SMB Websites and Commerce Now Inseparable Mailchimp started as an email platform and moved into "marketing automation." It has now become an all-inclusive SMB SaaS platform for digital

Apple TrackingEarnings: MSFT, Shopify, Facebook, Apple & Google Beat It's a big earnings week. Microsoft and Shopify reported strong revenue growth [https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/27/

Google Poised to Disrupt the $27B Food Delivery Business Google has become a potentially disruptive player in the multi-billion dollar food delivery business. One estimate of the market's

Native Apple Maps Ratings Coming Soon to US In September 2020 [https://searchengineland.com/apple-ratings-are-coming-to-ios-14-how-disruptive-will-it-be-340068] , it became clear that Apple Maps was going to start collecting its own user photos

Zagat Relaunches with New Scoring, Emphasis on Photos The Zagat restaurant guide was first published in 1979 by Nina and Tim Zagat. After many years as a print publication, its

Most Franchise Brands Local Marketing Laggards SOCi's recently published "Localized Marketing Benchmark Report" (reg. req'd [https://www.meetsoci.com/insight/lmbr-report-2021/]) scores 275 franchise

Stim-Driven Retail Booming, Online and Off March retail sales grew by almost 10% [https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/15/us-retail-sales-march-2021.html], driven by government stimulus checks, vaccinations and increasing

FB Survey: SMBs Remain Fragile As Economy Reopens A recent report (.pdf [https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/US_SSMB_Full_Report.pdf]) from Facebook chronicles the challenges

MSFT Buys Speech Pioneer Nuance for $16 billion. Announced today, the Nuance acquisition [https://www.reuters.com/article/nuance-commns-ma-microsoft/update-1-microsoft-to-buy-ai-firm-nuance-communications-in-197-bln-deal-in-healthcare-push-idUSL4N2M536I] becomes Microsoft's second largest after LinkedIn ($27 billion)

Swyft Wants to 'Democratize' Same-Day Delivery Swyft has created a "B2B managed-marketplace solving for affordability in last-mile logistics." Its objective is to bring Amazon-like same-day delivery

Google: Local and Digital Now Joined at the Hip In a blog post [https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/local-shopping-trends/] Google confirms what nearly everyone in local has known for years:

Verizon Inks Catalina Deal to Track Ad Impact In-Store Last week Verizon announced [https://www.verizonmedia.com/insights/catalina-real-time-decisioning-partnership] a partnership with Catalina [https://www.catalina.com/] to connect digital

Squarespace Buying Restaurant Startup Tock for $400M Bloomberg is reporting [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-31/squarespace-buys-restaurant-tech-startup-tock-for-400-million] that restaurant reservations and delivery startup Tock was acquired by SMB site

Vaccines Unlocking Pent-up Consumer Demand There's pent-up consumer demand for a return to normalcy. Evidence of new optimism, massive consumer savings [https://www.nearmedia.co/local-revenge-spending/] and stimulus-driven

Amazon Is to Google As Google Is to Bing Years ago, then Google CEO Eric Schmidt said Amazon was the company's biggest competitor. He wasn't wrong.

Big Tech Hearings: Likely 230 Reform but How Much? The CEOs of Google, Facebook and Twitter testified before Congress yesterday [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/technology/facebook-twitter-google-capitol-riots-hearing.html]

Coming 'Revenge Spending Binge' Will Boost Local We all know the e-commerce growth story [https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2021/02/15/ecommerce-during-coronavirus-pandemic-in-charts/] . That, combined with closures from major

Does Local Dominate 'Zero-Click' Search? According to SimilarWeb data, analyzed by Rand Fishkin [https://sparktoro.com/blog/in-2020-two-thirds-of-google-searches-ended-without-a-click/] , nearly two-thirds (65%) of Google searches "ended in the

Economy Poised for Comeback but for Whom? The US Federal Reserve is projecting [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-economy-analysis/analysis-europe-must-play-catch-up-as-u-s-economy-readies-for-take-off-idUSKBN2BB14C] white-hot economic growth in 2021: 6.5%. As vaccinations roll

Survey: 73% Say Unlikely to Opt-in to IDFA Tracking As we wait for the rollout of Apple's IDFA opt-in rules, there's ongoing speculation about how consumers

Amazon Cares About the Future of Healthcare Healthcare spending in the US is nearly $4 trillion annually, more than $11,500 per person. It's an evolving market and

Near-Me Search Hits 'All Time High' in 2020, Says Google Near-Me search hit an all-time high in 2020 according to Google. That's one of several trends

People Want to Support SMBs but Buy from Amazon Amazon technically lost share as e-commerce expanded in 2020 but it was the big winner during COVID lockdowns. Despite its anti-union

The Marketing Lesson of COVID: CX A year later, there are many answers to the question, "what did we learn from COVID-19?" We could discuss policy, social or

Study: 66% of Traffic in 2020 from Mobile A new data analysis [https://www.semrush.com/blog/mobile-vs-desktop/] looks at 2020 search trends. Many desktop apologists touted the return of

Does Google Challenger Neeva Have a Chance? I was given early access to Neeva [https://neeva.co/], the new search engine created by former Google ad boss Sridhar Ramaswamy, who

IAB: Media Companies Must Offer Trust + More Value A new IAB report [https://www.iab.com/insights/iab-outlook-2021-ecosystem/] on the changing digital marketplace argues that publishers must deliver more value

Women Are Better Leaders, Only 37 CEOs in Fortune 500 If you look at the data, there's no argument: women make better leaders than men. Women consistently outperform

Google and Facebook Responsible for Paid-Content Rise Facebook and Google often discuss how ads help keep the web free. However, as a Bloomberg opinion piece points out [https://www.bloomberg.

Privacy First or Google First? No ID Draws Mixed Reactions Once third party cookies disappear, Google won't replace them with an alternative identifier. Multiple companies have been working

Survey: We Don't Care That Google Has Our Data There's a gap between how many Americans feel about the tech companies that rule their lives and

Coming Soon: The Bank of Walmart Walmart just hired [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-28/with-goldman-hires-mcmillon-moves-closer-to-bank-of-walmart?] two senior Goldman Sachs bankers; could “The Bank of Walmart” be far behind?

The Antitrust Stars Are Aligning The antitrust stars are apparently aligned. The US House of Representatives is confident [https://www.protocol.com/Policy/house-hearing-antitrust] it can produce bipartisan antitrust reform

Facebook Says Personalized Ads 'a Lifeline' for SMBs Facebook has complained that Apple's coming App Tracking Transparency [https://developer.apple.com/app-store/user-privacy-and-data-use/] privacy rules will

Yelp: SaaS Tool Provider for Restaurants Google is badly beating Yelp. It's the top reviews destination by far and has much more review volume across categories. Yelp is

Shiny New Object: Augmented Reality Glasses Global smartphone sales [https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2021-02-22-4q20-smartphone-market-share-release] were down 12.5% in 2020. Apple was the top smartphone maker in

E-commerce in 2020 Was 14% (or 20%) of US Retail US e-commerce in 2020 was nearly [https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/us-e-commerce-sales-nearly-800-billion-in-2020] $800 billion, compared with about $600 billion in

Ghost Kitchens: The Future of Restaurants? There may already be as many as 100,000 cloud or ghost kitchens [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-11-18/what-are-virtual-restaurants-chili-s-and-applebee-s-add-wings-brands] in the US.

Angry Facebook Bans News in Australia Google and Facebook have been resisting Australia's News Media Bargaining Code (.pdf [https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/ems/r6652_

Amazon Buys Shopify Competitor Selz Selz is an Australia-based e-commerce platform for SMBs. It was acquired by Amazon [https://founderu.selz.com/selz-update/] in mid-January. Specific deal terms weren'

Google Testing 'Find Results' on Yelp in Local SERP Early last year Google implemented [https://searchengineland.com/new-local-serp-live-in-europe-329553] a new local SERP in Europe, featuring a carousel that

[https://nearmedia.co/memo] Facebook's Smartwatch Is Probably DOA Last week The Information first reported [https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facebook-plans-smartwatch-with-focus-on-messaging-health] that Facebook was working on an Apple

Poll Finds Digital Ad Burnout from Screen Overload Are people paying less attention to digital advertising? A new survey [https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/consumer-research-shows-heightened-receptivity-to-out-of-home-messaging-especially-in-big-urban-areas-301226044.html] from Harris for OAAA,

Private Equity to Spin Out Constant Contact Web hosting holding company Endurance International Group acquired Constant Contact in 2015 for roughly $1 billion. The latter was supposed to add new

Survey: Majority Will Say No to Facebook Ad Tracking Facebook has begun testing a prompt [https://www.nearmedia.co/foot-traffic-outlook-facebook-counters-apple-prompt-big-tech-promote-bobs/] asking users to embrace ad tracking ahead of Apple'

Facebook Moderates Ahead of Section 230 Changes Facebook announced [https://about.fb.com/news/2020/04/covid-19-misinfo-update/#removing-more-false-claims] yesterday it's getting deeper into content moderation by taking down

The Super Bowl Was Boring, So Were Most of the Ads Defying predictions of close game, the Super Bowl was essentially over early in the first half. Unless you'

Every Super Bowl We Ask: 'Is It Still Worth It?' The Super Bowl is Sunday. You know that. And while some high-profile advertisers such as Coke, Ford and

Walmart Buys Dynamic Creative Platform Thunder Walmart is buying PaperG/Thunder [https://www.wsj.com/articles/walmart-buys-ad-tech-to-chase-small-business-advertisers-11612438200?] and its dynamic display ad platform, in part to lure more SMB advertisers.

Report: Store Foot Traffic to Remain Down Post-Vaccine Businesses ravaged by COVID-19 hope widespread vaccination will trigger a return to pre-pandemic consumer behavior. But survey data [https://www.firstinsight.com/

Apple Confirms ‘IFDA Deprecation’ Will Go Live in Early Spring On Thursday, Data Privacy Data, Apple confirmed that its App Tracking Transparency requirement, which was originally supposed to go into

W [https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/jan/22/google-threatens-to-shut-down-search-in-australia-if-digital-news-code-goes-ahead] [https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/21/google-agrees-to-pay-french-publishers-for-news.html] hat the FLoC? Google says its cookie alternative is working The