CDP Institute

TikTok’s on-again, off-again romance with ecommerce is warming up for the holiday season.  The company has reportedly begun to test of an in-app purchase feature called TikTok Shop with selected U.S. partners.  Previous tests ran in the U.K. and Southeast Asia.

Some Shopify users have spotted a ‘search for anything’ test that lets them search all merchants for products based on keywords or previous purchases.  It would be a huge change for Shopify, which until now has given merchants isolated stores of their own.  The company previously said it wouldn’t move in the multi-merchant marketplace direction but stuff happens.

Don’t ask why, but we have three items related to product-led growth today, Dear Reader.  First is the launch of Loops.ai, whose “no-code solution plugs into data sources and automatically runs thousands of proprietary analyses and ML models that examine millions of data points to reveal exactly what product and growth teams need to know.”  They use “causal influence methodology” and $14 million in seed funding to make it happen.

Next up is MadKudu, which has offered automated lead scoring since 2014 and more recently focused on analyzing product usage data to find sales opportunities.  They just raised $18 million, neatly tripling their previous $9 million in funding.   Kudu is an African antelope species. I don’t know why he’s mad.

Finally we have Heap, a digital analytics provider that traces the paths users take through digital products.  They just released Journeys, which they say is “the only tool that combines visual mapping with data science and session replay.”  That particular combination may indeed be unique but only an industry expert could say for sure.

Twilio Segment has added a new version tailored to healthcare providers.  HIPAA compliance is a prominent feature, of course.  It’s not the first CDP to offer a healthcare edition, which is a growing market for the industry.

Optimove just announced TikTok and Snapchat advertising integrations, making it easier to send audiences to those platforms.  Optimove is already integrated with Facebook, Instagram, Google, Criteo, and other ad platforms.  Still, it’s a good reminder that CDPs are increasingly used for acquisition in addition to reaching existing customers.

Data aggregator Acxiom has joined the Salesforce AppExchange, which will make it easier to add Acxiom data to customer records in the Salesforce CDP.  Once in the CDP, the data will be available to the many Salesforce “clouds” for sales, service, marketing, loyalty, commerce, and whatever.  We’ve said it before: third-party data is not dead.

Sprinklr, which collects and classifies customer comments from social media, review sites, chat apps, and other external systems, has expanded its partnership with Salesforce to make it easier to load that data into the Salesforce CDP.  They also announced an agreement to work with Accenture to make it happen.  Sprinklr has already has partnerships with other CDP vendors including Adobe and SAP.

Regulators are increasingly hostile to app store owners who require apps to funnel payments through the store owner’s payment system and pay a hefty commission for the privilege.  Apple has received most of the unwanted attention, but Google is in regulators’ sights as well.  Google has responded with a pilot program to allow third-party billing in Android apps.  It just expanded the pilot to include the U.S., European Union, and other regions.

Google is also trying to keep regulators at bay when it comes to privacy and ad sales.  Its bird-named plans to replace third-party cookies with visitor clustering methods haven’t taken off but it’s still trying with Topics API, which classifies users based the sites they visit.  Criteo just issued test results that find Topics API is considerably less effective than Criteo’s own competing system.   They have an obvious axe to grind but the analysis is still worth a look.

No-code and low-code technologies are often described as enabling business users to do work that would otherwise require support from professional software developers.  But, at least according to this DuploCloud report, the professionals have widely adopted no/low-code for themselves: 71% are already using them and most of the others plan to.  Compliance and security are the biggest benefits.