Shopify's Q2 results highlight the shift to retail infrastructure
There was no #BlinkTank last week, as I was away on leave. I'm back now and getting back into the swing of things.
It is a fairly quiet week, as summer tends to be, but a few things are worth a look. We start with Shopify's Q2 results, out today.
After that: whether Meta is really a threat to Shopify, a couple of GA4 changes, Microsoft Advertising arriving in Campaign Autopilot, the schema.org validator throwing errors, and a reminder on the Google Ads bidding change before it lands on the 17th.
On to the news!
Why Shopify's Q2 results matter to operators
Shopify reports its Q2 results today. Most people reading this newsletter are operators, deep in the weeds day-to-day. So why should we care about these results? Because they show clearly the direction Shopify is heading.
The bull case, as one analyst note puts it, is that Shopify is "evolving from a toolkit for direct-to-consumer startups into the infrastructure layer for omnichannel retail". The numbers behind it back that up: Q1 revenue up 34% to $3.17 billion, GMV over $100 billion for a second straight quarter, and operating income more than doubled, driven by AI commerce tools and fast-growing B2B.
This is not a new idea to us - it is something we have watched happen issue after issue. UCP switched on by default across every store, agentic storefronts, the agents.md file, server-side purchase tracking, and now Campaign Autopilot attempting to automate media buying. Each one is Shopify taking on another layer that used to live in a separate tool.
It is also why we work the way we do. We treat Shopify as the source of truth - essentially the data warehouse for your products - and optimise there first. Get the catalogue and its structure right at the source and everything downstream follows, from SEO and PPC to how agents and marketplaces pick up your products. As Shopify becomes the layer everything plugs into, a stronger platform only helps if those foundations are in order.
🔗 Shopify's AI payments and B2B surge ahead of Q2 earnings (BigGo Finance)
An analyst calls Meta a threat to Shopify
For all the strength in those numbers, the market has not been fully convinced. Shopify's share price had a tough few days at the end of July.
On 21 July, Rothschild & Co Redburn downgraded the stock, saying Meta's move into AI commerce tools was a threat to a big part of Shopify's US business. The shares dropped on that, then climbed back over the next few days as other analysts made an opposing case - that Shopify is better protected than the downgrade suggested. It comes the same week as Shopify's Q2 results, out on 5 August.
Really, though, this is about one simple question: is Meta actually becoming a competitor to Shopify? Meta has been talking a lot about agentic shopping, and enough to spook an analyst into putting a number on the risk.
Our view is that the threat is overstated, at least in one important way: Meta is not building a Shopify competitor. On its earnings call, Zuckerberg called agentic shopping an opportunity but was clear the company is not about to turn into an Amazon or an eBay. Meta does what it has always done, top of funnel discovery and advertising across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, with AI shopping tools added on top and its data on people as the selling point.
It also helps to remember Meta's history here. Facebook Marketplace started as classifieds, Facebook Shops launched in 2020 but never became a real marketplace like Amazon or eBay, and live shopping was turned on and then dropped. Each time, Meta has gone back to advertising, because that is where its money is.
🔗 What Meta's AI push means for Shopify stock (Barron's)
GA4 gets a new way to group traffic sources
That is the bigger picture. The rest of this issue is closer to the ground, starting with a couple of GA4 changes. Google Analytics added a Source Group dimension and a hostname filter in June, and both help if you spend time in GA4 sorting out attribution. Source Group rolls the different labels for one source, like facebook, fb and m.facebook.com, into a single value, so cross-channel reports need less manual cleanup. The hostname filter lets you exclude events from domains that should not be in your reports, the fix people have wanted for referral spam and staging traffic skewing the numbers.
Two important caveats. Source Group is currently limited to the Advertising workspace, not the standard Traffic acquisition reports, so it is not everywhere yet. And leave a hostname filter in testing for a day or two before switching it on, so you can be sure it is not excluding real visitors.
🔗 Google Analytics adds source grouping and hostname filtering (Search Engine Land)
Microsoft Advertising comes to Campaign Autopilot
Shopify has added Microsoft Advertising to Campaign Autopilot, the AI marketing tool it launched in June that plans and runs campaigns across channels like Meta, Shop and email from inside the admin. You set a budget and some guardrails, approve what runs, and it handles the setup and the budget split using your store's data and patterns from across Shopify.
Not many people are using Campaign Autopilot yet, so a new channel is not going to shift many media plans this week. The point, though, is the direction. It is the same thread as Shopify adding basic server-side tracking through its GA4 work earlier this year - the platform steadily building simple, native versions of things that used to need a specialist or a separate tool.
For a large, established store this is not the tool that runs your paid programme. What you would expect from it is a way for a newer brand to get something off the ground quickly, without a media buyer, rather than anything more sophisticated.
🔗 Microsoft Advertising now available in Campaign Autopilot (Shopify)
The schema.org validator has been throwing 429 errors
Credit to Kelly Sheppard for surfacing this one. Over the past couple of weeks a number of Shopify stores have found that the schema.org validator fails to read their markup, returning a 429 error regardless of the page or site being tested. The cause appears to be a conflict between Cloudflare, Shopify and the validator itself, where Googlebot is served a 429 rather than the page.
The reassuring part is that this looks like a validator problem rather than a problem with your markup. Google's own Rich Results Test is unaffected, and both URL Inspection and PageSpeed Insights show Googlebot reaching the pages normally, so there is no sign that Google is actually being blocked. If your team hits this while checking structured data, it is worth switching to the Rich Results Test rather than assuming the markup has broken. It has been reported, so a fix may already be on the way.
🔗 Kelly Sheppard's post on the validator issue (LinkedIn)
Reminder: the Google Ads bidding change lands on 17 August
We covered this in full last month, but with the date now close it is worth a short reminder. From 17 August, Google changes how target-based bidding behaves on campaigns marked "Limited by budget". A budget-capped campaign on Target CPA or Target ROAS that has been over-delivering against its target will be steered back towards the number you actually set, without anyone touching a setting. It applies across Search, Shopping, Performance Max and Demand Gen.
The campaigns most exposed are the long-running ones where the target was set at launch and never revisited, so if your paid team has been enjoying an actual CPA better than the target set in the account, that is the place to look before the 17th. The Bid Target Adjustment Tool has been live since early July for exactly this.
🔗 Changes to target-based bid strategies (Google Ads Help)
Looking for work
Jaime Hill is an ecommerce, customer experience and digital transformation leader with close to 30 years across high-growth consumer brands, from scale-ups to large international retailers. That includes leading Shopify businesses with large product catalogues and complex, omnichannel trading, with a focus on profitable growth. Open to an executive role across ecommerce, CX or digital transformation.
If you are hiring and the role fits someone with large-catalogue Shopify experience, or you are looking and have that background, send me a message.
Testimonial: Simply Sound and Lighting
We do not share testimonials often, but we had some kind words recently from Ciara Goddard at Simply Sound and Lighting, one of the teams we work with across SEO and PPC, and it captures the way we like to work.
Working with Blink has been game-changing for us across both SEO and PPC. They are dedicated to getting the fundamentals right, and it's this foundational work that has driven sustainable growth and allowed us to scale for the future.
Rather than trying to bamboozle you with jargon or overinflated figures, they will work as an honest and trustworthy extension of your existing team, with a real desire to help you succeed. We have really enjoyed working with Blink over the last year and are excited to see what more we can achieve together.
Ciara Goddard, Marketing Manager, Simply Sound and Lighting
Who am I and what does Blink do?
I'm Sam Wright, Managing Director and co-founder of Blink SEO. We're a search marketing agency that works exclusively with large-catalogue Shopify stores - the kind where the challenge isn't just visibility, but helping customers find the right product in the first place.
We specialise in SEO and PPC for merchants managing hundreds or thousands of products. Most of our work starts with taxonomy: how a store is structured and categorised, and what that means for organic performance, paid efficiency, and on-site discovery.
If you found this useful and aren't already subscribed, you can sign up at blinkseo.co.uk/blinktank.
If you run a large-catalogue Shopify store and want to talk about organic or paid performance, reply to this email or find me at blinkseo.co.uk.