SMB Newbie Hangouts on Air: Driving phone traffic

Editor's note: This is our fourth post in a series on SMB Newbie Hangouts on Air, where experts on the AdWords support team are hosting short Hangouts on Air to walk SMBs through AdWords-related topics. Here on the Google and Your Business Blog, we'll be providing a wrap-up of the Hangouts. This particular post is cross-published from the AdWords Google+ page. 

AdWords Specialists Courtney Pannel, Adam Anderson, and Morgan Price hosted a Hangout on Air yesterday as the fourth installment of the SMB Newbie Hangouts on Air series.

During the Hangout on Air, we discussed features like call extensions and call metrics that can help drive phone traffic for your business. Here are some resources to check out on call extensions and call metrics.

We also chatted about the benefits of having a mobile-only campaign (keyword + ad optimization, mobile site destination URLs, metrics split from desktop performance, etc.). Here’s a nifty resource about mobile ads, complete with videos and examples.

Here's the full 25-minute Hangout on Air, from the Google Business YouTube channel:

To learn more about how to get started with AdWords, visit our Help Center, check out the AdWords Community forum, or call us at 866-2-GOOGLE if you already have an AdWords account.

And remember to tune in to the live stream of our next Hangout on Air at 11 a.m. PDT, October 11, when we discuss how to optimize your account to drive local traffic. Stay tuned!

Posted by Courtney Pannell and Will Lindemann, AdWords Team

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Social that Adds Up

Cross-posted from the Google Analytics Blog

Earlier this week HootSuite Enterprise hosted Adam Singer, from Google Analytics, to share how you can use Google to measure social performance. With over half of people talking more online than they do in “real life”, digital social media is a critical platform for marketers, but how do we measure its impact?

Most marketers use platform metrics as performance indicators, but often they cannot be linked to sales. Engagement is the easiest and often the most measured social metric in terms of followers, fans and comments. However, revenue is often the more important (and more difficult to measure) metric that can help marketers determine an ROI for their social media efforts. Google offers two solutions that can help drive social media performance: Google+ and Google Analytics social reports.

Building relationships on Google+ may improve other parts of your marketing plan. Google+ is integrating social in all the Google products marketers already use, which can help them drive deeper engagement with their target customers, be more relevant by offering social recommendations when customers need them most and remain accountable by providing transparency of how their ad dollars are performing.

With Google Analytics Social reports you can tie your social media to metrics you care about. Here are some top tips Adam covered in the webinar:

• Find something you can measure (micro or macro-conversions) and sprint in that direction. Focus on how separate channels can drive different types of site actions, which can be tied to a value you determine.
• Measure success criteria directionally. Benchmarks are uncommon and do not necessarily translate across products, services or industries.
• Create your social posts with a measurement goal in mind. Be sure to include a call to action to inspire your audience to act.
• Understand and connect with your audience differently across the different networks. Try not to post the same thing on each platform, customize and use what works best.

Thank you to those who could join, if you have any questions feel free to reach out to +AdamSinger on Google+ or watch the webinar recording here.

Source: Socialnomics, 2009

Posted by the Google Analytics Team

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Celebrating the spirit of entrepreneurship with the new Google for Entrepreneurs

Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog

Startups and entrepreneurs have the power to build technologies and creative solutions that transform the world and move us forward. Innovation is happening everywhere: There are approximately 400 million entrepreneurs across 54 countries, and 69 million early-stage entrepreneurs offering new products and services. As Google turns 14 this month, we’re celebrating this creative spirit and officially launching Google for Entrepreneurs, the umbrella for our several dozen programs and partnerships around the world that support startups and entrepreneurs.
Our focus is threefold:

1. Partnerships with strong organizations that serve entrepreneurs in local communities
2. Google-led programs to bring our teams and our tools directly to entrepreneurs
3. Placing relevant Google tools in the hands of startups as they are getting off the ground and ready to scale

We’re already on a roll, with current projects ranging from support for the annual journey of entrepreneurship through India by train, to partnering with a number of accelerator and incubator programs around the world, like iHub in Kenya and Le Camping in France. And, this week, we’re rolling out our newest partnership: teaming up with Women 2.0 to bring their Founder Friday events to more cities. These events bring together current and aspiring female entrepreneurs once a month to connect with mentors and one another to build community. We’re partnering to launch Founder Fridays in Detroit, New Orleans, Sao Paulo and Moscow over the next year.

To celebrate both our birthday and the spirit of entrepreneurship that’s helped get us where we are today, we are hosting our first annual Google for Entrepreneurs Week, which will bring together more than 3,000 entrepreneurs and Googlers around the world. We kicked off over the weekend with a Startup Weekend event hosted at the Google Ventures Startup Lab in Mountain View, Calif., where Bay Area entrepreneurs came together to create their own startups in 54 hours. Over the course of the next week, Googlers in 28 cities across 13 countries will be hosting an event in their communities to bring their passion and expertise to local entrepreneurs. We’re teaming with a number of partners to make this happen, including the Idea Village in New Orleans, Communitech in Waterloo, Tetuan Valley in Wroclaw, the Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship in Johannesburg and the Council Bluffs Chamber of Commerce in Iowa.

For more on these existing programs and to stay connected on upcoming events, visit google.com/entrepreneurs and follow us on G+.

Posted by Mary Grove, Head of Global Entrepreneurship Outreach

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Help Desk Hangouts: Administrative Assistant Community

Editor’s note: Each week on the Google+ Your Business page, we’re putting you in touch with Googlers and users who can help you as a business owner get the most out of our products and features. 

 In our latest Help Desk Hangout On Air, we chatted with the folks who created the Administrative Assistant Community on Google. Administrative Assistants and other extreme users of Google Apps can trade tips and tricks about productivity, getting organized, and anything else. They’ve also got educational Hangouts (sounds familiar!) that highlight different Google products.

Miss the event? You can watch the whole thing on the Google and Your Business YouTube channel.

Check out the video description on the YouTube page for a minute-by-minute breakdown. 

Some of the questions we answered during the Hangout:

What was the inspiration behind creating the Administrative Assistant Community? 
After having worked with a number of Google Apps customers over the years, we realized that Admin Assistants are the real super users of Apps. They use Apps, and in particular Gmail and Calendar, in novel and exciting ways. This also means that they often come across problems or things that don’t work the way they need them to, and this will usually happen when they are under extreme pressure to get things done for their boss. So they are also a group that needs special attention and focus. There is already an internal Google Admin Assistant community sharing tips and tricks, and we thought it would be great to extend this into a more public facing community. Plus we aim to make the site itself a one stop shop for Admin Assistant related resources and materials.

Who can join the discussion? Is it limited to paying Google Apps customers, or “official” administrative assistants? 
Anyone can join. It is a free public website and community. Although it is particularly aimed at Administrative Assistants who use Google Apps, all are welcome to share tips and tricks!

 Help Desk Hangouts are hosted on the Google+ Your Business page every other Wednesday. Don’t miss our next Hangout at 11a.m. PDT on Wednesday, October 3. Look for the topic announcement on the Google+ Your Business page.

Posted by Dori Storbeck, Hangouts and Chat CM and Jade Wang, Google+ Local CM

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Getting America’s businesses online

Editor's note: This article is cross-posted from the Google Official Blog.

The web is where we go to find things—somewhere to eat tonight, someone to cut your hair or someone to come quickly to tend to your plumbing disaster. Ninety-seven percent of Americans who use the Internet—pretty much all of us—are looking online for local goods and services. Businesses need to be where their customers are. In 2012, that’s online.

Yet, more than half of all small businesses in the U.S. don’t have a website. Many of those businesses are completely invisible in the one place people are looking for them. The impact of being online is real: Businesses that make use of the web are expected to grow 40 percent faster and are nearly twice as likely to create jobs. Since small businesses make up half of the U.S. GDP and contribute two-thirds of all new jobs, the potential impact of getting these businesses (more than 15 million of them) online is enormous. We wanted to help spur a new wave of SMBs on the web, and change the perception that getting online is hard, expensive and time-consuming.

In July 2011, we went to Austin to get Texas businesses on the web. Texas Get Your Business Online helped any business in Texas get a free, easy-to-build website as well as a free, customized domain name and web hosting for one year. The tools and resources made it fast, easy and free for any business in Texas to get online.

The response from the small business community in Texas was tremendous—thousands of businesses started to get online at events throughout the state and on the web. So we decided to expand the program, going state-by-state to get businesses online. At the end of August 2012, we went to Alaska and Hawaii. These were our 49th and 50th states. Just over a year after our experiment in Austin, we’ve brought America Get Your Business Online to all 50 states, with help from ASBDC, Score, Intuit and over 500 local partners. We’ve had more than 20,000 small businesses attend more than 200 events throughout the country.

This is just the beginning of our commitment to get businesses on the web and succeeding online. Today, small businesses throughout the U.S. can get online for free at www.AmericaGetOnline.com. Businesses get a free, easy-to-build website as well as a free, customized domain name and web hosting for one year. It’s fast, it’s easy and it’s free.

If you’re a small business, get your business online today. Or, if you know a great business that is not online, use this tool to invite them to the web. Getting America’s businesses online may very well be the fastest, easiest step we can take to grow our small businesses and our economy.

Posted by Scott Levitan, Director of Small Business Engagement

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Ocado whets users’ appetites through innovative Google+ features

Ocado whets users’ appetites through innovative Google+ features and content –uplifts in CTRs and video views are the icing on the cake! With its inherently digital focus, internet grocery retailer Ocado has established itself as an early adopter of new technologies, so it comes as no surprise that the company embraced Google+ as soon as it could – and has already started reaping some tasty benefits.

The opportunity for Google+ to contribute to improved search rankings was a convincing reason to launch the brand’s Google+ page. By adopting social extensions, Ocado ads became instantly more compelling, and click-through rates increased by 30%.

Hangouts are a clever way that Ocado has brought food-centric content to life. The company capitalised on its existing Great British Chefs initiative and used Google+ to produce a live event where the chefs cooked for customers. Ocado promoted the hangouts via True View ads on YouTube, which resulted in 167k engaged views. The Ocado YouTube channel views went from 50k to 230k in the space of a week thanks to the hangout, without including the people who live-streamed the event (which numbered about 60 individuals at any given time).

The experience has led Ocado to consider further possibilities for moving images. They are keen not to use text-based feeds as what they really want is to get people excited about food, and images are a great way of differentiating. In addition to hangouts and images, Ocado has embraced the Google+ badge which appears on the check-out page with the aim of making the shopping experience social through gifting and sharing.

In future, Ocado has plans for more hangouts on the Google+ page, as well as ideas for more video and channel-specific content. The intention is to deliver the sights and sounds – if not the tastes and aromas – of Ocado products straight to users’ screens. Find out more about Ocado’s recipe for success by reading the full case study here.

Posted by Natalia Cano, B2B Google+ EMEA

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SMB Newbie Hangouts on Air: Optimizing your account to generate sales

Editor's note: This is our third post in a series on SMB Newbie Hangouts on Air, where experts on the AdWords support team are hosting short Hangouts on Air to walk SMBs through AdWords-related topics. Here on the Google and Your Business Blog, we'll be providing a wrap-up of the Hangouts. This particular post is cross-published from the AdWords Google+ page. 

AdWords Specialists Will Lindemann, Kaylyn Frazier, and Chad Baranik hosted a Hangout on Air last week as the third installment of the SMB Newbie Hangouts on Air series.

During the Hangout, we talked about using negative keywords to ensure your ad only shows to users looking to purchase. To grab the attention of those users looking to buy, we showed you how to optimize your ad text and expand your ad with extensions like sitelinks. To further differentiate yourself in the marketplace, we also talked about video ads and product listing ads and how you can use those more advanced formats to drive users to purchase on your site.

You can watch the full 30-minute Hangout on Air from the Google and Your Business YouTube channel here:

To learn more about how to get started with AdWords, visit our Help Center, check out the AdWords Community forum, or call us at 866-2-GOOGLE if you already have an AdWords account.

And remember to tune in to the live stream of our next Hangout on Air at 11 a.m. PDT, Thursday, September 27, when we discuss how to optimize your account to generate phone traffic. Stay tuned!

Posted by Courtney Pannell and Will Lindemann, AdWords Team

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