Daily Minute Master Series – April 26, 2019

Social Media

Facebook Stories Have 500 Million Daily Users, 3 Million Advertisers

Facebook stories have now reached 500 million daily active users, up from the 300 million daily actives reported in September. In addition to this milestone, COO Sheryl Sandberg announced that the stories format is growing amongst advertisers as well. Impressions from stories ads were the largest contributing factor to overall impression growth in Q1 2019. Advertisers are moving towards stories ads so quickly that it’s causing a decline in the average price per ad since they’re sold at a lower price than feed ads. Facebook’s effort to push the stories format seems to be paying off with users and advertisers. With all of the privacy concerns surrounding Facebook lately, it’s interesting to see more people using a temporary form of content.

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LinkedIn Engagement Continues to Rise, According to Latest Update from Microsoft

This week, Microsoft released its FY19 Q3 results, which showed that, LinkedIn has continued to see rising levels of on-platform engagement. Microsoft reports that LinkedIn’s revenue has increased by 27% for the quarter, while the platform continues to see ‘record levels of engagement’, with on-platform sessions growing by 24%. LinkedIn engagement is rising, with algorithm and functional improvements keeping more users on platform for longer, and prompting more to check back with the app more regularly. That’s important to note for digital marketers. With many businesses looking to offset the steady declines in Facebook reach, other platforms are getting more focus. LinkedIn looks to be capitalizing on this by rolling out improvements quickly and providing new options for company page updates.    

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Marketing

Still have active destination URLs in Bing Ads? It’s time to migrate to final URLs

If you have any older campaigns running on Bing Ads, now’s a good time to double check if you have any lingering standard text ads and destination URLs still active. You won’t be able to create new destination URLs as of August, and by the end of the year, destination URLs will be phased out entirely, the company announced Thursday. You’ll need to convert any standard text ads to expanded text ads (select Edit from the Ads tab in the web interface) and put your landing page URL in the Final URL field. If you aren’t running any legacy standard text ads anymore, you probably won’t have to take any action — but still better safe to check. Expanded text ads offer more characters than the old standard text ads, and can now include three headlines and two description lines. The benefit of Final URLs is that separating the tracking parameters from the URL makes it possible to update tracking across multiple URLs once and changes to tracking templates don’t require ads to go back for editorial review.

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DuckDuckGo is Google’s Only Competitor to Gain Organic Search Share in Q1 2019

DuckDuckGo’s organic search growth is outpacing other search engines, with particularly strong gains reported in mobile search. On mobile devices, DuckDuckGo’s organic search visits are up 78% year-over-year. Overall search visits are up 54%. By comparison, Google’s total organic search visits fell 2% year-over-year in Q1 2019. However, Google’s mobile search visits grew 6%. Bing and Yahoo saw either neutral or negative growth in Q1 2019. This data was revealed in Merkle’s Q1 2019 Digital Marketing Report, which also includes statistics about paid search, social, and Amazon ads.

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