It is not a surprise to see Google introduce Google+ pages. Businesses have been asking for that feature for a long time. Google has also announced that businesses can connect their business pages to their AdWords campaign.  What does that mean? All the +1s you receive online from your page, website, ads, and search results will be tallied together as one. With Social Extensions, your visitors will be able to see all your recommendations in one place.

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.

This feature has the potential to improve the performance of your ads. Of course, you want to pay attention to your conversion rates just to be on the safe side. Google is adding a new reporting segment to show you the impact of social annotations. To activate social extensions, just choose the appropriate option from Ad Extensions tab.

Facebook Ads: one of the fastest growing social advertising platforms around. As more companies join this service, you are going to have to spend more time testing and optimizing your Facebook campaigns. But the service is not yet as competitive or sophisticated as Google Adwords.

StumbleUpon ads: one of my favorite services. StumbleUpon’s ad server is much different from Google Adwords. You don’t pay for clicks but for views. Depending on the number of stumbles your ads get, your site may end up getting a lot of free traffic too.

LinkedIn DirectAds: a powerful ad solution for small businesses and start-ups alike. You can target folks by location, job function, industry, and age.

If you have been addicted to Google Adwords for years, it may take you a bit to figure the above services out. But they all bring something different to your advertising program. It never hurts to test them.

50 percent of ad campaigns will include video ads bought on a cost-per-view basis (that means that the user will choose whether to watch the ad or not, and the advertiser will only pay if the user watches). That’s up from very little today.

Today, advertisers are starting to deliver ads that are tailored to particular audiences. Many are using real-time bidding technology, so that they can bid on the ad space that they think is most valuable. In 2015, 50 percent of these ads will be bought using this real-time technology.

With smartphone growth skyrocketing, mobile is going be the number one screen through which users engage with advertisers’ digital brands.

Today, the “click” is the most important way that advertisers measure their display ad campaigns, but it’s not always the best measure—especially if an ad campaign is designed to boost things like brand awareness or recall. With new measurement technologies emerging, in five years, there will be five metrics that advertisers commonly regard as more important than the click.

Just like most news articles on the web today can be commented on, shared, discussed, subscribed to and recommended, in 2015, 75 percent of ads on the web will be “social” in nature—across dozens of formats, sites and social communities.

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So the future of ads are mobile, social, video, and interactive. Google is not exactly breaking new grounds here. Google is working on ways to get the most out of these developments. For instance, the company is testing TrueView that empowers website visitors and let them skip ads that they do not want to see. Teracent technology will play a role in the future of Google ads as it can improve display ads on the fly based on numerous factors (e.g. geo information).

Google plans to use Google Goggles to offer advertisers the chance to display higher quality ads to their prospects. Companies are going to spend more on rich media ads in the future. Google is not going to be the only player in this market. But it won’t sit behind while Facebook, Apple, and other players go for their shares of ads markets. The future of ads is mobile, social, video, interactive, and geo-smart. But we knew that already, didn’t we?

Many small businesses take advantage of Google Adwords to bring traffic to their websites. You set up a keyword list, create your campaign and ad groups, get your targeting done, and go live. That’s all fine an dandy, but Google wants small businesses to have a better chance of reaching out to their prospects (for money of course). Google is test driving Local Listing Ads in California in order to launch the service nationwide in the near future. The service allows you to pay a fixed fee to show up on Google business listings (maps) above the SERPs.

So here is how Google Local Listing Ads work. You will have to add your business to Google’s Local Business Center. The process is painful and is free. You will have to verify your business before being able to move forward, but that’s nothing to sweat on.

Once you are listed on Google, you can take advantage of Google Local Listing Ads to not only reach out to new prospects in you area (through Google and Google Maps), but also have Google track your calls and user interactions with your ads. So how’s Google Local Listing different from “local ads” on Google Adwords? Local Listing Ads are much cheaper and don’t require small businesses to deal with keywords, campaigns, and so on. You can think of it as Paid Inclusion, except these are ads and won’t show up in the search results but rather above them as ads.

Should you try Google Local Listing Ads? It’s not currently available in a lot of areas, so you may not have the choice. But for those who do, Local Listing Ads is yet another simple, affordable way to get your business in front of your local customers. How affordable? That depends on how you define “affordable” for your business as well as your location and the category you want your business listed in. It never hurts to test it out.

Hate to be dramatic about it, but there was no question in my mind since I tried Google Adsense for Videos that the service won’t last too long. YouTube has not been the cash cow Google hoped it’d be, which is why it’s getting a makeover to move a bit away from user-generated content to generate more revenue for Google. Google Adsense for Video was a bad waste of ad space at best and a torture for publishers at worst. Google didn’t make enough money with them either:

… we frequently review our products and features to ensure their effectiveness. After reviewing our AdSense video units feature, which allows you to show YouTube content and ads on your pages, we’ve found that it hasn’t had the impact we had hoped for. As a result, we’ve decided to retire this feature at the end of April so we can focus our resources on other opportunities to help publishers earn from their sites.

It’s noble to try new things and test things out to figure out what works and what doesn’t on your website. But Google Adsense video units were truly atrocious. That doesn’t mean there weren’t people who were having success with Google Adsense Video. It’s just that it wasn’t making enough money for Google to continue the product.

If you have read popular Adsense books such as Adsense Secrets, you know that your goal should be to integrate Adsense into your pages in a way that it doesn’t screen “I am an Ad!” People are mentally blocking ads these days, and I didn’t think it was going to change with video ads. If you still enjoy displaying videos on your blog, you don’t have to necessarily remove your Adsense video codes from your site. They will automatically show YouTube videos on your site:

Once video units are retired at the end of April, any remaining Leaderboard or Skyscraper video units on your pages will direct users to YouTube.com, while other video unit sizes will automatically be changed to standard embedded YouTube players. These standard video players will display top YouTube videos, but you won’t generate earnings from them once this change occurs. If you have less than three ad units on your page, you may prefer to replace your video unit with a regular ad unit.

Of course, you may want to replace your video units with something that actually pays you in the long run. YouTube is great but who would want to display YouTube videos in hot ad spots?

In reality, you should never give up trying to push branded terms in your ads. You can use “@” (e.g M@cbook) to get your ads approved under the radar. But some companies don’t even forbid folks bidding on their brands, so you should not just assume anything. Your ads may not show up in bold, but folks who are searching for a brand are targeted and more likely to convert. Think about it. Who’s more likely to buy: someone who is searching for a  laptop or a Macbook. The latter is not super targeted as “15 inch 2GB Ram Macbook” but it’s still pretty good. With a lot of other products, you can bid on the exact term and gain access to a stream of super-targeted visitors. Now that’s worth a lot.

At the end of the day, you shouldn’t be shy about doing things on Google and other engines. What have you got to lose? As long as you are not cloaking and doing sneaky things, Google won’t ban you for playing with your keyword terms. So just keep plugging away!