Cory Henke: Meta and the New Commerce frontier

Transcript: Meta and the New Commerce frontier

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Welcome to ppc.zone August, 2022. I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. And I created this event to elevate new perspectives and insights in our industry. 

First up in the zone. We have a speaker with more than 15 years of experience in marketing, advertising, and business intelligence. He's been running his own agency for the last five years and is here to share his perspective on meta and the new commerce frontier.

He volunteered his time to mentor one of our speakers at last month's PPC zone, but today is his time to shine. Please. Welcome Cory Henke. 

Hello. Hello everyone. Very nice to be here and excited to get started. And we'll be talking about meta and the commerce frontier. Cory Henke, as Jyll mentioned at our agency, we're primarily, e-commerce a big differentiator for us is the fact that we have really cool analytics tools.

And I've been speaking for about five years as well, across a variety of different conferences. And so today we'll talk about the social commerce landscape that is IG shop, Meta’s commerce manager, as well as what you see in the future. So first let's talk a little bit about the landscape. What we can see is that social commerce sales have increased and will continue to increase 2 20, 25, according to e-marketer and large increases during the pandemic.

And we will still see double digit increases through 2025. The most important factor is the fact that like all social channels have the ability to do social commerce. It's just Facebook and Instagram, which drive the most inspiration to make a purchase as well as the most direct purchase on platform. And that's, again, something that we will discuss today.

But the important part is to understand that all social channels or platforms have the ability to let advertisers have a shop. I think the unique thing about Metas shop is the fact that you're able to have the ability to customize the cover art as well as the order of the products. And if you click on a collection, you're able to then see the products in the second screen.

And then if you click on a product, you're able to see a product page. Within your meta shop, or this is a, an IG shop example and a new feature is the ability to do layout optimization, which is basically if you turn this feature on, you allow Facebook to be able to change the cards and collections in your shop, to what you know, to what they know about a user in terms of what they might click on or convert.

How do people find the shop? The two primary ways are through a brand page and clicking the view shop button directly to the brand shop page where you can then browse categories, look at collections or specific products. The next area is a news feed post, and that way you can click view shop to end up on the shop you know, core brand page.

Or you can click the actual product tag, which brings you into the actual product page, where you also have the ability to host UGC images as well as videos. What's interesting is that there's also a shop tab and the shop tab is new because it's now getting premium placement right there at the bottom of the Instagram screen.

And when you click on that shop tab, you're able to see now categories and these different categories are listed here on the left, but you also have this area, this top tab area. And in this tab area, you have very unique sort of views into shops you follow. So there's people and brands that you follow and if they have a shop, this is gonna pop up. And then you have an offer section where you can have offers and then a featured section, which are called drops. And these are just new products for brands as well as you have IG live, as well as buy on Instagram. And so these are, these are products on buy on Instagram, where you can purchase directly on Instagram.

So. One of the other cool features that we've been diving into a little bit more is specifically the search inside of shop. And you can see on the far left, if you search for something, you get both searches as well as brands. And the interesting thing is that those brands, they usually have the keyword in their description or potentially their name, which I think does matter in something that we're helping advertisers with.

And the next screen you'll see, like when you search for, you know a keyword, you can sometimes find other keywords that might help you. Blog perspective, content perspective or just product development and the third card. You'll see that when you click on, you know, a search term, you end up with that product view and you get a chance to change price, color material.

But most importantly, there, these two little arrows on the far right, are what you see when you can buy something on Instagram. And we're wondering if that gets premium placement in the future.

Next we'll look specifically at the commerce manager. And so this is where you manage a lot of the aspects of your shop, as well as see into some of the analytics. So the first thing is that you get a variety of analytics and, and Facebook does a great job of taking data that was inside of your shop and then marrying it to data that happened on your website.

So they can see product views clicks to websites, as well as purchases on your website from people who visited your shop. Now you can break things down by top posts where visitors came from, but ultimately they want you to unlock more data by implementing checkout. The goal of Instagram is to implement check.

And also the goal of Instagram is to get users to purchase on Instagram. And so this is a great way by providing you more data to get brands, to, to, to implement checkout. This is one of the coolest features that I've found is the ability to look at followers versus non followers in terms of how they purchase on your website.

I think one of the things we've always tried to figure out is the worst of a follower, but in this case, I can easily show that within a month's time span, revenue is increased by 121%. And 70% of those that revenue can be sourced to followers versus non followers. I think this helps me understand that like followers actually mean something and I could put more effort into driving more potential followers.

The next thing is discovery. How do people find our shop? Right? And one of the most important areas is like they find our shop from within the shop, right? If people are just browsing within a shop, they can find our shop and that's one way that they find it. And that has grown over. The other way is by product tagging.

And that's the most important one to this specific brand, as you see at the top with Instagram feed. And so we've seen that also grow as, as the, as reels have grown as well. So those two pieces are important. And then the piece at the bottom, which would be IG shop search, we're also watching this grow. And the cool thing about it is they give us this really cool Google Analytics metric called bounce rate. An Instagram shop search with the intent does have the lowest bounce rate. As it's growing, something we're watching closely as Instagram search is probably gonna be as impactful as Amazon search, but maybe not as impactful as Google search.

Ultimately, when we think about the future of social commerce, it's gonna come down to placing an order within this app. So to convince brands to do that Facebook is now saying no fees through the end of 22, 2022. They'll allow, if you implement checkout to do product launch, Offers, have shopping partners do live shopping, which is on IG.

It goes away on Facebook. October 1st, the affiliate program is currently on hold and then the conversion beta that we're testing across multiple brands. Being able to see conversions from organic posts that are tagged with the product has been super advantageous to us, as well as comparing creators that tag our post end up in our shop.

Also great to see the conversions there, compare, contrast, but great things coming. And then ultimately at the end of the day, I think that the big upcoming battle is Instagram versus Amazon. And I believe this really becomes a true, I think race when, when Instagram adds the shop feature to the web.

So that's where I think this becomes the biggest battle, but that is the future. And ultimately I really appreciate the time ppc.zone, Jyll and everybody watching today. Thank you.

Thank you Cory, for sharing your unique perspective and insights with us in the zone. If you'd like to connect with Cory, you can find him on Twitter at Corey Henke. 

To learn more about ppc.zone and our speakers, or apply to speak at an upcoming event. Visit ppc.zone. I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. You can find me on Twitter @jyllsaskingales. I look forward to seeing you next time in the zone.