Google Plus & AdWords Social Extensions
There has been a *lot* written about Google+.
Opinion on how successful it will be is divided to say the least.
In my opinion, it is still to early to tell if Google+ is going to be a massive success or not, but I don’t think it is wise to ignore it completely. Google are pouring a lot of resources into making it work, and I think the odds are good that it will play some sort of significant part in the Google search results in the future. But for anyone who wants to make their own mind up, here are a few recent articles on the subject that you may not have seen yet:-
OK, that’s the background reading out of the way, and bearing this in mind that this is primarily a blog about PPC and not social media, lets have a look at:-
There is no doubt that this has a lot of potential.
If you have a wildly successful Google+ page which thousands of people have plus one’d and those thousands of people have each have thousands of other people in their Google social circles, then a *lot* of people will be seeing a personal endorsement of your AdWords ad from someone they know (at least vaguely). If this doesn’t have an effect on CTR and conversion rates, then I’ll eat my shirt…
However, the effect really will be minimal unless you put a whole of effort into Google + (and everyone else on the planet follows suit).
Here is a real world example (25 days of data) from a client account who has put a reasonable amount of effort into their Google + business page:-
You can see that out of 35,967 impressions only *4* impressions had a personal annotation and none had a basic annotation (which I am guessing will not be as good as a personal one but better than nothing).
Here is an example of a ‘basic annotation’ I found in the wild:-
NB – I had to go to google.ie to find it and google.co.uk refused to show any basic annotations for the same search – which maybe explains why I’m currently seeing zero basic annotation impressions in my reports.
To further emphasise how very early days it still is for social extensions, here is a screen shot of the data when the social extensions are segmented by Network (with search partners):-
Maybe I am missing something, but I’m not sure how AdWords social extensions can show on Search Partners (and I asked a support guy from Google and he assured me that social extensions definitely did not show on Search Partners). If anyone knows the answer to this (other than that it is a bug) I’d love to hear your comments.
In fact, if anyone has any comments at all about Google+ (especially the AdWords Social Extensions aspect of it). I’d love to hear them.
Thanks for reading.