Global Digital Marketing & Retail by Alex 14
Inspiration from across the world
🔎Semrush Ranking Factors 2024: relevance, star rating, authority, quality
Semrush released its annual ranking factors for 2024. This is always a must-read for every marketer and product manager in my opinion, although there is not anything surprising if you are already on the path of quality content and engagement.
I like the fact the report also has technical insights and helps reverse engineer why pages rank and that the study is really extensive. They analyzed 16,000+ English keywords and 300,000+ SERPs to uncover correlations with search rankings.
That’s why, motivated by the Yandex code leak, which brought a lot of insight into how Yandex works as a search engine, we were driven to create this ranking factor study
The cost associated with generating results using LLMs is at least 10 times more expensive than “linear” search, which will have a massive impact on Google’s costs if it uses SGE for every query.
Now we talk about SEO, I also suggest reading this article on search KPI’s in 2024 and beyond and the impact of LLM models.
https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/the-new-search-kpis-for-2024
💾An infographic to save: what makes up a conversion rate
Sometimes you find infographics that are worth saving. You never know when you need them to convince someone at work or to just use them for inspiration for user stories. This is such an example.
🇬🇭 Short dive: E-commerce in Ghana
E-commerce in Africa is exciting. Often forgotten in the West but many things are happening in African e-commerce. I have it high on my to-do list to visit and experience and write a blog about it.
Africa has been mobile-first already for a long time, but many places still lack a good stable internet infrastructure so in web development it is essential to provide a good offline/low bandwidth experience with your platform.
African countries often have informal marketplaces combined with social commerce. These platforms, often run by local entrepreneurs, cater to the specific needs and preferences of their communities, offering a wider range of products, including locally-made goods and affordable alternatives.
Platforms like M-Pesa in Kenya have enabled millions of individuals to transact, save, and access financial services without the need for traditional banking infrastructure. In addition to mobile money, African fintech is also witnessing a rise in offline payment methods, catering to vast segments of the population without constant internet connectivity. These solutions, often relying on for example SMS enable individuals to perform transactions even in remote areas with limited internet access.
Now let’s take a quick look at Ghana. It grabbed my attention after reading a short news post.
According to Statista, the e-commerce market in Ghana is expected to reach a value of US$833.4 million by 2027, with an annual growth rate of 5.6% from 2023 to 2027.
The penetration rate of the e-commerce market in Ghana stood at 12.52% in 2023 and is expected to reach nearly 17% by 2028.
Ghana's leading e-commerce platforms include Tonaton, Jumia Ghana, and Jiji Ghana.
Tonaton is a platform where people can sell and rent for 0 fees. I checked the site, quite nice features. For example, it has a “call back” feature, special warnings for fraud and pre-payment, they have a trusted badge system and verified listings. Nice localization.
Jumija is one of the largest African platforms and opened up e-commerce for millions of Africans including in Ghana.
Jiji Ghana is a more established classifieds platform than Tonaton. But also very popular. Jiji acquired Tonaton back in 2022.
The localization part makes E-commerce in Africa and thus also Ghana so interesting. Love to see these differences in features and usage.
This is because many things that make e-commerce work in Africa differ entirely from what makes e-commerce work in the US. The social nature of commerce in Africa, the payment rails, the logistics infrastructure, and the trust gap are critical missing pieces
Dufay emphasised that more than half of Africa’s 1.4 billion people reside outside of major cities or in rural regions where agriculture is the main economic driver. This indicates that in locations where shops are not as effective, there is a high demand for the kinds of goods Leroy Merlin sells, Bloomberg reports.
“Jumia is pushing into these areas, we have the right suppliers and assortment of products, and a light logistics model to address those smaller pool of consumers,” he said. “This would be much harder to do for bigger supermarkets and shops for instance.”
https://techcabal.com/2023/06/17/giants-of-e-commerce-in-africa-the-case-of-jumia/
https://weetracker.com/2023/03/23/jumia-targets-rural-markets/
🇨🇳 McDonald’s smart cars in the Beijing subway
China’s subways are great they are clean, fast, extensive, and cheap. Now (for many people) it got even better. The McDonald’s smart car showed up in the Beijing subway. Rachel shows us in the video below.
Select the food, and pay via WeChat/Alipay, and the door will open. A few times a day McDonald’s staff does a re-fill.
Source: https://twitter.com/rachelinchina2/status/1742174472285618557?t=_D69BVwrjhrYTwqrpIgmAA&s=03
🧔” How to work with me manuals ”: especially useful in remote or international teams
Increasingly popular are the “how to work with me” templates. They are used to share your preferences and communication style with colleagues or clients. In remote teams or hybrid teams, these templates also help in bridging the gap.
Vitaly Friedman from Smashing Media recently shared a few templates. I will share a few here:
A template from Google
User Manual of Me (Miro board), I think this one is very useful.
A Figma template “user manual of me”
There is even a website where you can generate your own “user manual of me”. (smart idea)
That’s it for this week. Thank you for reading,
Alex