Think You Can Stop What They Sell? I Doubt It.

[00:00:00] It is Wednesday, July 24th. Today, take two. TikTok tries its hand at e-commerce in Europe again. Yelp upgrades its request to quote service, a new spend limit on Google ads, and we have how you stack up against others on social media. I'm Tod Maffin. That's ahead of

[00:00:20] today in digital marketing. If at first you don't succeed, TikTok says it will give in-app shopping another go in Europe. The company tried to launch a couple of years ago, but ended up pulling back when

[00:00:33] internal conflicts over workload derailed the plans. In short, the UK staff didn't like being pushed as hard as TikTok's parent company's Chinese workers. At the time, the company's head of European e-commerce told TikTok employees he didn't think maternity leave should

[00:00:50] even be a thing. Quoting Bloomberg, quote, TikTok told partners, including merchants and creator agencies in recent weeks, to get ready for a TikTok shop debut in two countries according to people familiar with the matter. The rollout will be smaller than previously

[00:01:06] envisioned, although preparations are underway to bring the portal to other parts of Europe next year, unquote. By smaller they mean it will restart in just two countries, Spain and Ireland. TikTok says there are 15 million sellers on the app and claims that in

[00:01:22] the UK it's already the second largest online beauty and wellness retailer. Doyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, made more than $300 billion US in sales in 2023. TikTok didn't even bring in $3.8 billion. Quoting social media today, quote,

[00:01:40] It doesn't seem like TikTok is ever going to become an e-commerce powerhouse on the same level as Doyin, but it's certainly going to try. And while I can't envision this being a transformative shift, the evidence is there that TikTok could still become a bigger retail presence

[00:01:56] and a bigger brand consideration, at least in certain sectors. So will this new EU shopping push yield big results? Probably not. But then again, even smaller scale take up could be significant, unquote. Yelp has announced some new ad features for multi-location businesses

[00:02:19] and national advertisers. First, there's the request a quote feature for brands supported by a new leads API, which lets national service businesses receive and manage leads across multiple locations. This is particularly useful for businesses in categories like contractors,

[00:02:35] HVAC plumbers and movers. Yelp's guaranteed program offers up to $2,500 in coverage if something goes wrong with the project booked through request a quote. Some other updates, it's also expanded its ads formats, including spotlight video ads that now appear in business page

[00:02:53] photo galleries. Yelp audiences have been extended to audio platforms like Spotify, Pandora and SiriusXM as well as connected TV. And there's a new conversions API to help measure ad performance without relying on cookies. It is relatively easy to get stats on your social media work from

[00:03:14] the platforms. Almost all social platforms and third party tools provide some level of analytics about things like how much you're posting, but they rarely include information on how that measures up against others in your industry. To that end, Hootsuite has released its social

[00:03:30] media benchmarks report for Q2 of this year, which looked at data from 100 social media profiles within each market vertical. There are numbers for basic stats like average impressions, entertainment and retail lead the way there. But what I found more interesting is the posting

[00:03:46] frequency. The study found that on Facebook, entertainment brands posted the most each day, just under two posts a day on average. What I didn't expect was second place, government, though that second place position drops posting frequency down to only four and

[00:04:02] a half posts per week. Over on Instagram, entertainment is still leading with a bit fewer daily average posts, 1.25 for that vertical. Government is also in second place on Instagram at one post a day. The categories that post the least real estate and finance. Of course,

[00:04:19] these are massive averages and only taken from a small ish pool of companies per vertical. But if you're looking for a very general benchmark to guide your own posting, there you go. We have a link to Hootsuite's full social benchmarks report in today's email newsletter

[00:04:32] which you can sign up to by tapping the link at the top of the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter. Google's taken a lot of hits over the last few months, complaints over bizarre responses from

[00:04:47] its AI overviews to name just one, but that didn't hurt its revenue. Google's parent company Alphabet yesterday reported nearly $85 billion in revenue in Q2 driven primarily by its search and cloud computing businesses. The search division alone contributed 48 and a half

[00:05:05] billion. The cloud segment reached $10 billion in revenue for the first time. That gives it a $1 billion operating profit. Earlier this month, Google was romancing the cloud platform Wizz in what would have been its largest startup acquisition ever. Rumors said the deal would

[00:05:20] have been worth $23 billion. But in the end, Wizz dropped out of the talk saying they'll go to IPO instead. On the ad side, significant growth with revenues reaching $64.4 billion. YouTube adds rose 13% year over year to $8.6 billion. Alphabet's full Q2 earnings report is

[00:05:39] also in today's email newsletter. A nice update for Google's local service ads. You can now set a maximum monthly spend limit for some accounts. This is of course a nice touch for those smaller businesses who choose the set it and forget it model of advertising.

[00:05:58] It's not clear which accounts have this and which don't, which probably means they're just testing it for now. The controls are pretty simple. You can turn on or off the monthly limit

[00:06:08] and it will show you what your spend was last month and what you have remaining for this month. Local services ads are usually used by bricks and mortar locations and tend to be for service businesses that require appointment booking, dentists, movers, lawyers, HVAC repair people

[00:06:24] and so on. YouTube now lets users save music from the short speed directly making it much easier to reuse audio in different videos. Previously people had to use workarounds to save shorts music but now the save music option will be available directly in the shorts UI.

[00:06:45] YouTube is also expanding its inspiration tab which was initially available in English to three new languages Japanese, Korean and Hindi. This tab provides AI generated content tips and video outlines to help brands and creators develop their content. Also YouTube is rolling out a new

[00:07:04] desktop extension for creators in the YouTube shopping affiliate program. This lets creators save products and compare commission rates while browsing on Chrome making it easier to list products in YouTube clips. All right nothing to say here I'm Todd Mappen thanks for listening see you tomorrow.