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Whether users are searching for clothes, car insurance, or a holiday, they have never had so much choice. And as users increasingly rely on the opinions and experiences of others to help them choose, a brand's reputation matters more than ever before. That's why we've developed ways to show ratings, reviews and social endorsements for your business as part of your search ads on Google. This kind of information makes your ads more useful to potential customers and can improve ad performance.

Introducing Consumer Ratings Annotations
Over the next few days, we'll be rolling out consumer ratings annotations, a new format for search ads that provides detailed consumer opinion data. Consumer ratings annotations highlight one or more strongly rated aspects of your business as part of your ad. For example, if you're an insurance company, this annotation may be focused on claims handling. If you're an airline, it may highlight your rewards program.

Example search ad showing consumer ratings annotations

Testing with our beta advertisers has shown that consumer ratings annotations can increase click-through rates (CTR) by 10% on average. Many advertisers have already seen the positive impact of this format. Brian Borkowski, Director of Digital Marketing at Farmers Insurance Group, says, "Consumer ratings annotations help us stand out from competitors and attract new customers. When we looked at our ads that displayed these ratings, we saw an increase in CTR, which speaks to the awareness, trust and impact from this format."

Consumer Ratings Annotations: Powered by Google Consumer Surveys
Data for this annotation comes from hundreds of thousands of surveys we've run using the Google Consumer Surveys platform. Google Consumer Surveys provides a controlled platform for sampling consumer opinion, helping to avoid some of the potential biases and risks with other types of open-to-everyone review platforms. Each rating is based on at least hundreds of completed surveys, with the average above 1000. We plan to regularly refresh the survey data to keep the ratings current.

Learn more
For the last few years, we’ve been working on bringing trust and transparency to your search ads with formats like seller ratings and review extensions. Consumer ratings annotations will soon start showing with several hundred advertisers' search ads in the US, UK and Canada. We hope to expand availability to more advertisers in the future, so drop us a line if you’re interested in showing consumer ratings annotations with your ads.

To learn more about consumer ratings annotations, check out the AdWords Help Center.

Authored by Shreyas Doshi, Group Product Manager, AdWords
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This week we introduced Google+ Pages, a new way to get closer to your customers online. At that time we announced that you’d be able to link your Page to your AdWords campaigns, so that all your +1s -- from your Page, your website, ads and search results -- get tallied together and appear as a single total. We’re happy to announce that starting today, and rolling out to all advertisers globally over the rest of the week, we’re making this functionality available with a new AdWords feature called Social Extensions.

With Social Extensions, consumers will be able to see all the recommendations your business has received, whether they are looking at an ad, a search result or your page. This means your +1’s will reach not only the 40+ million users of Google+, but all the people who come to Google every day.

Currently (and for campaigns that don’t have Social Extensions enabled) your AdWords ads only show +1’s from people who have +1’d that ad’s landing page. This limits the likelihood that someone who sees your ad will have a friend or contact who’s recommended it. By enabling Social Extensions on your ad campaigns you’re able to leverage all the +1’s your brand has received, whether it be on a search result, on your Google+ Page, your website or on your ads, making it more likely that someone who sees your ad will have a friend or contact who has recommended it.

We believe that this has the potential to improve your overall ad performance. In fact, 71% of shoppers say that recommendations from friends and family impact their purchasing decisions.* These additional recommendations may result in more conversions and deeper engagement with your business overall.

Not only have we enabled you to serve more personalized ads, but we’ve also added a new reporting segment that will help you better understand the impact that social annotations are having on your campaigns and ads. Starting today you can segment any campaign, adgroup, keyword or ad by a new +1 annotation segment.

This segment will breakout your performance metrics into three categories
  • Impressions with personal annotations - (impressions where the viewer had a friend or contact who had +1’d your brand.)
  • Impressions with basic annotations - (impressions that included an anonymous count of people who +1’d your brand)
  • Impressions without any social annotations
Note that this segment works on all campaigns, even ones that don’t leverage the new Social Extension (since +1 annotations can come from a number of sources, and not simply Google+ Pages).

To enable Social Extensions on your AdWords campaigns simply click the Ad Extensions tab in your account and select Social Extensions from the drop down menu and choose new extension. You’ll be prompted to add your connected Google+ Page URL and click save.

You can link your Google+ Page to your AdWords campaign with Social Extensions. Social Extensions are available in the ad extensions tab in your AdWords account

To learn more about the AdWords Social Extensions please visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords Crew

*Harris Interactive, June 2010
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For more than ten years, AdWords has been at the forefront of the advertising world. From text ads to video ads, we’ve been constantly innovating and redefining the advertising ecosystem. Starting today, you can be one of the first to experience the next generation of advertising: Google Blimp Ads.

Imagine this: a baseball stadium, packed with thousands of fans. A home run flies through the air, and as the crowd looks up, they see your ad, bigger than ever, hand-painted on the side of a majestic blimp. Blimp Ads can make this a reality.


With your text ads on our brand new fleet of gBlimps, you can reach an even wider audience and capitalize on many new targeting options, including blimp height and location. You can even target special events like football games, outdoor concerts, meteor showers, and more. The possibilities are endless!

Over the past few months, we’ve privately tested Blimp Ads and found that they performed even better than expected. Now you have the opportunity to boost your ad performance by participating in our free public beta testing program.

Check out our product site to learn more and sign up now. Join us as we continue to push the boundaries of advertising.


Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew
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