How small changes in the menu bar can increase your conversion rates up to 60%? Microsoft blew us up with a number of new ad features, Amazon surprises us with Q1 earnings, changing habits of Gen Z and Millennial social consumers, and much more from the world of digital marketing in our new episode of the RGray Weekly Marketing Insights and News Digest.
- Within 2 weeks we got acquainted with more than 20 new advertising features developed by Microsoft. Read our digest to learn about the best ones.
- Amazon generated around $7B in 2021 already! Find out the details in our digest.
- Check out our weekly digest to see how to increase the conversion rates of your store up to 60.
- What should we know about Gen Z and Millenials as consumers? How did COVID-19 influence their buying habits? Take a look at the infographic we prepared to get the answers.
Microsoft is back with new advertising features
Microsoft has been on a roll with new ad opportunities lately. More than 10 new features were announced last week, and 10 more features were introduced a couple of days ago.
What’s new? Really a lot! But we’re going to tell you about the three most important and exciting features that will play a big role for marketers:
- Phrase match will now include the broad match modifier. This is a similar change to what Google made in February this year.
- The email list is now available to all advertisers. Anyone can now download customers’ email addresses and redirect them across the Microsoft network.
- Easier conversion tracking functionality. A number of changes and functionalities have been made to the user interface to simplify the conversion tracking process.
Microsoft apparently thought that they were unlikely to surpass Google in terms of ad coverage, but at least they can do so in terms of the number of features available.
Amazon Advertising generated $7B in 2021
Amazon Advertising breaks into the big leagues.
The company published its Q1 results and the first thing that caught the eye of advertisers was the “other” section.
This division is the advertising business of Amazon. In Q1, it brought in about $7 billion and increased by 77% over last year.
What it means for marketers: This is a promising ad network worth keeping an eye on. Amazon invests enough funds to develop and improve its advertising product.
“The advertising team has done a great job of turning clicks into productive sales,” said Amazon’s CFO, Brian Olsavsky.
Olsavsky also claimed that “Amazon is using new deep learning models to show more relevant sponsored products and are working to improve the relevancy of the ads shown on product detail pages.”
Recently, exciting new changes are coming in the e-commerce advertising space.
How a simple menu change can increase the conversion rate of a store by 60%?
Many online businesses don’t have good websites, and in most cases, they confuse consumers.
Let’s take a look at the picture above. The green area is the part where users can easily reach with their thumb and touch. Red is an inaccessible area. But what’s the problem? It is in the upper left corner that online stores place their hamburger menus.
Even if you try to solve the problem by flipping the image horizontally, depicting a left-handed person, this area will remain inaccessible.
This problem has been brought up in the Data-driven eCommerce by Mathias Schrøder newsletter. He even provided a solution that increased conversions by 60%.
Back in 2013, which seems so distant for us, Facebook moved from the hamburger menu to the bottom tab bar, which remains to this day. According to various media, this kind of menu has increased engagement, revenue, and perceived speed.
The same year, Beamly acted differently and switched from the bottom tab bar to the top menu. The result was obviously not the best one and users came back to the app less and spent less time there.
The two examples above automatically provide you with a solution:
Well, firstly, place the menu at the bottom of your website/app to make it easier to reach with your thumb. It’s also worth adding a hamburger menu, search, and shortcuts to some of your top-selling products to the bar. Thus, Mathias Schrøder increased the conversion rate in two of his stores.
Secondly, add a checkout button to the bottom panel so that after adding a product to your cart, you can quickly and easily place an order.
Gen Z and Millennial Social Consumer Habits [Infographic]
As has been said a bunch of times before, consumer behavior has changed significantly over the past year.
COVID-19 has forced people to stay at home more often, and, as a result, the e-commerce costs drove up. Most likely, these habits will remain with us after the pandemic, because of online shopping being easy to use and convenient for the majority.
However, it is important to understand the shopping habits and behavior of users.
We have prepared an infographic for you about two generations and how their preferences and habits are changing when it comes to social networks, products, and their general consumer behavior.
Check out the infographic below.
