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

TikTok tries its hand an in-app e-commerce in Europe again. Will this attempt be the one they stick?

TikTok to Try Ecommerce in Europe. Again.

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 internal conflicts over workload derailed the plans. In short, the U.K. 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 ecommerce told employees he didn’t think maternity leave should even be a thing.

By smaller, they mean it will restart in just two countries: Spain and Ireland.

TikTok says there are 15 million sellers in the app, and claims that in the U.K. it’s the second largest online beauty and wellness retailer.

There’s clearly potential

Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, made more than USD$300 billion in sales in 2023. TikTok didn’t even bring in USD$3.8 billion.

Yelp Upgrades Its Marketing Tools

Yelp has announced some new ad features for multi-location businesses and national advertisers.

Request a Quote

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, HVAC, plumbers, and movers.

Yelp’s Guaranteed program offers up to $2,500 in coverage if something goes wrong with a project booked through Request a Quote.

Other Updates

It’s also also expanded its ad formats, including Spotlight video ads that now appear in business page photo galleries.

Yelp Audiences has been extended to audio platforms such as Spotify, Pandora, and SiriusXM, as well as connected TV.

There’s a new conversion API (CAPI) to help measure ad performance without relying on cookies.

Is Your Social Posting In Line With Your Industry?

It’s easy to get stats on your social media work from the platforms — almost all social platforms and third-party posting 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 Media Benchmarks report for Q2 2024, 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 find more interesting is posting frequency.

Post 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 about 4.5 posts per week.

On Instagram, Entertainment is still leading with a bit fewer daily average posts — 1.25 for that vertical. Government is also in second place at one post a day.

The categories that post the least? Real estate and finance.

Of course, these are massive averages and only taken from a smallish pool of companies per vertical, but if you’re looking for a very general benchmark to guide your own posting, there you go.

Google’s Q2 Very Good, Despite AI Mishaps

Google's taken a lot of hits in the last few months — complaints over bizarre responses from 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 $48.5 billion, while the cloud segment reached $10 billion in revenue for the first time, achieving a $1 billion operating profit.

Huge acquisition deal shut down

Earlier this month, Google was romancing the cloud platform Wiz in what would have been its largest startup acquisition ever — rumours said the deal would have been worth $23 billion. But in the end, Wiz dropped out of talks, saying they’ll go to IPO instead.

Advertising revenue broken out

On the ad side, significant growth, with revenues reaching $64.6 billion, while YouTube ads rose 13 percent year over year to $8.6 billion.

Set a Monthly Maximum Spend on Your Google LSAs

A nice update for Google’s Local Service Ads — you can now set a maximum monthly spend limit for some accounts.

This, of course, is a nice touch for those smaller businesses who choose the set-it-and-forget it model of advertising.

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, and it will show you both 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, and so on.

YouTube Updates: Shorts Music, Inspo, and Affiliates

YouTube now lets users save music from the Shorts feed directly, making it 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.

Inspiration tab

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 creators develop their content.

Affiliate updates

Also, YouTube is rolling out a new 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.

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