11/27/2023 0 Comments Apples media playerAny crisis of profitability is an opening for ads. But Shopify could be their Rosetta Stone.Īnd Meta and Google in particular must be thrilled by Shopify staying in its lane and not launching an ad engine of its own.įor now, the programmatic industry is waiting, watching – and, perversely, hoping for Shopify’s shares to tank. They can only stare in envy at Amazon Advertising humming along on purchase data.įact is, walled garden platforms were nearly sent back to ancient Egyptian times by Apple’s ATT. have tried to become one-click shopping and purchase platforms in their own right. Last week, Eric Seufert of Mobile Dev Memo made a case for Shopify to open Audiences to more retailers and ad platforms.įacebookagram, Google, TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest, et al. Google, Meta and Pinterest already have Audiences integrations, and Shopify Audiences will likely extend to Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter, which have partnerships to connect merchant accounts to their ad platforms. If Shopify is leaving money on the table, who are the ones to gain? If Shopify really gets into advertising, it would be yet another platform where sellers must pay to play – and that’s a heel turn the company is loath to make. Instead, he called out Maison MRKT, a marketing services partner, that he said helped a fashion seller halve its cost per acquisition. When Shopify President Harley Finkelstein touted Audiences on the company’s earnings call last week, for example, he didn’t mention Shopify’s prowess. “The merchant is the customer for (Audiences),” Michels said. It could risk losing its objectivity in terms of which platforms perform best and lose its position as a pure merchant-facing SaaS business, said Bill Michels, GM of Moloco’s retail media business and former EVP of product at The Trade Desk.īut Audiences is a product Shopify can credibly sell as equally available and beneficial to any of the merchants in its base. The challenge of embracing advertising is twofold for Shopify. Shopify Audiences is such a big step because it pools data to create leads for one merchant from another merchant’s traffic. A person shopping at is the merchant’s customer, not Shopify’s. Amazon has no qualms forcing brands to bid for potential Amazon customers. Historically, though, Shopify has been hands-off when it comes to advertising.Īt Amazon, the atomic unit is the customer. It’s gone from facilitating ad platform integrations within the Shopify UI to creating audience segments from across Shopify’s merchant network – which many insiders hope is a sign that Shopify will lean further into data-driven advertising services. The data is put through two black boxes – Shopify’s layer of audience segmentation and then the walled garden optimization machine – so there’s not much to see aside from the ad platform’s reported ROAS improvement.īut Shopify Audiences represent a big change for the company. Three Shopify merchants and two Shopify ad-buying specialists told AdExchanger that the Audiences product doesn’t scale right now or provide much in the way of useful analytics. Instead, those campaigns lead to Shopify payment processing, and Shopify gets a low single-digit percent of the sale.Ĭonsidering the crazy-high CPMs that retail ad networks charge for ad inventory attributed to store sales, Shopify is likely forsaking serious moolah. The product isn’t yet a major revenue driver, and Shopify is wary of becoming an ad data player.įor instance, Shopify doesn’t take a cut of ad budgets with Audiences. Pinterest was added in January.įor now, these three walled gardens are the only partners for Shopify Audiences. The big two – Facebook and Instagram and the Google fleet – were the only two channels with Audiences partnerships in 2022. Last year, Shopify introduced Audiences as a way for merchants to upload first-party data to Shopify and create lookalike audience lists. Shopify’s base of small merchants and sellers, many of which are social-based or online-only companies, were hit hard by ATT, which made them unable to effectively target ads to potential new customers.īut Shopify Audiences is one way to potentially turn those sour apples into lemonade. Shopify closed Tuesday worth $52 billion. But the rollout of Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework and an economic downturn have had their impact. In November 2021, Shopify’s market cap surpassed $200 billion.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |