Hello everyone, please forgive my absence this week as I have had plenty to do leading up to Black Friday. One loyal reader actually queried whether I was dead but fear not, I am alive! I have actually left a few tabs open this week as a constant reminder that I must let you guys know about their content via this blog. These tabs contain information related to Social Extensions, a new ad extension introduced to Google AdWords with the aim of connecting your Google+ Page to your Adwords campaigns. For those of you who don’t know: Google Adwords is a pay per click advertising medium which is used both on Google’s main search engine and any websites who use something called Google AdSense, I can almost guarantee you have come across either of these products whether you were aware of it or not.

You've most likely spotted these ads and +1 button before, but if not ... these are AdWords ads.

The main idea behind these Social Extensions are to improve any social marketing efforts you might be making with +1 recommendations from previous, current or future customers. This new ad extension allows you to link your Google+ page with a Google AdWords campaign thus sharing +1′s and annotations between the two. Originally without Social Extensions this may have been frustrating as advertisers could have lots of +1 recommendations on their Google+ page for example yet have none on their AdWords advert, Social Extensions addresses this problem though allowing everything to be combined into one large collection.

The official Google AdWords blog claims that 71% of shoppers say that recommendations / reviews from friends and family have an influence on their purchasing decisions. I would therefore state that the opportunity to accumulate +1′s and annotations from your Google+ page, website landing pages and Google AdWords ads is a very important one. It was nice to find out that these +1′s will not cost you a penny either, you will only be charged for the traditional click on your ad meaning any public recommendation you receive will be free!

Creating the Social Extension between your ads and Google+ page is incredibly simple. Just go to the Ad Extensions tab in your AdWords account, select Social Extensions from the View: drop down section and then copy your Google+ page URL. Your page will have to verified for this to feature to work but you can establish the link in the meantime while waiting for the verification to be complete.