This week: Pinterest is growing faster than many had expected, Google beats Facebook in mobile referral traffic, and Bing Ads now offers in-market audience targeting.
Here’s what happened this week in digital marketing.
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DoubleClick Bid Manager Offers Audio Ad Buying Globally
Looking to run audio ads on streaming services like Spotify, TuneIn, and Google Play Music? If so, Google’s DoubleClick has you covered.
The ad platform now globally supports programmatic audio ad purchases.
“We are thrilled to see DoubleClick embracing programmatic audio,” said Zuzanna Gierlinska, head of programmatic, Europe at Spotify. “This launch makes it possible for Bid Manager customers to reach Spotify’s highly engaged audience across video, display and audio formats.”
If you think there isn’t much of a market for audio ads, think again. Total digital audio ad revenues exceeded $1.6 billion in the US last year. That’s a 39% increase over 2016.
The DoubleClick platform supports MP3 audio spots in a number of different lengths, including 15-second and 30-second ads.
You can also upload an optional companion image that will display around the publisher’s audio player.
Google Beats Facebook in Referral Traffic on Mobile Devices
Google is now the top source for referral traffic on mobile devices.
According to a new report from Chartbeat, Facebook’s new algorithm changes have caused a decline in its referral traffic. Now, the social media giant prioritizes personal content over off-site articles.
The report also points to AMP as a reason for the increase in Google search referral traffic:
As we explained earlier this year, referral traffic from Google Search is up, due primarily to increased traffic from mobile, and more specifically from pages that use AMP. We also wrote about the emergence of a new browser-based referrer – Google Chrome Suggestions – which is up 21x since January 2017 as a traffic referrer for publishers.
Chartbeat advises digital marketers to include mobile search as a part of their key strategy going forward.
Facebook Rolls out Ads in Stories
Facebook is now running ads in Stories.
Earlier this month, the company started testing the new Story ads. They’re video clips that last anywhere between 5 and 15 seconds in length.
Users can skip the ads with a simple tap.
As of now, Story ads include no click-throughs or calls to action (CTA). Brands can only use them to build awareness.
Facebook plans on adding click-throughs and CTAs in the future, though.
Companies can run Facebook Story ads by extending their existing Instagram Story ads to the Facebook platform.
Bing Ads Now Offers In-Market Audience Targeting
Finally.
After years of waiting, Bing Ads users can now run ads to in-market audiences.
If you’re unfamiliar with in-market audiences, they’re groups of people who are likely to buy whatever it is you’re selling.
Bing tracks user search histories to determine if they’re “in the market” for a specific product or service. If you’re selling that product or service, then those people are part of your in-market audience.
You can run display ads to target people in that audience.
According to Bing, targeting in-market audiences results in a 28% higher click-through rate (CTR) and a 48% higher conversion rate.
Google: It’s No Problem to Have Multiple Sites on the Same IP
If you think that your rank might suffer because you point multiple domain names to the same IP address, Google has some good news for you.
You won’t be penalized at all.
In a recent webmaster central office hours hangout, one of the participants expressed concern about a decline in traffic on numerous sites that are all on the same IP.
Google’s John Mueller said that it’s typical for Google to find multiple sites on the same address. It’s not a problem.
He did, however, caution that duplicate content on those sites will definitely cause trouble.
Google: Crawl Budget Optimization Is Overrated
You probably don’t need to worry about your crawl budget.
That’s according to Google’s John Mueller. This past week on Twitter, he wrote: “IMO crawl-budget is overrated.”
https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1001814463320903680
He went on: “Most sites never need to worry about this. It’s an interesting topic, and if you’re crawling the web or running a multi-billion-URL site, it’s important, but for the average site owner less so.”
Mueller also said that if you have time to work on crawl budget optimization, that’s fine. If you don’t, though, it’s not likely your rank will suffer.
Google: PDFs Aren’t Mobile-Friendly
If your website is loaded up with PDFs, you might want to “translate” them to HTML. That’s because PDFs aren’t mobile-friendly.
And, in this day and age, mobile is everything.
This past week on Twitter, somebody asked John Mueller about “mobile-friendly PDFs.”
Mueller replied that he hadn’t heard of such a thing.
He went on to say that he’s fairly certain that Google doesn’t identify any PDFs as mobile-friendly.
If you do have PDFs on your website that are indexed, you’ll likely see the following warning next to them in the SERPs: “Your page is not mobile-friendly.”
Report: Pinterest Is Growing Faster Than Twitter and Snapchat
Pinterest is gaining more users than Twitter and Snapchat.
As of now, Pinterest has about 250 million monthly active users (MAU). That’s up 50 million from September.
By way of comparison, Twitter added just 9 million users during the past year. Snapchat added 25 million users.
Of course, Pinterest is still way behind Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in total users. But there’s no doubt that the social media channel is performing better than many people had expected.
