1010Computers Staging

mobile web

Auto Added by WPeMatico

1 2

How COVID-19 transformed the way Americans spend online

Published June 16, 2020
Ethan Smith
Contributor

Ethan Smith is founder and CEO of Graphite, an SEO and growth marketing agency based in San Francisco. Ethan has served as a strategic advisor to Ticketmaster, MasterClass, Thumbtack and Honey.

COVID-19 has transformed the way Americans use their phones and the way they spend their time and money online. These shifts present both a number of challenges and a raft of opportunities for savvy growth marketers.

We’ve seen COVID-19 affect a number of verticals. A number of industries have taken a hit (like music streaming and sports), while some are expanding due to the pandemic (groceries, media, video gaming). Others have found distinctive ways to adjust the way they position and sell their product, allowing them to take advantage of changes in buyer behavior.

The key to being able to read and react to changes in this still-tumultuous time and tailoring your growth marketing accordingly is to understand how public sentiment is reflected in new purchasing behaviors. Here’s an overview of the most important trends we’re seeing that will allow you to adjust your growth marketing effectively.

By the numbers: A sheltering-in-place economy

Virtually all of the data we’ve seen shows a marked difference in buyer behavior following the WHO’s declaration of a pandemic on March 11, 2020. With consumers encouraged to stay home to deter the spread of COVID-19, it’s no surprise that the biggest change is the spike in online activity.

Powered by WPeMatico

Web traffic increases in 2019 were driven by mobile; top 100 sites saw average of 223B monthly visits

Published February 10, 2020

Mobile adoption around the world is having a significant impact on the web’s traffic. According to a new report from SimilarWeb, out today, mobile web traffic has jumped 30.6% since 2017, while desktop traffic dropped 3.3%. But it’s not just the numbers that are changing. Mobile visitors also behave differently from their desktop web counterparts, staying on pages for shorter periods of time, for example, which is impacting core metrics web publishers today track.

The report found that 2019’s total web traffic to the top 100 sites was up 8% from 2018, and up 11.8% over 2017, averaging 223 billion visits per month. The largest increases were in April and June 2019, when traffic was up by more than 10% over the same time in 2018.

Mobile is driving these traffic increases, but mobile visitors don’t stay as long on the site. Across platforms, the overall time spent on websites has dropped by 49 seconds from 2017 to 2019, the report found.

In addition, mobile has become the platform of choice for visiting certain categories of websites. Mobile traffic dwarfs desktop on adult sites, gambling sites, food & drink, pets & animals, health, community & society, sports and lifestyle. And over the years, other categories shifted to become more mobile as well — including news and media, vehicle sites, travel, reference, finance and others.

But not all categories are doing well, despite the shift to mobile.

News sites, for instance, were losing traffic. The report found that traffic to the top 100 media publications is down 5.3% year-over-year from 2018 to 2019 (a loss of 4 billion visits), and down by 7% since 2017.

These decreases impact all sorts of media categories, with popular news, entertainment news and local news all showing decreases of more than 25%. Only business & finance and women’s interest news categories saw any increases, the report said.

The increase in mobile traffic is also helping the biggest sites on the web grow larger, helping to further cement their position on today’s internet. The top 10 biggest sites saw a total of 167.5 billion monthly visits in 2019, up 10.7% over 2018. The remaining 90 biggest sites out of the top 100 only saw a 2.3% increase, by comparison.

Google’s move to consolidate traffic to its core domain increased traffic to google.com; YouTube grew as well. However, Facebook’s troubles were reflected in its numbers as it lost 8.6% of traffic over the past year alone. The report theorized that some of its lost traffic went to YouTube, which could inform Facebook’s heavier focus on video in recent years. That said, Facebook’s investments in mobile helped it grow elsewhere — both Instagram and WhatsApp saw their web traffic grow up to 74% year-over-year.

Also on the decline were Yahoo, which lost 33.6% of its 2017 traffic, and Tumblr, which banned adult sites in 2018, leading to a 33% loss in traffic.

Facebook fought off the web traffic declines and related declines in app usage by re-engaging existing users in 2019, which helped it to increase the total number of app sessions throughout the year. YouTube uses a similar tactic to increase its own app engagement figures, leading to a close tie between the two on this metric.

The data for the report was gathered from January 2017 to December 2019, and tracked desktop and mobile web traffic, as well as Android app use.

The full report, available here, also dug into specific categories, like shopping, travel, finance, messaging and more.

 

Powered by WPeMatico

Google starts rolling out better AMP URLs

Published April 17, 2019

Publishers don’t always love Google’s AMP pages, but readers surely appreciate their speed, and while publishers are loath to give Google more power, virtually every major site now supports this format. One AMP quirk that publisher’s definitely never liked is about to go away, though. Starting today, when you use Google Search and click on an AMP link, the browser will display the publisher’s real URLs instead of an “http//google.com/amp” link.

This move has been in the making for well over a year. Last January, the company announced that it was embarking on a multi-month effort to load AMP pages from the Google AMP cache without displaying the Google URL.

At the core of this effort was the new Web Packaging standard, which uses signed exchanges with digital signatures to let the browser trust a document as if it belongs to a publisher’s origin. By default, a browser should reject scripts in a web page that try to access data that doesn’t come from the same origin. Publishers will have to do a bit of extra work, and publish both signed and un-signed versions of their stories.

 

Quite a few publishers already do this, given that Google started alerting publishers of this change in November 2018. For now, though, only Chrome supports the core features behind this service, but other browsers will likely add support soon, too.

For publishers, this is a pretty big deal, given that their domain name is a core part of their brand identity. Using their own URL also makes it easier to get analytics, and the standard grey bar that sits on top of AMP pages and shows the site you are on now isn’t necessary anymore because the name will be in the URL bar.

To launch this new feature, Google also partnered with Cloudflare, which launched its AMP Real URL feature today. It’ll take a bit before it will roll out to all users, who can then enable it with a single click. With this, the company will automatically sign every AMP page it sends to the Google AMP cache. For the time being, that makes Cloudflare the only CDN that supports this feature, though others will surely follow.

“AMP has been a great solution to improve the performance of the internet and we were eager to work with the AMP Project to help eliminate one of AMP’s biggest issues — that it wasn’t served from a publisher’s perspective,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “As the only provider currently enabling this new solution, our global scale will allow publishers everywhere to benefit from a faster and more brand-aware mobile experience for their content.”

 

Powered by WPeMatico

Answering its critics, Google loosens reins on AMP project

Published September 18, 2018

Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, has been a controversial project since its debut. The need for the framework has been clear: the payloads of mobile pages can be just insane, what with layers and layers of images, JavaScript, ad networks, and more slowing down page rendering time and costing users serious bandwidth on metered plans.

Yet, the framework has been aggressively foisted on the community by Google, which has backed the project not just with technical talent, but also by making algorithmic changes to its search results that have essentially mandated that pages comply with the AMP project’s terms — or else lose their ranking on mobile searches.

Even more controversially, as part of making pages faster, the AMP project uses caches of pages on CDNs — which are hosted by Google (and also Cloudflare now). That meant that Google’s search results would direct a user to an AMP page hosted by Google, effectively cutting out the owner of the content in the process.

The project has been led by Malte Ubl, a senior staff engineer working on Google’s Javascript infrastructure projects, who has until now held effective unilateral control over the project.

In the wake of all of this criticism, the AMP project announced today that it would reform its governance, replacing Ubl as the exclusive tech lead with a technical steering committee comprised of companies invested in the success in the project. Notably, the project’s intention has an “…end goal of not having any company sit on more than a third of the seats.” In addition, the project will create an advisory board and working groups to shepherd the project’s work.

The project is also expected to move to a foundation in the future. These days, there are a number of places such a project could potentially reside, including the Apache Software Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation.

While the project has clearly had its detractors, the performance improvements that AMP has been fighting for are certainly meritorious. With this more open governance model, the project may get deeper support from other browser makers like Apple, Mozilla, and Microsoft, as well as the broader open source community.

And while Google has certainly been the major force behind the project, it has also been popular among open source software developers. Since the project’s launch, there have been 710 contributors to the project according to its statistics, and the project (attempting to empathize its non-Google monopoly) notes that more than three-quarters of those contributors don’t work at Google.

Nonetheless, more transparency and community involvement should help to accelerate Accelerated Mobile Pages. The project will host its contributor summit next week at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, where these governance changes as well as the technical and design roadmaps for the project will be top of mind for attendees.

Powered by WPeMatico

Google will now allow 300×250 ads above the fold on mobile webpages, says they can be ‘user-friendly’

Published May 2, 2017

 Google today announced a change to its AdSense policy that will remove a limitation previously in place that restricted certain kinds of ads “above the fold” – meaning, visible on a website without scrolling down the page. The company says that it will now allow its 300×250 medium rectangle ads to be implemented above the fold on the mobile web, without resulting in… Read More

Powered by WPeMatico

Google launches new certification program for mobile site developers

Published April 3, 2017

 Google is launching a new certification program for mobile site developers today. The exam covers everything from the basics of why mobile sites matter to how to improve mobile site speed, effective mobile UX design and more advanced topics like progressive web apps. As Google notes, passing the exam is meant to show that you have “a demonstrated ability to build and optimize… Read More

Powered by WPeMatico

Google fixes a big problem with AMP, now lets you view and share a publisher’s own links

Published February 6, 2017

pasted-image-0 Google today is rolling out a change to its AMP integration in Google Search that will let you view, copy and share the publisher’s own link to the webpage in question, instead of the AMP URL. The decision to make this change follows some backlash from publishers who believed Google was stealing their traffic by changing their own URLs to those that had “Google” in… Read More

Powered by WPeMatico

Google will soon integrate Progressive Web Apps deeper into Android

Published February 2, 2017

android-chrome Progressive Web Apps, which are basically sophisticated web apps that are able to use features like push notifications and a local cache to give users a native-like experience, have been on Google’s radar for the last few years. While they almost look and feel like native apps, they were never fully integrated into Android. Google plans to change this soon, though. Soon, you will not… Read More

Powered by WPeMatico

1 2