Instagram Story Links, The Biggest Ad Networks, Google Rater Guidelines: Acquisition Channel Opportunities

I analyzed over 4200 marketing/tech headlines last week to identify the most relevant and useful news for founders. These are opportunities that, if you're one of the first to take advantage of them, can give you a competitive advantage in attracting more paying users. Here they are:

1. Everyone on Instagram can now link to your product

The news: Instagram has announced that they will allow anyone on their platform to include links in their Stories.

Previously, this was only possible if you had more than 10,000 followers.

The opportunity: Influencer and affiliate marketing on Instagram just got a whole lot easier.

Do you know any Instagram influencers that your target audience follows? If so, chances are (especially if you're in a smaller market) that many of those people have fewer than 10,000 followers.

With this update, you can contact those people, and ask them to publish an Instagram Story with your link in exchange for a free product/cash. You could also provide them with an affiliate link through which they can earn a commission.

How to get started with this: Go to SparkToro and find influencers followed by your target audience (SparkToro will show you mainly influencers on YouTube and Twitter).

Look for those influencers' Instagram account (chances are they have an account with way less followers than on Twitter or YouTube). Get in touch with them, asking to post a Story with your link in exchange for something. Chances are, you'll get a way cheaper price than if you asked them to do the same on their primary platforms (YouTube, Twitter, etc.)

2. These are the biggest ad networks for Q3 2021

Last week, all major platforms released their quarterly earnings. Let's see how much they made from ads in Q3 2021:

• Facebook made $29.01 billion, mostly from ads
• Snapchat made $1.07 billion, also mostly from ads
• Google's ad business made $53.1 billion this quarter
• Twitter's ad revenue was at $1.14 billion
• Spotify also started making money with ads and ended up with $376 million this quarter.
• Amazon's "Other" category (made predominantly from ad revenue) made $8.09 billion

Some takeaways from these earnings reports:

• Amazon is making more money from ads than Snapchat, Twitter and Spotify combined
• Facebook and Snapchat were the most harmed by Apple's ATT privacy update
• Twitter and Google were less harmed by Apple's privacy update. Both companies described the impact of Apple's ATT update as "modest" in their earning reports. Spotify didn't mention anything (they were probably too happy with making money from ads in the first place that they forgot about Apple altogether :)) ).

The opportunity: According to many analysists, adapting to Apple's privacy changes will take years, not months for large platforms like Facebook. If you advertise on Facebook and Snapchat, you've probably seen lower ROIs after iOS 14.5. It might worth experimenting with Google and Twitter, which weren't affected that much (probably due to the fact they use contextual-based, rather than behavior-based targeting).

Btw, if you want cool opportunities like these delivered to your inbox every week, feel free to subscribe below:

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3. Here's what Google considers to be a high-quality website

A week ago, Google released their latest "Quality Raters guidelines". It's a 172-page document that instructs Google's Quality Raters on how to, well, rate a site.

AHrefs did a recap of the most important parts from the PDF:

• Pay attention to what other sites say about you. Google instructs their Quality Raters to look for any Wikipedia, magazine and forum mentions on the websites they rate. A quick Google search for "name -name.com" (example: indiehackers -indiehackers.com) will give you an idea of what others have written about you.
• Show off your expertise. Have you heard about E-A-T? It stands for expertise, authority and trust. Google talks a lot about this acronym, and they instruct their raters to "Think about the topic of the page. What kind of expertise is required for the page to achieve its purpose well?"
• If you're a YMYL site, the rules will be tougher for you. YMYL stands for "your money, your life" and are websites that "impact a person's future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety". These are websites on the topic of finance, government, news, jobs, safety, health and fitness and so on. Google Quality Raters are instructions to look at those sites with more scrutiny, paying attention at things like the author expertise, the 'about' page, external reviews, claims and so on.

The opportunity: After you get a certain amount of Google traffic, you're bound to get a quality rater looking over your site. Knowing what to do (and, more importantly, what not to do) can mean the difference between increasing your SEO traffic and being penalized.