The Department of Justice is again suing Google for alleged antitrust practices, this time over its dominance in ad technology, with the DOJ making the case that its market dominance over both the buy and sell side of the equation effectively muscles out competitors.
The recent Cyber Weekend was a boon for online mining of consumer data, with major social media players using cookies to track users’ activity across the internet, including of course ecommerce websites, often without permission, then sell the data to advertisers.
TikTok, the hugely popular short-form video site owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, had quite a year in 2022, surpassing 1 billion users globally and making itself a force to be reckoned with in advertising, ecommerce and fulfillment, becoming the latest competitor to Amazon’s dominance. But government bans are applying heat.
With Black Friday and Cyber Monday quickly approaching, retailers are gearing up, stocking inventory, hiring seasonal staff and even upping their cybersecurity. In this day and age, shoppers must be extremely careful when making purchases online, as bots are more sophisticated and damaging than ever before.
The CPG industry is evolving faster than ever. Nearly everything about the category has changed, including the way brands develop and bring products to market. Also, inflation puts pressure on marketing budgets, loyalty is weakening and younger consumers have higher expectations and tend to be skeptical of advertising efforts.
Best Buy is the first retailer to leverage a new demand-side platform from Criteo that lets brands and agencies purchase ads across retail media networks in self-serve fashion, while also using retailer’s first-party data to make programmatic buys on the open web as third-party cookies are being sunset.
Ad spend: should you really be thinking of cutting it in a recession (or near one)? Consider the contrarian route. Inflation is over 9% and consumer sentiment is falling for the first time since early 2020. Counterintuitively, these recessionary markers indicate it’s actually the perfect time for ecommerce companies to step up advertising.
A study sampling 5,000 DTC sellers in Q2 found ad spend on TikTok was up 53% from the previous quarter, as brands flock there based on lower costs relative to Facebook and Instagram, as well as the short-form video platform’s younger audience being their lifeblood for the future.
The world’s top brands have started investing in digital trade promotion and are eager to partner with merchants that can run hyper-personalized, data-based marketing campaigns to promote their products. Leveraging the right technology will be key in acting swiftly on this important trend.
For marketplaces that rely on ad revenues, it’s all about conversions. And if you can’t optimize search, listings, ads and promotions on your site, you don’t get conversions. This leads to desperate blasting and promotions that just drives drives users away and kills revenue. Here are 5 steps to help you avoid this dreaded ad death spiral.