Social Extensions for Adwords: the new +1 Annotation Segment
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Social Extensions for Adwords: the new +1 Annotation Segment

17th November 2011

Connect your +1’s with Social Extensions

Connecting Google +1Following on from the launch of Google+ Pages for business, Google also announced that it was going to be possible to connect +1’s so that all of your +1 data from pages, ads and search results are pulled together to form an overall +1 total.

Connection was launched late last week when Google rolled out Social Extensions for Adwords. As with organic search results and more recently display ads showing annotations, you will also start to see personal annotations alongside Adwords ads if any of your friends or connections have recomended an ad using the +1 button.

Once your Google+ Page is live and you are linked to Analytics (via webmaster tools or by putting the Analytics snippet on your page), you can activate the social extensions setting by associating ads with your Google+ page.

Connect your Google+ Page

If you haven’t set up your Google + page yet – go here. If you have and you want to connect your page to your Adwords visit: View Ad Extensions > Social Extensions to associate your Google+ Page

Social Extensions

Reporting Segments

The reporting segments mean that you will actually be able to see +1 activity breakdowns at Campaign, Ad group and keyword levels in your Adwords Campaign as follows:

  • Personal – Someone you are connected to +1’d your Google + Page or landing page
  • Basic – anonymous +1 information
  • None – Impressions without any +1’s

+1 Reporting Segments

How will Social Extensions affect PPC?

It’s early days and we can’t see what ads may look like yet, or whether it will cause more clutter for users to sift through, but the use of annotations for Paid Search suggests that advertisers will have to become more involved with their target audience in order to encourage the use of +1 buttons for PPC.

Currently the Annotations are limited to just friends or Google connections. Not everyone will be clicking on the same ads or searching for the same products and services so it may be a while before we see widespread visibility of annotations.

Benefits of social extensions:

  • Social extensions essentially allow any customer to see all recommendations you have received from organic, display, pages and PPC, which means that all +1’s will be counted towards an overall +1 ‘score’
  • Increased +1 recommendations add value for CTR which means that this is potentially a boost for Quality Score (this has not been verified by Google, but many search professionals expect it to be announced as the +1 develops)
  • You will actually be able to see if a +1 makes a difference to your campaign

For more information on +1 Annotation see the Google Blog

For an interesting listen, check out the webmaster radio show with John Lee from Clix discussing How Google +1 affects Adwords

Read our coverage from September at SMX East What Every Paid Search Marketer Needs to know about Google +1

Written By
Jackie Hole is an Award Winning Search Marketing consultant specialising in Paid Search, Conversion Improvement and Organic Search / SEO for the USA, Canada and European markets. Starting out in Multimedia & Interface Design, Jackie has over 15 years experience in online marketing and was recently awarded European Search Personality...
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