Digital Marketing Reads – Volume 11

Here’s the latest instalment of Digital Marketing Reads, a roundup of some of the more interesting articles we’ve read lately in the digital marketing world.

Big Amazon affiliate commission rate cuts among latest program changes

As of April 21 of 2020, commission rates are lower for many product categories for Amazon affiliates.

What does this mean? Well, bloggers and influencers often recommend products on Amazon and earn a small commission for any items purchased through their link. Amazon’s commission rates have always been quite low, but now they’re almost laughably low for some product categories. Furniture and home improvement dropped from 8% to 3%, headphones and beauty dropped from 6% to 3%, and health and personal care has decreased from 5% to 1%.

It’s any business’ right to adjust commission rates as they see fit; however, to do so during a pandemic when essentially everyone EXCEPT for Amazon is suffering financially is arguably not ok.

If you’re an Amazon affiliate, now might be an opportune time to research other affiliate programs to replace it.

Image via High Paying Affiliate Programs.

Google Cutting Up to 50% of Marketing Budget

According to this article, “An internal email reveals that Google is cutting up to 50% of its marketing budget for the second half of 2020.” Yikes!

Our best guess is that it’s Google’s attempt to make up for loss of advertising profit since the COVID-19 pandemic hit. In particular, advertising in the travel sector has all but dropped to zero in the past month, which is money straight out of Google’s pocket.

To cut costs, Google are doing things like implementing a hiring freeze and cutting non-essential Why You Need Online Marketing Now More Than Ever and travel during this time. Will it make up for all the ad earnings lost? Unlikely. But it’ll at least lessen the blow just a little bit for now.

Image via Search Engine Journal.

Facebook & Instagram to Show Where Popular Pages Are Posting From

In social media news, Facebook and Instagram are beta testing a location-stamping feature on posts from popular pages. This will allow users to see which country the page manager is posting from.

According to Facebook, “We want to make sure people use our services authentically and can understand who is behind the posts they’re seeing… so we’re taking extra steps to make Pages and accounts with large audiences more transparent.”

For now, the feature is only being rolled out to pages with a large US-based audience, which means it may affect pages managed in other countries.

Facebook also claims, “These changes are part of our broader efforts to protect elections and increase transparency on Facebook and Instagram so people can make more informed decisions about the posts they read, trust and share.”

With the upcoming US presidential election, this change is very well-timed. No word yet on whether the feature will be rolled out to other pages, or when.