+ Post Ads : Another Master Stroke By Google Marketers Should be Excited About

Google Plus Post AdsWith zillions of content being posted on various social channels it is a serious pain for the users to separate signals from noise. On the other side of the table, marketers are striving hard to ensure that there content doesn’t get lost in all the noise and is visible to their target audience. Adding to these woe, social platforms like Facebook are limiting organic reach of your content, forcing marketers to adopt paid channels to ensure enhanced visibility of their content.

Google has been going out of their way to promote Google Plus though the platform never gained as much traction as they would have liked it to. However, things could now change with the + Post Ads.  To put it simply Google now gives you an option to use your Google Plus posts as advertisements on their Display Ad Network. The best part however, is that +Post Ads are not displayed in Google Plus stream but on relevant websites in Google’s Display Network, which basically means with + Post Ads, your content is no longer limited to the Google Plus audience but would have a much broader reach encompassing millions of sites in Google’s Display Network.

Also if an user is signed into his Google Account while viewing a +Post Ad, he can forward, comment and / or +1 the content in the Ad itself, without even having to go to Google Plus at all. If there is a link to your website in the ad, users can click through to your website also. This is a seamless experience for the users and also a beautiful opportunity for brands to get a larger audience connected and engaged to their content.

Google + Post Ads are managed through the regular Adwords interface and also offers a wide range of targeting options. It won’t be surprising to see if Google adds a few more audience segmentation options for +Post ads exclusively. However, at present + Post Ads are limited only to Brands with more than 1000 followers on Google Plus.

The Masterstroke

The reason I talked about +Post Ads as a masterstroke from Google because with this they are achieving multiple objectives..

  • Now That Google Plus content has a much broader reach with this ads , more Brands would join and actively participate in Google Plus
  • More and more people will now be using Google Plus without even realizing it
  • Google can showcase the valuable content in Google Plus to the non Google Plus users at the advertiser’s expense and attract new users to the network
  • They are able to monetize Google Plus, without cluttering the platform with ads

+ Post Ads and Facebook Ads

No I am not going to compare them but talk about how + Post Ads can actually help your Facebook ad campaigns. Facebook allows you to create a custom audience by placing a conversion pixel on certain pages of your website. When a user visits a page with conversion pixel, Facebook analyzes the person’s profile and serves your ads to people with similar profile ( as they are more likely to be interested in your product). Now if you put a link in your + Post Ads to one of the pages with Facebook Conversion pixel more and more people will visit that page by clicking on the + Post Ad and this will continue to increase the target audience for your Facebook ads. However, we will need to carefully consider the fact that Conversion Pixels are supposed to be used for conversion tracking which in many cases could be transactional whereas + Post Ads are more focused on engagement and would attract a different type of audience and reaction.

Google Plus never really had the type of attention from marketers as Facebook, Twitter or even Pinterest had. People shared great content on Google Plus but there weren’t many to appreciate. SEOs looked at the platform as a necessity with the apprehension that Google might be using +1s as a signal in their algorithm or at least getting more +1 for their content would increase their content’s visibility on search, with personalized search being ubiquitous. With this update Google has probably given marketers a genuine reason to focus their effort on Google Plus, though it stands on the shoulders of Google’s biggest bread earner; Adwords.

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Check out the About SRC Page for more details about Saptarshi Roy Chaudhury.

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