Social Extensions Discontinued
According to the announcements in the Google Partners Help pages, Social extensions are no longer shown with Ads if you are using it in your search advertising campaigns. This started last December 10, 2015.
What are Social Extensions?
Social extensions are one of the twelve types of extensions that can be used to enhance your ads for your search advertising campaigns. They fall under automatic extensions, meaning, ads that appear on Google search and the Search network show them when the Adwords system can link the ads to your active and verified Google+ page.
These extensions show how many Google+ followers and +1s that your company or website has if the Adwords system determines doing this would improve the performance of your ad campaign.
How Social Extensions Used to Help Ad Campaigns
Let’s assume you own an Ecommerce website and you created a Google+ page for your business. You ran a Google Adwords campaign with some ads on Google search. If your Google+ page is linked to your website, and has a minimum of 100 followers, the social extensions will appear with the ad showing the number of followers. When those who are searching to buy a product see various ads about that product, your ads will have the advantage because of the influence of the number of followers and the reviews, which are hopefully positive, that your followers wrote.
What Now?
Now that Social Extensions are no longer going to be shown, you can select from other ad extensions to highlight your product or company’s unique value proposition. If social presence is still very important to your business, use sitelinks or callout extensions to highlight this.
