January 2, 2018

The Figaro Digital Digest: 2nd January 2018

As the festive break comes to a close, we might say that 2018 ‘officially’ starts today. Ease yourself into the new year with our roundup of the latest digital news:

Google Announces Chrome Ad-Block For February 2018

Back in June, Google announced it would be cracking down on ad compliancy and this week they gave an update. From February 15th 2018 Google will stop showing ads on websites that do not provide compliant ad experiences.

This means that sites with automatic sound, flashing ads or even full-page interstitials will experience issues.

To find out if this will affect any of your ads, check your Ad Experience Report. Here ads will be labelled with ‘warning’ or ‘failing’. If violations remain unfixed, Chrome will then block all ads on the site. Once fixed, sites can be resubmitted for consideration.

Seven Consumer Brands Are Dominating Paid Search This Christmas

A study from Kantar Media’s AdGooroo platform has revealed that UK paid search advertising this festive period is being dominated by seven major consumer brands. The research studied 990 top retail keywords over 10 days in December 2017 and found that collectively the following seven brands accounted for 26 per cent of all desktop and 28 per cent of all mobile clicks.

1. Amazon – 7.5 per cent desktop click share, 8.8 per cent mobile click share
2. Argos – 3.5 per cent desktop click share, 5.2 per cent mobile click share
3. Currys – 3.4 per cent desktop click share, 3.7 per cent mobile click share
4. John Lewis – 3.2 per cent desktop click share, 2.5 per cent mobile click share
5. AO – 2.5 per cent desktop click share, 2.1 per cent mobile click share
6. House of Fraser – 2.7 per cent desktop click share, 1.8 per cent mobile click share
7. Oak Furniture Land – 1.1 per cent desktop click share, 1.4 per cent mobile click share

Facebook Is Taking Action Against Engagement-Bait

Facebook has revealed that it will soon penalise any posts that request likes, shares or comments which forcibly inflate engagement metrics in order to rank higher in news feeds.

These ‘engagement bait’ content posts will be identified and demoted, as will the pages that frequently share them. In a blog post on December 18th, Facebook representatives said:

“Publishers and other businesses that use engagement bait tactics in their posts should expect their reach on these posts to decrease. Meanwhile, Pages that repeatedly share engagement bait posts will see more significant drops in reach,”

UK Programmatic Spend Was Up 23 Per Cent In 2017

Last week, we revealed that UK programmatic ad spend was set to surpass £3 billion. This week, according to the latest figures released by eMarketer, spending on programmatic advertising has grown 23.5 per cent on last year and programmatic now represents 79 per cent of all UK digital ad spend, whereas predictions reveal this will continue to rise to 84 per cent by 2019.

 

For more news updates, guides and opinion pieces, take a look at a few more of our articles.