News and Analysis
Amazon is Making Meaningful Gains in Search Ad Market
It will be key to see if the pace of Amazon’s overall and search ad revenue slows down in the next few years as it exhausts. For now, its ad success is just one more sign, like the news that it will likely sell its Go tech to retailers, that Amazon can find and dominate new businesses beyond its core identity as the Everything Store.
Retail as a Service: Amazon Tips its Hand
Amazon has a knack for moving into new vertical segments and then applying its logistical mastery and economies of scale to carve out margins and undercut incumbents. Then, it doubles down by scaling things up to its signature high-volume/low-margin approach. As Jeff Bezos ruthlessly admits, “Your margin is my opportunity.”
The latest place for this to unfold is retail. No, we’re not talking about Whole Foods, though that’s part it (more on that in a bit). We’re talking about Amazon’s transformation of the in-store experience — upending and streamlining logistics just like it’s done in shipping and cloud computing.
Here are some predictions for how Amazon’s disruption of retail via licensing of its Go technology will upend the industry.
Olo Deal Helps Restaurants Access Traffic From Google’s Platforms
Ninety percent of consumers research restaurants online before dining—more than any other business type—and the vast majority of those web searches start on Google. The search giant plays an important role in the success of restaurant marketing online, making it a desirable partner for any digital platform serving the restaurant industry.
Partnering with Google often means increased search traffic and a strengthened position within the restaurant vertical, which helps to explain the enthusiasm coming from Olo’s recent announcement that it will be working with Google to allow its restaurant partners to receive orders directly from Google Search, Maps, and Google Assistant.
Commentary
When Breaking Google’s Guidelines Is Almost Necessary with GMB
A couple of months ago I was helping a physical therapy business on the Google My Business Forum that was filtered out of the local results on Google because of the Possum algorithm update in 2016. In this case, the culprit was a completely different physical therapy business down the street (about a two minute walk away).
The Usability Gap: Designing the Right Products for SMBs
Surely small business owners belong to the class of ordinary users. Expecting them to invest the time and energy to become power users is a good way to guarantee that your user base will remain small. This realization could lead to a very different and more fruitful approach to product design for SMBs.
Could Chipotle Have Saved Millions of Dollars By Taking Online Reviews More Seriously?
If done right, online reputation management can act as an early warning system for multi-location businesses, and can ultimately prevent long-term brand damage and reduce the risk of decreasing profits.
Latest Posts
Street Fight Daily: Uber Gets Merchants to Pay for Rides, Shopify Teams Up with Postmates
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Uber Offers Gets Merchants to Pay for Rides… More Than 21,000 Businesses Can Now Add Same-Day Delivery Through Postmates… Vacation Rental Startups Attract $100 Million in Funding So Far This Year…
Will Phone Calls Survive the Chatbot Apocalypse?
The trillion dollar question is if this emerging chatbot technology will annihilate the phone call. Though I’m bullish on messaging and chatbots, the answer to that question is likely no.
6 Customer Analytics Solutions for Restaurants
The restaurant industry may be better positioned to take advantage of big data than almost any other vertical. Here are six examples of data platforms that restaurants can use for both sales and service optimization.
Sponsored Post: 9 Mobile Apps That Are Transforming Local Commerce
There is no shortage of business tools and apps available to entrepreneurs today. Technology, now more than ever before, is discovering new ways of solving old problems and enabling retailers and service providers as well as the mighty consumer to reach, share, save, buy, bid, deal, message, post and even make a phone call, anytime and from almost anywhere. …
Street Fight Daily: Co-op Marketing Battles Facebook/Google/Amazon, Lead Generation’s Future
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facing Facebook, Google, and Amazon, Brands Pool Their Data (Marketing Land)… The Future of Digital Lead Generation (TechCrunch)… Publishers ‘Feeding On Scraps from Facebook’, Says Bloomberg Media Boss (The Guardian)…
Understanding the Local Search Marketing Funnel
According to the funnel metaphor, customers travel in stages from awareness to purchase, the funnel getting narrower at each stage as some customers drop off and do not move to the next stage.
LiveIntent President: Local Publishers Need to Leverage ‘Gold Mine’ of Email Newsletters
Advertising network LiveIntent has 1,300 publisher clients, including Hearst, New York Times, Washington Post and ESPN. Through these relationships, it can target 130 million unique visitors. We caught up with the company’s president, Jason Kelly, to talk about how local publishers can compete with social-media platforms for ad revenue.
What Designing an ‘OS for Restaurants’ Really Requires
When you look at the restaurant tech stack, there are clearly solutions, software, applications that should play nicely with each other, but the larger players have purposefully walled off their gardens. The next multi-billion-dollar company in this space will identify the mission-critical pieces of technology in the stack, and own them.
Amplified Robot CEO Lays Out a Case for the Role of AR/VR in Retail
At the LOCALCON conference in London last week, Amplified Robot CEO Steve Dann gave a keynote address on VR’s practical uses for the retail industry. VR is steadily “climbing up the slope of enlightenment,” Dann said, and it’s in our best interest to familiarize ourselves with it.”
Street Fight Daily: Search Engine Jelly Relaunches, How Foursquare Predicted Chipotle’s Sales Drop
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… With Relaunch, Jelly Makes Another Run at Q&A-Style ‘Social Search’ (Search Engine Land)… How Foursquare Knew Before Almost Anyone How Bad Things Were for Chipotle (Washington Post)… Google Is Reportedly Building an All-in-One Travel App Called Trips (The Next Web)…
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Meta Is Automating Ads, But Brands Still Face a Bigger Problem