Earlier this month Google unveiled Google + pages for business, and they are continuing to innovate new ways to help link these pages with your Adwords campaigns. So, on the 9th, Google introduced Social Extensions, another feature of their popular Ad Extensions. In short, this feature allows the Social Network of Google + to interact with your Adwords ads, and can help CTR. There are many positives of this new feature, and it takes a lot of work, but it can be a real benefit if you take into account the benefits it can bring your advertising efforts.
Before this innovation, the +1s that your ad received in Adwords were only based on the +1s that people gave to that particular landing page. A great feature no doubt, but limited in scope. Someone could see a few +1s, but the chances of one of their contacts (or even anybody) adding a +1 to that ad were very small. It had a limited scope, and didn’t seem all that impressive. But, as of now, you can link all of your +1s to show on every ad and page that you want. It is a very simple process, but requires some work on your part.
To start, you have to create a Google + business page. This in itself can be somewhat painstaking, as you want to create a proper page that will attract +1s from your users. After doing this, enable +1s to your ads. And then, enable social extensions (shown in the screenshot below). By doing this, all of your +1s that your ads accrue, as well as any +1s that your Google + business page get, will be shown under the ad. So, instead of individual ads and landing pages getting the +1 totals, all ads and landing pages display the +1s for all, as well as your Google + business page. Basically, this allows for a higher possibility of a user clicking, because seeing not only more +1s but potentially seeing people in their circles who have +1d your ads will increase the potential for someone clicking your ad.
In addition to this, Google has released new reporting features for this extension. There are now two new segments in regards to reporting that you can utilize to gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns. The first, know as “Impressions with personal annotations,” shows you impressions accrued where the viewer had a friend or contact who +1d your brand. The second, known as “basic annotations,” are impressions that included an anonymous count of people who +1d your brand. And finally, there are impressions without any social annotations, or just impressions. You can use these to see how people are interacting with your +1s. You can see if your brand is benefitting from people’s social circles, or if your +1s are the result of random users. This can be beneficial when determining which kind of wording to use in your ads. Using phrases such as “See what everyone is talking about” or “Your friends have spoken” (or other more creative wording, I am no poet J) may help with ads that are seeing more personal annotations.
So to conclude, make a Google + for your business, utilize the new social extensions in your Adwords campaigns, and you can really see some positive results.
