Facebook will receive more than two-thirds of all social media ad spending this year, according to a new study by eMarketer. Facebook is set to generate an estimated $22.37 billion (about £17 billion) in revenue in 2016, which is a staggering 30 per cent increase on the figure recorded for the previous 12 months.

Google has released a new Play Store algorithm that will reduce the size of mobile app content and provide additional information to help smartphone and tablet users. Google announced the changes in an Android Developers blog post, stating that it would make data costs ‘more transparent’.

Google wants to make mobile ads faster and less intrusive for everyone with the launch of a new format based on Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). Google claims that the new “special purpose” tech can cut loading times for ads on smartphones and tablets by more than a third as it looks at ways to curb the rise of ad blockers across the net.

Google is helping marketers to get a complete overview of the value of their mobile ads by combining cross-device conversions automatically. The search engine giant claims that advertisers given early access to tracking have already recorded a significant uptick in conversions.

The number of data requests made by governments across the globe reached a record high during the second half of 2015, according to Google’s latest Transparency Report. Governments sent more than 40,000 requests during the period, which was significantly more than the 35,365 recorded earlier in the year.

Marketers believe that creating high-quality content is the most effective SEO strategy, according to a new study by customer intelligence solutions enterprise Clutch. More than a third of the marketing professionals surveyed said that publishing content across the web would be their top priority for driving search results during the next 12 months.

After the social media giant rolled out Instant Articles late last week, Facebook Messenger users will now be able to access quick-loading content from links published within the popular app. Facebook said that it had seen strong indication that the optimised article-reading format provides a better experience for everyone on the platform.

Mobile ad spend on Google soared by 55 per cent year-on-year for the second quarter of 2016, according to new data published by global marketing cloud enterprise Ignition One. Despite the mobile jump, paid search spend in the US was pretty much flat overall, as the figure dipped by one per cent between April and June.

Google has announced that it has acquired the team behind content-sharing service Kifi as it looks to expand and improve its own group-sharing mobile app Spaces. The deal is likely to see Google begin integrating its deep search engine capabilities into Spaces as it looks to the next frontier for delivering more relevant SERPs for brands and end users.

Google is rolling out a raft of new tools and features for retail and travel enterprises in order to help them promote themselves and their products more effectively via search results and ads. Google said that the update would prepare marketers for the upcoming holiday season and boost their reach and traffic from mobile customers.