👉 Losing touch

Author

Kyle Tully
September 20, 2023

Welcome to Morning Commerce!

Here’s what I’ve been paying attention to this week in the world of Shopify:

  • Pinterest ad updates

  • Shopify's new 3D Scanner on iOS

  • Marketers losing touch with the average Joe

  • New Liquid features for better web performance

  • AMA: Real Shopify Merchant Questions Answered

  • Google quietly increases ad prices to meet targets

— Kyle Tully

ACQUISITION

Pinterest ad updates

Pinterest just announced a bunch of interesting updates for advertisers at their Pinterest Presents event.

Three new ad formats:

  • Premiere Spotlight on search and home feed - Premiere Spotlight allows brands to exclusively own premium ad placements, now extended from search to the home feed.

  • Showcase ads - Showcase ads are a new interactive ad solution that allows users to preview and explore a brand's content by swiping through branded images.

  • Quiz ads - Brands can include up to three questions per quiz to create an entertaining experience for people to engage with.

Five new features for Business Manager, including:

  • New dashboard

  • New audience sharing features

Creative Studio:

  • A speedy way to generate lifestyle imagery for product Pins.

  • Add your Pin link, select the prompts that match your need, and Creative Studio will generate a selection of custom background images.

Making Pinterest more shoppable with mobile deep links and direct links that take people from a Pinterest ad to a retailer’s website with just one click. Hurrah!

Google quietly increases ad prices to meet targets

Wondering why your ad costs keep creeping up even though you’re optimising your campaigns to within an inch of their life?

It might be because Google raises auction costs to meet revenue targets.

That’s hot news out of the recent antitrust trial, direct from Google ad executive Jerry Dischler.

For some queries, they’ve raised prices by as much as 10%.

Now we know what the “smart” part of smart bidding is all about 🤑 

CONVERSION

AMA: Real Shopify Merchant Questions Answered

Kurt and Paul from the Unofficial Shopify Podcast always have useful content and this AMA covers some questions you might have wondered about, including:

  • The pros and cons of one-page checkouts.

  • Deep dive into the world of Google Analytics.

  • SEO retainers

  • International duties and taxes.

  • Advice on growing without a hefty ad budget.

Always worth a listen.

Marketers losing touch with the average Joe

A recent study by Morning Consult and Advertiser Perceptions explores the growing disparity between consumer values and behaviors and marketing priorities in the U.S.

The full report is worth a read, but some highlights include:

  • Marketers often chase “shiny and new” trends consumers don’t care about.

    • 40% of consumers have never heard about NFTs, which drops to 0% for marketers.

    • 33% of consumers have never heard of “charcuterie”, again dropping to 0% for marketers.

    • 33% of consumers have never heard of pickelball, once again dropping to 0% for marketers.

  • Marketers are 4 times more likely to drive an EV than consumers.

  • Consumers are motivated by friends and family, marketers are motivated by fortune, fame, and fear.

  • 66% of Marketers are excited about the potential AI will unlock for society, while only 39% of Consumers are.

  • Consumers value religion, the military and freedom of speech to a much greater extent than Marketers do.

  • Both Consumers and Marketers say that they hear from too many influencers – and not enough real people – in marketing.

  • The biggest thing both marketers and consumers agree on is if they had an extra hour, they’d use it for sleep.

A good reminder that you are not your customer and to always put the work in to get to know and understand them.

SEO

Google releases the September 2023 helpful content update

Dear Lord, when will it end? Google is keeping SEOs hot on their toes with another “helpful content” update.

According to the big G, “the helpful content system aims to better reward content where visitors feel they've had a satisfying experience, while content that doesn't meet a visitor's expectations won't perform as well.”

This update will further refine how they classify content.

We know little else about the specifics of this update other than it will take about two weeks to fully roll out. Good luck out there and stay safe.

Google Search can now validate responses from Bard

Ask a question in the latest version of Bard and you’ll see a little G icon and a notice that you can check Bard’s response using Google Search.

Click the icon and Bard will google the question you asked and highlight both confirming and conflicting information that appears on Google.

You can then click on the highlighted text and a popup will show the extra information with a link to the website.

This should be a good thing for content creators as traffic will funnel from Bard back to Google.

Not sure how I feel about having to fact-check the magic robots though, can’t they just do everything for me?!

SHOPIFY NEWS

Shopify's new 3D Scanner on iOS

If you just bought a regular model iPhone you might want to chuck it in the bin and go get a Pro model.

Why?

Shopify just released a native 3D scanner that lets you create 3D models of your products with nothing but an iPhone Pro and the latest version of the Shopify app.

This lets your customers view your products from any angle to capture the “complexity, character, and individuality” of what you offer. Shopify says these 3D models can also “boost customer confidence and conversion rates while reducing returns and customer service inquiries“.

This type of technology used to cost thousands of dollars (for each product) and take weeks to complete, which put it out of reach of most vendors.

Now you can DIY with your phone in about 20 minutes. Nice.

New Liquid features for better web performance

Optimising Shopify themes for performance has always been a tricky job for theme developers. They need to build a rich feature set used by thousands of different stores in all kinds of unique combinations.

It’s difficult to optimise when you don’t know exactly how something will be used.

Often it was up to independent developers like myself to take a client’s unique implementation of a theme and optimise it based on their use case.

Two new Liquid features should help reduce your reliance on such help:

  • Default lazy loading for the image_tag for sections further down the page

  • New section properties section.index, section.index0, and section.location for more fine-tuning of image lazy loading as well as async CSS loading.

If all that is Greek to you, never fear. All you need to know is in future versions of your theme, the theme developers have the ability to optimise image loading with much greater control than they do now.

Five new Shopify updates

INSPO OF THE WEEK

Sometimes product photos alone don’t tell the whole story of how your product or the process of purchasing works. Fussy (a client of ours) uses a dead simple but effective “how it works” section on their homepage that explains in three panels everything you need to know. As a business owner, this sometimes seems obvious, but to first-time visitors who are just scanning, this type of section can be crucial to “getting” it.

How we can help…

🔥 Looking for an experienced Shopify Partner to work with? 
Smart ecommerce brands rely on us for innovative design, development, optimisation, and growth strategies to create highly profitable Shopify websites. Work with our consultancy.

🎯 Want to reach our audience? Hit reply to discuss advertising.