Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

According to a recent Official Google Blog post, your Google Places account for your local business will soon be obsolete.  If your business has yet to embrace the awesomeness that is Google+, now would be a great time to start learning how Google+ can help you interact with both current and potential new customers.  All good things come to those who wait and this exciting Google improvement is no different.  Google+ Local will be rolling out and replacing Google Places accounts in the next few months.  What does this mean for your local business?

If you are a local business that has a Google Places for Business page – great news:  Your Places page will be automatically transitioning into a Google+ Local page with little to no effort on your part.  According to Google, you will still be able to log in to and manage your local business information through Google Places for Business.  From there you will be able to verify and update basic listing data and respond to reviews.

If you have already created a Google+ Page for your business – great job:  You are ahead of the curve and should be receiving information from Google on how to link your Google+ Page to your local listing.  Once the transition is complete, your Google+ Local page will be a fully functional social media machine capable of all sorts of complex customer interaction and fun stuff like status updates, hangouts, circles and more.

Either way, the announcement of Google+ Local is super exciting for local businesses.  Why not take advantage of all the cool social features being offered by Google+ Local?  Don’t forget to thank the Google for another free and extremely robust way to keep your business in front of customers.

Last week was full of big news from the Google+ Project.  Not only did Google announce that they would finally be opening Google+ up to businesses via Google+ Pages, but they also unveiled the new Social Extensions feature in AdWords.  Social Extensions will be rolled out to advertisers this week and will allow advertisers with Google+ Pages to link their Google+ Page to their AdWords campaigns.  This means that all brand +1s that are received, whether via the website +1 button, ads or organic search results, will be complied and added together to be viewed as ONE single total visible to consumers.

How does this have the potential to affect the PPC advertising efforts you have in place for your business?  Google believes that adding Social Extensions can potentially improve the ad performance for PPC advertisers.  According to Google (via Harris Interactive, June 2010), recommendations from friends and family impact the purchasing decisions of 71% of shoppers.  The AdWords ads for current campaigns that do not have Social Extensions enabled only show the +1 recommendations for the specific landing page of the ad.  Once Social Extensions are enabled in your Google AdWords campaign, potential customers will be able to see all of the +1 recommendations that your brand has received and make their purchasing decisions accordingly.

Now that they are able to show more highly targeted and personalized ads, how will advertisers be able to study the performance data of this new feature and gauge whether or not it is working for them?  Of course Google has an answer for that!  Google has enabled a new +1 annotation AdWords reporting segment for any campaign, ad group, keyword or ad.  This new segment allows advertisers to view performance metrics by three categories.  The first performance segment category is impressions with personal annotations.  A personal annotation means that a personal contact of the searcher has +1’d your brand (your webpage, Google+ Page, organic search result or PPC ad).  The next performance segment is impressions with basic annotations.  Basic annotations are impressions that included an anonymous count of people who have +1’d your brand.  The third, and final, performance segment is for impressions without social annotations.  While both personal and basic annotations make your ad socially relevant, viewers that see people they actually know and trust +1ing something they are interested in purchasing will, in theory, be more likely to purchase said product.

If you are a PPC advertiser interested in making your brand more socially relevant, then you have some homework to do.  First, set up the Google+ Page for your business here.  Setting up your Google+ Page will not only allow you to get closer to your customers, but will allow you to create your business’s identity on Google+.  Next, you will need to use your Google+ Page URL to enable Social Extensions from the Ad Extensions tab in your AdWords campaigns.  Finally, after you have let the data accrue for a bit, use the +1 annotation reporting segment to see how the +1 features are affecting the performance of your advertising efforts.

Here at JumpFly we are very excited to see how these new Google+ enhancements will affect our clients ROI.  We expect nothing less than big things from the ever evolving Google!