🗞️ Links & Thinks from 2023.03.16
Reduce Reuse Recycle: Ads Edition
I'm a big believer in 'create once, slice and dice to use a million times,' so I love this ad compilation idea:
A compilation ad is a mash-up of the best footage from multiple ads, recreated into a new ad with a new voice-over.
Click through the link to learn "how to make a perfect" one.
Ecomm Growth Opportunities
This look at predicted ecommerce growth by product category only has 3 categories making notable gains by 2027:
- Food & Beverage
- Health & Personal Care
- Auto & Parts
Alert the sales team. (Or dust off your business idea book.)
Now for the bad news, US merchants are regressing when it comes to shopping experience. It’s caused by a lack of consumer awareness of the digital shopping features they want from merchants that offer it.
Most brands obsess over the info they display on their product pages. What if they devoted some of that energy to their shopping features?
Dueling Indicators
February didn’t keep up January’s retail sales party, but it did let the music play on. Depending on which source you trust, they either inched up or down a bit. Either way, they look good year-over-year.
Mortgage application volume is creeping up. Good news considering all the other shenanigans happening in the financial sector right now. Also aligns with some things I’d heard from people in the industry. Slow start to the year, but not for lack of interest, just wanted to wait until closer to spring. This will be interesting to watch as we flip to the new season.
New GA4 Toys
You can (finally) make custom channel groupings in Google Analytics 4 now. Or soon. Sometime.
I checked when I was in an account earlier today and didn’t see the option yet. Google has mastered the art of announcing something and then sporadically rolling it out over an arbitrary timeline. (Facebook isn’t bad at it either.)
Big G also put out a server-side tagging fundamentals course.
Just The Headline
U.S. Threatens Ban if TikTok’s Chinese Owners Don’t Sell Stakes TikTok says forced sale won’t resolve national-security issues; CEO set to appear before Congress next week
Facebook’s behavioral ads lacked legal basis, Dutch court rules
WordPress.com owner Automattic acquires an ActivityPub plugin so blogs can join the Fediverse