🗞️ Links & Thinks from 2023.02.23
Shopify Secrets Revealed
Koala Inspector is a free Chrome extension for Shopify store spying. (This is not an ad.)
I fired this up on a client's site and this is the data it pulled.
Store structure
- theme & plugins
- an option to track the shop (paid only)
Products
- first and last published product dates
- number of products
- highest price, lowest price, average price
- list of all products and new products (including image, name, price, date added, number of variants, and tags for each product)
- list of best sellers, but it didn't find any for me
- you can also see which other retailers a product is listed on (Amazon, Shopify, eBay, Walmart, AliExpress, Target, Gearbest, and Wish noted in the Find Retailers tab)
Live Sales
- Venmo style feed of recently purchased products
Shop Traffic
- social media links on site
- monthly visits graph over a 6 month period
- traffic sources and countries pie charts (knowing the traffic sources for this site, that graph is not accurate
- search keywords
Ad Campaigns
- Google, Facebook, and Instagram ad screenshots (which is a game changer for competitive analysis (yes, you can find this elsewhere, but this is way quicker))
You can export data to CSVs, but it’s limited by credits (replenished each month on the free plan). Same goes for find retailers, shop traffic, and ad campaigns.
If you're in the ecomm game—whether or not you sell on Shopify—check this out and see what you can learn.
So What?
That's your next copywriting trick. Ask "so what?" Again and again. And again.
Pick a product, pick a feature of that product, and then:
Keep asking, “So what?” until you reach one of these desires:
- Physical: Food, drink, warmth, and shelter
- Safety: Security and safety
- Belonging and love: Companionship and intimacy
- Esteem: Feelings of success and superiority
- Self-actualization: Achieving one’s full potential
New Google Ads Goodies
PMaxers rejoice, new toys cometh (or you can read this LinkedIn post from the ads liaison). Here’s what we’re getting:
- Campaign-level brand exclusions for Search & Shopping inventory: so you can avoid showing on branded queries related to your brand—or other brands, from a provided list.
- Page feeds: allowing you to curate potential landing pages. Or grouping them by label to use in relevant campaigns.
- Page feeds + final URL expansion = steered AI performance
- Build video assets directly in the campaign creation flow.
- New experiments: incrementality and Standard Shopping faceoff
- More reporting: asset group level metrics and budget pacing insights
The Secret to Overnight YouTube Success
A handy checklist from Demand Curve
- Creating videos that people find valuable
- Posting them on YouTube at least once a week
- Repeating this for at least 2 years
AI Art Can’t Be Copyrighted
The U.S. Copyright Office decided a graphic novel that used AI-generated art should not have been given a copyright. But that only applied to the art itself, the author does get copyright on the story and layout.
There’s a lot of controversy over how these models were trained, but it’s going to be just an interesting to watch the ownership and copyright debate over the output. The final decision could impact its viability in the commercial sector.
Section 230 Check In
Via WSJ:
Supreme Court justices reacted skeptically Tuesday to claims that YouTube parent Google LLC could be sued for algorithms that automatically recommended extremist recruiting videos
Just The Headlines
Target bets on e-commerce by investing $100 million in hubs to speed up delivery (Most big companies are becoming logistics companies. Remember, "building a product has become commoditized. Distribution is where all the leverage is.")
What Is Conversational Commerce? Definition and Guide (If you leverage chatbots in your online store, or want to, check this out.)
Klarna wins over the US (71% growth last year.)
Meta is internally testing a BeReal-like ‘Roll Call’ feature in Messenger
The Mercedes-Benz E-Class is getting a giant touchscreen, TikTok, and a selfie camera