An Interesting Revelation In Google's Memo To Employees

[RedBar]

Europe Readys Anti Trust Charges against Google

[webmasterworld.com...]

What I have found interesting is this statment:

Mobile is changing everything — with the explosion of apps taking people directly to the information they want. Today 7 out of every 8 minutes on mobile devices is spent within apps. Yelp, for example, has said that over 40% of its traffic comes direct from its mobile app.

7 out of every 8 minutes!

Really? That's an incredible statistic, if true, therefore how is this affecting the advertsing platform for us as publishers since Google is pushing sites towards responsive designs yet they almost infer that they've given up the challenge in the face of apps.

What do you feel?

[graeme_p]

Chat is obviously taking from both email and social networks - pity we do not have a standard for it that is widely used (XMPP exists, but...) so people have to use a proprietary service.

[Nuttakorn]

Does app that they talking about is included browser app like Chrome or default browser app?

[hannamyluv]

open rate always over 50%, often over 70%

For the average email campaign, I would find this statistic HIGHLY unbelievable.

This page from MailChimp shows a more reasonable open and CTR
[mailchimp.com...]

Around 22% open and 2-3% click through (I just eyeballed it).

Even the 22% open rate seems a little inflated to me, but it has been 10 years or so since I ran an email campaign.

Point being is you can achieve near that with social media if you work it right. And social campaigns can have legs for much longer than a email campaign too.

[netmeg]

something called Words With Friends.

That's a game, so not sure it counts. It was called Scrabble before it got sued by the real Scrabble.

[graeme_p]

It may be unbelievable, but its what we get, and I think above 50% is easy if you have useful information for your subscribers. I am happy to shared a screenshot if you do not believe me. I have to admit the open rate now is lower than it was a year or two ago when I was getting the high numbers.

Mailchimp's numbers are definitely far too low as so many mail clients (web and native) block external elements by default. hobbies and arts get opening rates, industry wide, of nearly 30%, and all most all are above 20%, which is significantly better than the REACH of Facebook PAGES (not posts) [facebook.com...]

[hannamyluv]

It may be unbelievable

I didn't say it was unbelievable for an individual company. Just for the industry as a whole as an average. And I will bet industry emails have a much higher open rate (probably in the 20-25%) than ecomm emails. My past experience with those is closer to 10-15%.

And Facebook is not the only social media out there. Up until a few weeks ago, Pinterest outstripped Facebook in terms of traffic to our site. FB has since surpassed it due to the fact that legacy campaigns are still bringing in residual traffic, months and even years later. Heck I had an article last month that went "re-viral". It went viral the first time we posted it and then nearly a year later, without anything we did, went viral again.

I will grant that email has its uses, especially if you are in a field related to people's work. I just feel that it will not be the communication choice of the next wave of professionals. As evidenced by RedBar's discussion of how they use WhatsApp.