{"id":4645,"date":"2018-04-04T10:32:45","date_gmt":"2018-04-04T09:32:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/?p=4645"},"modified":"2018-04-04T10:32:45","modified_gmt":"2018-04-04T09:32:45","slug":"chromes-mobile-article-recommendations-2100-percent-one-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/chromes-mobile-article-recommendations-2100-percent-one-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Chrome\u2019s mobile article suggestions now 4th greatest source of referral traffic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chrome\u2019s mobile referrals are now 4th, behind Twitter, Facebook, and Google Search.\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Research by\u00a0Chartbeat\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0data science team reveals that Google Chrome\u2019s Articles for You (also known as \u201cChrome Content Suggestions\u201d or \u201cChrome Suggestions\u201d) are one of the fastest growing sources of publisher traffic on the internet.\u00a0These mobile article recommendations show up when a user opens a new tab in the Chrome app.<\/p>\n

What does this mean for publishers?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Google Chrome\u2019s Articles for You is an under-publicized feature of Chrome on both Android and iOS. Even though Chartbeat is currently only tracking Articles for You referrals from Android and not from iOS, its Android referrals alone are now about two-thirds the size of all of Twitter (desktop, Android, iOS) in terms of the volume of traffic sent.<\/p>\n

Articles for You traffic grew an astounding\u00a02,100 percent<\/em>\u00a0in 2017 \u2014 from driving 15 million visits per month to publishers using Chartbeat to 341 million visits per month.<\/p>\n

Under The Hood<\/strong><\/h3>\n

How? There are a number of factors at play here:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Mobile traffic continues to grow as users transition away from desktop to mobile devices. Since January 2017, mobile web traffic to Chartbeat clients has grown over 20 percent, reflecting just how much more time users are spending on their mobile devices.<\/li>\n
  2. Articles for You is also a default on the most popular browser in the world. Chrome users contribute 44 percent of the overall traffic to Chartbeat clients and 42 percent of the mobile traffic.<\/li>\n
  3. A default on Chrome is a great place to capture user attention. Articles for You is on every single \u201cnew tab\u201d page in each mobile Chrome Browser and accounts for roughly 12 percent of site visits on Android Chrome as per Chartbeat\u2019s March data.<\/li>\n
  4. Further, Articles for You surfaces predominantly AMP pages (72 percent are AMP), where visitors are\u00a035 percent more engaged<\/a>\u00a0than on the standard mobile web.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    This speaks to the incredible power and influence that Google has over a user\u2019s browsing behavior and, consequently, publisher traffic. Once a user has chosen Chrome as her browser, Articles for You is almost unavoidable. It is placed prominently within a user\u2019s mobile experience, personalized with the immense knowledge that Google has about one\u2019s browsing behavior and interests and frequently boosted by the speed of AMP.<\/p>\n

    Who’s driving?<\/h3>\n

    Although Articles for You is programmatically driven, the user does have some control over its recommendations. Articles for You takes a user\u2019s browsing behavior from\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0turns it into<\/a>\u00a0personalized content recommendations. Users can delete specific Chrome visits from their history and they won\u2019t factor into the recommendations. iOS users can turn it\u00a0off completely<\/a>; Android users cannot.<\/p>\n

    One thing that is unclear is how, if at all, publishers can take advantage of this new Google traffic source. Since Google\u2019s mission is to \u201corganize the world\u2019s information and make it accessible and useful,\u201d it has been very proactive in giving publishers clear and (relatively) well documented policies on more \u201ctraditional\u201d Google traffic sources like\u00a0Search<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0Google News<\/a>. Those policies have spawned agencies, consultants, and other experts both inside and outside of publishers that help drive results.<\/p>\n

    Traffic signals<\/strong><\/h3>\n

    The signals that drive Articles for You are much less clear. Other than what appears to be a preference for articles that have adopted the AMP format, how\u00a0exactly<\/em>\u00a0are the selections made?<\/p>\n

    How does my browsing history affect what I see? If I read about Marine Le Pen on an American news site, will I suddenly start seeing more articles about Marine Le Pen, about right-wing European parties, from right-wing American sites? From French sites?<\/p>\n

    Are all Google-crawled pages considered? Is it just a subset (perhaps the Google News corpus of whitelisted sites?). What factors (authenticity, reliability, pageload speed) drive a ranking? In short, how does Articles for You work?<\/p>\n

    I would encourage Google to reveal some of these answers to the publisher ecosystem. When Articles for You was an insignificant source and a curiosity, this was not necessary. But now that it is meaningful as a referrer source to many publishers, it is in both Google\u2019s and publishers\u2019 interests to understand how to make sense of this traffic. Are these users a potential new source of brand loyalists? Or are they just fly-by users who boost short-term traffic, but don\u2019t return or subscribe? More deeply understanding Articles for You is one of the next things on Chartbeat\u2019s research agenda.<\/p>\n

    As always, we want to hear from you. Have you seen an uptick in this traffic? How are you thinking about it? I\u2019m always available on Twitter\u00a0@saroff_nyc<\/a>\u00a0and our Data team can be reached at\u00a0insights@chartbeat.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    \n

    John Saroff<\/a>\u00a0is CEO of\u00a0Chartbeat<\/a>. This piece originally\u00a0ran at Digital Content Next<\/a>\u00a0and is republished with kind permission<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Further reading:<\/p>\n

    SEO Journal:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Google Chrome\u2019s Article Suggestions Now 4th Greatest Source of Referral Traffic<\/a><\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Chrome\u2019s mobile referrals are now 4th, behind Twitter, Facebook, and Google Search.\u00a0 Research by\u00a0Chartbeat\u2019s\u00a0data science team reveals that Google Chrome\u2019s Articles for You (also known as \u201cChrome Content Suggestions\u201d or \u201cChrome Suggestions\u201d) are one of the fastest growing sources of publisher traffic on the internet.\u00a0These mobile article recommendations show up when a user opens a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3702,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17613,26,550],"tags":[478,721],"yst_prominent_words":[1458,7503,7505,4175,1655,7502,7508,7506,7507,7509,7500,1490,2129,7510,2686,7511,1656,7504,7499,7501],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4645"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4645\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4645"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=4645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}