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Don’t Just Open an Online Store. Build an Ecommerce Brand

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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.

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Discovery and attribution: what’s driving Instagram’s new QR code push?

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By Chris Sutcliffe

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.

 

 

By Chris Sutcliffe

Sourced from The Drum

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‘Work won’t love you back’: adland workers share why they are quiet quitting

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By Ellen Ormesher

‘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.”

*Names have been changed to protect identities

Feature Image Credit: AdobeStock

By Ellen Ormesher

Sourced from The Drum

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Apple already decimated Meta’s ad-tech empire. Now, it’s homing in on Facebook’s advertisers, too.

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By Shoshana Wodinsky

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%.

Meanwhile, finding support as a smaller brand was becoming an increasingly frustrating exercise in futility, Sonne explained.

“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.

Sourced from MarketWatch

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Why Niche Targeted Landing Pages Are So Valuable

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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.

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7 Tips to Follow If You’re a New Travel Blogger

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Many people think that being a travel blogger is all about snapping pictures and writing out your adventures, but there’s so much more to it than that—and there are certain things that newbie travel bloggers should know before they get started.

We’ve compiled everything we wish we’d known when we started out on this journey into one handy blog post (which will hopefully save us from having to make this same list over and over again). Here are some tips for newbies who want to start their own blogs:

Haiku Stairs, Kaneohe, United States. Photo by Kalen Emsley, Unsplash
Haiku Stairs, Kaneohe, United States. Photo by Kalen Emsley, Unsplash

Have a plan

A lot of people don’t set goals for themselves, but it’s important to do so if you want to succeed as a blogger. To make sure your blog is successful and keeps growing, it’s important to have a plan for the future and know what exactly you want to achieve with your blog.

For example, if one of your goals is increasing video content on your YouTube channel because that’s where most of your audience is, then make sure that happens right away! It’s also smart to have some sort of outline or plan for any videos on the channel—it should be easy enough since they’re all scripted beforehand anyway.

You should also try not to forget about social media either; having an Instagram feed full of images from around the world isn’t enough anymore – nowadays, there needs to be some sort of story behind each photo so people can relate more easily (this goes back again into having good quality content). If someone sees something interesting while scrolling through their feed, then chances are good they’ll click through – which means more views!

Anaheim Hills, Anaheim, United States. Photo by Jordan Wozniak, Unsplash
Anaheim Hills, Anaheim, United States. Photo by Jordan Wozniak, Unsplash

Be consistent

If you want your blog to be successful, you need to be consistent. Having a schedule and posting regularly is key to building an audience and gaining subscribers. If people know when they can expect new content from you, they’ll be more likely to visit regularly and interact with your posts.

Don’t forget that consistency in style is just as important as consistency in frequency! Your readers will appreciate knowing what they can expect from each post—that means sticking with the style of writing (like first-person or third-person), tone (casual or formal), length (longer or shorter), and format (article vs listicle).

Make sure your content is useful

When it comes to content, make sure it’s useful. Don’t just talk about your trip; share tips and tricks that will help the reader plan their own adventure. You can even include a section on the blog where you answer people’s questions!

If you do this well enough, people will feel like they’re getting more than just a travelogue from your blog: they’ll also be learning something while they read. They’ll be able to get inspiration for their own trips and have ideas for how to spend their time once they arrive at their destination (which can make them more likely to return).

San Diego, United States. Photo by Frank Mckenna, Unsplash
San Diego, United States. Photo by Frank Mckenna, Unsplash

Diversify your social media channels

You should use different platforms for different purposes. For example, your Instagram could be all about travel photos and what’s going on in your life at the moment; as it’s not really appropriate to post about business topics there! You can keep your LinkedIn account for that. So, if you’re looking to grow your following on social media, make sure that you’re posting content that fits with each channel’s personality—and not just copying-and-pasting the same thing everywhere.

Use social media for research and networking. It may sound counterintuitive at first (since we’ve been told our whole lives not to talk about schoolwork), but think of blogging as a job: If someone was paying you an hourly wage with benefits included, would they expect their employees not to ask questions? Of course not!

Connect with other bloggers

If you’re a new blogger, the best way to connect with other travel bloggers is to get out there and find them—and don’t just stick to the Internet! Make it a point to attend conferences or meetups in your city on a regular basis so that you can build relationships in person as well as online.

Partner up with hotels and airlines

There are several ways to find hotels and airlines that would be good partners for you, but the best way is to start by checking out your competitors’ partnerships. If they’re working with companies like Hyatt, Hilton, and American Airlines, then those could be good options for you as well.

Highway 212, Lithonia, United States. Photo by Matt Duncan, Unsplash
Highway 212, Lithonia, United States. Photo by Matt Duncan, Unsplash

Travel safely and learn how to protect your stuff

Most people would only talk about growth but not about how to protect your stuff while traveling. We find it as essential as the other points because one bad memory can scar your future travels forever.

Hence, it goes beyond simply bringing a lock and keeping your stuff on you at all times. You’ll also want to make sure you have insurance in case of theft, loss, or damage to your items. The best thing to do is get travel insurance as soon as possible before leaving home, but it’s not too late if you already have a trip planned!

Travel with friends whenever possible. While solo travel is great for some people, having someone else with you can help reduce stress levels while traveling abroad and keep things from getting boring when there’s nothing going on in your itinerary.

Conclusion

We hope this article has been helpful in guiding you to start your own travel blog. If you have any questions, feel free to ask us!

By

Sourced from Go World Travel Magazine

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Why Marketers Should Explore These 4 Emerging Technology Trends

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By Claudia Ratterman
Marketers should explore four emerging tech trends and how they impact customer data management and consumer privacy.

For brands, the pandemic’s initial disruptions are easing, if not absent, while spiralling inflation, talent scarcity and lingering supply chain challenges continue to contest marketers’ best laid plans.

Against this conflicting backdrop, marketers seek to balance between tried-and-true, personalized campaigns with novel digital experiences that differentiate their brands.

In contrast to the new customer acquisition strategies of 2021 and early 2022, the rest of this year and next will emphasize a more comprehensive view of the customer to unify cross-functional data to improve customer experience (CX), drive conversions and ensure retention.

New to this year’s Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing are four key technologies that will help marketers with this renewed focus of integrating customer data to drive innovation: generative AI, emotion AI, digital twin of a customer and customer data ethics.

Here’s how digital marketing leaders can incorporate these crucial technologies into their strategies.

Generative AI: Determine Initial Marketing Use Cases

Generative AI is a disruptive technology that impacts content development, CX enhancement and the generation of synthetic data. It learns from existing artifacts to generate new, realistic artifacts (e.g., video, speech) that reflect the characteristics of the training data without repetition.

In spite of third-party data depreciation, enterprises are still charged with both delivering a strong CX and influencing customer decisions. Generative AI can help marketers identify the core characteristics of customers to then target them with custom content in a privacy-compliant way.

In fact by 2025, Gartner expects 30% of outbound marketing messages from large organizations will be synthetically generated.

We see generative AI take hold in digital commerce; for example, where brands can generate human images for customers to try on clothes or makeup virtually. Avatars and virtual influencers can also engage customers on social media and in the metaverse to provide customer support.

Obstacles in digital marketers’ use of generative AI include potential government hurdles that seek to limit associated research, or the unfortunate reality of the technology being used for deepfakes, fraud and disinformation.

What can digital marketers do? Start by investigating how generative AI techniques benefit your industry and determine initial marketing use cases where you can rely on purchased capabilities or partnerships. Document the opportunities synthetic data could bring in terms of facilitating data monetization and lowering the cost of data acquisition.

Emotion AI: Explore Vendor Capabilities

Emotion AI uses computer vision, audio/voice input and more to translate behavioural attributes into human emotions, helping marketers better personalize digital communications. This is part of a larger trend we call “influence engineering,” which seeks to automate elements of digital experience that guide user choices at scale by learning and applying techniques of behavioural science.

Emotions play a key role in all phases of customer journeys. Access to emotion data delivers insights into motivational drivers that help them test and refine content, tailor digital experiences and build deeper connections between people and brands.

By 2024, 30% of marketers will use emotion AI, up from less than 5% today. Yet privacy concerns remain an obstacle to rapid adoption of many use cases, especially in live situations (versus lab/research environments). Hesitation around the manipulative power of emotion-aware algorithms and potential bias are prevalent, too. To avoid bias when using facial expression analysis, models must be retrained in different geographies to detect nuances due to different cultural backgrounds.

What can digital marketers do? Review vendors’ emotion AI capabilities and use cases carefully in order to enhance customer analytics and behavioural profiling. Appoint responsibility for data privacy in your organization to a chief data privacy officer or equivalent and ensure they work with your chosen vendor to avoid user backlash due to sensitive data being collected.

Digital Twin of a Customer (DToCs): Run Pilots, Establish Trust

A DToC is a dynamic virtual representation of a customer that simulates and learns to emulate and anticipate behavior. DToCs help data-rich organizations provide a more personalized, curated CX to customers, many of whose buying habits have changed due to inflation.

DToC can both transform and disrupt: Privacy and cyber-risk concerns may lengthen the time it takes DToCs to mature. Plus, it’s challenging for organizations to embark on customer data ethics initiatives, which are essential to the success of DToC projects.

What can digital marketers do? Begin by running a pilot and comparing results with and without a DToC and define the benefits to customers and establish trust. Explain how they can control, or cancel, data usage, and eventually integrate DToCs with existing marketing technology systems for maximum utility.

Customer Data Ethics: Be Transparent

Customer data ethics aligns business practices with moral and ethical policies that reflect a company’s values. The need for such arises from the often unintended social and environmental consequences of using customer data to maximize profits.

It’s clear that AI is a growing force within marketing as techniques for marketing automation and personalization. The public — and marketers — increasingly recognize the tendency of these techniques to amplify biases in customer data used to train them. As organizations expand their focus on privacy and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) issues, addressing the ethical challenges of algorithmic marketing practices becomes imperative to keep company practices and values aligned.

What can digital marketers do? Go beyond mere compliance and treat customer data ethics as an ethos that your company publicly shares with all stakeholders. Operationalize the ethical evaluation of all automated decision making and tailor global brand or corporate frameworks to specific geographies, audiences and societies. Establishing and monitoring long-term metrics that tie customer data ethics to economic factors (e.g., ESG ratings and brand equity measures) will ensure the most value is realized.

Conclusion: Determine Value for Emerging Marketing Technology Trends

While investment in such technologies continues apace, digital marketing leaders still grapple with the challenges associated with these powerful yet immature technologies. AI and machine learning (ML) are highly dependent on access to customer data, yet only 14% of organizations have achieved a 360-degree view of the customer. Furthermore, consumer and regulatory concerns about their ethical implications may erode trust among customers.

Digital marketers must take a critical look at each of these technology trends to determine what value they bring to their organizations, especially within the confines of economic headwinds.

By Claudia Ratterman

Claudia Ratterman is a Director Analyst for Gartner for Marketers, based in Los Angeles. She has over 14 years of experience building Social Media Marketing Strategies for billion-dollar brands such as Disney, Tide, Pampers, Olay and Amgen.

Sourced from CMSWIRE

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19 Engagement Metrics to Growth Hack Your Way to Success

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By Steve Allen

Before you can grow your business, you need to know your numbers.

Simply adding more content to your blog or social media channels without knowing what works (and what doesn’t) is a big waste of time and effort.

To know the right course of action, your engagement metrics will provide everything you need to achieve significant results.

In this post, we look at 19 engagement metrics to help you measure the performance of your content, so you can growth hack your way to success.

Let’s dive in.

What Are Engagement Metrics?

Engagement metrics are a method used to measure the frequency of user impressions, interactions, and purchases of your content and products online.

Common types of metrics include:

  • Impressions: The number of times a piece of content is displayed on a screen, whether it gets clicked or not
  • Reach: The number of people who see your content
  • Conversions: The number of times someone takes a desired action after viewing a piece of content (clicks a link in an email, becomes a subscriber, buys a product, etc.)

They are used as Key Performance Indicators or KPIs, providing insightful data behind what’s working to grow your business.

Why Engagement Metrics Matter

Engagement Metrics

Knowing the metrics behind user engagement is not only valuable but essential for business growth.

The more engagement your audience shows, the more likely they are to become customers.

Your metrics give you insight into how people interact with the content you publish.

Here are three benefits for tracking user engagement metrics.

1. Discover if people are consuming your content

When you track user engagement, you’re able to see if your content is being consumed or not, enabling you to make necessary changes.

If you publish a lot of content, your metrics can reveal whether a lack of engagement is down due to an algorithm or interest in the content.

2. Know what content gets attention

When you know which content gets the most attention, you can ask yourself why.

By comparing popular content with underperforming content, you can understand your audience better and provide them with more of what they want.

Sometimes higher performing content comes down to design, the copy you use, or the topic. Analysing which content does best helps you zone in on what works.

3. Make better business decisions

Sure, you can hire a team or agency who monitors your metrics and helps you growth hack more traffic, leads, and sales.

But if you’re a one-person team, knowing your metrics is essential. When you wear all the hats in your business, you need to know how to make the right decisions.

Then, if you want to pay a VA to do some of this work, you’ll at least know which metrics are important and understand your VA’s suggestions.

Essential Engagement Metrics for Your Website or Blog

In this group of metrics, we’ll look at the most essential things to measure on your website and blog.

Sessions

Sessions are the total number of visits your website gets in a chosen timeframe.

This shouldn’t be mistaken with visitors or the number of people who visit your site, because the same people can visit your website multiple times and be counted as separate sessions.

Google Analytics 4 counts a session within a 30-minute window. That means if someone visits your site, leaves in 10 minutes, and then comes back 5 minutes later, it’s still counted as one session.

Sessions can be found in Google Analytics, under Acquisition Overview:

You can improve sessions by running ads to your website or by increasing organic traffic through content marketing.

Using WordPress? Check our article on the best Google Analytics plugins for WordPress.

New users vs returning users

These metrics show the number of new users and returning users you get on your site. They can be found under the Retentions report in GA4.

A new user is essentially a visitor who hasn’t visited your site before and a returning user is a someone who has.

These metrics can help you establish how valuable your visitors are when running an online shopping cart.

More on Ecommerce metrics later.

Pageviews

This metric is the number of views a webpage receives in a given timeframe. It’s different to sessions because one person can view more than one page per session.

A webpage can be a home page, contact page, or an article on your blog.

When people are talking about website traffic, they are sometimes referring to sessions or pageviews. However, they are quite different.

Pageviews can be tracked in Google Analytics under Engagement Overview and Events:

Pages per session/visit

Pages per session is the average number of pages people view on your website per session in a chosen timeframe.

So if you get 10 sessions in one day by 10 people and each person views 2 pages each, your average pages per session would be 2.

This metric helps you know if people are clicking on multiple pages on your site, either to read more content or learn more about you and your business.

The higher the number, the more engagement you have. A good range to aim for depends on the type of business and content you have.

But an unofficial standard is 2.6 pages per session.

If your average pages per session is low, you can improve it by adding more relevant internal links in articles, improve site navigation, or keep a clean site design.

For more information on performing an internal link audit, we have a full guide here.

Average engagement time

This is the average time people spend on your website over a specific period.

You can also get a breakdown of average time spent per session in GA4 under the Engagement Overview page.

Engagement metrics - Average engagement time

It’s calculated per visitor and over the average session duration. This is an important metric because it can tell you whether or not your visitors are sticking around.

If your average engagement time is low, it could mean the pages they land on aren’t providing the user with the information they were looking for.

Improving this metric can be done by making each page hyper specific, providing enough valuable content, and having strong keyword intent.

Read our post on Google Analytics for Blogs to learn more.

Engagement Metrics for Ecommerce or Affiliate Sites

Customer satisfaction is essential for any business, including eCommerce brands.

Knowing these metrics will help you gain clarity to maximize business growth.

Revenue

Engagement Metrics for eCommerce

Increased revenue is a clear metric you’re doing something right. This is what all businesses want to see in their analytics dashboard.

Measuring it will depend on the platform you’re using, most of which can be integrated with Google Analytics.

Looking at this metric directly might not reveal much, but knowing your averages can allow you to drill into contributing factors when things don’t look right.

Order Value

Order value is the average amount customers spend per order in your eCommerce store.

Increasing this number will usually increase your overall revenue.

Other than increasing traffic and conversions, here are a few more ways to increase average order value:

  • Set an order minimum for free shipping
  • Cross promote similar products with upsells and order bumps
  • Add lower-priced products that complement your catalog

Increasing order value will usually add more revenue to your business.

Abandonment rate

Abandonment rate tells you the percentage of how many people leave the checkout page without purchasing in a given timeframe.

It’s the total number of people who make a purchase divided by the total number of people who visit the checkout page, then turned into a percentage.

The calculation looks like this:

(1 – (100 purchases ÷ 400 checkout visitors)) * 100 = 75%

In the above example, 400 people landed on the checkout page and 100 of them continued with their purchase.

That means that 75% of people didn’t abandon the sale.

Knowing this metric helps you better understand how to increase sales at the checkout level.

Many shopping cart platforms will trigger an abandonment cart email sequence when the customer enters their email and then leaves before purchasing.

Conversion rate

The conversion rate in ecommerce is the number of people who buy compared to the total number of traffic to product pages.

So if your online store received 500 visitors last month, and you made 20 sales, your conversion rate would be 4%.

When you monitor this metric, you can identify potential issues people might have when making purchase decisions.

You can improve this number by making your shopping experience more user-friendly.

Click-through rate (CTR)

Click-through rate is the total number of ads or search results that are clicked compared to the number of times they are seen, also known as impressions.

For example: Your Facebook ad is seen 10,000 times and gets clicked 800 times, giving you a CTR of 8%.

Or your Google search results get 50,000 impressions last month and got 6,000 clicks to your website, giving you a CTR of 12%.

Measuring this metric in your ads platform will help you make improvements to the copy in your ads or make changes to your offer.

And keeping track of your search traffic, CTR will show where to improve the copy in your titles and aiming for higher rankings.

Engagement Metrics for Email Marketing

Email marketing still has the highest ROI out of any other marketing channel.

These are the metrics to look out for when improving email engagement.

Email sign-ups

Engagement Metrics for Email

Email sign-ups are the total number of email subscribers you gained in a certain timeframe, usually tracked monthly.

It’s an essential metric to monitor if you want to grow your email list and revenue.

Email marketing services like Flodesk or ConvertKit keep track of this metric for you, with percentage stats on increases and declines.

To grow email sign-ups, you can offer a lead magnet, add a popup to WordPress, or reposition opt-in forms.

Also, check our post on how to build an email list from YouTube.

Form impressions

This metric can be found in some email opt-in plugins such as OptinCat and Sumo. It shows the number of times an opt-in form is seen in the browser. OptinMonster of course includes this with all of their packages as well!

It can be very useful because it can help you locate optimal areas to place opt-in forms on your site.

For example, let’s say you have an opt-in form in the sidebar and you’re getting lots of sign-ups. Maybe your form impressions are disproportionately high and it would make sense to place the form somewhere else.

Trying different locations could result in more of your visitors seeing it and getting even more subscribers than before.

Open rate

Email open rate is the percentage of your email subscribers who open your emails.

All email marketing services, like ConvertKit, will share this number so you can make improvements to your email campaigns.

A low open rate could mean that people aren’t getting your emails in their inbox or the subject lines aren’t attracting clicks.

Improving email deliverability and testing your subject lines are effective ways to improve your open rates.

Email CTR

Email CTR is the percentage of subscribers who click links inside the emails you send them.

If you get a decent open rate but a low email CTR, then knowing this number can help you resolve the issue.

It could be the copy in the email isn’t engaging enough, or that you don’t have enough links, or that your call to action isn’t clear enough.

Either way, this metric can direct you to testing different things in your emails to see what gets more clicks.

Engagement Metrics for Social Media

Social media engagement metrics are an integral part of business growth through social media marketing.

Here are the metrics you want to keep a close eye on.

Reach

Reach on social media is the amount of times your content is viewed. You can see your total reach in your analytics dashboard or for each individual post.

Tracking this metric will help you understand what types of content people are consuming, what they’re interested in, or which types the algorithms are favouring.

It’s a good idea to create similar content that is doing well to see if they propel growth.

Impressions

Impressions on social channels are the total number of times your content gets seen in feeds or elsewhere, even if it isn’t clicked on.

This number will almost always be higher than reach because not everyone who scrolls past your content will click on it.

Monitoring your impressions helps you know if your content is grabbing people’s attention enough or if you need to write more interesting captions.

Engagement rate

This is quite an important social media metric and one that will help grow your socials the most.

It’s how many times people interact with your content, so likes, saves, comments, or shares, etc.

The more content engagement you get, the more it gets favoured by the algorithms. That’s because the platforms want people to stick around for as long as possible.

When you know which content performs the best, you’re able to give your audience what they want.

Video watch time or completion rate

Watch time is the number of minutes and hours your videos have been watched over a specified time period.

Completion rate, on the other hand is the percentage of viewers who watch your videos to the very end.

Both provide you with great insights into the quality and engagement of your videos.

The more time your audience spends watching your videos, the more you’ll build a relationship with them and the more you’ll grow your social media channels.

Customer engagement metrics

A customer engagement metric will help you further understand the relationship between how your customers engage with your marketing strategies.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

This metric is a key performance indicator of how satisfied customers are with a company’s products and services.

A Customer Satisfaction Score can be obtained by asking customers a simple question, “How satisfied are you with your overall experience of your product?” and getting them to rate it out of 5 or 10.

The CSAT score is then calculated by taking the positive responses and dividing them by the total number of responses, and multiplied by 100, giving a percentage.

For example, if you receive 100 total responses and 65 were positive, your CSAT score would be 65%.

The metric is a great indicator of customer experience, which can be collected on your website or in email campaigns.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score or NPS is like Customer Satisfaction Score, but is calculated differently and measures customer loyalty.

Customers are given a simple question such as, “How likely are you to recommend [Product/Service] to a friend or colleague?”, in which they can score between 1 and 10.

Respondents are then put into one of three categories:

  • Promoters: People who scored 9 – 10
  • Passives: People who scored 7 – 8
  • Detractors: People who scored 1 – 6

Then the percentage of detractors is subtracted from the percentage of promotors to get the final score.

For example, if 55% were promoters, 40% were passives, and 5% were detractors, the total score would be 50%.

The range can be between -100 and +100 and the higher the number, the better.

Conclusion

That concludes this post on the most important engagement metrics you need to know about.

Staying ahead of these metrics will give you a huge advantage when focusing on business growth.

To learn more about improving these numbers read our post on how to increase blog traffic.

By Steve Allen

Steve Allen is a niche site builder, writer, and all-around WordPress wizard.

He enjoys personal development, entrepreneurship, double espressos, and making things work better than they did before.

Sourced from Niche Pursuits

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Google will soon stop VPN apps blocking ads on Android

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By Jon Mundy

Google will soon clamp down on VPN apps that block ads on the Android platform.

The tech giant, which still earns most of its vast revenue from advertising, will prohibit VPN apps on the Google Play Store from actively interfering with ads from November 1.

Google updated its Google Play policy last month, setting down strict stipulations for VPN apps. This includes a rule that such apps can’t “manipulate ads that can impact apps monetization.”

Another stipulation is that “Only apps that use the VPNService and have VPN as their core functionality can create a secure device-level tunnel to a remote server”.

These measures appear designed to secure user data with such VPN services, as well as to prevent ad fraud. As part of the new terms and conditions, VPN developers must encrypt data across the whole process.

However, as The Register reports, some developers aren’t too happy with Google’s new stipulations, feeling that it’s too sweeping with its requirements. Older versions of Blokada and Jumbo could be ruled out based on the new rules.

Blokada’s developers also speculate that the likes of privacy-focused web search app DuckDuckGo could be a casualty of Google’s new rules, though DuckDuckGo’s developer itself believes that it will be alright.

Apple applies a similar set of VPN-focused rules for iOS, though interestingly it doesn’t specifically rule out interfering with ads.

Around this time last year, Google announced that it was offering its own VPN service to subscribers of its 2 TB and higher Google One plans in the UK and other countries after an initial 2020 rollout in the US.

By Jon Mundy

Jon is a seasoned freelance writer who started covering games and apps in 2007 before expanding into smartphones and consumer tech, dabbling in lifestyle and media coverage along the way.

Sourced from Trusted Reviews

 

 

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A New Approach to Car Batteries Is About to Transform EVs

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By Mark Andrews

Auto companies are designing ways to build a car’s fuel cells into its frame, making electric rides cheaper, roomier, and able to hit ranges of 620 miles.

Weight is one of the biggest banes for car designers and engineers. Batteries are exceedingly heavy and dense, and with the internal combustion engine rapidly pulling over for an electric future, the question of how to deal with an EV’s added battery mass is becoming all the more important.

If you want to build an EV with better range, slapping in a larger battery to provide that range is not necessarily the solution. You would then have to increase the size of the brakes to make them capable of stopping the heavier car, and because of the bigger brakes you now need bigger wheels, and the weight of all those items would require a stronger structure. This is what car designers call the “weight spiral,” and the problem with batteries is that they require you to lug around dead weight just to power the vehicle.

But what if you could integrate the battery into the structure of the car so that the cells could serve the dual purpose of powering the vehicle and serving as its skeleton? That is exactly what Tesla and Chinese companies such as BYD and CATL are working on. The new structural designs coming out of these companies stand to not only change the way EVs are produced but increase vehicle ranges while decreasing manufacturing costs.

According to Euan McTurk, a consultant battery electrochemist at Plug Life Consulting, since technologies such as cell-to-pack, cell-to-body, and cell-to-chassis battery construction allow batteries to be more efficiently distributed inside the car, they get us much closer to a hypothetical perfect EV battery. “The ultimate battery pack would be one that consists of 100 percent active material. That is, every part of the battery pack stores and releases energy,” he says.

Traditionally, EV batteries have used cell modules that are then interconnected into packs. BYD pioneered cell-to-pack technology, which does away with the intermediate module stage and puts the cells directly into the pack. According to Richie Frost, the founder and CEO of Sprint Power, “standard modules may fit well within one pack but leave large areas of ‘wasted’ space in another pack. By removing the constraints of a module, the number of cells can be maximized within any enclosure.”

So cell-to-pack allows the module building blocks to be left out of a battery pack, meaning less wasted volume. BYD has also championed LFP (lithium iron phosphate) batteries, which have better chemical stability and are cheaper to produce. One problem is that the energy density of LFP cells isn’t that good compared to the NCM (nickel cobalt manganese) chemistry cells used in EVs like Hyundai’s Kona Electric, Jaguar’s I-Pace, and Volkswagen’s ID range. However, a cell-to-pack design enables the company to fit more cells into a given space and increase the density to a level closer to that achievable with NCM batteries.

Shenzhen-based BYD is one of the world’s most vertically integrated EV producers—meaning it makes the batteries, many of the vehicle components, and the cars themselves—but it actually started out as a battery company. Its biggest rival in the Chinese battery space is Contemporary Amperex Technology, a company that in 2021 was the world’s largest EV battery producer, with a 32.6 percent market share. This was largely due to CATL dominating the Chinese market with a 52 percent share.

CATL already has a plant in Germany, along with a $5 billion battery plant under construction in Indonesia and plans for a similar investment in the US. Its own investments in both lithium and cobalt mining help shield the company from commodity price fluctuations. But one of the key factors for CATL’s global expansion will be cell-to-chassis technology, where the battery, chassis, and underbody of an EV are integrated as one, completely eliminating the need for a separate battery pack in the vehicle.

Redistributing the batteries’ bulk will also free up space in a car’s design for a roomier interior, since designers will no longer need to raise the floor height of an EV to stash the cells underneath in a big slab. Freed from these previous constraints, as the cells can make up the entire chassis, manufacturers will be able to squeeze more cells into each EV, thereby increasing range.

CATL estimates that production vehicles of this design will achieve ranges of 1,000 kilometres (621 miles) per charge—a 40 percent increase over conventional battery tech.

Body Shop

At Tesla’s 2020 Battery Day, the company shared information about a few key advancements. While Tesla’s new 4680 battery dominated the headlines, CEO Elon Musk and senior vice president Drew Baglino outlined how production of Tesla cars was changing through the usage of large-scale die-cast parts to replace multiple smaller components. They also said that Tesla would start using cell-to-body technology by around 2023.

Using the analogy of an aircraft wing—where now instead of having a wing with a fuel tank inside, the tanks are wing-shaped—the duo said the battery cells would become integrated into a car’s structure. To do that, Tesla has developed a new glue. Normally the glue in a battery pack keeps the cells and pack plates together and acts as a fire retardant. Tesla’s solution adds a strengthening function for the adhesive, making the whole battery load-bearing.

McTurk explains: “Integrating cells into the chassis allows the cells and the chassis to become multi-purpose. The cells become energy-storing and structurally supporting, while the chassis becomes structurally supporting and cell-protecting. This effectively cancels out the weight of the cell casing, turning it from dead weight into something valuable to the structure of the vehicle.”

According to Tesla, this design, along with its die-casting, could allow vehicles to save 370 parts. This cuts body weight by 10 percent, lowers battery costs by 7 percent per kilowatt-hour, and improves vehicle range.

While Tesla’s 4680 battery with its larger volume seems to play an integral role in the company’s ability to move to a cell-to-body design, CATL’s new Qilin battery boasts a 13 percent increase in capacity over the 4680, with a volume utilization efficiency of 72 percent and an energy density of up to 255 watt-hours per kilogram. It is set to become a key part of CATL’s third-generation cell-to-pack solution and will likely form the basis of the company’s cell-to-chassis offering.

An Easy Cell

topdown view of Leapmotor C01 EV

The Leapmotor C01 sedan, on sale later in 2022, uses a cell-to-chassis design.

Photograph: Leapmotor

For those thinking these breakthrough battery technologies are still a few years off, cell-to-chassis is in fact already here. The rapidly growing but still relatively unknown Chinese EV startup Leapmotor claims to be the first company to bring a production car featuring cell-to-chassis technology to market. Leap’s C01 sedan should go on sale before the end of 2022. Using proprietary technology, which the company has offered to share for free, Leap says the C01 offers superior handling (the better weight distribution of cell-to-chassis designs might account for this), slightly longer range, and improved collision safety.

Many EVs were previously created from the platforms of internal-combustion cars—and some still are—but the adoption of cell-to-chassis designs will make those older platforms hopelessly outclassed. According to Frost at Sprint Power, “the commitment by most [manufacturers] to an EV-only future in conjunction with more integrated designs, such as cell-to-chassis, will lead to significant improvements in the overall design and performance of EVs.”

While cell-to-chassis tech is undoubtedly the next step with EVs, it is not a panacea. Technologies like solid-state batteries and sodium-based batteries are likely to be parts of the puzzle. And cell-to-chassis adoption will undoubtedly introduce new problems for the industry.

For one thing, replacing faulty cells will be far more difficult in a cell-to-chassis housing, as each cell will be an integral part of the car’s structure. Then there is the question of what happens when the car is scrapped. Currently, modules can find their way into many second-life applications, but  McTurk believes the larger battery sizes in cell-to-pack and cell-to-chassis designs may limit them to grid-storage applications.

Feature Image Credit: The Leapmotor C01 is among the first EVs to use a new battery design that provides a range of benefits.Photograph: Leapmotor

By Mark Andrews

Sourced from WIRED

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