Hump Day Headlines: Google reviews, Amazon’s new status, Instagram Stories ads, and what’s new with Maps

By Art Unlimited.

Google and Facebook are being challenged by a third platform for generating the most dollars in advertising revenue.

Hello and welcome to Hump Day Headlines! You can either watch the video or read the transcript below. Plan to join us live each Wednesday on Facebook.

Bad Reviews’ Silver Linings

We’ve been diving in and analyzing some fairly new data that's come out regarding Google reviews and their impact on your business. Many of you probably remember this from prior episodes—we’ve been talking about reputation management almost every other session.

Here’s what we’ve been finding.

Many people, when they see that they have a bad review on their Google My Business listing; they just freak out and they think, like, "Oh no, my ranking went down!" and that’s the end of it.

Now, most of the time, it’s important to have quantity in reviews. Yes, you do want to have those good reviews and people liking you, but the most important thing is responding to the bad reviews. Because more often than not, when a client or a customer gets a good response to a bad review, they're more likely to change the review to a better one.

Like, if you've gotten a one-star: they're could change it to at least three or four stars if you’ve given them a good response. And so one thing that we’ve been finding that is really important is customer service.

Poor customer service on a global scale can cost seventy-five billion dollars per year. So it's really important when you have those bad reviews to respond to them promptly. And actually, the bad reviews can expose a lot of things in your business that can help you improve!

For example, it can help you with training materials! So if you are seeing a repetitive problem pointed out in reviews, you can say, “Okay, here’s an issue that we're seeing in our business and this is what we need to do to fix this as a company." Negative reviews can even help you create content for your website! So if you are seeing a lot of questions about one thing specifically, you can make an FAQ page. Or if there's something that people are having difficulty with on your website and you know that it's just user error, you can make a page detailing how to walk through that problem. Say, "Here are screenshots of where you should be clicking on the website.”

So yeah, negative reviews aren't always a bad thing. They can improve you as a company.

Another tip on reputation management: its impact on your business is significant.

Amazon Cruises Up the Ladder

In the last couple of weeks, data has been rolling out regarding different advertising platforms and their influence. And so, one big change is that Amazon has risen to the number three spot in the different paid advertising platforms that are generating the most income.

No big surprise here; Google is sitting in the number one slot, Facebook is number two, and Amazon has risen to the number three spot. There are huge gaps in between the revenue that each one of these platforms is taking in, but it is something to take note of because Amazon is coming to that third spot at a rapid rate.

And will they surpass Facebook and Google? I don't know that it's gonna happen anytime soon, but they will start to close that gap; we know they are the dominating platform when it comes to e-commerce digitally.

Instagram Story Opportunities

So another topic that we've been diving into is—and we were just talking about e-commerce from Amazon—we’re now looking at Instagram. And these are some of the new features they’ve been rolling out:

Instagram is really tapping into that e-commerce side and trying to implement and incorporate e-commerce into their Stories.

So everybody should be familiar with Instagram Stories. If you're not, then try to look into that! But Stories is an Instagram feature that people and businesses use to post instantly.

And now what Instagram is rolling out is a shopping feature. So then you can link it—it just looks like a little square kind of thing—into your page. So people can be shopping off of your Stories. Which is huge!

And right now there have been 90 million users who have been engaged with it per month since it rolled out in June. So that's a lot of leads that you could be getting, and this is specifically important for people who have e-commerce sites. Look into it!

Maptastic Updates

So the last topic we wanted to cover was Google Maps has now just become incorporated within your Apple account. What does this mean?

It means when you are utilizing your CarPlay option in your vehicle, Google Maps is now providing data to those devices that are streaming that information. This is a big deal because your listing and your information and how you are positioned on Google are now being transmitted through your vehicle as you drive across the country.

And so, the next thing that’s important to take note on is that you as an Advertiser with Google Ads now have the ability to stream ads through this platform.

If you have questions on any of these changes that have been happening, let us know! Our team is always happy to help.