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I’ve been seeing the Google +1 button appearing on more and more websites since it was released a few months ago.  Recently, I’ve even seen it as an option for paid search ads.

If I perform a search while signed into my Google account, the +1 button appears as a part of the actual PPC ad.

This seems to be the exact same thing as giving users the ability to “Like” an ad in Facebook.  However, Facebook is built around the idea of social sharing.  You would “Like” an ad because of the brand or product it represents, knowing that your friends will see that you are a fan.  It seems like a shortcut of sorts for Facebook users wanting to share that they “like” something without having to leave the page they are on and track down the actual business page.

I’m not sure if many people use Google’s search engine in the same way.  Personally, I use it to find information, not to recommend a company/brand/product to my social circle.  If I were to click the +1 next to a PPC ad, my Google contacts would see that notation if they performed a similar search while also signed in.  Also, Google will show the +1 when the clickthrough URL for the ad matches a website that one of your friends has “+1”’ed.

Google makes it clear that the +1 button does have an impact on your organic rankings, regardless of whether they come from a PPC ad or your organic listing.  As long as the URL of your PPC ad matches the URL of the organic listing, +1’s will show on both results.  The company also notes that while +1’s will affect your organic search ranking, they will not change Quality Score or ad ranking.  However, the most important component of Quality Score is Click-Through Rate (CTR) and I suspect that the primary reason that Google is testing this functionality in PPC ads is that they believe (as I do) that when a user sees a +1 from a trusted source, they will be more likely to click on the ad—increasing CTR, Quality Score, and Google’s ad revenue.

What do you think?  Is Google trying to make +1 just like the Facebook Like button, or is there real value/usage for people clicking the +1 button on a PPC ad?

One of the SEO sites that I frequently read (www.searchengineland.com) has a VERY interesting post by a  reader, LebSEO Design’s Wissam Dandan.  He has found examples of Google Adwords ads appearing at the bottom of the page for some searches.

No one on our search team at DealerOn has come across these examples yet, and  judging by the information I’ve seen on other SEO industry blogs, it’s a fairly limited test, since not many searchers are.

This could have interesting implications to PPC buys if Google decides to keep this test as a permanent feature.  I haven’t seen anything about how Google would report on the placement for ads that run at the bottom of a results page.

This could be a positive for dealers using PPC as a marketing strategy. If your ads were previously being pushed to page 2, they may now be on the bottom of page 1.

I wonder how Google will incorporate these ad positions into their “Position Preference” targeting.    It is entirely possible that ads would be more effective on a Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) basis when they’re at the bottom of the page.  Potentially you could target your campaigns to reach users that had scrolled through the organic results to the bottom of the page, most likely not finding what they were looking for.  This could be very interesting and a huge campaign management changer for PPC providers.

What are your thoughts on how this might impact your Google Adwords campaigns?

It is almost hard to comprehend how fast mobile Internet usage is growing.  According to Google, more smartphones were sold last year than PCs.  It’s predicted that 50% of Americans will have a smartphone by the end of the year and that there will be 10 billion mobile Internet devices in 2012, up from the 2 billion that are activated today.  A child is more likely to own a cell phone than a book!

How is that going to impact the car buying experience and your online strategy?  With 51% of mobile car shoppers using search engines to research their next vehicle purchase, it’s extremely important that your dealership has a well-optimized mobile site and a well thought-out mobile marketing strategy.  One tactic your dealership may want to consider is using Google Mobile Ads to target mobile web users with pay per click (PPC) ads.

In addition to the regular PPC ads that you’re running (which can be viewed by mobile users on full-browser devices), you can use the Google Mobile Ads to target mobile phone customers who don’t have full-browsers on their smartphones.  Google has reported that advertisers using a mobile-only AdWords campaign, designed to target mobile customers who don’t have full-browser devices, can increase click-through rates by 11.5%.

Mobile Ads also allow you to have a separate keyword list than your normal AdWords campaigns, so you can tailor your keyword lists to the shorter keywords this type of mobile web searchers tend to use.  Remember that if you’re going to run mobile ads on Google, you have to use a mobile website landing page—it’s not just a best practice, it’s a requirement.

Has anyone adopted any mobile strategies that they’ve found to be particularly effective or any that have proven not to be?