User-Generated Reviews Start Appearing In Google Panels Graphs

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They say word-of-mouth is the best advertising a business can have. The same could also be said for the online version of this: user reviews. There are few better ways your company can earn the trust of potential customers than showing how much other customers have enjoyed your services or products.

Now, Google is giving an even bigger platform to user-generated business reviews by adding “Reviews from the web” to its Knowledge Panels that appear in search results. This comes a month after Google started including best-of lists and critic reviews in results for local search.

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Source: Google

Consumer reviews will appear in the Knowledge Panel exactly as critic reviews do, but they will be more visible on mobile where they appear before both critic reviews and best-of-lists. You can see how they will appear in the screenshots above and below:

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Source: Google

If you want to feature user-generated reviews from your site or another prominent review site, you need to mark up your content with Google’s review Schema. You must also abide by Google’s guidelines for inclusion.

Including the new “Reviews from the web” section, Google’s Knowledge Boxes are now prominently displaying three review sources. It will still be collecting and highlighting its own reviews, making it more important than ever for businesses to have a strategy to collect reviews from customers across a wide range of platforms.

Thanks to the increased profile of user reviews, it has never been easier for your customers to spread the word about your business to thousands of potential customers every day.

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Advertisers Can Now Show Pre-Roll Ads On Periscope and Twitter Videos

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Twitter Video

Twitter’s video features have been a hit with users, including Periscope, the Twitter-owned live streaming platform. However, the company has struggled to find ways to monetize visual content.

This week, Twitter announced it was launching several changes to make it easier for advertisers to reach video audiences and creators to monetize their content.

For starters, the company is allowing advertisers to run pre-roll ads that appear before a video begins to play. Similar to YouTube’s pre-roll ads, the video advertisements will allow users to skip the ad if they are not interested.

For creators, adding these new pre-roll ads s as easy as signing up for Twitter’s Amplify program and opting-in to use pre-roll ads. You can choose to use the ads on an individual basis or by making pre-roll ads default on all video content.

In addition to the new ad format, Twitter is also making some changes to its Media Studio and Twitter Engage app to improve the monetization of content and advertising across its platform. These changes include:

  • A unified media library including videos, GIFs, and images.
  • Tweet scheduling features.
  • Team management and multi-account support.
  • Improved upload performance and overall stability.
  • An Earnings section detailing your monetization performance.

The biggest wrinkle for Twitter has been deciding how to monetize videos across Periscope live streams. The nature of live streaming video makes it difficult to incorporate ad breaks. Instead, Twitter is allowing Periscope users to seek and connect sponsors for live broadcasts.

These sponsors can then run pre-roll ads before live broadcasts begin.

Considering Periscope videos appear in Twitter timelines and live videos, the decision to incorporate pre-roll ads helps bring the streaming app more in line with Twitter’s other services while making them more attractive for both content creators and advertisers.

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Facebook Gives Advertisers a Warning About Site Speed

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FacebookVideo

Your site’s speed on mobile devices will soon be a factor deciding how many people see your Facebook ads, according to an announcement from the social network this week.

In Facebook’s words:

“Over the coming months, we’re working to improve ad experiences for people by considering website performance and a person’s network connection in our ad auction and delivery system.”

While it isn’t clear exactly how site speed and page performance will be implemented into Facebook’s algorithm for displaying ads, the social network is already introducing features to help brands deliver content more quickly across Facebook.

In addition to the use of Accelerated Mobile Pages, Facebook is introducing prefetching to help users see the content they are interested in as quickly as possible. This week’s announcement explains that prefetching starts loading mobile content in the Facebook in-app browser before a user ever clicks a link.

According to their estimates, this speeds up mobile site load time by as much as 29 percent and decreases the rate of site abandonment during the loading process.

The new Facebook help page dedicated to prefetching goes a bit more in-depth about how the system actually works:

“For each News Feed mobile ad, Facebook attempts to predict how likely a person is to click on an ad. If the prediction score meets the requirements, we prefetch the initial HTML page when the story first appears on a person’s screen. This content is cached locally on the person’s device for a short amount of time. If the person clicks on the ad, Facebook loads the initial page from the cache. The initial page then makes regular web requests to the publisher’s server to load the remainder of the page. We currently only cache the initial HTML page. Keep in mind that the CSS, Javascript or images on the website are not cached.”

Ultimately, Facebook’s changes are aimed at improving their overall ad performance and increasing engagement with ads. Advertisers with slow-performing sites tend to also underperform in many ad metrics.

While Facebook’s new feature will improve content delivery speed across the board, the company also offered five tips for tuning up your site:

  • Minimizing landing page redirects, plugins and link shorteners
  • Compressing files to decrease mobile rendering time
  • Improving server response time by utilizing multi-region hosting
  • Using a high-quality Content Delivery Network to reach audiences quickly
  • Removing render-blocking javascript
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