Fueling discoverability and engagement with Google+

Monday, March 11, 2013

Automotive brands were among the first advertisers to adopt Google+ and they’re making it pay off in big ways. Our research has shown that the path to buying a car is becoming more and more social, with consumers relying on information and advice from their social connections and brands to inform their purchase. Millions of consumers are already engaging with the top global auto companies on Google+, and brands are using this opportunity to connect and engage with customers in unique ways, from connecting with auto enthusiasts through G+ Communities to launching new car models via Hangouts.

Today we’re releasing new insights on how Google+ is working to amplify auto brands’ existing marketing campaigns. For example, we found that brands can experience a 91% increase in conversion rate for non-brand terms when running social annotations on search ads.

Please check out our infographic below for additional insights and tips, and visit our Google+ Business site to learn more about Google+.

Click to see full-size infographic

Posted by Gretchen Howard, Director of Global Social Solutions

Continue Reading | comments

Take your social strategy to the next level with Learn with Google Hangouts and Webinars

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Over the next few weeks, we’re offering five opportunities to learn more about Google+ for your business. We kick off with a Learn with Google Hangout on Air with bestselling author +Chris Brogan on November 5th at 10am PT / 1pm ET. Chris will cover tactics for successful social marketing and discuss his new book, “Google+ for Business: How Google's Social Network Changes Everything.” RSVP for the Hangout on the Google+ Event page.

Learn Chris’s recipes for how to grow and engage your Google+ community to build your brand and drive your business’s visibility and conversions. Hear about Chris’s own experiences helping companies succeed in their content marketing and social projects. Chris Brogan is a New York Times bestselling author, CEO of Human Business Works, and advises companies on marketing, business strategy, communications and more.

If you have a question for Chris, leave your question as a comment on the Google+ Event.

Boost your success with Google+

Want to learn more about using Google+ for your business? Sign up for our Learn with Google webinars. Here are some great upcoming webinars to help you get the most out of social for your business:

• Social Media Best Practices for a Successful Holiday Season (Wed, Oct 31, 10am PT / 1pm ET)
• Social that Adds Up: Performance and Measurement (Thurs, Nov 8, 10am PT / 1pm ET)
• Supercharge your Social Media Initiatives with Video (Wed, Nov 14, 10am PT / 1pm ET)
• Building a Digital Brand with Google+ (Thurs, Dec 6, 10am PT / 1pm ET)

Continue Reading | comments

Social that Adds Up: Performance and Measurement

Monday, September 17, 2012

Join us for a webinar on Tuesday, September 18th at 11am PT, in partnership with Hootsuite, to learn how we can make better decisions based on performance metrics of social networks using Google Analytics social reports. Register today, it’s open to everyone!

Adam Singer, the Product Marketing Manager for Google Analytics, will go beyond the current social metrics of followers, +1’s, likes and others, to discuss the true impact your social media is making on your brand’s bottom line. Many of the current metrics available allow us to measure the reach of our message, but not necessarily the ROI. Learn how to connect visits to your social pages all the way through to a sale or conversion on your website.

You’ll also learn how social media can impact the rest of your digital presence. For example, when you verify your Google+ Page, recommendations from your customers and fans may be more likely to appear in search results on Google. This can raise the social awareness of your business and increase its relevance. For paid marketing campaigns, social can actually help you improve clickthrough rate performance. 77% of US consumers trust recommendations from their social media connections, more than any other media source, meaning that +1s may have a positive effect on purchase decisions. On average, search ads with annotations have a 5-10% uplift in clickthrough rate. Some of our advertisers have seen even higher uplifts, H&M achieved 22% uplift and Cadbury achieved 17% uplift in clickthrough rates on their search ads.

Start measuring the value you’re creating through your social media campaigns!

Posted by Andy Lutz, Inside AdWords crew

Sources: Google Research 2012; Google internal data

Continue Reading | comments

How Google+ has helped Cadbury connect with over 1.2 million people

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Cadbury has become the European brand with the largest number of followers on Google+, currently at 1.2 million. Their Google+ success is having a strong impact on their overall marketing strategy, especially by improving the performance of their Search campaigns. The question is how exactly did they do this?

Their first step was to create a Google+ page. As featured in a previous blog post, Cadbury used hangouts to interact in real time with Olympic athletes and chocolate experts, and to participate in creating the chocolate replica Google+ page. By promoting their hangouts, Cadbury grew their Google+ follower base by 150,000 people.

They also used circles to segment their followers according to their chocolate preferences and unveiled a brand-new product launch, the Dairy Milk Bubbly Bar, which has achieved a strong impact, already sales are over £8M.

However, where they are seeing tremendous results is in their search campaigns. Since they started using social extensions, which links Cadbury’s Google+ page to its AdWords campaigns, they have achieved a 17% uplift in CTR across all their AdWords campaigns. Now when you search for “Cadbury” and see the relevant ad, recommendations from your friends are displayed directly with it, making the ad much more relevant to you. By clicking on the social extension, you directly land on Cadbury’s Google+ page and can start following all the great content they are posting.

And since Cadbury installed the Google+ badge on its homepage, it’s now easier than ever for fans to follow the brand; Cadbury gains 10,000 new followers on average per day and have had an increase of 7.5% of traffic from Google URLs. To continue benefiting from their Google+ success, Cadbury are looking to include a Google+ social stream that will pull in their most recent updates into a re-launch of their homepage, which will be happening soon. Stay tuned to learn how Cadbury continue to innovate to make their Google+ experience a success!

Learn more about Cadbury’s success with Google+ by reading the full case study here.

Posted by Natalia Cano, Product Marketing Manager Google+ For Businesses

Continue Reading | comments

The +1 button & AdWords

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Word of mouth is powerful. When you have a choice to make, it’s common to turn to the people you trust. But what about word of click? How can getting a suggestion from a friend or co-worker when you need it be as simple as having a hallway conversation -- or even simpler?

We want to make it easy for Google users to get recommendations from the people they trust right when they’re searching. That’s why we’re introducing the +1 button. With a single click, the +1 button lets signed-in Google users recommend the content they like on the web to their friends and contacts right when it’s most useful -- on Google search.

+1 is a simple idea. Let’s use a hypothetical Brian as an example. When Brian signs into his Google account and sees one of your ads or organic search results on Google, he can +1 it and recommend your page to the world.

(click for full size image)

The next time Brian’s friend Mary is signed in and searching on Google and your page appears, she might see a personalized annotation letting her know that Brian +1’d it. So Brian’s +1 helps Mary decide that your site is worth checking out.

(click for full size image)

We expect that personalized annotations will help users know when your ads and organic search results are relevant to them, increasing the chances that they'll end up on your site. You don’t have to make adjustments to your advertising strategy based on +1 buttons, and the way we calculate Quality Score isn’t changing (though +1s will be one of many signals we use to calculate organic search ranking). Think of +1 buttons as an enhancement that can help already successful search campaigns perform even better.

At first the +1 button will appear for English searches only on Google.com, but we’re working to add more languages in the future. You don’t have to make any changes to your campaigns for +1s to help you -- over the coming weeks, we’ll add +1 buttons to ads and search results on Google.com.

But the +1 button isn’t just for search pages. We’re working on a +1 button that you can put on your pages too, making it easy for people to recommend your content on Google search without leaving your site. If you want to be notified when the +1 button is available for your website, you can sign up for email updates at our +1 webmaster site.

The +1 button is the next step in our effort to find relevance through relationships on the web. We’re excited about using +1s to make search, and your search campaigns, more personal, relevant and compelling. And we hope you’re excited too!

To learn more about the +1 button and how it affects your search ads, visit Google Ad Innovations.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

Continue Reading | comments