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We got an email yesterday from Google Adwords letting us know that now the +1 button will be availble on the PPC results.

In the coming weeks, your search results and ads on Google will include a +1 button, which users can click to recommend your ads. You don’t need to make any changes to your account in order to take advantage of them. The final landing page URL of your ads can also appear on the Google profile of any user who +1’s your ad.

Think of the +1 button as a way for fans of your business to recommend what you offer, for all their friends and contacts to see. By helping searchers see more personal, relevant ads, we believe you’ll see more qualified traffic. You can also add the +1 button to your site to give your customers the opportunity to +1 your site after visiting it.

We started seeing the button a few weeks ago on the search results and now we can see it on almost all our searches. Unfortunately Adwords didnt mention anything about reporting and if we are going to be able to see how many people click on the button or even which ad/which URL.

Google announced that as of yesterday, interest categories are now available to all AdWords advertisers. Interest categories are a good way of exposing your content campaigns to more users within the display network. We always recommend that client set up a re-marketing in order to get more data and understand the creative performance

How interest categories work? According to Google “the system looks at the types of pages a user visits, taking into account how recently and frequently those pages have been visited, and then associates their browser with relevant interest categories. Using these categories, you can show ads to the people most likely to purchase your products or services, and you can reach them across all types of sites in the Google Display Network in addition to contextually relevant sites.”

There are over 1,000 interest categories from very niche to very broad interests/themes.  Once more Google is helping advertisers to use the Google Display Network.

Google announces a series of  search improvements today on the “Inside Search” event. A few days ago Google emailed journalists inviting them to Inside Search for ”an under-the-hood look at Google Search, share our vision, and demo some of our newest technology and features.”

There where several improvements on the mobile  search improvements but the three main annocuments are the following:

Voice Search

Now you can speak your web searches instead of typing them! A small microphone will appear on the search box, once you click the microphone your results will show up just as they would if you’d typed the query!

Search by Image

You can also search by using an existing image.  Users can drag and drop an image into the search box, or instead choose to upload it or copy and paste it into the field. There is also a very handy Chrome extension where you can right click on an image in order to do a search.

Google Instant Pages

This is by far the best improvement. With Instant Pages, Google will pre-load websites from the search result pages, not only the HTML code but even images.  According to Google this will save seconds off the search process by loading Websites before you even click on them.  Instant pages is currently available only on Google’s Chrome browser. Once more Google proves that really want to speed up the internet!!

It was reported a few days ago in the US that users are seeing the top PPC ads on Google Adwords with a pink background and it seems this is now launched in the UK too. Google move from the old blue background to the yellow one in 2007. In the meantime they have tested a lot of different versions. It will be interesting to see if this change increases the CTR!

Google announced on the 28th of June another new feature/extension on PPC ads. The introduction ofseller ratings.

Starting today we’re introducing a new feature, called seller rating extensions, that makes it easier for people to identify highly-rated merchants when they’re searching on Google.com. Seller rating extensions does this by attaching your merchant star rating from Google Product Search to your AdWords ads. These star ratings, aggregated from review sites all around the web, allow people to find merchants that are highly recommended by online shoppers like them.

If your online store is rated in Google Product Search, you have 4 or more stars, and you have at least 30 reviews, you’ll automatically get seller ratings with your ads. Its free and you’ll only be charged if someone clicks on the headline of your ad – clicks on the review link are free. When we did a competitor search yesterday we noticed that the seller rating are now  available in the UK.