You’re probably interested in the rumors about Google’s plans for a watered-down version of Apple’s anti-device-tracking policies, Dear Reader, but this newsletter deals only in hard, cold facts. So instead I’ll report that Amazon’s product recommendation technology is now available to Shopify merchants. The connection is an app from HiConversion, which uses the Amazon Personalize engine on Amazon Web Services.
Recommendation engines are only as good as their data, and many companies don’t have enough data of their own to be useful. PreciseTarget is filling the gap with product affinity profiles on 200 million U.S. shoppers based on more than five billion retail transactions from 1,000 merchants. Marketers can add preference scores to existing customers and send targeted prospect lists to media partners.
Let’s do some martech mind-reading today, Dear Reader. First we’ll look at B2B tech marketing community FINITE’s survey, which found that 65% of respondents plan to increase use of martech in 2021 and 75% plan to focus on personalization. That’s cheery!
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.