Why Google's +Post ads Program May Be Important For You

by Eric Enge

On April 16, 2014 Google announced that +Post ads would be available to all Google+ brand pages that have more than 1,000 followers. In this article I will review what these are, why it is important for brands to consider taking advantage of them, as well as why this this makes it more important than ever to be engaged in Google+.

What are +Post ads?

+Post ads allow brands to promote their Google+ content posts via Google’s AdSense program. This means that any post you push out via your brand page on Google Plus can receive additional traffic from other places on the web. If you are not familiar with the AdSense program, it is a form of the Google AdWords program, except the ads show up as display ads on 3rd party web sites instead of in Google’s Search results.

Imagine that you are running a business that promotes travel to the beautful Outer Banks section of North Carolina, and you create great article content that you would like visibility for. One step you can take is to promote that article on Google Plus from your brand page. The +Post ads program allows you to also pay to promote that same content on other people’s web sites, therefore dramatically increasing the visibility of that content. Basic controls within your AdSense account allow you to control what places these ads show. The following screen shot shows a traditional AdSense ad on the TripAdivsor web site:

One of the great features of this program is that the shared posts are fully interactive. Visitors to the site running your +Post ad can actually comment on the article right on that 3rd party site, including resharing them through their own Google+ accounts. You can see this in action in this example of a Toyota ad on the AllRecipes web site:

In this screen shot we see a +Post ad on the right rail and in the center of the screen the ad has been expanded out as the user has already begun to engage with it. The user can +1 the content, share it, or comment on it.

READ FULL ARTICLE:  forbes.com