Tamar Weinberg says, “It’s not a test. These new ad-free pages on Facebook are official. In fact, if you’ve navigated to a brand page on Facebook, you may have seen it already. The brand pages focus on the brand and put ads on the sidelines. The new layout is crisp, clean and gives the brand a little more prominence. A spokesperson from Facebook said, “We’ve introduced a new design for Pages on desktop to make it easier for people to learn about and interact with businesses on Facebook, including a new column for tab navigation and a more prominent call-to-action button.” The layout... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “To help people gain experience with Google Analytics, Google is launching Demo Account for Analytics. The idea is to give those without access to a full-fledged account a way to get hands-on experience, but it can also be used by those with access to accounts who want a playground for experimentation before making changes — in a client’s account, for example. And of course, Demo Account can be used in any training environment. Demo Account is populated with real data from the e-commerce Google Merchandise Store and will include the features marketers typically set... [...]

Tim Peterson says, “There’s a reason this article isn’t titled, “You’ll never guess how Facebook is fighting clickbait now.” Actually, two: 1) You probably could guess; and 2) the phrase beginning that headline is exactly how Facebook is now fighting clickbait. On Thursday, Facebook announced the latest salvo in its roughly two-year-old war against clickbait posts. Quick thing before we get into the details though: It’s worth pointing out that Facebook kinda instigated the clickbait craze in December 2013,when it decided to reward article links that got a lot of clicks. So let’s... [...]

Barry Levine, from MarketingLand, says, “Native ads can be very effective in attracting reader attention because their content relates to the surrounding editorial content, and their visual style helps them blend in. But a new study, out today, finds that most of them blend in too much, possibly tricking readers into thinking they’re not ads. The Online Trust Alliance (OTA)’s Native Advertising Assessment looked at the 100 top news websites by unique monthly visitors, of which 69 percent had one or more native ads on their home pages. The sites included such major publishers as ABC News,... [...]