Do you have a morning routine? A UK mathematician has come up with a morning routine that she says is mathematically proven to improve your day.
Ryan Seacrest shared on-air the expert surveyed 2,000 people to come up with the schedule, as part of a campaign with Special K cereal.
“Not everyone has the same routine but a combination of the different elements should be key to ‘getting out of bed on the right side,’” British Science Association head Dr. Anne-Marie Imafidon told the Sun.
· WAKE UP AT 6:44 AM
· GET OUT OF BED AT 7:12 AM & SHOWER FOR 10 MINUTES
· EAT BREAKFAST FOR 18 MINUTES
· EXERCISE FOR 21 MINUTES
If you work at 9, then you have 59 minutes to get there.
See the math above to make it fit for your own schedule and listen back for more:
A new team will be tasked with building paid experiences across Meta’s apps
Meta is setting up a product organization to identify and build “possible paid features” for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, according to an internal memo sent to employees last week that was obtained by The Verge.
The new division is Meta’s first serious foray into building paid features across its main social apps, all three of which boast billions of users. It’s being set up after Meta’s ads business was severely hurt by Apple’s ad tracking changes on iOS and a broader pullback in digital ad spending. The group, called New Monetization Experiences, will be led by Pratiti Raychoudhury, who was previously Meta’s head of research.
In an interview with The Verge, Meta’s VP of monetization overseeing the group, John Hegeman, said the company is still committed to growing its ads business, and that it had no plans to let people pay to turn off ads in its apps. “I think we do see opportunities to build new types of products, features, and experiences that people would be willing to pay for and be excited to pay for,” he said. He declined to elaborate on paid features that are being considered.
Meta’s revenue almost entirely comes from ads, and while it has several paid features already across its apps, the social media giant hasn’t made charging users a priority until now. Hegeman downplayed paid features becoming a meaningful part of the business in the near term, but said that “on the flip side, I think if there are opportunities to both create new value and meaningful revenue lines and also provide some diversification, that’s obviously going to be something that will be appealing.”
Longer term, Meta sees paid features becoming a more meaningful part of its business, he said. “On a five-year time horizon I do think it can really move the needle and make a pretty significant difference.”
Facebook group administrators can already charge for access to exclusive content, and virtual “stars” can be purchased to send to creators. WhatsApp charges certain businesses for the ability to message their customers, and Instagram recently announced that creators could also begin charging a subscription for access to exclusive content. In June, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company wouldn’t take a cut of transactions from paid features and subscriptions until 2024.
Meta isn’t alone in pushing toward more paid features. Social media apps have been increasingly turning to charging over the past couple of years. TikTok started testing paid subscriptions for creators earlier this year, Twitter has paid Super Follows, and Discord makes its money entirely from its Nitro subscription. In addition, this year both Telegram and Snapchat added paid tiers that unlock additional features. Snapchat’s paid tier has proven to be an early hit.
“We’re obviously paying attention to what’s going on in the industry,” said Hegeman. “And I think there are multiple companies that have done interesting things in this space that I think hopefully we can learn from and emulate over time.”
TikTok has absolutely taken the world by storm since 2020. And it’s not just for the kids — with over 1 billion users, it’s popular across all demographics.
User behaviour on TikTok has been evolving as its popularity grows. We’ve seen the app go from dancing teenagers to influencing shopping behaviour across the world.
Now the next step for TikTok seems to be turning into the next big search engine.
Is TikTok the new Google?
Short answer: no.
TikTok is an internal search engine for TikTok content. It’s dedicated to a particular area of focus and a particular format: video.
There are a few different factors at play in how we choose the search engine to solve our need in the moment, but at the end of the day, TikTok and Google satisfy very different search intents.
Why do users search on TikTok?
We’re seeing TikTok take market share from Google in verticals such as food, gardening, and travel. These are low stakes searches where the outcome is unlikely to cause you harm. Since you don’t need a perfect or factual answer, you can use TikTok to find it.
TikTok’s video format makes a lot more sense if you’re looking for answers where the visual matters. Date spots in your city or a gardening tutorial are perfect searches for the platform.
Another reason users choose TikTok is that the answer will always be provided by a subject matter expert, not a niche blogger. Social proof abounds, as you can assess the expertise of your source by looking at the comments and number of views, likes, and followers.
A few concerns have been raised about the spread of misinformation on TikTok, as they have in most other content platforms. However, these are slightly more worrying on TikTok because it has an unprecedented potential for virality, and a large, young user base, who are more easily influenced during content discovery than during active search.
Users are even searching for TikTok content on Google, with queries such as “TikTok pasta”, amassing 1,778 searches per month in the US:
Branded queries on Google for TikTok content have a combined monthly search volume of 30.1 million in the US alone. But in the spirit of transparency, I’ll share that most of those are not PG (or even PG-13).
Active search vs. content discovery
There are two key behaviours on TikTok we must differentiate: active search and content discovery.
Content discovery
Content discovery is the main behaviour on TikTok and it’s the one we’re most familiar with. It’s when the user is scrolling through the app, passively hoping to find entertainment, financial advice, recipe ideas, or a new favourite beauty product.
Users have been enjoying a positive content discovery experience on TikTok for years. They have found new restaurants or a selfie angle that makes them look like Kylie Jenner.
This is the key to understanding TikTok’s rise as a search engine: This positive content discovery experience has earned the users’ trust. They know that the content they want to consume is on TikTok. So when the need arises, they turn to the video platform first.
Active search
This leads us into active search. Active search is when a user types a specific question into TikTok’s search box.
On TikTok, users can seamlessly scroll through all of the content that answers their query, without having to open multiple tabs on their browser. This improves user satisfaction, reduces friction and, most importantly, teaches TikTok the best answer. More on that later.
Let’s talk about psychology
Persuasion resistance is a natural psychological defense when we feel like someone is trying to manipulate us into buying, doing, or thinking something. We perceive persuasion as a threat and we try to move away from it or oppose it.
Over a decade ago, the online advertising industry started to worry about a decrease in the CTR of their display ads. Pop-ups got dismissed, banners went ignored. Users had caught onto advertisers: we were trying to sell them something.
This triggered a phenomenon known to psychologists as persuasion resistance. Advertisers called this response “banner blindness”. As an industry, we developed four different strategies to counter this resistance to persuasion.
First, we started making our ads look like they were part of the content. We called these “native ads”.
Then, we started placing the ads in unexpected places, where users were less likely to be bracing themselves to be sold to.
We started making ads a little bit more relevant to the context, so that they felt less intrusive.
Finally, we moved into social proof, and we started leveraging the power of trust. Thus influencer marketing was born.
TikTok leverages these four strategies to counter resistance to persuasion by design. How do they do it?
Creators are paid for their content through the Creator Fund, based on how many views or engagement their videos get. They are incentivized to make quality, engaging content that users will enjoy, not just by making deals with brands.
They regularly showcase their beauty routines, fashion, or home products, with or without a brand sponsorship. This makes affiliate or sponsored content look just like regular content.
Their ads are served in exactly the same format as their regular content, with a small tag letting you know that it’s promoted content.
All the videos have an identified creator, visible like and view counts, and open comments. Social proof abounds!
But SEO is not paid social or influencer marketing. So why should we care?
SEO is now omnichannel
Putting the right content in front of users at the right time is at the core of what we do. If we want to keep achieving this goal, we must provide content where the user is looking for it.
As technology integrates further into our lives, we’ve seen the rise of multisearch. Google created the term as a way to integrate their Google Lens functionality into the way we speak about search and SEO.
We now search by asking our home assistant devices questions or taking a picture of a tree we don’t recognize. We search on Google Maps, on Youtube, on Instagram and even on Amazon.
The days when SEO was about responding to a query in a search box are long gone.
By putting our content out on TikTok and optimizing it for search, we are helping users find our content when they need it, where they want it, and in the format they chose to consume it.
TikTok on the SERPs
An omnichannel SEO strategy will let you interact with your users beyond your own domain, and it can help your brand take up more real estate in the SERPs.
Google is trying to diversify the domains they show on search, so if you want to feature in the SERPs multiple times, you’ll have to distribute your brand’s content across different domains.
TikTok’s website has over 31 million pages built programmatically around topics, hashtags, and sounds:
Topic pages make up the most of their URLs and traffic, and seem to be built based on hashtags used, along with some form of machine learning consolidation of their variations. These include related videos, topics, users, hashtags, and sounds.
Based on the data available on different tools, we know that this section on TikTok’s website has about 157 million monthly organic clicks.
Based on the numbers alone, the benefit of having your content feature in these pages is obvious.
Industries that should be on TikTok
TikTok serves you content based on what the algorithm has determined you’ll enjoy, not based on who you follow. So users constantly discover new creators.
The TikTok algorithm does a genuinely good job at finding your interests or helping you discover stuff that you like. These topics of interest become small niches with their own name.
Much like a subreddit, TikTok has unofficial “toks”. You can find niches such as book-tok, finance-tok, food-tok, and many others.
Based on the data, case studies, and some expert opinions, there are industries that can truly benefit from being on the platform and surfacing content tagged for these various “toks”:
Sports teams
Streaming services and entertainers
Fashion and beauty brands
Restaurants and food bloggers
Travel brands and influencers
Home and DIY content creators and brands
If you think this list reminds you of the top industries on Pinterest, you are right.
TikTok and Pinterest have a lot in common. Both platforms prioritize content discovery based on your interests and serve mainly visual content.
When looking at suggested searches, the value becomes clear when I start typing keywords typically associated with an informational or commercial intent:
While these are personalized for each user, you can see that others are searching for content that brands or publishers have typically kept on their blogs and find valuable for their businesses.
Brands looking to increase their brand awareness can benefit from being on TikTok regardless of their industry. After all, nobody expected the success Duolingo has had on the platform.
Conclusion
Is TikTok threatening Google? No. Is it worth the attention of SEOs? Yes.
Over the next few months, keep an eye out for more pieces on how to make the most of this upstart and unlikely content discovery search engine. I will be writing about the TikTok algorithm, what the search experience looks like on TikTok, and how to make sure your videos rank.
Learn about click farms and how to stop them from draining your business’ ad budget.
Fake products hawked by influencers. Shady merchandise on Facebook marketplace. The internet is filled with fraudulent schemes. Among these bad actors are click farms, a particularly sinister fraudulent act aimed explicitly at draining businesses’ advertising budgets. Juniper Research estimates that U.S. businesses will lose over $23 billion to this type of ad fraud scheme by the end of the year. Here’s what you need to know about click farms and three quick ways to stop them from hurting your business.
What is a click farm?
A click farm is a physical location where a large group of workers spends their days manually clicking on paid advertising at scale. These clicks inflate the ad’s traffic and impressions, resulting in zero sales since these fraudulent clicks do not convert to sales.
How do click farms work?
Click farms generate a large volume of “real human” clicks. Bots are better suited for achieving this goal, but websites are better at detecting bot clicks through CAPTCHA and other preventive measures. However, the human element makes all the difference with click farms, as click farm activity is harder to detect.
Here’s how the process works.
A click farm worker sees as an ad
They click on the ad
They’ll perform the necessary action (download an app, fill out a form, like a post, follow an account, etc.)
The attribution system reads the click as valid and charges the advertiser.
The click farm worker repeats this process for every ad, with some going so far as to create fake profiles using stolen identities online.
Take, for example, the $50 billion click farm problem plaguing China. According to Yahoo Finance, there have been reports of click farms housing and operating as many as 17,000 phones simultaneously used to perform clicks based on the buyer’s request. This recent rise in click farms in the urban areas of China has affected global advertising. In the U.S., $62 million out of $407 million in ad spend per user was wasted due to ad-fraud schemes.
How to detect click farms on your ad
One way to detect whether click farms are draining your ad budget is by monitoring your traffic activity. Typically, click farms have the same pattern when “click farming” an ad. They share the same phone model, IP address, device, geolocation, browser versions, etc., in large numbers.
Once you notice you’re getting clicks from a particular region and they all have the same pattern, check your engagement metrics. Ideally, any platform running ads would allow you to see how your ads perform. It may be a click farm attack if you notice a sudden spike in traffic and a high click-through rate but zero conversions.
Effects of click farms on ad campaigns
Wasted ad spending: This is often the most noticeable impact of click farms on ad campaigns. Due to the fake clicks, advertisers quickly rack up charges that drain their ad budgets. Take an ad running on Google. A competitor can hire a click farm to drive false clicks to your ad. This drains your ad budget with little to no returns. And once you can no longer fund your ads, Google takes you off their platform.
Skewed marketing data: Making accurate marketing decisions relies on evaluating past results and determining the weak and strong points to inform future strategy and improvement. Once this data is compromised with fake clicks, the marketing data becomes useless — without it, advertisers have difficulty running ads that will effectively convert traffic into sales.
How to combat click farms
1. Enable restrictive geo-targeting
To get the best results for your ad, you have to restrict displaying ads to users in certain regions of the world known for click farms. You can easily set this preference up on any ad platform. Alternatively, you can also block specific IP addresses from accessing your ads. For example, if you notice a sudden spike in clicks from IP addresses in Hong Kong, you can block those addresses.
2. Opt for tasking pre-qualification challenges
CAPTCHA challenges for human verification aren’t as compelling — or complex — as they used to be. In less than 5 seconds, click farm workers can bypass the challenge of accessing your ads. However, creating a tasking challenge that requires complete concentration frustrates the workers, hence preventing them from draining your ad budget since they can’t do it at scale.
3. Avoid fraudulent publishers and ad platforms
Sometimes, the click farms draining your ad budget are directly from the publishers or supply-side platforms you use. These platforms advertise ad space promising high traffic, clicks, views and impressions to help you connect with your audience. Meanwhile, the traffic they’re promising is from click farms. Avoid this scheme by working with ad platforms and publishers that use ads.txt.
ds.txt, which stands for Authorized Digital Sellers, is a text file allowing publishers to list resellers of their ad inventory. As an advertiser, this list is essential in deterring fake traffic and clicks from eating up your ad budget. Ads.txt benefits include safeguarding advertisers from bogus ad inventory and more accessible matching seller IDs during bid requests.
To summarize the pervasive click farm problem: The overall demand for clicks and user attention is a booming industry that, unfortunately, continues to attract bad actors. Ad networks generally offer some level of protection to all advertisers, but click farms have developed sophisticated systems to bypass this protection. While there’s no single solution for eliminating click farms, utilizing the abovementioned strategies will prevent ad budget losses on fraudulent clicks.
Fewer people are starting their product searches on Amazon.
When you’re looking to find a product online, your first stop is most likely Amazon(AMZN -0.36%). The majority of online product searches start with the e-commerce giant, followed by a regular old search engine like Alphabet‘s (GOOG 0.59%)(GOOGL 0.39%) Google.
But Amazon’s dominance of product searches appears to be waning while search engines like Google remain resilient.
Is Google gaining ground?
Jungle Scout, a company that develops software for online marketplace merchants, recently asked consumers where they start their product searches online.
While 61% of respondents said they started on Amazon during the second quarter, that’s down from 74% in the first quarter of 2021. Meanwhile, search engines have remained steady at 49%. (Respondents could select more than one option.)
That might suggest Google is becoming a better discovery platform for online shopping. It’s been an area of focus for Google for years, even before former CEO and executive chairman Eric Schmidt called Amazon its biggest competitor.
Current CEO Sundar Pichai said investments in e-commerce are paying off. During Alphabet’s second-quarter earnings call, Pichai said: “People are shopping across Google more than 1 billion times each day. We see hundreds of millions of shopping searches on Google Images each month.”
Interestingly, Amazon wasn’t the only site or app that saw fewer respondents in 2022 versus 2021. In fact, practically every other potential response was selected less often, except for search engines. That includes Walmart and social media apps. That’s despite heavy investments from competitors, including Alphabet’s YouTube, in growing e-commerce on their platforms.
The survey shows Amazon is still dominating other retailers in the product-search space and fending off the growth of social media. Overall, consumers might be using fewer sources to search for products online, but Amazon remains the top option for more people than anything else.
Amazon has built a business as a search engine
The reason investors need to pay attention to Amazon’s position as a product search engine is that it now runs a very big business based on product searches. The bulk of its ad revenue comes from sponsored products and brands in its search results.
Last quarter, ad revenue grew 18% to $8.76 billion. That’s a $35 billion run rate. And that revenue is very high-margin relative to its marketplace, third-party seller services, and even its cloud computing business. Notably, that ad revenue growth has slowed significantly after monster increases in 2020 and 2021.
Amazon dominates e-commerce channel advertising even more than it dominates e-commerce. While its robust user base and meaningful data on its users help attract more-valuable ads, it’s the search traffic that has led to that dominance.
As e-commerce growth continues to outpace in-store sales growth, Amazon is poised to see the benefit of shifting ad budgets from things like end caps in store aisles to banner ads on Amazon and other online retail websites.
But Google sees that opportunity as well, and it could present a bigger threat to the growth of Amazon’s ad business than any of its retail competitors. While the most recent Jungle Scout survey indicates Google is making progress in e-commerce, Amazon remains at the top of the chart. For now, there appears to be plenty of growth left in Amazon’s ad business, but Amazon investors should keep an eye on Google’s progress in e-commerce advertising.
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Get your power back as an entrepreneur with a diversified channel strategy.
The ecommerce space has seen rapid expansion since the pandemic. As physical retail stores were forced to close or halt operations in the physical space, global retail ecommerce experienced an increase from 14% in 2019 to 17% in 2020. Recent estimates suggest that ecommerce will register more than $6.5 trillion in sales by 2023, representing 22% of global retail sales. To capitalize on this, ecommerce business owners will benefit from rethinking their channel strategies and focusing on building their brand.
Most customers begin their shopping journey on Amazon. These shopping searches don’t often get extended to the rest of the web and are why marketplaces and social platforms are so popular with online shoppers and business owners.
While setting up a primary shop on Facebook, Amazon or eBay is simple, businesses can spend months or years trying to perfect their channel strategies. Since they offer simple, structured approaches to inventory management and sales and access to a broad pool of customers, such platforms are attractive to those just starting their ecommerce venture.
With each platform requiring a dedicated strategy, business owners typically concentrate on just one or two channels. If a business manages to dominate the buy box on Amazon or master Facebook advertising, investing more effort in the successful platform makes sense. This leads to vulnerability as businesses become locked into ecosystems.
The problem with channel lock-ins
Business owners protesting channel lock-ins and market dominance by a central platform is nothing new. As conglomerates have managed to corner the online market, small retailers leveraging these marketplaces have seen their profits decline. Data shows the number of small retailers has fallen by 65,000 between 2007 and 2017 as Amazon has grown. Marketplaces also impede the ability of small businesses to operate independently as business owners are prevented from having direct relationships with their customers.
This becomes more problematic when Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple change a rule or an algorithm. For example, Apple recently changed its rules regarding data transfer on apps from its app store. This simple change dramatically affected Facebook advertising, leaving ecommerce stores that relied heavily on Facebook ads to find new sources of traffic. Other challenges come with listing products on a marketplace. Amazon has been known to freeze accounts or withhold earnings. The retailer has also copied products under their private label, Amazon Basics.
Besides the above, building customer relationships becomes impossible if there’s a third party managing the transaction.
Moving beyond the online store
As tech giants battle for internet control, building a robust sales and customer acquisition strategy is critical for ecommerce businesses. Consider a backup plan if a single channel is responsible for more than 50% of your revenues. This could be as simple as creating a website on an independent domain for brand awareness. By setting up an online store on a separate domain, small businesses can capture customer information that can help generate repeat customers and brand advocates. This approach will help reduce reliance on marketplaces.
Consider your traffic sources for those already drawing revenues from an independent website. What would you do if one of them disappeared? Is your brand identity powerful enough to withstand the loss of a social source? Do you have an email strategy to interface with customers? If you have product feeds for Google, why not diversify to Facebook and Pinterest? If you succeeded in using Facebook ads, why not try out Snapchat or TikTok?
Building your own ecommerce brand
Your ultimate aim as an ecommerce entrepreneur should be to build a brand, not just a store. You must diversify your traffic sources and sell on multiple channels for maximum outreach. To become a multi-channel ecommerce business, you will need to own your data and emails. The simplest way to build a multi-channel presence may be to use a platform to unify your channels and focus on your brand.
Small entrepreneurs may never be able to win a fight with tech giants. This is true especially regarding the sheer scale and integrated experience offered by marketplaces that combine payment processing, well-oiled shipping networks and SEO. But there are ways to level the playing field strategically. One way could be to dramatically reduce the customer experience gap and offer near identical or more personalized user experiences. If you are confused about where to begin, ecommerce cloud vendors provide many tools and strategies for cultivating brand awareness. Building your brand equity can generate a long-term impact on the future of your business as you reap dividends in customer loyalty, brand recall and most importantly, a much larger slice of the market pie.
Instagram, like all social media platforms, is investing heavily in its e-commerce capabilities. But while its ambitions are forward-facing, it is also looking backward at an underappreciated marketing tool to supercharge those ambitions – the QR code.
The QR code is having a renaissance. Once mostly seen in out-of-home (OOH) grassroots campaigns, the value of the code has skyrocketed as marketers grew to understand its wider implications for attribution and analytics purposes.
Instagram, finding itself on the back foot for e-commerce compared to platforms such as TikTok and Snapchat, is now quietly rolling out a new QR-based feature for all users. Following a limited trial of the tool, as noted by Alessandro Paluzzi, the platform is allowing its wider user base to share links to Reels and posts through the generation of a QR code.
A Meta representative told Techcrunch: “To make it easier for people and businesses to share specific content, we recently launched the ability to create QR codes for profiles, tags, locations, reels and more.”
It is another lease of life for the QR code. In 2015, Snapchat experimented with launching QR-based Snapcodes, allowing users to easily follow their friends. TikTok similarly launched its own visually-distinct QR code to allow users to share their own profiles.
The tool has also previously seen use in marketing in print titles. South Africa’s Associated Media – which publishes the regional editions of Cosmopolitan among others – saw positive results from printing QR codes next to products in its print magazines. That allowed its brand partners to track the purchase funnel from an analogue product to a digital one with much greater specificity than would otherwise have been possible.
At the time, Associated Media’s chief exec Julia Raphaely said: “We started with a QR code because, in South Africa, that is the payment gateway that’s very well recognized. We partnered with a QR code technology that was powered by a bank, and we started testing it.”
In the rest of the world, however, the QR code was seen mostly as a tool that had never lived up to its potential. Now, though, audiences have greater familiarity with codes for information-sharing and linking out. In its most recent Marvel series, for instance, Disney has included QR codes within TV shows that take users to bonus content.
A social strategy
Now, however, the QR code has come roaring back to the fore as a viable marketing tool. On social platforms, as in print, the codes are being used to open the purchase funnel for consumers – and to deliver greater measurement options for advertisers.
Jordan Lukeš, communications director at Emplifi, explains: “QR codes offer a wealth of opportunity for brands in terms of social-forward marketing. We know that influencer marketing is a huge hit with younger consumers especially. Just imagine how this could enhance the shopping experience – you could have QR codes connecting product info to posts where an influencer is wearing the item, or even include QR codes on physical clothing racks in stores.
“Not only does this create a phygital experience for the shopper, but it offers a new way for brands to drive and monitor their engagement in a way that can be traced all the way down to the bottom line.”
The codes would also aid with one of Instagram’s perennial issues – that of discovery. While more consumers are using platforms such as TikTok and Pinterest to seek out and discover recommendations, thus opening the purchase funnel for brand partners, Instagram has struggled to match their capabilities. This integration of QR code allows its creators to share their posts off-platform, which could help ameliorate that problem.
Beyond that, the key benefit for Instagram is one of attribution. The QR code allows for more direct and demonstrable measures of efficacy when it comes to linking through to advertising partners’ products.
Media Bounty’s Max Harris and Ali Moloney explain: “For advertisers, this trend has provided the added benefit of gathering audience data for future marketing purposes. For example, QR codes can store digital information such as when, where and how often you scan a code, which typically leads to an app or a website that then tracks your personal information. Therefore, the rise of the QR code follows the agreement between platforms and users as we exchange our data for access and convenience.”
The QR code was a victim of Amara’s Law, and its early use cases were arguably too early to take advantage of the rise of the smartphone camera and social media. With Instagram and the other major social platforms making huge strides toward developing their e-commerce operations, however, the QR code has again found its place in the marketer’s arsenal.
Apple’s quietly begun hiring for roles aimed at poaching the Facebook and Instagram advertisers that felt the biggest brunt from the company’s privacy updates
In terms of Silicon Valley feuds, you’d be hard pressed to find one that’s spicier than the years-long battle between Meta and Apple. Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg started steering his company toward virtual-reality tech, and now Apple CEO Tim Cook has made it clear he’s gunning for the same. Meta’s Facebook recently started testing out encrypted chats, a domain that Apple has dominated for years.
Facebook is a company that historically hasn’t shied away from sharing user data with countless third parties. Meanwhile Apple AAPL, 0.16%, as its own glitzy ad campaigns constantly remind us, is the one tech company that doesn’t spray your data across the web.
And, of course, there’s Apple’s recent privacy changes to its operating system that wiped out an estimated $10 billion of revenue for Meta META, -0.83%. At the same time, the advertisers that relied on the long-established tools on Facebook and Instagram were left without the data they long relied on for their businesses.
In the year since Apple CEO Tim Cook denounced ad-based business models as a source of real-world violence, Apple has ramped up plans to pop more ads into people’s iPhones and beef up the tech used to target those ads. And now it looks like Apple’s looking to poach the small businesses that have relied almost entirely on Facebook’s ad platform for more than a decade.
MarketWatch found two recent job postings by Apple that suggest the company is looking to build out its burgeoning ad-tech team with folks who specialize in working with small businesses. Specifically, the company says it’s looking for two product managers who are “inspired to make a difference in how digital advertising will work in a privacy-centric world” and who want to “design and build consumer advertising experiences.” An ideal candidate, Apple said, won’t only be savvy in advertising and mobile tech, and advertising on mobile tech, but will also have experience with “performance marketing, local ads or enabling small businesses.”
The listings also state that Apple’s looking for a manager who can “drive multi-year strategy and execution,” which suggests that Apple isn’t just tailing local advertisers but will likely be tailing those advertisers for a while. And considering how some of those small brands are already looking to jump ship from Facebook following Apple’s privacy changes, luring them off the platform might be enough to hamper Meta’s entire business structure for good, ad-tech analysts said.
“If you talk to any small business, they’ll tell you, ‘Yeah, right now is a disaster,” said Eric Seufert, one analyst who’s been following the battle between Apple and Facebook evolve for years. “It’s just a meltdown. There’s been a complete, devastating change to the environment.”
Is Apple’s Tim Cook stealing a page from Facebook’s playbook? Getty Images
‘What goes around comes around’
Zuckerberg has said (over and over again) that Apple’s move to cut off the company’s precious user data would hamper “millions” of small businesses, and, indeed, in the iPhone update’s aftermath, some marketers said they were left “scrambling” to identify whom their ads were reaching — and typically paying sky-high prices for the privilege to do so.
From an iPhone owner’s point of view, it can be tough to understand exactly how a privacy feature could singlehandedly bring countless mom-and-pops to their knees. Especially when that feature, App Tracking Transparency (ATT) — which Apple rolled out in April of last year — does something as upstanding as mandating that app developers give users the freedom to choose whether they want to be tracked across their device.
Most users, by all accounts, would end up saying no. And once they did, those apps lost access to a crucial mechanism in mobile advertising: that person’s unique “identifier for advertisers,” or IDFA for short.
You can think of it as something like the iPhone’s answer to a web cookie. An advertiser can use your IDFA to track, say, whether you saw its ad on Instagram and then bought its product on Etsy ETSY, -0.66%, or followed its account on Pinterest PINS, 3.62%. IDFA was the key that let mobile advertisers know whether their ads actually worked.
So when Apple’s change hit, it wasn’t just Facebook’s advertisers that were flying blind — small shops that were running ads on Google’s GOOG, 0.63%GOOGL, 0.41% YouTube, Snap’s SNAP, 0.84% Snapchat, Pinterest or any other platform where ads are sold experiences some sort of hurt. And the more your platform’s business relied on user data, the bigger sting you felt.
“You can have an ideological take on all of this and say, ‘Well, these ad tools shouldn’t have gotten so efficient, since that was dependent on violating people’s privacy,’ ” Seufert said. “And that’s a fair argument.”
But, as he also pointed out, you can’t ignore economics. Apple certainly hasn’t.
“I guess what goes around comes around,” said Zach Goldner, a forecasting analyst at Insider Intelligence who specializes in digital ads. “I mean, it’s not like Facebook hasn’t copied other platforms before.”
Aside from its myriad privacy scandals, the other core concept that the Meta brand is synonymous with is copying competitors. As Goldner put it, it was only a matter of time before someone tried made a run at the company that’s spent more than a decade weaving its brand into small businesses.
“Using Facebook ads for small businesses is voluntary in the same way that using email for a job search is voluntary,” said Jeromy Sonne, a longtime digital marketer who has since abandoned the platform to start his own ad-serving network.
“No, you’re not ‘locked in,’ and they aren’t forcing you to spend money. There’s no contract here,” he went on. “But because of the lack of options and the number of businesses that built their entire revenue off the back of the platform, it’s virtually impossible to walk away.”
Mark Zuckerberg made Facebook indispensable for the nation’s small businesses. Will that stranglehold endure? Associated Press
How Facebook became ‘virtually impossible’ for small business to escape
Before rivals like Snapchat and TikTok would hit the social-media sphere, Facebook had been running ads for years.
Some of the last holdouts in the switch to digital were smaller businesses — and reports at the time showed that there wasn’t a lack of companies trying to swoop in on the opportunity to work with local mom-and-pops. Ultimately, a good chunk of them would end up migrating to Facebook; the platform’s ad service was easier and cheaper to run than its competitors, and it offered more data than they did, too.
“You could just run anything in it, and it was so cheap it didn’t matter,” said Sonne. Facebook was offering something that was “100% self-serve” and didn’t have the price floors that other platforms — like, say, DoubleClick — were demanding at the time. And it was far easier to navigate than those competitors to boot.
Then the early aughts happened. In an effort to make its platform more user-friendly in 2014, Facebook started throttling the cheap promotional page posts that brands had become accustomed to, forcing the bulk of them to pay up for ad space in people’s feeds or lose the audience they’d spent nearly a decade cultivating.
When small businesses cried foul, Jonathan Czaja, Facebook’s then–director of small business for North America, said bluntly that the platform was simply “evolving,” and advertisers had no choice but to evolve alongside it.
So they did. A month after Czaja’s statement, the company boasted in a blog post about a new record number of small businesses operating on the platform: 40 million. At the same time, Zuckerberg noted that the company, though it was pivoting to fewer ads in people’s feeds, would be going even harder on microtargeting — a strategy that even he admitted was “pretty controversial” inside the company. Around the same time, employees reportedly began raising red flags about a then-obscure ad firm named Cambridge Analytica, which improperly harvested data from countless Americans in the run-up to the 2016 election.
‘Using Facebook ads for small businesses is voluntary in the same way that using email for a job search is voluntary.’
— Jeromy Sonne, digital marketer
By 2017, the combination of Facebook’s ever-growing cache of user data and increasing scale had left advertisers more or less stuck. When Facebook admitted to marketers no less than a dozen times that it might have flubbed the figures it provided, advertisers shrugged off the miscalculations every time. “Even with the wrong math — it is really small compared to fraud rates on other platforms,” one ad executive told Business Insider at the time. “In digital advertising, you just learn to live with a certain amount of ambiguity.”
Another executive put it more bluntly: “I wouldn’t say they are foolproof, but they are fairly impervious to almost anything.”
Revelations that the company knowingly lied to advertisers for years about how far their campaigns were reaching didn’t send advertisers packing, and neither did the slowly rising prices that many advertisers were paying. It’s typical for ad prices on any platform to fluctuate from month to month, but Facebook’s spikes were unusually extreme. Between January 2017 and January 2018, for example, one analysis found that the prices advertisers were paying for their Facebook ads were spiking as much as 122%.
“Over time the [prices] go up, support gets stretched thin, scaling issues take hold,” he went on. But what was a struggling startup to do? Venture capital had been steadily flowing into a new generation of digital-first brands for more than a decade, which gave them new monthly goals they needed to hit.
“It became a situation where brands or agencies who had expectations of eternal growth could consistently get it from Facebook,” Sonne said, and that their funders now expected the same. But it also made them dependent on a platform that was either increasingly unreliable or downright unusable, depending on which advertiser was asked. Some small businesses reported having their ads improperly flagged by Facebook’s automated ad-review process, while other marketers expressed frustration at how buggy the back-end systems were.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Meta, meanwhile, noted that “small-business owners around the world tell us our products helped them create and grow their businesses.”
“It’s why we are consistently committed to developing and providing new programs, tools, training and personalized advertiser support for them,” the spokesperson went on.
The company doesn’t disclose how many of the 10 million–plus advertisers pouring money into a given Meta property each year qualify as a “small business.” The last time Facebook shared that data itself was in a 2019 earnings call when then–Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said the top 100 advertisers represented “less than 20%” of the company’s total ad revenue. An analysis from the marketing analytics firm Pathmatics found that percentage closer to 6%, at $4.2 billion in spending altogether. The company raked in nearly $70 billion in ad revenue that year alone.
Apple’s next move
Since upending the online advertising ecosystem, third-party analysts have seen a surge of advertiser activity — and ad dollars — head Apple’s way.
Last year, for example, one of these reports found that Apple’s Search Ads — which appear at the top of your iPhone screen when you’re looking for a new app to buy in the company’s App Store — were the source of roughly 58% of all iPhone app downloads. A year prior, these same ads were only responsible for 17%. And earlier this summer, one Evercore analyst projected that Apple’s App Store ads could net the company $7.1 billion in revenue by 2025.
“I think the revenue piece [of the ad market] is less important to Apple than just breaking up Facebook’s total ownership of distribution on mobile,” Seufert said. He pointed out that, for a long time, Facebook dominated the market in driving app installs. One report earlier this year found that about three-quarters of those marketing a mobile app rely on Meta’s ad-tech tools to do so.
“Ads are a revenue opportunity, but, more importantly, they’re a discovery mechanic,” Seufert went on. “And suddenly Facebook was determining which apps got downloaded, not Apple. My sense with all this is that they care about the revenue, but I don’t think that was the primary driver. I think it was about the power.”
As far as power plays go, there’s really no better move than homing in on small businesses that have become disgruntled with Meta’s platforms. And as Goldner pointed out, with the economic crush that came with the ongoing pandemic, more advertisers — big and small — are shirking display-based advertising like Meta’s for more search-based advertising like Apple’s.
“As we’re hitting a potential recession, people are moving more towards bottom-of-the-funnel ads to squeeze the margins,” Goldner said. “Whenever a potential economic downturn exists, companies want to focus on maximizing their sales. They care less about goodwill and more about just keeping their businesses afloat.”
Apple’s impending small-business push could also explain the rumblings that the company plans to add search ads to Apple Maps in the near future. After all, one of the best ways your local hardware store or diner can advertise their wares today is via search ads in Google Maps, which have been there since 2016. As Seufert put it, “How could [Apple] justify not doing it?”
Feature Image Credit: Getty Images
By Shoshana Wodinsky
Shoshana Wodinsky is an Enterprise Reporter for MarketWatch.
‘Quiet quitting’ has become the labour market’s latest buzzword. We hear the stories of advertising industry employees rethinking their work-life balance.
The premise of quiet quitting is straightforward. A somewhat updated version of the work-to-rule form of industrial action in which employees perform their duties to the letter in order to slow productivity, quiet quitters no longer go above and beyond their pay grade, instead maintaining firm boundaries when it comes to their work-life balance.
Many of the people The Drum spoke to say it has helped them to sustain their mental health and wellbeing in the face of what has been a turbulent few years. However, others say the phenomenon is merely a reassertion of healthy work-life boundaries.
But moreover, is quiet quitting really the answer to poor working conditions? Or does advertising’s insidious toxic culture require more organized, radical action?
The root causes
Emma* had four years of experience under her belt when she was the first marketing hire at a startup, where she was offered a £23,000 ($28,000) salary.
“I was then promoted to head up the marketing team of three and became a line manager after about 18 months at the company, and my salary increased to £30,000 ($35,000). I pushed for a raise in line with my expectations as I had been solely responsible for the marketing strategy and execution for over six months but due to working in a pre-revenue startup, it didn’t happen. I had also been promised shares in the business (one of the key benefits of joining a startup) since I joined, but nothing materialized.”
Her frustrations meant she was forced to reassess how much effort she was putting in for little reward, she says. “I spent the following few months logging on and logging off when contracted and taking my full hour lunch break. In a startup they want people to grind, but being underpaid with no shares – there was no way I was doing this. I became unmotivated and unexcited, and I no longer bought into the company’s mission. After about four months of quiet quitting, I decided to start looking elsewhere and then two months later signed a contract for a new company.”
But tales of high expectations met with low pay and gruelling hours are common throughout the advertising and marketing industry. Sarah* says the last several months in her marketing role have been “extremely demanding.”
“I have a broad and challenging remit – covering both internal and external communications. I work at least 15 hours over my contracted hours every week, rarely take proper breaks and struggle to switch off at weekends and even on holiday. There has been little to no let up from the pandemic period when things were even more challenging. Warning bells rang for me when, during what should’ve been a totally relaxing holiday, I was waking up plagued with anxious work thoughts; worries about the pile of emails and build-up of demands awaiting me on my return.”
‘Quiet quitting’ is just refusing to be exploited
Sarah explains she sees her decision to quiet quit as more of a reassertion of boundaries, of resetting and prioritizing self-care “rather than ‘slacking off’ or being unprofessional.”
“I’ve taken a conscious decision to change how I operate. I’ll never stop caring about doing a good job, but I’m taking steps to break the cycle of stress before it leads to burnout or worse. I’ll be logging on and off at reasonable times, taking daily breaks, declining non-essential meetings, blocking focus time in my diary and reclaiming headspace for the things that matter, rather than being all-consumed by work.”
Similarly, Simon* says: “Constantly going above and beyond in terms of workload and hours, despite receiving a salary far lower than the standard of pay in other professions and below what you really need to live a reasonably comfortable life in or around London, solidified the idea in my mind that work will never love you back.”
Another factor was the Covid-19 pandemic, he says. “Daily death-toll announcements, creaking public services and ongoing economic impacts really put everything in perspective. Brands and campaigns no longer felt like a big deal, and I started to resist the idea that I should spend any time beyond my working hours thinking about them.”
However, Simon says it is all these factors combined that have left him resolved to think of his job as just that. “A means of making money to feed my family, pay my bills and fund my lifestyle.”
He says: “I now strongly resist the idea that one’s job should be the sole avenue for self-actualization – life is finite and I don’t want to spend it caught up in the stress of work. Is this quiet quitting or just refusing to be exploited and manipulated?
”Has it cost me in terms of advancement, my relationship with management or my daily passion and motivation? Probably. But these are a price worth paying for a balanced life and a slightly freer existence.”
Work-to-rule
For some adland workers, however, the phenomenon of quiet quitting has its limitations. Frankie* says it’s a privilege to be able to act in this way because many marginalized groups have to go above and beyond to prove themselves within the workplace. “This is why in pop culture the coaster archetype is often a suburban white guy,” they say.
“At the start of my career [across journalism and marketing], I often worked nights and weekends for years. It took getting to director level to be able to quiet quit.“
Frankie says it’s also an unfulfilling position to be in. They describe quiet quitting as “an individual rebellion that doesn’t change anything.“
“For it to have real impact it needs to be organized and collective. This would also be more inclusive of those that just can’t afford to work to rule. In fact, in organizing circles, work-to-rule is an established tactic, so perhaps the future of this trend is in coordinating and organizing it.”
What makes these specific, targeted landing pages so effective? And what are the best ways to use them in your business?
Almost every modern business now has a website. But for most businesses, a website is just a static tool, meant to provide general information to a general audience. This can work well, especially if adequately supported with a smart marketing and advertising strategy. But if you want to see even better results, I recommend using niche targeted landing pages.
What makes these specific, targeted landing pages so effective? And what are the best ways to use them in your business?
The strategy
Most landing pages are created with one goal in mind: conversion. The idea is to funnel some of your traffic to a specific page. Often it exists separately from your main website, so you can appeal to those audience members with specific content, including written body content, images and videos.
Niche targeted landing pages aren’t meant for a general audience. Instead, they are meant for one specific audience. You’ll be appealing to one group of people, based on their measurable demographics and where they originated. For example, you’ll need to create very different landing pages for young women from Twitter and older men from your email marketing newsletters.
If utilized properly, you can use these landing pages to provide compelling information to each of your audience segments and stand a much higher likelihood of converting them.
Why are niche landing pages so valuable?
Why do I stand behind this strategy so much?
Flexible utility: You can use niche landing pages in conjunction with a variety of different marketing strategies, including search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) ad management, social media marketing and more. You can create them in a matter of minutes and destroy them if they’re no longer working. You can load them up with almost any type of content you can imagine, and change that content on the fly. Because of this, niche landing pages are some of the most flexible elements of your overall marketing strategy, and they’re useful for a wide variety of different goals.
Specific targeting: Landing pages are highly effective because they are specifically targeted. These days, generic content doesn’t work. If you want to stand apart from your competition and have meaningful engagements with your audience, you need to achieve relevance. You’re only going to be relevant if you’re providing specific information for your specific target audience.
Limited competition: You can also benefit from using landing pages because you’re usually going to face limited competition. Even if your business is in a highly competitive environment, landing pages can be a tool for you to evade traditional competition. You can make a unique claim or appeal to a specific audience segment to avoid competitive woes.
Domain control: Domains are a powerful marketing tool, and you can use them perfectly with your landing pages. You’ll have the option to set up landing pages within your main site, but you can also create landing pages under specific domains. Choose a relevant and powerful domain, and the effectiveness of your landing page will multiply immediately.
Possibilities for experimentation: One reason I love niche landing pages is that they offer unlimited possibilities for experimentation. You can change individual variables quickly and measure how user behaviour changes in response. You can compare different landing pages against each other. You can also analyse progress over time, witnessing how your audience’s characteristics evolve.
Audience funnelling: Landing pages don’t have to be the end destination. If you’re trying to get more people to your main website, each landing page can serve as a node in an overall funnel.
Tips for making the most of targeted landing pages
Creating the perfect landing page is something worthy of further exploration. For now, I just wanted to give you some of my best tips for making the most of niche targeted landing pages:
Get specific: General landing pages might have worked in the past. But if you want to maximize your chances of success today, you need to get specific. The more specific your audience targeting is, the better. This will not only limit your competition but also increase your relevance.
Cater to your audience perfectly: If you want your landing pages to work, you need to make sure they’re perfectly catered to your target audience. Do your research to learn how your target audience thinks, what their values are and how they might perceive your content.
Track user behaviour: Pay close attention to onsite user behaviour. How much time are people spending reading your content? Which links do they click? Which videos do they watch? How often do they convert? The more you understand about how people engage with your material, the better you’ll be able to update it in the future.
Take advantage of experiments: In line with this, take advantage of experiments. Don’t allow your landing pages to remain static forever. Instead, slip in new headlines, new structures and other types of new content to see how it affects user behaviour. Data is a prerequisite tool for ongoing improvement.
You may not be successful with the first landing page you create for your brand, but try not to sweat it. Niche landing pages are at their best when they are flexible, adaptable and experimented with. So keep tinkering with your drafts until you find a set of variables that work.
