Weekly Digital Marketing Roundup

August 28, 2017 - By Aaron Hockel

Here are the biggest announcements, product updates, and news stories impacting the digital marketing industry last week:

Google Doubles Sitelinks on Paid Ads

Recently, Google announced it was changing the formatting of mobile sitelinks in AdWords to a tappable carousel, now it appears they are increasing the number of sitelinks as well. An update in the Google AdWords help center notes that mobile ads will now show up to 8 sitelink extensions. For advertisers, this means it is necessary to go back and make sure all of your AdWords campaigns have at least 8 sitelinks available.

Facebook Eliminating Post Boosting Options

To help streamline advertising options, Facebook is eliminating 17 types of organic posts that businesses can boost as ads. The move is based on data that want to make ads more precise and focus on delivering business results. The amount of pages boosting these types of boosts was minimal and the results were not impactful, so Facebook simply decided to eliminate them effective September 15th.

Facebook to Penalize Fake Video Ads

Have you clicked to play a video on Facebook only to discover it was a static image that opened a new landing page? This type of misleading post is a growing concern for Facebook and last week they announced they were taking action against fake videos. The problem is that posts are being used brands, including ones as big as ESPN, to trick users into clicks that launch the video on a landing page, not Facebook. According to Facebook, they will begin demoting these posts in newsfeed, but will not punish pages that publish them. The update does not impact ads, where this type of post is already a violation of Facebook's ad policy.

5 Mobile Apps Dominate Digital Consumption

According to Comscore's 2017 US Mobile Apps Report, Google and Facebook continue to dominate the consumption of digital media on mobile apps. The two brands control 8 of the 10 most used mobile apps, with Facebook owning 3 and Google owning 5. Pandora and Snapchat were able to crack the top 8 in the 18-24 and 25-34 age demographics, but did not crack the top 8 for older users. The data is impactful for advertisers because smartphone users spend 90% of their time in within a user's top 5 apps. You can download the report for free after registering.

Google Launches Landing Pages Assessment Tool

Google has debuted its new mobile landing pages assessment tool in the new AdWords layout. The tool shows advertisers their mobile friendly click rate, the percentage of clicks coming from smartphones to mobile friendly pages, and can help them prioritize which pages and URL's need to be fixed. The easiest insight to get from this new tool is which desktop pages are driving high clicks but are not performing well on mobile, and likely need a mobile refresh. For more on this, checkout Greg Sterling's coverage on Search Engine Land.