New York, USA

đŸ’Ș Shopify’s Coming For You Bezos

Shopify, the company behind Kylie Jenner, Allbirds and countless Youtube dropshipping gurus now has its sights set on Amazon.

Way back in fall 2019, Youtube stars and fashion influencers Jeffree Star and Shane Dawson announced “a limited-edition makeup collaboration”.

The sale was about to set records.

It was perhaps “the biggest drop sale in the history of the internet.”

Given their combined 40 million-plus subscribers on Youtube and 50 million more on other social media, the duo promoted their makeup with nearly five hours of videos.

Results?

Nearly 90 million viewers for a November 1st flash sale.

The massive flash sale temporarily broke Shopify Plus (their division for large merchants).

Loren Padelford, head of Shopify Plus, called it “a perfect storm of pressure”.

Despite Shopify’s massive infrastructure and them boasting over 1 million merchants around the globe, Jeffree Star said that the incredible demand:

“broke the front end, it broke the back end, everything is f#$%^d”

Padelford said “there were more people on their website, that one single website, the moment that product dropped, then there were on Amazon at the same time. It was the biggest drop sale in the history of the internet, as far as we can tell.”

The stars claimed to have sold 1 million palettes that day alone.

Padelford says he’s “excited and terrified” of the scale some of these people building to, afraid “they’re going to break the internet”.

Last year Shopify announced plans to invest $1 billion over five years on warehouse space and robotics to build out a fulfilment network.

Shopify saw roughly $1.5 billion in revenue in 2019, a 50% jump from the previous year.

Paddelford and other execs will tell you Shopify is “arming the rebels” and going after Amazon.

Shopify purchased 6 River Systems in October for $450 million with plans to lease warehouse space and utilize robotics.

With Amazon’s $64 billion spent on logistics and shipping alone in 2019, is Shopify making one big gamble?

Are they truly ready to tackle the big bad bully?

>> Read the full piece here and find out! <<

[SPONSORED] Accelerate your conversions and increase your revenue with lemonads

Are you a media buyer, webmaster, e-mailer, or blogger and looking for profitable offers for your audience? lemonads affiliate program is the guarantee of thousands of conversions by providing you with offers that fit your traffic the best!

đŸ€© High-standard CPA offers
💰Secure & Weekly payment
đŸ’Ș Revenue-driven Performance
đŸ€Ÿ Expert & Multilingual support

But since we all know that numbers talk, let’s checkout this case study, provided by one of lemonads affiliates.

  • Vertical : Nutra
  • GEO : FR, Native Traffic from AdCash
  • Tools : Voluum, AdPlexity, SimilarWeb
  • Campaign duration : 14 days
  • Spent : 3 869€
  • Total revenue : 6 152€
  • Net profit : 2 283€

Thanks to our account manager for highly recommending to us this offer. It performed very well with a payout of 28€! The information given by the AM was confirmed by the analysis performed on SimilarWeb as well as with the spy tool Adplexity, whose effectiveness is well established.

  • Traffic source:

Native format is the most common for this type of nutra offers. As such, we have chosen Adcash which still has quality native traffic. We fully trust them.

  • Campaign tracking and optimization:

We targeted both mobile and desktop traffic. The isp of one and the other was provided to us by Voluum tracker whose use was essential for the optimization of this campaign. We passed conversion info through Voluum to our sources, to refine targeting and therefore optimize our bidding:

We had a lot to test: the creatives, our Landing Page, the locations and the offer itself.

  • 5 Ads were put into rotation, each tackling different content. Very quickly, the angles on the creatives were validated. The two creatives with the highest CTR also had the highest EPC:

  • Then, three Landing Pages were created. The original, then two versions with content that fit with the best performing creatives. The results were convincing!

We just had to calculate the winning combination using the eCPM 😎:
. Creative 1: 1000*0,75%*0,21 = 1,58€
. Creative 3: 1000*0,81%*0,17 = 1,38€

Thus, even with a lower CTR, the creative 1 remains the best in terms of revenue for 1.000 displays. Our funnel is refined, let’s make money!

  • Scaling and exploitation of results:

For more profitability, the next step was to duplicate our campaigns into 4 CPM campaigns and eliminate the locations and categories that did not provide results on the test phases:
. High value placements
. Medium value placements
. Low value placements
. Learning

The locations leaving the learning campaign were either stopped or its joined one of the three campaigns. After 14 days of running, we generated 2 283€ net profit, thank you lemonads!

If you also want to expand your business, join lemonads!
85% of our publishers reported an in increase in their revenues, within the first 3 months of using lemonads!

Let’s play

đŸ˜± [Leaked] Avast Subsidiary Sells “Every search. Every click. Every buy. On every site.”

Avast Antivirus, a program used by hundreds of millions of people has been found to sell highly sensitive web browsing data to some of the world’s biggest companies, including Home Depot, Google, Microsoft, Pepsi and McKinsey.

A joint investigation by Motherboard and PCMag relied on “leaked user data, contracts and other company documents” to expose the secretive market.

Jumpshot, an Avast subsidiary, boasts with data from over 100 million devices, while Avast claims to have more than 435 million active users per month.

Avast collects the data and provides it to Jumpshot, who in turn, repackage it into different products that are then sold to some of the largest companies in the world.

Some company names include the likes of: “Google, Yelp, Microsoft, McKinsey, Pepsi, Home Depot, CondĂ© Nast, Intuit, and many others.”

Reports state some clients paid millions of dollars for so-called “All Clicks Feed” which track user movement across websites in highly precise detail.

The data obtained by the investigators includes Google searches, lookups of locations and GPS coordinates on Google Maps, people browsing companies’ LinkedIn pages, particular Youtube videos and even porn websites, even down to specific search terms used.

To quote Motherboard:

“I was not aware of this,” Keith, a user of the free Avast antivirus product who only provided their first name, told Motherboard. “That sounds scary. I usually say no to data tracking,” they said, adding that they haven’t yet seen the new opt-in pop-up from Avast.”

>> The rabbit hole goes even deeper, check out the full piece, click here <<

Weekly Picks

 

GOOGLE – Google quickly “redesigning the redesign” for search results after receiving severe backlash from users. 🐔 — Read more

AMAZON – Amazon to ramp up reporting of counterfeit goods sold on their website to law enforcement. 🚔— Read more

PODCAST ADS – Podcast ads are so hot right now, see here. đŸŽ™ïž — Read more

U MAD? – How does cathartic anger management on Twitter? Let it all out. 😡 — Read more

SHOWERTHOUGHTS – “You go to math class in school so that you can unlock different buttons on your calculator” / u/jawa24
Source: Reddit

[FEATURED STM THREAD] Need Some Landing Pages? Get Them For FREE at STM.

Did you know that we now have a “Landing Page Depository” section over at the STM Forum? We started it about 2 months ago, in an effort to make the life of our newbie members a bit easier. Setting up the first LP can be a challenging task, so we just wanted to help you guys out.

There is already a couple dozens of “cleaned” LPs available for download in .zip format. Just grab the ones you like, make some edits, upload them to your hosting
 and you’re ready to launch your first campaign.

All of the LPs were chosen based on the data from the best spytool out there: Adplexity, which assures there are some top performers in the mix.

We cover a variety of verticals: the majority would be sweeps landers, but there is also dating, crypto, insurance, pin submits, forex, gambling and even some LP’s used to collect PUSH subscribers.

How’s that for a free bonus for our members?

One less excuse for delaying the launch of your first campaign 🙂

>> Preview the thread here <<

Stay tuned for the next edition of MRKTRS WKLY.

Want to offer some feedback or submit content? Email us at [email protected]