If you thought Google+ was just another social network, think again. It’s more than that. In fact, Google has said all along that it intends to connect all of its services with Google+. And it looks like that is happening slowly but surely.

One way that Google+ users can benefit from the service on a sister property is by connecting their Google+ account with their Google AdWords account.

If people respect the recommendations of their friends and families as the latest polls show that they do, then it makes sense to show how many +1s your ads receive. People who conduct a search on Google and see your ads on the search results pages will see which ads their friends and families have +1ed. That will act as encouragement for those searchers to either +1 your ad or click the link.

But here’s the catch: You have to turn this feature on in Google AdWords account.

Google calls this “social annotations” and they could become a key metric for your PPC advertising. It’s also a way for your pay-per-click initiatives to take on a flavor of social media marketing. In the 21st century, social media marketing could become the standard by which all other marketing initiatives are judged. Including PPC.

Facebook wants to woo small business owners into becoming advertisers. How are they going to do that? By giving away $10 million in free advertising. They’re planning to do this $50 at a time starting next year.

So why is Facebook giving away all that money in free advertising? Here’s a test. It’s multiple choice. Can you guess which answer is correct?

1. Small business owners don’t think they need Facebook
2. They want to steal you away from Google AdWords
3. Facebook wants to encourage small business owners to advertising using Facebook Marketing Solutions
4. They think if they give you $50 in free advertising that you’ll stick around and spend more money

If you said “all of the above,” then you’d be correct. Facebook is getting aggressive about pursuing small business owners as advertisers.

It’s true, 64% of small business owners think social networking isn’t necessary. Therefore, they aren’t on Facebook at all.

Since Google AdWords has pretty much dominated Web advertising for almost a decade, Facebook is looking to get a piece of that action, and more than any other company they are poised to take a big bite out of Google’s chunk of the market. I think Google is just a little bit concerned too.

So if Facebook can convince you to at least give Facebook Marketing Solutions a try, then maybe – just MAYBE – you’ll do well enough to keep advertising. They’ll make more money, you’ll get more business, and Facebook can topple Google from king of the Internet mountain.

At least it’s worth a shot in Facebook’s eyes. Can you blame them?

American Express OPEN Forum has an excellent article on Facebook ads (of course, I’m biased since they quoted me in the article). If you haven’t used Facebook ads yet, you’ll want to read the article. Here’s a summary of the 5 pointers.

1. Set goals and plan your approach – What do you want to achieve with your advertising? If you don’t know, then you likely won’t achieve anything.
2. Use creative target marketing tactics – More so than traditional PPC ads, Facebook ads allow you to drill down your demographic targeting. You can get real small in your efforts too and narrow it down pretty well. You can even send out pre-emptive birthday messages, and that kind of marketing rocks.
3. Use powerful text and images – Don’t just use your logo. Pick an image that draws attention to your ad and make your text powerful enough that it gets the click-through.
4. Test multiple ads – One of the biggest mistakes small business owners make is only running one ad. Create four ads that are similar and test which one works best.
5. Keep your page updated – Have your Facebook page ready to close the sale. Keep it updated so that you can be ready to respond to click-throughs.

These are great tips. If you’re wondering which one I contributed, you’ll have to read the article.

For years, large companies like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and ExxonMobil have spent millions of dollars simply to maintain a positive impression in the media. They weren’t so much concerned with the coveted ROI on advertising campaigns as they were with branding themselves and achieving top-of-mind awareness.

When you establish a new advertising campaign – whether it be through pay-per-click services, outdoor advertising, print media, or any other medium – you should outline your goals. Are you looking for ROI or would you be happy with branding effects?

If ROI is your main concern, then you have to think about your budget. Being the top spender in your market segment may mean that you lose money on your advertising. But it could mean that you achieve huge branding success. Which is more important to you?

PPC is like any other advertising medium. You can figure out which price point per click will yield the greatest ROI on your advertising efforts or you can try to own the advertising space with a PPC branding campaign. If you opt for the latter, be prepared to pay top dollar for clicks. Sometimes, your customers come from other places on the Web because they noticed your PPC ads when they conducted a search.

PPC for branding isn’t for the faint of heart. You must ensure you have the budget for it or you may as well go home.

Google has said publicly that it fears Facebook. As well it should. The social network is now the most trafficked website online. But there is another reason to fear Facebook too. It has a competing advertising model.

For the longest time, serious advertisers online went to the pay-per-click line, and Google was the beginning of that line. The alternatives were Yahoo!, Bing (or Windows Live), and smaller PPC search engines. But then Facebook became the popular social network and introduced its own PPC advertising model. In the last couple of years, Facebook has improved its advertising offerings and is now in a respectable position.

The latest test run by Facebook is for real-time advertising. Will it win out?

Imagine posting to your Facebook wall, “I’m going out tonight and wearing my red high heels.” At that moment, an ad appears advertising shoes. Would it creep you out? Would you click the link?

The verdict is not out on whether Facebook users would tolerate real-time advertising. My bet is that they would. There may be a few complaints, but most people would just go along with it. So I think this represents a great opportunity for advertisers. If you want to promote your business through PPC, Google is no longer your only option. It may not even be your best option.

Google has been known for its constant testing and tweaking. As a result of this constant testing with AdWords, the Inside AdWords blog has announced that it will change the way display URLs look in AdWords ads.

Here’s what the blog says the change will look like:

Following the change, the domain portion of your display URL will always be shown in lowercase letters. For example, if your display URL is Subdomain.Example.com/Subdirectory, it will appear as subdomain.example.com/Subdirectory.

Will this subtle change make a difference in click throughs? Google is claiming that it will. What do you think?

In related news, Google has introduced a new way to manage negative keywords across multiple domain names with negative keyword lists.

What this change effectively does is allow you to more efficiently manage keyword lists for more than one domain name. Negative keywords are important to any pay per click campaign because these are keywords that generally result in high click-throughs but low conversion rates. Or they could be non-related keywords that are typically associated with your keywords.

For instance, if you are a car dealer and you sell Corvettes and one of your keywords is “red Corvette”, then you might add “little red corvette” and “Prince” to your negative keyword list because you don’t want your ad to appear for these search phrases and run the risk of getting click-throughs on non-related searches.

During this time of great change in Internet marketing, pay per click marketing is a method of advertising online that has been effective for many small businesses and Google AdWords has been a major influence in the success of many of these businesses.

Many new pay per click advertisers get wrapped around the idea that their ad needs to be in the No. 1 position to be effective. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, studies show that the No. 1 position is often not the best position. For one thing, to get that position you have to pay some pretty hefty click prices for many niches. And those prices could scale you right out of your ROI.

Which brings me to my next point. The best PPC position is the one that will maximize your ROI. In other words, where will you make the most profit on sales achieved from your clicks on that position?

That’s a difficult question to answer and it can only be answered through tests. You have to raise and your lower your click bids until you arrive at the best position then fight to keep it. And the best position for you may not be the best position for someone else. It all depends on the effectiveness of your ad, the effectiveness of your landing page and the price of your clicks. Test, test and test some more.

Ideally, all of that said, the best positions for many advertisers tend to be Nos. 2-4 on page 1 of the SERP. Why are these the best positions? That’s a good question.

Typically, the first position is owned by a big brand that is in protective mode. They’re more worried about keeping their market share than increasing business. For them, the ad is as much about keeping the name brand front and center than about getting click throughs. If it achieves that purpose then they consider their PPC campaign successful even if it loses money. As a small business you can’t afford to do that.

Your goal should be to spend as little as possible on each click to obtain the highest number of conversions at the highest possible price for your product. If your product has a low profit margin then you don’t want to spend too much on click prices. Settling for a lower position may actually produce a high profit margin for you.

So what’s the best PPC position? It depends on a number of factors, all of which have to constantly be tested.

Google have introduced a special area in their Adwords forum specifically targeted towards small business. Appropriately named ‘Small Business Corner’, it allows small businesses that use Google Adwords to come together to discuss what works, what doesn’t work, and how to get the best out of their ad campaigns. PPC for small business can be difficult as business owners tend to manage their own campaigns rather than employing professionals.

The Google small business blog best sums up the forums intentions stating:

The Small Business Corner is designed to give those of you who are running your own AdWords accounts the opportunity to share best practices in discussions with your peers so that you can make sure your AdWords account is doing all it can to support your business goals.

Areas of interest that small business owners can share include tools used to help with PPC campaigns and measuring results, and how to craft winning ads.  In the offline world, small businesses have regularly come together to form associations where they can discuss and share business ideas. Google’s Small Business Corner is only one of a number of small business forums, however, as it’s directly related to Adwords, it may make for an interesting place to share ideas.

Dennis Yu has some good ideas on using Facebook for advertising. Specifically, some of the things that I like about his approach include:

• If you’re a small business then you can use these strategies to move in on your larger competitors
• Advertising on Facebook using these methods is direct targeting in ways that you can’t do off line
• It’s easy to sneak up on your competition
• You can give the impression that you are bigger than you are just by advertising
• I particularly like the “Switcher Campaign” model

Facebook has been criticized for not being as effective as PPC, but I think we may be seeing some evidence of change in how Facebook rolls out its advertising. If they can prove that Facebook advertising is as effective as PPC advertising with Google AdWords then we might see some legitimate competition in the online advertising space. At any rate, Facebook advertising looks like it could be worth a look-see.

For years we’ve been preached to, and I’ve preached pretty heavily, that online marketing is about drawing people toward you. Interruption marketing doesn’t work online. In fact, if you are a Seth Godin fan then you’ve likely heard that song and dance more times than you can count.

There’s no wonder why. Interruption marketing, for the most part, is not an effective online marketing strategy. It doesn’t work for SEO, articles, blog marketing, social media, video marketing or most other free channels online. However, PPC ads are somewhat different.

Think for a second about what you are asking your PPC ads to do. You want them to attract the attention of people who landed on a specific page looking for information about a topic and get those people to click on the ad to visit your page instead. In essence, you are asking your ads to interrupt people in their browsing plans.

Great, you say. I’ve built my entire online marketing strategy on the attraction concept and now you’re telling me to interrupt people. What gives?

Nothing gives, really. It’s just a little insight I’ve gleaned from reading SEO ROI. They were speaking specifically about the content network, but the insight is relevant to traditional PPC as well. Even on the SERPs, when searchers get the top 10 results for their search query, your ad is hanging there waiting for their attention. Here’s the problem: 80% of the searchers won’t click on it. You’ve got to SCREAM at them to get their attention.

While most online marketing is about attraction, PPC advertising is about attention. Get it any way you can. Make your ads scream. They are, after all, in the business of seeking attention. And to do that, they have to be remarkable.