, you will soon at least. Spend your money without leaving the app! To help power all this they’ve launched a Shopping API for realtime catalog integration (which is a nice improvement over their once-a-day import currently). Product tagging in idea pins. Pinterest API for Shopping.
Like a lot of platforms, they’re betting big on creators. For brands that means easier partnership opportunities with a simple tag feature, using these pins as ads (been waiting for this), and the ability to tag products in Idea Pins (this could be big).
They’re also rolling out their TikTok clone, it’s called the Watch Tab. A “fully immersive, full screen of great ideas from creators and brands.”
Alright, let’s wrap this up with the inspiration stuff again. They see themselves as “a challenger brand challenging the status quo” that wants to “own inspiration.” To this end, they had some research done via internal data and Nielsen that found 97% of searches on-platform are unbranded and the platform drives 10x higher branded searches off-platform than competitors.
Speaking of Shopping
If you aren’t allowing customers to BNPL (buy now, pay later), you should probably start. This payment method is forecasted to account for 5%+ of global ecomm transaction value by 2025. (What is BNPL? It’s reverse layaway, or a loan / temporary credit card for people that don’t want either of those things but also don’t want to pay all at once.)
Old Navy let the internet write their newest commercial, UGC is (still?) the future.
And, oh hey, 66% of brands spent more on creator marketing last year (which is the new term for influencer marketing but is a bit more specific to people that make engaging content to showcase the product vs. posting a post-workout picture with a tub of protein powder on The Gram™). Insta Stories are still The Place but TikTok is coming on strong.
Walmart’s fulfillment-as-a-service offering exploded last year, 5x’ing their volume. And helped grow their new ad business to $2b. (This is their version of “shipped by Amazon.”) They also reported that it led to sales growth for participating sellers, of 50% in many cases.
In other “old media does new stuff” news, OTT rakes it in (kind of). 5 streaming services brought in $438m worth of ad spend last year: Hulu, HBO Max, Discovery+, Peacock, and Paramount. 65% of the total $1.3 billion OTT ad market. This number is only 3% of digital ad spend. Top advertising industries are: media, retail, financial/insurance, pharma, food.
But What Does It Mean?
At some point in time you will ask or be asked “but are these metrics any good?” If that question is about search advertising, you may be in luck. Do you beat the benchmarks?
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection throws a wrench in email metrics, at least open rate. I like this idea of creating a segment or list based on recipients who open 100% of emails but don’t click anything, that screams MPP user. (Or your emails aren’t geared towards click generation, in which case analytics probably aren’t that important.)
Google Quick Hits
RIP expanded text ads
Google is adding 3 new UTM parameters to Analytics 4. Yay more data!
Optimize + Analytics 4 now allow for Google Ads targeting & BigQuery integration (if you don’t know what that means you probably don’t need to worry about it)
Have a podcast? Google will give you money to turn it into a YouTube series
Somewhere on Twitter an SEO expert reported that rankings dramatically improved within competitive keywords when content in accordions were made visible by default. Google says this is wrong. But it makes sense to me that this could happen. The content was in the html so googlebot saw it but we know Big G™ penalizes for pop-ups since the obscure content so why wouldn’t the inverse hold true? Hiding content for UX means is still hiding content to a robot.
If you're running ads in Europe, get your cookie consent process in order by May 11 or get your account suspended. Your choice.
They’ve updated their documentation on connecting Search Console to Data Studio, if you’re into that kind of thing
TikTok Quick Bits
TikTok was the most downloaded app in the US last year. Followed by Instagram and Snapchat. Notice a trend? All photo and video sharing apps. Facebook’s flagship blue square app clocked in at #7 and downloads were down 11% compared to 2020.
The Trend Machine™ is slowly gaining on YouTube, it’s time to stop ignoring this platform
TikTok says TikTok is great as a second screen marketing channel and creates more awareness and resonance than TV commercials (are TV commercials really still the best comp for this kind of stuff?)
Other Social Tidbits
I can’t find a link anywhere but I’ve heard reports that Instagram is testing a new ad placement a la TikTok: the top of the feed. Based on what I remember hearing, it currently works by injecting an ad at the top of the feed after a user has spent a certain amount of time on the app.
Shop while you Tweet! Twitter is hopping on the ecomm wagon and adding Shops to the platform. The shop will show up on your profile, you can add up to 50 items, and traffic is driven to your site via in-Twitter browser. It’s a limited roll out for now but I’m sure this isn’t the last we’ll see of a Twitter commerce push.
Microsoft Bits & Bobs
Microsoft Ads rolled out new business attributes that can display on ads like: carbon neutral, vegan, family-owned, visual assistance, etc.
Multi-asset audience ads: sounds like Google’s responsive display
Image extensions now import from Google Ads
Seasonality adjustments for automated bidding (give them more info and the algo will (theoretically) be better prepared for performance swings)
Professional Service Ads for real estate, insurance, and tax services, etc. This format looks like it will add a little more personality to these ad placements and targeting will be handled automagically, just tell Windows World™ what geos you want to appear in.
LinkedIn buys Oribi (a marketing analytics platform), announces it in an overly corporatespeak post, and promises privacy-first solutions. I am particularly intrigued by the automated tags for conversions and “code-free solutions”. It will be interesting to see how Oribi is integrated into the LinkedIn family and if it will remain a Google Analytics alternative.
They are also boosting their post insights offering with more demographic detail per post