What’s New with Mobile?
Digital marketing tools are frequently making updates to their algorithms and platforms in an effort to improve the overall experience. More often than not, these updates benefit the user and not the businesses that use these tools to market themselves. So where does that leave us?
It’s vital to stay on top of the trends and changes in digital marketing. Something you could publish to Facebook yesterday, might not perform well today. It can be overwhelming to try and keep track of all of these changes yourself, so that’s why we’re doing it for you!
Below are some of the most important changes from the last 30 days that will affect businesses of all sizes.
Facebook Wants You to Go Mobile-Friendly
Last year, Google announced that it was going to use mobile-friendliness as criteria for search rankings. Just like Google, Facebook is encouraging mobile-friendliness too. You might be thinking, “Why would Facebook care about business’s websites?” Good question.
Facebook discovered that 40% of users will leave a mobile website if it doesn’t load in 3 seconds. But many businesses are paying for Facebook ads to drive users to their websites, so that statistic is a little problematic. In order to remedy the situation, Facebook is:
- Encouraging businesses to improve the mobile-friendliness of their sites
- Building a “prefetching system” to identify ads that users are likely to click on – from there, Facebook will pull HTML content from the site link in order to reduce mobile site load time
- Offering options for advertisers to target their audience without taking them away from Facebook
The most important thing coming from this update, however, is that Facebook announced that advertisers with slow-loading mobile sites might find that their ads are displaying less frequently as a result.
Google Hates Mobile Pop-Ups
Like we said, Google uses mobile-friendliness as criteria for search rankings. This means that businesses with mobile-friendly websites benefit. But Google started noticing that many websites are publishing what they call ‘intrusive interstitials’ – or in laymen’s terms, pop-ups.
Google has decided that these pop-ups make for a poor user experience. Their response? Come January 10, 2017, businesses that continue to use this technique may not rank as highly as they used to. Their site will still rank higher than sites that aren’t mobile-friendly, but these pop-ups will put them below sites that don’t have pop-ups.
Major lesson? Make your site mobile-friendly! Don’t know what that means? Here are a few ways you can improve your users’ mobile experience.
Like we said, many of the updates major marketing platforms make are for the benefit of the users. These updates really make us stop and think – how can we provide the best experience possible for our audience? Which is never a bad question to be asking.
Facebook is trying to ensure users can easily access the content they’re looking for, and Google doesn’t want users to get frustrated by pop-ups that prevent them from reading the content they want to be reading.
We understand that these changes can be confusing and difficult to understand, and that’s exactly why we want to help. Let’s start with the marketing basics. Here’s what NOT to do when developing your business’s marketing plan. You’re going to want to check it out to avoid making some detrimental marketing mistakes.
