Bleak Milestone: 800K Dead from COVID Later this week the US will hit 50M cases and 800,000 dead from COVID, likely an undercount of the real mortality figure. The

Google's Local Pack Refresh During a previous Near Memo [https://www.nearmedia.co/squarespaces-everything-to-sell-anything-google-vs-lowe-and-has-the-local-pack-outlived-its-usefulness/] we discussed how Google's local results were in need of an upgrade.

Yelp: 'Our Review Approach Is Best' Yelp released the results of an October consumer survey [https://blog.yelp.com/news/survey-finds-what-makes-reviews-trustworthy-consumers-want-more-than-ratings/] about reviews and consumer trust. Yelp'

Will Smart Glasses Replace the iPhone? Apple has an entire building and hundreds of employees dedicated to its forthcoming mixed-reality glasses. The expectation is that the first of perhaps multiple

Xooglers Sue Google for Abandoning 'Don't Be Evil' Google removed the phrase "Don't Be Evil [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_

Cyber Monday Comes Up a Bit Short As with Black Friday, Cyber Monday's spending disappointed. Last year US consumers spent $10.8 billion on Cyber Monday. However this

Black Friday: Not Quite As Black Black Friday didn't quite deliver. With fewer in-store discounts, foot traffic was nearly 30% lower than 2019 [https://www.cnbc.com/2021/

Macy's: Digital Commerce Better with Stores More than a decade ago I ran into Euclid Analytics [https://searchengineland.com/euclid-offers-google-analytics-for-the-real-world-99982] ' founder Brent Franson on a flight from

Survey: 'At Least' Half of Search Is Local For years, I've been trying to get an accurate sense of what percentage of Google search volume is

Outlook: Small SMB Optimism Declines Earlier this year when the economy was on a tear, there were millions of jobs unfilled, especially among local businesses. Now the economic vigor may

Who's Buying More Online? Affluent Consumers As we head into the holiday shopping season in earnest, there's lots of speculation about the mix of online and

Amazon Alexa Is 7 Years Old On the heels of the failed Fire Phone, Amazon released the first generation Echo (feat. Alexa) in November 2014 [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/

Will You Use You.com? On the heels of Neeva [https://neeva.com/], another search engine has launched: You.com [http://you.com/]. It appeared in public beta on Tuesday

FTC's Emerging Review Fraud Strategy In October, the FTC notified major US brands [https://www.nearmedia.co/fake-reviews-crackdown-amazons-toyland-shoppers-dont-care-about-voice-search/] that "misleading use of endorsements could lead to major

GMB to GBP: So What? I know that you already saw: Google "rebranded" Google My Business as Google Business Profile [https://support.google.com/business/thread/133876833/introducing-new-updates-to-business-profile?

Amazon's Lock on E-commerce Amazon dominates [https://www.emarketer.com/content/amazon-dominates-us-ecommerce-though-its-market-share-varies-by-category] e-commerce. And it appears there's nothing on the horizon that will change that. A

Going Back into Stores Most holiday shopping surveys say a version of the same thing: consumers plan to shop online but stores remain important to their overall experience. This hybrid/

It's Meta Time or the End of Days We're late to the meta-party. I'm sure you've read 20 articles and 10x more

Q3 Impact of Apple Privacy Rules 'Modest' Snap said it was hurt [https://www.nearmedia.co/amazon-goes-bopis-isp-surveillance-apple-bites-snap/]. But Twitter reported the revenue impact was "lower than expected

AGs: Google's AMP a Scheme to Drive Revenue The second amended antitrust complaint against Google (.pdf [https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.564903/gov.uscourts.nysd.

Amazon Goes BOPIS with 'Local Selling' One of Google's strategies against Amazon is showing online and local product inventory in SERPs. Traditional retailers have sought to

Yelp: 85% of Business Locations Have Re-Opened Though the Delta variant is still here, local economies are nearly back to normal, according to Yelp's Q3 economic impact report

Privacy Rules Juice Apple Search Revenue Is it just a coincidence? According to a Financial Times analysis [https://twitter.com/PatrickMcGee_/status/1449608262492459011], since the introduction of iOS 14.5,

FTC Begins Fake Review Crackdown Earlier this week, the FTC notified [https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2021/10/latest-ftc-notice-penalty-offenses-tells-700-national] "more than 700 businesses [https://www.ftc.gov/

Yelp's New Services for Home Services Last month, Yelp integrated its restaurant tools into a "Guest Manager" SaaS suite [https://www.nearmedia.co/google-local-inventory-astro/]. Now it&

Some SMBs Questioning Dependance on Social Millions of small businesses (SMBs) consider social media – Facebook and Instagram in particular – their top marketing channel. But following two recent outages and a

Welcome: If Google and Instagram Got Together... There's a new local search app [https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/07/welcome-debuts-a-smarter-city-guide-app-on-ios-backed-by-3-5m-led-by-accel/] in town, called Welcome (iOS only [https://apps.

Haugen: The Algorithm Is the Evil It's only a couple of days since former Facebook PM Frances Haugen appeared on 60 Minutes [https://www.nearmedia.co/fb/]. (You&

Facebook Whistleblower: 'Profits over People' You probably saw or read about the CBS 60 Minutes "Facebook Whistleblower" segment [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-misinformation-public-60-minutes-2021-10-03/] last night.

Marketers: Reputation Management Trumps Ads According to a new survey of multi-location marketers, "managing online reputation is now more important than advertising": 57% to 43%. The survey, which

Google's Refocused Lens and 'In-Stock' Filter Google is (re)introducing two shopping tools that have been around for awhile: Google Lens and local inventory. Google Lens

Local Restaurants on Front Lines of Vax Wars More than 180 million Americans have been fully vaccinated [https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-total-admin-rate-total] and more than 210 million have

Apple's Opt-In Ad Rules Hurt Facebook There are many cynics [https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/24/apples-ios-changes-hurt-facebooks-ad-business.html] who believe Apple's opt-in tracking rules [https:

Apple Maps Has Finally Arrived After a botched original launch and years of playing catch-up to Google Maps, Apple Maps has finally become truly competitive. There are a wide range

LSAs and Lawyers: Heading for Divorce? While nobody knows how much Google is making on Local Services Ads (LSAs), they're popular and growing. LSAs were introduced for the

What's My Business: WhatsApp's 'Yellow Pages' Earlier this week we wrote about Twitter's relatively new "About Module [https://www.nearmedia.co/

Twitter's 'About Module' for Local Businesses In April Twitter launched [https://twitter.com/TwitterBusiness/status/1384968745156755458] "Professional Profiles." They offer a verified and expanded

Shopify CAC, Marketing Benchmarks for SMBs Marketers are always looking for good benchmarking data. Shopify offers some [https://www.shopify.com/blog/customer-acquisition-cost] (based on a survey) that reflect SMB

Chase Buying Zagat and The Infatuation Banking giant JPMorgan Chase said [https://finance.yahoo.com/finance/news/jpmorgan-chase-acquire-leading-restaurant-171500485.html#:~:text=NEW%20YORK%2C%20September%2009%2C%202021,recommendations%20for%20where%

News Pubs Liable for Random Facebook Comments In a defamation case that may have broad implications, the Australian High Court ruled [https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/sep/08/high-court-rules-australian-media-companies-are-liable-for-defamatory-comments-posted-on-their-facebook-pages?

Report: Intuit to Buy Mailchimp for $10B Bloomberg reported [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-01/intuit-said-in-talks-to-buy-mailchimp-for-more-than-10-billion] this week that Intuit, maker of tax and accounting software, is seeking to

SMB Survey: 55% Not Buying Digital Ads A new survey [https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/366360/small-businesses-increasing-digital-ad-spend-not.html] of 800 SMBs by social content platform Ripl [https://www.ripl.

Survey: Annual 'SMB' Ad Budgets $109K Borrell Associates published its annual local advertiser survey [http://www.insideradio.com/free/borrell-survey-points-to-strengthening-ad-market-radio-in-good-position-to-benefit-from-gains/article_ce63ca88-0631-11ec-ace2-df5cc2e20782.html] . Conducted in Q2, the sample

WTF: Google Paying $15B for iPhone Default Search There have been various informed estimates over the years about how much Google is paying Apple to be the Safari browser'

GoLocal: Walmart's Last-Mile Delivery Service Walmart is doing something that would have been unthinkable in a pre-Amazon world: offering its delivery infrastructure to other retailers. Announced earlier this

Study: Most Search Queries Are 'Mid-Funnel' Marketers discuss the "purchase funnel" all the time without really knowing what it means for their actual customer's

Contrarian Move: Amazon Plans Department Stores At a time when e-commerce is driving retail growth [https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/article/quarterly-online-sales/?], Amazon is planning more physical stores. The Wall Street

'Historic Moment': Amazon Passes Walmart Walmart reported [https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2021/08/17/walmart-releases-q2-fy22-earnings] quarterly earnings yesterday. The world's largest traditional retailer said that

Apple Boosting Search with iOS 15 Apple has been slowly and incrementally improving its Spotlight Search feature on the iPhone over time. With iOS 15,  there are new upgrades and

'Vaxports' Coming to an SMB Near You As the seriousness of the Delta Variant sinks in, consumers are becoming more depressed [https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/13/

Google Picking Winners and Losers in Food Delivery Google is beset by antitrust critics on all sides. In its defense Google often argues its decisions are for the benefit of

Climate Crisis: No More BAU You've probably read about [https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/09/world/ipcc-climate-key-takeaways/index.html] a massive new UN report [https://www.ipcc.

Yelp Surprise Profit, Vaccination Attributes Yelp announced [https://www.yelp-ir.com/news-releases/news-release-details/2021/Yelp-Reports-Second-Quarter-2021-Financial-Results/] a surprise Q2 profit and 52% YoY revenue growth this week. The company saw gains

Local and Organic Drive 73% of Page Views If you didn't already know, the two most effective digital channels are organic SEO and local (Google Local Pack), according

The (New) Ethics of Targeting and Tracking For 20+ years, digital marketers essentially captured as much data as they could about consumer behavior and identities, as quietly as possible – so

Snap Personalizes Map with 'My Places' It's "places week." On Wednesday Apple relaunched its Maps Connect listings portal, as Places on Maps [https://www.

Apple 'Places' Replaces Maps Connect Apple's self-service listings management portal Maps Connect, which launched in 2014 [https://searchengineland.com/apple-launches-maps-connect-self-service-local-listings-portal-206349] , is now "Places on Maps

Roofer Sues Over 1-Star Reviews, Gets Bombed File this in the "will they never learn" column. A couple renting a house in Vancouver, Washington engaged with a roofer,

Section 230 Bill Takes Aim at Facebook One of the first concrete acts of "Section 230 reform" is Senator Amy Klobuchar’s proposed Health Misinformation Act of 2021

Square Bank Should Scare Traditionals Square has expanded its banking capabilities [https://squareup.com/us/en/press/introducing-square-banking] and is now offering full-service banking for small business customers. Formally called

Olympics Race to Avoid Financial Disaster In an ominous sign for the 2021 Olympics, Toyota said it will not air TV commercials [https://apnews.com/article/sports-2020-tokyo-olympics-business-health-coronavirus-pandemic-5eb0e254b9a0cac7ad57005677eebe66] during the games.

What's Really Going on with IDFA? There's a lot of conflicting information about Apple's AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) and the number of opt-ins. According to Flurry

Craigslist Revenue Off Almost 50% Since 2018 Haven't used Craigslist lately? You aren't alone. According to a report [https://aimgroup.com/2021/02/11/craigslist-traffic-revenue-fell-radically-in-2020/] from

Biden's Sweeping Competition Order Faces Challenges On Friday President Biden signed an expansive executive order [https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/07/09/executive-order-on-promoting-competition-in-the-american-economy/] "promoting competition

Regulating Google Play: Would It Matter? Earlier this week Attorneys general from 36 states and Washington DC filed an antitrust suit [https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/07/36-states-dc-sue-google-for-alleged-antitrust-violations-in-its-android-app-store-498622]

$4.3 billion: Nextdoor Finally Going Public Current CEO Sarah Friar replaced founding CEO Nirav Tolia in late 2018, roughly a decade after the company that became Nextdoor was founded

Location Intelligence Enters a Challenging New Phase Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley said he's "stepping back" from his current role [https://streetfightmag.com/2021/06/29/where-location-intelligence-stands-as-foursquare-founder-steps-back/

FTC Humiliated, Facebook Antitrust Case Dismissed Earlier today, a federal court judge dismissed [https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/28/judge-dismisses-ftc-antitrust-complaint-against-facebook.html] state and FTC antitrust lawsuits against Facebook. Like

Google Gives Cookies a Temporary Reprieve Google said [https://blog.google/products/chrome/updated-timeline-privacy-sandbox-milestones/] this week that it's going to push back the Chrome deprecation of third party

E-commerce Review Fraud a $152B Problem Nearly 90% of global e-commerce spending (eMarketer: $4.3 trillion) is influenced by reviews. That means product reviews on Amazon and other marketplaces are

Amazon Prime Day Sales May Reach $11B Last year Amazon Prime Day generated almost $10.5 billion in sales. This year should beat that, although Prime Day won't

Google Building Search to Sale Local Experiences Google is making it easier [https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/small-business/show-what-your-business-offers/] for local business owners to input their content directly from SERPs and

Uberall Raises $115M, Buys MomentFeed Given that I work for Uberall we debated whether to cover this. But it is a big story; so here's the news [https:

Digital Boosted SMBs, Can They Keep It Up? Many small businesses pivoted during COVID to offer more digital capabilities: better websites, chatbots, online appointments, ordering and food delivery. Half of

Antitrust Bills 'Package' Takes Aim at Big Tech A bipartisan group of House lawmakers today introduced [https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/11/amazon-apple-facebook-and-google-targeted-in-bipartisan-antitrust-reform-bills.html] five separate reform

Apple Goes All Google Maps Apple made a ton of OS and feature announcements during its WWDC developer keynote [https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/101/] on Monday. The

Google: Newspaper Ad Losses Not Our Fault Newspaper publishers often blame Google for the decline of ad revenues. In the US, Craigslist took lots of blame early on. More recently,

Nextdoor Revamps Classifieds – Now Called 'Finds' Nextdoor announced [https://blog.nextdoor.com/2021/06/03/introducing-free-finds-a-new-experience-to-find-free-items-nearby/] a new section in its classifieds marketplace, for free items: Free Finds

To the Winners Go the Stores Even as many retailers struggle [https://www.aarp.org/money/credit-loans-debt/info-2020/bankrupt-retail-chain-store-list-is-growing.html] and pundits pronounce stores endangered, we're entering a

Google: 'Content for Data' Is Over Google held its annual Google Marketing Live event this week. There were many ads- and analytics- related announcements [https://blog.google/products/

Fake Review Economy Is Booming Google is the dominant local reviews platform [https://www.nearmedia.co/when-google-came-to-dominate-reviews/]. It also dominates the world of fake reviews. A new investigation [https://www.

Food Fight: DoorDash vs. UberEats Food delivery in the US is estimated to be worth nearly $30 billion according to estimates [https://www.statista.com/outlook/dmo/eservices/online-food-delivery/united-states#

20 Years After Apple, Google Opens a Retail Store It's 20 years since the first Apple Store opened in Tyson's Corner VA. And it's

AI Making 'Search' More Conversational AI was center stage at Google's I/O developer event. During a 2+ hour long keynote [https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Mask Confusion Hits States, Retailers Last week the CDC changed its mask guidance [https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vaccinated.html]. The agency proclaimed that fully vaccinated people didn&

The Future of (Local) Commerce Shopify's new Future of Commerce report [https://www.shopify.com/future-of-commerce/2021] builds on surveys as well as customer data. It's

Nextdoor: Preference for SMBs Growing Nextdoor released [https://business.nextdoor.com/enterprise/blog/nextdoor-insights-series-5-our-changing-spending-habits] a new report, showcasing attitudes and behaviors of its audience ("consumers 16-64 who have used

Leak Shows Massive Scale of Review Fraud The scale of the review fraud problem online is not precisely known, except that it's big. This is especially true for

IDFA: Consumers Saying "No" to Tracking According to a new report from Flurry Analytics [https://www.flurry.com/blog/ios-14-5-opt-in-rate-att-restricted-app-tracking-transparency-worldwide-us-daily-latest-update/] (Verizon Media), based on roughly 10 days of

Facebook's Trump Ban: Who Gets to Speak Online? The world's most important political debates are now happening on social media. Over the past several weeks, for

Yahoo's Death By 1000 Cuts Continues with PE Sale Verizon is selling its media and ad-tech assets, AOL and Yahoo, to Apollo Global Management for $5 billion. The

SMB Websites and Commerce Now Inseparable Mailchimp started as an email platform and moved into "marketing automation." It has now become an all-inclusive SMB SaaS platform for digital

Apple TrackingEarnings: MSFT, Shopify, Facebook, Apple & Google Beat It's a big earnings week. Microsoft and Shopify reported strong revenue growth [https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/27/

Google Poised to Disrupt the $27B Food Delivery Business Google has become a potentially disruptive player in the multi-billion dollar food delivery business. One estimate of the market's

Native Apple Maps Ratings Coming Soon to US In September 2020 [https://searchengineland.com/apple-ratings-are-coming-to-ios-14-how-disruptive-will-it-be-340068] , it became clear that Apple Maps was going to start collecting its own user photos

Zagat Relaunches with New Scoring, Emphasis on Photos The Zagat restaurant guide was first published in 1979 by Nina and Tim Zagat. After many years as a print publication, its

Most Franchise Brands Local Marketing Laggards SOCi's recently published "Localized Marketing Benchmark Report" (reg. req'd [https://www.meetsoci.com/insight/lmbr-report-2021/]) scores 275 franchise

Stim-Driven Retail Booming, Online and Off March retail sales grew by almost 10% [https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/15/us-retail-sales-march-2021.html], driven by government stimulus checks, vaccinations and increasing

FB Survey: SMBs Remain Fragile As Economy Reopens A recent report (.pdf [https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/US_SSMB_Full_Report.pdf]) from Facebook chronicles the challenges

MSFT Buys Speech Pioneer Nuance for $16 billion. Announced today, the Nuance acquisition [https://www.reuters.com/article/nuance-commns-ma-microsoft/update-1-microsoft-to-buy-ai-firm-nuance-communications-in-197-bln-deal-in-healthcare-push-idUSL4N2M536I] becomes Microsoft's second largest after LinkedIn ($27 billion)

Swyft Wants to 'Democratize' Same-Day Delivery Swyft has created a "B2B managed-marketplace solving for affordability in last-mile logistics." Its objective is to bring Amazon-like same-day delivery

Google: Local and Digital Now Joined at the Hip In a blog post [https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/local-shopping-trends/] Google confirms what nearly everyone in local has known for years:

Verizon Inks Catalina Deal to Track Ad Impact In-Store Last week Verizon announced [https://www.verizonmedia.com/insights/catalina-real-time-decisioning-partnership] a partnership with Catalina [https://www.catalina.com/] to connect digital

Squarespace Buying Restaurant Startup Tock for $400M Bloomberg is reporting [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-31/squarespace-buys-restaurant-tech-startup-tock-for-400-million] that restaurant reservations and delivery startup Tock was acquired by SMB site

Vaccines Unlocking Pent-up Consumer Demand There's pent-up consumer demand for a return to normalcy. Evidence of new optimism, massive consumer savings [https://www.nearmedia.co/local-revenge-spending/] and stimulus-driven

Amazon Is to Google As Google Is to Bing Years ago, then Google CEO Eric Schmidt said Amazon was the company's biggest competitor. He wasn't wrong.

Big Tech Hearings: Likely 230 Reform but How Much? The CEOs of Google, Facebook and Twitter testified before Congress yesterday [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/technology/facebook-twitter-google-capitol-riots-hearing.html]

Coming 'Revenge Spending Binge' Will Boost Local We all know the e-commerce growth story [https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2021/02/15/ecommerce-during-coronavirus-pandemic-in-charts/] . That, combined with closures from major

Does Local Dominate 'Zero-Click' Search? According to SimilarWeb data, analyzed by Rand Fishkin [https://sparktoro.com/blog/in-2020-two-thirds-of-google-searches-ended-without-a-click/] , nearly two-thirds (65%) of Google searches "ended in the

Economy Poised for Comeback but for Whom? The US Federal Reserve is projecting [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-economy-analysis/analysis-europe-must-play-catch-up-as-u-s-economy-readies-for-take-off-idUSKBN2BB14C] white-hot economic growth in 2021: 6.5%. As vaccinations roll

Survey: 73% Say Unlikely to Opt-in to IDFA Tracking As we wait for the rollout of Apple's IDFA opt-in rules, there's ongoing speculation about how consumers

Amazon Cares About the Future of Healthcare Healthcare spending in the US is nearly $4 trillion annually, more than $11,500 per person. It's an evolving market and

Near-Me Search Hits 'All Time High' in 2020, Says Google Near-Me search hit an all-time high in 2020 according to Google. That's one of several trends

People Want to Support SMBs but Buy from Amazon Amazon technically lost share as e-commerce expanded in 2020 but it was the big winner during COVID lockdowns. Despite its anti-union

The Marketing Lesson of COVID: CX A year later, there are many answers to the question, "what did we learn from COVID-19?" We could discuss policy, social or

Study: 66% of Traffic in 2020 from Mobile A new data analysis [https://www.semrush.com/blog/mobile-vs-desktop/] looks at 2020 search trends. Many desktop apologists touted the return of

Does Google Challenger Neeva Have a Chance? I was given early access to Neeva [https://neeva.co/], the new search engine created by former Google ad boss Sridhar Ramaswamy, who