Ecommerce MGMT, Author at Ecommerce Management Education

Dec 3 2024

X Alternatives Compared, for Marketing

There has been much speculation following the U.S. elections about Elon Musk’s X. According to social analytics firm Similarweb, more than 115,000 U.S. users deactivated their X accounts on Election Day.

Prominent celebrities and brands have left X, and alternative microblogging social media apps such as Bluesky and Threads have seen spikes in signups. However, X is no longer publicly listed and thus is not obligated to disclose its performance.

Nonetheless, it’s a good time for marketers and brands to explore alternatives to publish real-time news and engage with followers.

Threads

Threads

Threads is a real-time microblogging network from Meta that requires an Instagram account to use. Threads reserves your existing Instagram user name and verification badge and, via a few taps, automatically follows the same accounts you follow on Instagram. Threads is text-based, with a 500-word maximum for each post, and allows for replies, creating conversation threads. Users on Threads can customize their settings and control who can see their content, reply to your threads, or mention you. Threads does not contain ads, although it plans to.

Initially referred to as Project 92, Threads launched in 2023 as an alternative to Twitter, according to Meta’s chief product officer, Chris Cox. The platform gained over 100 million users in its first five days. Early in November 2024, Threads surpassed 275 million monthly active users.

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Bluesky

Bluesky

Bluesky, started by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, began as a research project within Twitter to explore the possibility of decentralizing and developing an open standard for social media, giving users more control over their data. Bluesky launched as an independent company in 2021 and was invitation-only until it opened to the public in February 2024. Several celebrities and brands have announced they’re joining Bluesky and leaving X, including pop singer Lizzo and the Guardian newspaper. According to Bluesky, the platform has over 23 million users.

Bluesky resides on the AT Protocol, an open-source toolbox for building social apps that can communicate with each other. The AT Protocol offers account portability, algorithmic choice, and composable moderation with features including automated filtering, manual admin actions, and community labeling. Bluesky does not offer advertising, but it’s exploring other ways to generate revenue

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Substack

Substack

Substack is a platform for subscription newsletters, with support for podcasts and subscriber-based discussion threads. Authors can offer free or paid subscriptions and make posts publicly available to non-subscribers. In 2023, Substack added a microblogging component, Notes, where writers can publish short-form posts, share ideas, and join conversations. Through Notes, writers can share posts, links, images, quotes, and comments with their subscribers and the greater Substack network.

Substack states the essence of its community and 35 million registered users is a shared appreciation for quality independent writing. The platform facilitates sponsored content but not other forms of advertising. Brands and marketers can find followers by sponsoring compelling niche content.

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Mastodon

Mastodon

Mastodon is a free and open-source social media network built on a decentralized protocol. Each Mastodon server is an independent entity with its own rules and able to sync with others to form one global social network. Users can go to a different Mastodon server and take their followers.

Mastodon supports audio, video and picture posts, accessibility descriptions, polls, content warnings, animated avatars, custom emojis, thumbnail crop control, and more. Mastodon will not serve ads or use algorithms to promote content. However, marketers can utilize collaborations, sponsorships, and user-generated content campaigns to engage followers.

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Spill

Spill

Spill, created by former Twitter employees, is a social platform that establishes a fun, safe, and culturally relevant conversation space for marginalized communities, especially people of color and the LGBTQ+ community.

Users can create, comment, amplify, or share a random thought, called a “Spill,” with the public. Users can (i) create a virtual space via Tea Parties for conversations with live audio, video, and chat, (ii) launch groups and discover members with shared interests, (iii) discover popular Spills, and (iv) automatically get paid if a Spill goes viral and the platform monetizes against it.

Spill is in an open beta release.

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Reddit is a network for social news aggregation. The platform has over 100,000 communities, called “subreddits,” dedicated to specific topics. Users submit content such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which other users then vote up or down. Voting on posts and comments increases or decreases the creator’s “karma” and helps popular and relevant posts rise to the top while filtering out inferior or irrelevant posts. Some communities require karma to post or comment, which helps maintain content quality and community standards.

Experts, brands, and marketers can leverage Reddit by hosting “Ask Me Anything” discussions, which are unfiltered Q&A sessions to update followers and answer questions honestly.

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Tumblr

Tumblr

Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking site founded in 2007 and then acquired by Yahoo. Automattic, the WordPress company, now owns it. Tumblr states its platform hosts over 600 million blogs and most new users are Generation Z.

Tumblr utilizes a dashboard as the primary management tool for users, with a live feed of recent posts from followed blogs. Users can like and repost blogs, publish comments, and schedule posts. Users can also upload text posts, images, videos, and links and publish to other networks. Tags help users find content for a topic.

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Hive Social

Hive Social

Hive Social is a social media platform aiming to improve user experiences through a chronological timeline with no personalization algorithms. It offers self-expression features such as profile music, profile banners, image and text posts, Zodiac signs, pronouns, and full app color themes. Hive Social doesn’t have a character limit, but it does have a verify feature.

The app reached number one on Apple’s App Store in November 2022, during the controversy from Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Launched in 2019 by two college students and bringing on just one full-stack developer in 2021, Hive suffered some initial crashing due to the massive influx of users.

Hive Social reportedly has over 2 million users as of late 2023.

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Discord

Discord

Discord is an instant messaging and social platform with audio and video calls, text messaging, and media. Conversations can take place in virtual servers accessed through invite links. Gamers primarily use Discord, though the share of users interested in other niche topics is growing. As of 2024, the service has about 150 million monthly active users, with approximately one-fourth of its traffic coming from the U.S.

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TikTok

TikTok

TikTok, from China-based ByteDance, is a social network for creating and sharing short-form videos ranging from three seconds to one hour. The TikTok app has been downloaded more than 130 million times in the U.S. and over 2 billion times worldwide. TikTok also has an ecommerce platform, TikTok Shop, launched in September 2023.

While it’s not exactly a microblogging platform for real-time news, TikTok might be what your followers want right now, especially millennials and Gen Z users, to discover and share new ideas and trends. TikTok’s Ads Manager can help brands create, manage, and optimize campaigns.

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Dec 3 2024

Content Optimization Checklist for SEO

Optimizing content for organic rankings involves editing text and other on-page elements for the words and concepts people use when searching. The effectiveness of those keywords depends on how and where they appear on a page.

The checklist below will help ensure maximum keyword prominence to search engines.

Content Optimization Checklist

Title tag

A title tag is an HTML element that provides a concise and informative description of a web page. This title shows in browser tabs but is not immediately visible to a web user.

Search engines rely on title tags to determine the page’s contextual and keyword relevance. It’s the most essential element for rankings and often included by search engines in visible organic snippets. Thus a title tag should appeal to both humans and search algorithms.

Screenshot of Practical Ecommerce's title tag in the HTML.

Sample title tag: “Practical Ecommerce | News, How to, Definitions, Guides, Examples.” Click image to enlarge.

Here’s Practical Ecommerce’s home page title tag used as the link in Google’s organic search snippet.

Screenshot of Practical Ecommerce's home page title tag in organic search results.

Practical Ecommerce’s home page title tag in organic search results. Click image to enlarge.

Only the first 60 characters (or so) of a title tag will show in a snippet. Hence ensure those words invite (human) clicks, although Google will evaluate the full title as a ranking signal. Still, don’t overuse keywords.

Meta description

A meta description is an HTML attribute that summarizes a page. It is not visible to visitors, but search engines frequently show it in organic results below the title.

Sample meta description: “Practical Ecommerce: Independent analysis and strategy for online merchants — Amazon, SEO, analytics, marketing, design, payments, social media, cross-border, multichannel, shipping, much more.” Click image to enlarge.

Here’s Practical Ecommerce’s home page meta description used by Google in search results.

Screenshot of the meta description for Practical Ecommerce’s home page in Google’s search results.

The meta description for Practical Ecommerce’s home page in Google’s search results. Click image to enlarge.

Meta descriptions are not ranking signals but can influence searchers’ decisions to click the listing in organic results.

Words that people use in a search are bolded in the description of the search snippet, as shown above with the query “practical ecommerce.” Thus including searchers’ terms in the meta descriptions is important for clicks, as are calls to action.

Google shows only the first 150 characters (or so) of meta descriptions in search results, although it experiments continually with that length.

H1 headline

The H1 HTML tag defines the most important heading of a page. Google often shows it in search snippets instead of the title tag, and it’s visible and dominant to page visitors.

Use similar writing principles for H1 tags as for titles, but keep in mind an H1 could impact visitors’ engagement, a ranking factor. Thus compose H1 headings to entice visitors to read and scroll on a page.

Body copy

The body copy is why visitors access a page. Use keywords naturally in language that reads well. The beginning is more critical than the end. Forget about keyword density. The more natural the copy, the better.

In an era of AI search, include question and conversational words, related terms, and intent-based keywords, such as:

Informational: How to repair drywall.
Commercial: Best laptop for teenagers.
Transactional: Lowest price for a MacBook Air.

I’ve addressed tools and resources for AI search.

H2 and H3 subheadings

H2 and H3 subheadings help Google and humans understand a page’s structure. They also improve visitor engagement by making it easier to skim and find what’s helpful.

Use keywords in subheadings, but don’t overdo it. Like anything on the page, subheadings should be natural.

Internal and external linking

Contextual linking — linking from body copy — sends a stronger ranking signal than linking from the navigation menus. Always include internal links to related content (and products). External links to trusted sources and related tools are helpful, too.

Both internal and external links help Google understand the relevancy of a page.

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Dec 2 2024

Bluesky Emerges As Traffic Source: Publishers Report 3x Engagement via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Bluesky, a decentralized social network, recently shared that it’s become a growing traffic source for online publishers.

The blog post included quotes and data from several well-known news outlets, showing more engagement and conversions on Bluesky than on other social media platforms.

Publisher Testimonials Highlight Bluesky’s Impact

Matt Karolian from The Boston Globe reported, “Traffic from Bluesky to @bostonglobe.com is already 3x that of Threads, and we are seeing 4.5x the conversions to paying digital subscribers.”

Dave Earley from The Guardian also chimed in, suggesting that traffic from Bluesky to The Guardian is “significantly higher than the very obvious 2x that of Threads.”

According to Kevin Rothrock from The New York Times, “It’s hard to exaggerate how nuts the engagement is on Bluesky compared to 𝕏. A vastly smaller user base (at this point) but so much more active and attentive.”

Marc Elias from Democracy Docket noted, “Traffic from Bluesky to @democracydocket.com is surging while X is falling and Threads remains largely dormant.”

Open Source Web Development Community Thriving on Bluesky

Bluesky has a highly engaged user base that benefits more than just news publishers.

Patak, an open-source web developer, noted that even though they have only 6% of the followers on Bluesky compared to 100,000 on X (formerly Twitter), their announcement post for Vite 6.0 received half the reposts and a third of the likes.

“Most of the comments and quotes from OSS maintainers happened here,” Patak noted. “I don’t know about other communities, but OSS web dev is a Bluesky game now.”

SEO Community Finding a Home on Bluesky

Many SEO professionals, publishers, and developers are now using Bluesky. They like the platform’s features and high engagement, which support discussions and knowledge sharing.

Bluesky is more accommodating towards links compared to X. A company representative stated:

“We want Bluesky to be a great home for journalists, publishers, and creators. Unlike other platforms, we don’t de-promote your links. Post all the links you want — Bluesky is a lobby to the open web.”

This contrasts with a recent statement from Elon Musk, who didn’t deny claims that X demotes posts with links in them.

Just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply. This just stops lazy linking.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 24, 2024

Bluesky’s algorithm could help SEO-related content get more visibility. Unlike X, where posts can disappear quickly, Bluesky’s decentralized system and focus on user control allow SEO content to stay visible longer and reach a bigger audience.

Bluesky also offers “starter packs” and curated feeds, making it easy to join industry conversations in real-time.

Looking Ahead

Bluesky could become a preferred social network for SEO professionals, offering space to share website content without losing engagement.

It’s important to watch how Bluesky develops and grows to see if it can replace X as the main platform for the SEO community.

You can take advantage of this platform’s opportunities by staying updated and adapting to changes.

Featured Image: Shutterstock/NasShots

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Dec 2 2024

WooCommerce SEO: The Definitive Guide For Your Online Store via @sejournal, @coreydmorris

In the world of ecommerce platforms, plugins, and shopping carts, there are a lot of technology options. WooCommerce for WordPress leads the way in terms of market share.

All of the various ecommerce platforms have their own pros and cons in terms of features, content management, and overall integration with your business.

Many of the benefits of WooCommerce come from the fact that it is a plugin for WordPress, which is also the most popular website platform technology in the world as well.

My website team utilizes WooCommerce with WordPress for the work we do for clients, and we continue to invest in our processes centered around that technology for digital marketing and driving sales for our clients’ businesses.

We’ve used it for over a decade, and while other popular platforms have emerged, we find that it has the flexibility and opportunities we need to implement the SEO tactics we need in alignment with our broader SEO strategies.

Why Does Any Of This Matter?

You may already be using WooCommerce or another ecommerce platform.

I’m all for whatever platform works best for you. There are definite SEO ceilings that you’ll hit in what you can do on different platforms.

WooCommerce will have ceilings, too, if you aren’t leveraging how you can set it up, how you handle your WordPress optimization as a whole, and how your overall SEO strategy is defined.

I hope that if you’re in WooCommerce or are deciding which platform to choose and have SEO in mind, this article will help you on that journey.

What Makes WooCommerce SEO Unique

WooCommerce SEO is unique because it is within WordPress. Much of what you’ll do to optimize a WooCommerce ecommerce site falls in line with what you’d do for a WordPress site overall.

Overall, SEO-friendly benefits of WooCommerce within WordPress out of the box or with light configuration include:

Analytics: WooCommerce has extensive analytics and connects easily to Google Analytics, so you can blend first and third-party visitor data.
Content: Easily mix WooCommerce’s ecommerce functionality with WordPress’ content management.
Organization: Easily organize and manage product categories, tags, and attributes.

Best Practices

Most WooCommerce and WordPress best practices align with broader ecommerce SEO best practices.

That includes managing the technical, on-page, and off-page aspects of ecommerce SEO within an overall strategy and at a tactical level.

If you’re new to SEO or want to ensure you’re not missing anything, I recommend checking out SEJ’s SEO intro guide.

Getting Started

Before you optimize, you’ll want to ensure you’re ready.

I highly recommend working on developing your action plan and goals before you start.

Knowing your current performance and researching what keywords and topics you want to target are big parts of both.

WooCommerce Analytics

I recommend using Google Analytics (GA4) as your primary analytics data source and platform for WordPress.

Going deeper and specifically into ecommerce analytics that you can integrate into GA4 from WooCommerce, the GTM4WP plugin is a great way to get that data.

Don’t skip out on measuring the data you want and need from your site for your SEO and broader marketing goal tracking.

I recommend prioritizing data before you get deep into optimizing so you can capture baseline data to measure against if you don’t already have it in a good place.

Transactional Emails

Another foundational thing you’ll want to do is set up transactional emails. Several email platforms integrate with WordPress and WooCommerce.

A favorite of my team’s for ease of use and doing the job well is Mailchimp’s transactional email functionality.

It was formerly called Mandrill and can handle post-purchase email communications like order and shipping confirmations.

Mailchimp can also be used to create automated email campaigns based on customer journey or shopping behavior, such as cart abandonment emails, win back, etc.

Functionality like this is essential to get the most out of our SEO investment, and for traffic, you work hard to drive to the site and into the shopping cart.

Keyword Research

Knowing what words, phrases, topics, and terms are related to the subject matter you want to rank for is critical. Beyond that, validate that people searching for those topics are your potential desired audience.

There are many great third-party audience and keyword research tools like Semrush, Moz, and Ahrefs.

They are paid tools with varying subscription levels but are leaders. They have their respective strengths in helping you research topics that align with your content, products, and categories and dive deep into the right targets for your SEO plan.

Build your lists, map them out to your content, and use them as context as you work through the optimization best practices to follow.

Technical SEO

Like with any site, and to follow broader UX best practices, you want your site to load quickly, be indexable, and not have anything holding it back.

Several specific technical factors you need to consider, configure, and monitor can hold back or unlock your opportunity for rankings compared to peer sites.

Indexing

It is essential to have your content found.

That starts by ensuring you have a clean XML sitemap and robots.txt file. Plus, go into Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and third-party validation tools to ensure everything is as intended.

Use the Yoast plugin (or similar) to adjust settings for your XML sitemap and robots.txt files.

Yoast is great at giving you options to include or remove from those files, so you don’t have to touch the code or manually adjust those files at all. You can get the settings to your liking and then submit them for validation through the Console/Webmaster Tools.

Image from author, November 2024

Page Experience

There are a lot of data points and best practices on page load times, site speed, and other factors that Google looks at for “page experience.”

Overall, you want to pay attention to core web vitals and page load times to ensure that you have fast-loading pages that don’t harm image quality and content richness for users.

The core web vitals include:

I strongly recommend getting familiar with these three aspects of core web vitals with SEJ’s guide.

Imagify and WP Rocket are recommended plugins for image optimization and caching to improve page load times and overall site performance.

Screenshot from Imagify, November 2024

Accessibility

Making your content accessible to all, including those with visual impairments, is important.

That includes coding to common ADA standards and ensuring that alt attributes and other cues are included.

Not a plugin recommendation here – I recommend using a third-party tool like PowerMapper.com to audit pages to get the helpful information you need to adjust page elements to meet the standard that your legal counsel advises (I’m not a lawyer).

Structured Data

Using extra context cues and opportunities to categorize, catalog, and mark up your subject matter is important. Leverage it where possible to get specific information for your industry, especially using specific product attributes.

Again, you can tap into the power of the Yoast plugin to add basic schema markup to pages on your site.

I recommend reading more about Schema and how it works before diving into the implementation if it is a new concept.

Screenshot from WordPress, November 2024

Canonical URLs And Permalinks

Web stores inherently can have complexities and struggles with duplicate content.

Whether you have a product that appears in multiple categories or are just dealing with the “out of the box” way that WordPress and WooCommerce generate many separate URLs for a single page, you need to include a single “canonical” version for the search engines to index, show in the search results, and aggregate all link value to.

I recommend Yoast here again for handling canonicals.

I also recommend the Redirection plugin if you have pages that move, discontinued products, or need to permanently 301 redirect a specific page to another.

Be mindful of how you use canonicals and redirects, and always validate with tools like Screaming Frog or other lightweight redirect testing tools.

You want to avoid conflicts between multiple plugins that can send the wrong signal to the search engines or provide a bad experience for your users (sending to 404s, redirect loops, etc.).

Screenshot from WordPress, November 2024

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are links on interior pages that show a user (as well as a search engine) where they are on a site in terms of the navigational path or depth.

They allow users to see how far they are drilled down into a specific product category, blog category, or other interior section and a way to click to go back upstream.

They are typically coded into your WordPress site theme as a default element. The Yoast plugin is great for adding schema markup to them for WordPress/WooCommerce.

Screenshot from WordPress, November 2024

On-Page SEO

On-page ranking factors and SEO aspects for ecommerce SEO that you’ll want to have covered in your WooCommerce site include:

URLs

Beyond the technical aspects of implementing canonical tags and trying to manage duplicate content to get the search engines to index and rank a single version of your pages – including categories and products – you don’t want to miss the opportunity to include important contextual keywords in your URLs.

Use WordPress’ native page naming conventions and tools to put meaningful keywords (without going overboard or stuffing) into the URL string.

Copy

A unique, optimized copy can be a challenge for ecommerce sites.

Much like tags, you might have trouble doing it at scale. Or, you may have a lot of similar products.

Find ways to invest in the manual time to write to best practices, avoid duplicate content, and scale it programmatically where possible while maintaining high quality.

Images

Image file attributes are an area where you can include relevant, contextual keywords describing the image’s subject matter.

This is important for product images, product category-level images, and any content on your site.

They are important in terms of meeting accessibility standards – and also, to the search engines – to understand the context of an image.

Manage these in the media center in WordPress at upload or later by editing images through the media tab or going into the page and clicking on the image to review and edit properties.

Screenshot from WordPress, November 2024

Product Reviews

User-generated, unique content can help add contextual copy, supplementing the copy on a product page.

Added context and another type of potential schema element can be added to product reviews.

My team leverages and recommends the stamped.io plugin for easy management and implementation of reviews.

However, many great review management plugins are available, and they vary in cost, implementation ease, and complexity.

As a bonus, Stamped will also send out post-purchase requests for reviews.

Screenshot from WordPress, November 2024

Screenshot from WordPress, November 2024

Off-Page SEO

Ecommerce SEO, like most SEO, requires off-page factors to build upon your technical and on-page/content-focused tactics.

These factors are more general and least tied specifically to WooCommerce, but shouldn’t be left out of your SEO plan:

Links

Seek high-quality, industry/context-relevant inbound links to your products, categories, and content.

That includes natural associations like manufacturers, partners, affiliates, PR-related mentions, and other quality natural sources.

Social Media

Sure, there’s debate on whether it is a direct ranking factor.

Regardless, link to your site from social media content to build context and connections and seek out areas of opportunity across the social media landscape to gain links and mentions.

Engagement

Seek out other opportunities for engagement and mentions online.

Whether part of a PR plan, influencer strategy, or other ways your brand gets mentioned, leverage them.

Seek them out, and look for high-quality content to reference yours.

Popular SEO Plugins For WooCommerce

You can boost WooCommerce with other WordPress plugins, many of which are free.

Here’s a recap of the plugins I noted that are related to individual items you’ll want to optimize.

My team’s recommended WordPress plugins to use with WooCommerce (and in many cases in general for WordPress) SEO include:

Yoast: SEO plugin that will create an editable sitemap and robots.txt files, help you change product metadata from product pages, add basic schema, handle canonicalization, breadcrumbs, etc.
Imagify: For image optimization for page load time and site speed optimization.
WP Rocket: For caching to improve site performance.
Redirection: For creating any 301 redirects you need as part of an SEO strategy.
Stamped.io (Or similar service): For managing customer product reviews.
GTM4WP: Allowing you to implement enhanced ecommerce tracking for Google Analytics.

The great thing, for the most part, about these plugins is that if you have some WordPress experience, you may not need a developer to set them up.

Like any plugin, your WordPress infrastructure might impact your access level and any custom aspects required to implement depending on how they interact with other plugins or functionality.

Wrapping Up

At this point, it is probably pretty clear that a lot of the great things about SEO that we can manage in WordPress also translate over to WooCommerce.

And more broadly, you can implement ecommerce SEO best practices in WooCommerce as a whole.

I made it clear that my team uses WordPress and WooCommerce pretty exclusively right now.

We have had plenty of experiences with Magento, Shopify, and other platforms that left us frustrated as there were things locked down that we couldn’t control or optimize.

Or, as an admin or user, we weren’t able to edit content and manage the site as efficiently as we could with the more user-friendly controls within WordPress.

I’m not saying the other platforms aren’t right for you and your business. I would put each of them through an honest test before you create a new store or consider re-platforming.

There are definitely pros and cons to any platform, and my goal is for you to find the right one. If it is WooCommerce, great – and happy optimizing with the information I shared in this guide!

More resources:

Featured Image: earth phakphum/Shutterstock

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Dec 2 2024

The Future Is 360°: Trends And Tactics For Comprehensive Marketing In 2025 [Webinar] via @sejournal, @lorenbaker

Feeling the pressure to keep up with shifting marketing dynamics? You’re not alone.

In today’s competitive landscape, a unified, 360° marketing strategy is the key to success. It’s time to connect every channel, message, and tactic to achieve your overarching business goals.

Join us for an exclusive webinar where industry experts from Rhapsody and their valued partner Ceros will reveal the strategies, trends, and tools that will shape marketing in 2025 and beyond.

Why This Webinar Is a Must-Attend Event
Discover how to embrace a comprehensive marketing approach that will keep you ahead of the competition. In this session, we’ll cover:

Practical Strategies: Learn how to build a cohesive, full-service marketing strategy to drive results.
Future Marketing Trends: Explore AI-driven personalization, the evolution of customer experiences, and the power of value-based marketing.
Interactive Content in Action: Understand how interactive content like landing pages and eBooks can transform your engagement efforts and bring your brand stories to life.

Spotlight on Ceros
We’ll showcase Ceros’ interactive platform, highlighting how it enables dynamic, engaging content that captivates audiences across channels.

Who Should Attend?
This webinar is perfect for:

Marketing professionals, particularly in retail, aiming to stay ahead of industry trends
Businesses serving a B2B market seeking to increase ROI
Ecommerce marketing professionals looking to gain insights for 2025

Live Q&A: Get Expert Answers
After the panel discussion, join our experts for a live Q&A where you can ask your most pressing questions and gain tailored advice.

Don’t Miss Out!
The future of marketing is here, and a 360° approach is the way forward. Don’t miss your chance to gain actionable insights and strategies to make your business stand out.

Can’t attend live? No problem—register now, and we’ll send you the recording.

Get ready to revolutionize your marketing strategy for 2025. Sign up today!

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Dec 2 2024

Using Google Merchant Center Next For Competitive Analysis via @sejournal, @gilgildner

In Google Ads, where every click can be a potential sale, understanding your competition isn’t just strategic, it’s also absolutely necessary for creating a profitable ad campaign.

For our ecommerce clients, Google Merchant Center has long been a critical tool for managing unwieldy amounts of data.

When some ecommerce clients can stock thousands of SKUs or maybe even millions of SKU iterations, it enables us to manage shopping campaigns that would otherwise be impossible.

With new evolutions of machine learning and AI-powered Shopping on the horizon, making sure your store remains competitive in the massive landscape of ecommerce advertising is more important than ever.

Enter Merchant Center Next, which is the next evolution of Google’s product listing management tool. It’s designed to give ecommerce retailers a sharper edge in the competitive arena.

Here’s how you can use this tool not just for managing product feeds, but also for identifying huge opportunities in your competition.

Merchant Center Next is an upgraded platform that allows ecommerce stores to manage how their products appear on Google Shopping, both paid and organic.

But for this post, we’ll focus more on its analytics and insights features, which are a gold mine for competitive analysis.

How To Use Competitive Analysis Features In Merchant Center

First, you need to make sure your account actually has access to Merchant Center Next.

Although Google first announced a full rollout by September 2024, not all accounts have access yet. The integration with Google Ads is seamless, so it’s an easy click.

Second, take a look at the competitor visibility section. This section is reached by navigating to Analytics > Products, and then looking at different content tabs, labeled Traffic, Competitors, Popular Products, Pricing, and Promotions.

This shows you cards that highlight how your products stack up against the competition in terms of overall visibility. You can see who among your competitors is getting more clicks, where their ads rank, and how your own traffic compares.

Third, take a look at price competitiveness. Google Merchant Center Next provides insights into how product prices align with the overall market.

Are your SKUs priced above, similarly, or below the average price across the internet? The data within this section will help you adjust your pricing strategy easily.

Google Merchant Center Price Competitiveness

Researching Price Competitiveness Within Google Merchant Center. Screenshot from Google Merchant Center, November 2024.

Next, look at search trends. This section allows us to have a closer look at and to understand what consumers are looking for in aggregate.

It’s not just about products or individual SKUs, but also entire categories and product niches you may not be aware of.

Doing a deep dive into product performance can be massively valuable.

Best Sellers allows you to identify products flying off your virtual shelves. If competitors are selling items you don’t currently offer, this is a good indicator to consider product line expansion.

Out-of-stock Insights gives you a heads-up that you may need to restock a product – inventory management is always a huge issue with popular ecommerce stores.

How To Interpret Data For Real-World Use

One of my favorite metrics in Google Merchant Center Next is the Ad/Organic Ratio Analysis. This metric tells us how much of the traffic per product is paid versus organic.

You can infer competitor ad spend from this. If you can see a competitor has a high ratio of paid to organic, it means they’re possibly spending a lot more on ads than you, so it might be time to ramp up your Google Ads spend (something you’ve likely heard from plenty of Google reps).

Ad/Organic Ratio Analysis in Google Merchant Center. Screenshot from Google Merchant Center, November 2024.

Since Merchant Center isn’t only about paid traffic, you can also use search term insights in the Analytics > Summary tab to help with your ecommerce store’s SEO performance.

Use these insights into keywords to refine product titles, descriptions, or even URLs. If a competitor’s product with a similar title is ranking higher, this can indicate possible opportunities for improvement.

Continuous monitoring and adapting to the current market are critical. Nothing seems to change faster than the digital advertising landscape.

Using Merchant Center Next to identify market shifts means you can discover new entrants, changing consumer preferences, seasonal trends, and more.

Using Merchant Center Next to identify changing product trends. Screenshot from Google Merchant Center, November 2024.

Using this newly available data within Merchant Center can help you outsmart the competition – spotting gaps where you may be able to see that competitors are missing out on certain categories or price points.

If you can see that no other competitor offers free shipping, or aren’t bundling products in unique ways, these are all ways to leverage the data for your own benefit.

More Data Is Coming For Shopping

One of the biggest complaints over time has been that Google Ads seems to continually remove granular data from our fingertips, making it harder to optimize and improve campaigns.

This is especially important to ecommerce advertisers who often have unwieldy amounts of SKUs and transaction data to analyze.

Google Merchant Center Next actually seems to be bringing some of this data back into the fold. By leveraging this data – specifically the competitive analysis tools – you cannot only keep up with the rest of the ecommerce market, but also maybe even jump ahead.

Plus, Google Ads has been making some major strides in consumer-focused customized experiences within Google Shopping.

These AI-powered custom shopping experiences are still in their infancy, but making sure your campaigns are fully optimized within Merchant Center Next is the first step to staying competitive even through these new changes.

After all, the data that Google uses to train these new experiences come directly from stores just like yours (which can sometimes feel like a double-edged sword, to be sure).

All indications seem to be that this data will continue to increase. Not only has Performance Max been offering more and more data recently, but shakeups at Google Ads seem to indicate that more granular data may be coming to us from more than one platform.

Ecommerce knowledge and data aren’t just power – they are profit!

More resources:

Featured Image: eamesBot/Shutterstock

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Dec 2 2024

5 Content Marketing Ideas for January 2025

January is a month of new opportunities. In 2025, content marketers can kick the year off right, focusing on resets, AI-driven repurposes, cheese, hobbies, and even opposites.

Content marketing is the act of curating or creating articles, videos, or podcasts to attract, engage, and retain customers.

For merchants, content is often a key to successful search engine optimization and the foundation for social media marketing.

What follows are five content marketing ideas your business can try in January 2025.

January Reset

Female exercising using resistance bands

January is a good time for content marketers to encourage and support potential customers.

The new year is synonymous with fresh starts. Roughly 30% of American adults set resolutions to be healthier, more productive, or better organized.

Ecommerce marketers can publish articles, podcasts, and videos to support those resolutions. The content could be both uplifting and promotional to a store’s products.

Here are a few examples.

A DTC fitness brand might publish a blog post titled “10 Simple Ways to Stick to Your Fitness Resolutions in 2025.” The post could feature the brand’s products, such as yoga mats and resistance bands.

A home organization retailer could create a short-form video series showcasing “decluttering challenges” that include helpful tools and products.

A woman’s apparel boutique might write “How to Refresh Your Wardrobe for the New Year,” an article linking to blouses, skirts, or shoes.

AI-driven Repurposes

Generative AI can reproduce and transform content into new formats.

OpenAI released ChatGPT on November 20, 2022, and in surprisingly little time, generative artificial intelligence has become an almost unreplaceable tool for some content marketers.

Many businesses avoid using AI to produce entire articles but often deploy it to reuse or repurpose content.

With the spirit of resets and resolutions in January, content marketers might resolve to remake some content with AI. Here are three examples.

Convert videos into text. Multiple AI tools can convert a video into blog posts, email newsletters, or social media posts.

Spotlight written content for social media. Marketers use automation workflows with tools such as Zapier, ChatGPT, and Buffer to generate and schedule dozens of X, Threads, and Facebook posts from a single article.

Transform chat into FAQs. Another technique is employing AI to anonymize and remake customer chats into FAQs.

National Cheese-lovers Day

Content marketers have an opportunity to celebrate cheese lovers in January 2025.

January 20, 2025, is National Cheese-lovers Day and an opportunity for content marketers to celebrate shoppers who thoroughly enjoy that item.

This pseudo-holiday is often confused with its close kin, National Cheese Day, which is in June, but there are differences. National Cheese Day commemorates the longstanding (perhaps 7,000 years) cheese-making tradition and celebrates a beloved food. Meanwhile, January’s National Cheese-lovers Day focuses on folks who eat cheese.

While this particular celebration will make the most marketing sense for retailers and ecommerce shops in the food or kitchen supply segments, clever marketers from nearly any segment should be able to produce some tasty content about cheese consumption.

Here are a few potential article ideas.

Kitchen supply shop: “10 Perfect Recipes for the Cheese Gourmond.”
Pop-culture store: “Which Celebrities Love Cheese? These 20 Sure Do.”
Luggage merchant: “15 Destination Vacations for Traveling Cheese Lovers.”

‘What If’ Articles

Image of a dog walking a small boy on a leash.

“What if” articles could be a fun way for content marketers to celebrate Opposite Day.

While entertainment is certainly a valid form of content marketing, most folks working in the retail and ecommerce businesses rarely aim to amuse.

January 25, 2025, however, might be a rare opportunity to do just that. National Opposite Day is a whimsical event based on the children’s make-believe game.

To celebrate the occasion, folks might wear clothes backward, walk in reverse, or behave unexpectedly.

Interestingly, a literary form that feels like Opposite Day is the “what if” article, which explores hypothetical scenarios and asks “what if” questions about almost anything one could imagine.

For example, a pet supply store could publish an entire series on the premise “What if dogs owned humans?”

National Hobby Month

January is National Hobby Month.

January is National Hobby Month. It is a time for folks to embrace new interests, rediscover forgotten pastimes, or tackle a hobby they’ve always wanted to try.

Hobbies provide relaxation, personal growth, and even social connections. It’s an excellent opportunity for ecommerce businesses to inspire customers while showcasing products that make it easy to start or improve hobbies.

Hobby-focused content might include articles, videos, or even online courses. Each could be associated with a product bundle or “starter kit” connecting content and commerce.

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Dec 1 2024

New Report Shows AI Overviews Trends Are Stabilizing via @sejournal, @martinibuster

As we enter the holiday season, October’s data reveals significant shifts and stabilization across industries in AI Overviews (AIOs). Critical insights from October reveal growth in certain sectors, stability in others, and strategic changes in content types and sources. These insights offer actionable strategies for marketers aiming to optimize for AIOs during this critical period.

YouTube Citations In AI Overviews: September Through October

YouTube AI Overviews citations surged in September by 400 – 450% more than the baseline from August when YouTube citations were first tracked. The level then stabilized in October at a level of about 110% to 115% of the August baseline. This gives the impression that this level of YouTube AIO citations may represent a new normal.

The kinds of video content that Google AIO tended to cite were:

How-to’s
In-depth reviews
Product comparisons

BrightEdge’s report observed that YouTube AIO citations in November continued to be stable:

Current State (November): Stabilized at approximately 115-120% with minimal day-to-day variation (±3%).

The next few months will show how satisfied users are with YouTube citations. Presumably Google tested YouTube citations before rolling them out so expectations for dramatic a change should be kept in check because the volatility of YouTube AIO citations was low, indicating that Google may have found the sweet spot for these kinds of citations. So don’t expect this level of YouTube citations to drop although anything is possible.

This trend highlights the continued importance of YouTube video channel as a way to expand reach and the continued evolution away from purely text content. If you embed video on web pages then it’s important to use Video Schema.org structured data.

Massive Growth In Travel Industry AIO Citations

Travel AIO citations surged by 700% from September through October. This may reflect Google’s confidence in AI for making travel recommendations.

BrightEdge offered this advice:

“To capture AIO visibility, travel brands should optimize content around seasonal travel, local events, and specific activities. Many of the keywords that are part of this surge start with “Things to do” which then triggers an unordered list.”

Localized and Activity-Specific Travel Queries

Google AIO is showing citations for more localized travel related queries that are more specific and longtail, which may mean that AI Overviews is handling more of the local travel type queries as opposed to the big destination queries that drilled down to the neighborhood level.

BrightEdge explained:

“Initially, travel AIOs were dominated by broad, general queries focused on major tourist destinations. However, as the month progressed, there was an increase in more localized, activity specific, and seasonal travel searches, reflecting a deeper level of user intent. By November, AIOs were increasingly focused on niche travel queries covering smaller cities, specific neighborhoods, and unique local activities.”

Examples of the pattern of travel queries that triggered AIO are:

Top attractions in
Things to do in
Family friendly activities in
Fall festivals in

AIO Is Stabilizing And Maturing

Another interesting insight from the BrightEdge data is that the daily growth of AIO citations slowed down to 1.3%, indicating that we are now entering a more stable phase.

BrightEdge offers this insight:

“We are now six months into the AIO era and seeing macro-changes in AI overviews that are gerng smaller and smaller”

Another statistic that confirms that AIO are here to stay is that volatility in AIO citations decreased by 42%, another sign of stability. This is good news because it means more predictability for what keyword phrases will trigger AIO citations.

BrightEdge notes:

“The stabilization in AIO appearance allows brands to optimize for a consistent presence, par:cularly for evergreen holiday keywords. This benefit campaigns where a steady AIO presence can drive significant traffic and conversions. As AIOs stabilize, planning and incorporating them into strategies becomes easier. This is pivotal insight for marketers who wish to make AI Overviews part of their 2025 strategy.”

Education Topic Performance

Education topics were on a steady growth trajectory of a 5% increase in keyword that trigger AIO, representing 45-50% of keywords. The growth was seen in more complex educational queries like:

cybersecurity certification prerequisites
career options with a psychology degree
psyd vs phd comparison

B2B queries experienced modest growth of 2%, representing 45-50% of keywords and with less volatility in October than September. Healthcare AIO citations were similarly stable with only a 1% change in October and with 73-75% of keywords triggering AIO citations.

How Chrome Site Engagement Metrics Are Used via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google Chrome collects site engagement metrics, and Chromium project documentation explains exactly what they are and how they are used.

Site Engagement Metrics

The documentation for the Site Engagement Metrics shares that typing the following into the browser address bar exposes the metrics:

chrome://site-engagement/

What shows up is a list of sites that the browser has visited and Site Engagement Metrics.

Site Engagement Metrics

The Site Engagement Metrics documentation explains that the metrics measure user engagement with a site and that the primary factor used is active time spent. It also offers examples of other signals that may contribute to the measurement.

This is what documentation says:

“The Site Engagement Service provides information about how engaged a user is with a site. The primary signal is the amount of active time the user spends on the site but various other signals may be incorporated (e.g whether a site is added to the homescreen).”

It also shares the following properties of the Chrome Site Engagement Scores:

The score is a double from 0-100. The highest number in the range represents a site the user engages with heavily, and the lowest number represents zero engagement.
Scores are keyed by origin.
Activity on a site increases its score, up to some maximum amount per day.
After a period of inactivity the score will start to decay.

What Chrome Site Engagement Scores Are Used For

Google is transparent about the Chrome Site Engagement metrics because the Chromium Project is open source. The documentation explicitly outlines what the site engagement metrics are, the signals used, how they are calculated, and their intended purposes. There is no ambiguity about their function or use. It’s all laid out in detail.

There are three main uses for the site engagement scores and all three are explicitly for improving the user experience within Chromium-based browsers.

Site engagement metrics are used internally by the browser for these three purposes:

Prioritize Resources: Allocate resources like storage or background sync to sites with higher engagement.
Enable Features: Determine thresholds for enabling specific browser features (e.g., app banners, autoplay).
Sort Sites: Organize lists, such as the most-used sites on the New Tab Page or which tabs to discard when memory is low, based on engagement levels.

The documentation states that the engagement scores were specifically designed for the above three use cases.

Prioritize Resources

Google’s documentation explains that Chrome allocates resources (such as storage space) to websites based on their site engagement levels. Sites with higher user engagement scores are given a greater share of these resources within their browser. The purpose is so that the browser prioritizes sites that are more important or frequently used by the user.

This is what the documentation says:

“Allocating resources based on the proportion of overall engagement a site has (e.g storage, background sync)”

Takeaway: One of the reasons for the site engagement score is to prioritize resources to improve the browser user experience.

Role Of Engagement Metrics For Enabling Features

This part of the documentation explains that Chromium uses site engagement scores to determine whether certain browser features are enabled for a website. Examples of features are app banners and video autoplay.

The site engagement metrics are used to determine whether to let videos autoplay on a given site, if the site is above a specific threshold of engagement. This improves the user experience by preventing annoying video autoplay on sites that have low engagement scores.

This is what the documentation states:

“Setting engagement cutoff points for features (e.g app banner, video autoplay, window.alert())”

Takeaway: The site engagement metrics play a role in determining whether certain features like video autoplay are enabled. The purpose of this metric is to improve the browser user experience.

Sort Sites

The document explicitly says that site engagement scores are used to rank sites for browser functions like tab discarding (when memory is tight) or creating lists of the most-used sites on the New Tab Page (NTP).

“Sorting or prioritizing sites in order of engagement (e.g tab discarding, most used list on NTP)”

Takeaway: Sorting sites based on engagement ensures that the user’s most important and frequently interacted-with sites are prioritized in their browser. It also improves usability through tab management and quick access so that it matches user behavior and preferences.

Privacy

There is absolutely nothing that implies that Google Search uses these site engagement metrics. There is nothing in the documentation that explicitly mentions or implicitly alludes to any other purpose for the site engagement metrics except for improving the user experience and usability of the Chrome browser and Chromium-based devices like the Chromebook.

The engagement scores are limited to a device. The scores aren’t shared between the devices of a single user.

The documentation states:

“The user engagement score are not synced, so decisions made on a given device are made based on the users’ activity on that device alone.”

The user engagement scores are further isolated when users are in Incognito Mode:

“When in incognito mode, site engagement will be copied from the original profile and then allowed to decay and grow independently. There will be no information flow from the incognito profile back to the original profile. Incognito information is deleted when the browser is shut down.”

User engagement scores are deleted when the browser history is cleared:

“Engagement scores are cleared with browsing history.

Origins are deleted when the history service deletes URLs and subsequently reports zero URLs belonging to that origin are left in history.”

The engagement score for a website decreases over time if the user doesn’t interact with the site. This is called “decay” when the user engagement score drops in time. Engagement scores are forgotten which improves the relevance of the scores and how the browser optimizes itself for usability and the user experience.

The impact of user engagement scores that “decay to zero” is that the URLs are completely removed from the browser:

“URLs are cleared when scores decay to zero.”

Takeaway: What Could Google Do With This Data?

It’s understandable that some people, when presented with the facts about Chrome site engagement metrics, will ask, “What if Google is using it?”

Asking “what if” is a powerful way to innovate and explore how a service or a product can be improved or invented. However, basing business decisions on speculative ‘what if’ questions that contradict established facts is counterproductive.

These metrics are solely for improving browser user experience and usability, the scores are not synched and are limited to the device, the scores are further isolated in Incognito Mode and the scores are completely erased when users stop interacting with a site.

That means that the question, “What if Chrome shared site engagement signals with Google?” has no basis in fact. The purpose of these signals and their documented use cases are fully transparent and well understood to be limited to browser usability.

Read the Chromium documentation:

For Developers > Design Documents > Site Engagement

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands

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Dec 1 2024

These AI Minecraft characters did weirdly human stuff all on their own

Left to their own devices, an army of AI characters didn’t just survive — they thrived. They developed in-game jobs, shared memes, voted on tax reforms and even spread a religion.

The experiment played out on the open-world gaming platform Minecraft, where up to 1000 software agents at a time used large language models (LLMs) to interact with one another. Given just a nudge through text prompting, they developed a remarkable range of personality traits, preferences and specialist roles, with no further inputs from their human creators.

The work, from AI startup Altera, is part of a broader field that wants to use simulated agents to model how human groups would react to new economic policies or other interventions.

But for Altera’s founder, Robert Yang, who quit his position as an assistant professor in computational neuroscience at MIT to start the company, this demo is just the beginning. He sees it as an early step towards large-scale “AI civilizations” that can coexist and work alongside us in digital spaces. “The true power of AI will be unlocked when we have actually truly autonomous agents that can collaborate at scale,” says Yang.

Yang was inspired by Stanford University researcher Joon Sung Park who, in 2023, found that surprisingly humanlike behaviors arose when a group of 25 autonomous AI agents was let loose to interact in a basic digital world.

“Once his paper was out, we started to work on it the next week,” says Yang. “I quit MIT six months after that.”

Yang wanted to take the idea to its extreme. “We wanted to push the limit of what agents can do in groups autonomously.”

Altera quickly raised more than $11m in funding from investors including A16Z and the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s emerging tech VC firm. Earlier this year Altera released its first demo: an AI-controlled character in Minecraft that plays alongside you.

Altera’s new experiment, Project Sid, uses simulated AI agents equipped with “brains” made up of multiple modules. Some modules are powered by LLMs and designed to specialize in certain tasks, such as reacting to other agents, speaking, or planning the agent’s next move.

Ai-generated Minecraft simulation of characters running

The team started small, testing groups of around 50 agents in Minecraft to observe their interactions. Over 12 in-game days (4 real-world hours) the agents began to exhibit some interesting emergent behavior. For example, some became very sociable and made many connections with other characters, while others appeared more introverted. The “likability” rating of each agent (measured by the agents themselves) changed over time as the interactions continued. The agents were able to track these social cues and react to them: in one case an AI chef tasked with distributing food to the hungry gave more to those who he felt valued him most.

More humanlike behaviors emerged in a series of 30-agent simulations. Despite all the agents starting with the same personality and same overall goal—to create an efficient village and protect the community against attacks from other in-game creatures—they spontaneously developed specialized roles within the community, without any prompting. They diversified into roles such as builder, defender, trader, and explorer. Once an agent had started to specialize, its in-game actions began to reflect its new role. For example, an artist spent more time picking flowers, farmers gathered seeds and guards built more fences.

“We were surprised to see that if you put [in] the right kind of brain, they can have really emergent behavior,” says Yang. “That’s what we expect humans to have, but don’t expect machines to have.”

Yang’s team also tested whether agents could follow community-wide rules. They introduced a world with basic tax laws and allowed agents to vote for changes to the in-game taxation system. Agents prompted to be pro or anti tax were able to influence the behavior of other agents around them, enough that they would then vote to reduce or raise tax depending on who they had interacted with.

The team scaled up, pushing the number of agents in each simulation to the maximum the Minecraft server could handle without glitching, up to 1000 at once in some cases. In one of Altera’s 500-agent simulations, they watched how the agents spontaneously came up with and then spread cultural memes (such as a fondness for pranking, or an interest in eco-related issues) among their fellow agents. The team also seeded a small group of agents to try to spread the (parody) religion, Pastafarianism, around different towns and rural areas that made up the in-game world, and watched as these Pastafarian priests converted many of the agents they interacted with. The converts went on to spread Pastafarianism (the word of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) to nearby towns in the game world.

The way the agents acted might seem eerily lifelike, but their behavior combines patterns learned by the LLMs from human-created data with Altera’s system, which translates those patterns into context-aware actions, like picking up a tool, or interacting with another agent. “The takeaway is that LLMs have a sophisticated enough model of human social dynamics [to] mirror these human behaviors,” says Altera co-founder Andrew Ahn.

Ai-generated Minecraft simulation of farming crops

In other words, the data makes them excellent mimics of human behavior, but they are in no way “alive”.

But Yang has grander plans. Altera plans to expand into Roblox next, but Yang hopes to eventually move beyond game worlds altogether. Ultimately, his goal is a world in which humans don’t just play alongside AI characters, but also interact with them in their day-to-day lives. His dream is to create a vast number of “digital humans” who actually care for us and will work with us to help us solve problems, as well as keep us entertained. “We want to build agents that can really love humans (like dogs love humans, for example),” he says.

This viewpoint—that AI could love us—is pretty controversial in the field, with many experts arguing it’s not possible to recreate emotions in machines using current techniques. AI veteran Julian Togelius, for example, who runs games testing company Modl.ai, says he likes Altera’s work, particularly because it lets us study human behavior in simulation.

But could these simulated agents ever learn to care for us, love us, or become self-aware? Togelius doesn’t think so. “There is no reason to believe a neural network running on a GPU somewhere experiences anything at all,” he says.

But maybe AI doesn’t have to love us for real to be useful.

“If the question is whether one of these simulated beings could appear to care, and do it so expertly that it would have the same value to someone as being cared for by a human, that is perhaps not impossible,” Togelius adds. “You could create a good-enough simulation of care to be useful. The question is whether the person being cared for would care that the carer has no experiences.”

In other words, so long as our AI characters appear to care for us in a convincing way, that might be all we really care about.

Update: We gave more detail on how Altera’s system combines LLMs with other modules.

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