Google caters to more SMEs

Pornthip Kongchun, head of marketing at Google (Thailand), said only 10 per cent of the 2.9 million SMEs in the country were benefiting from an online presence. Google aims to help encourage the rest of them to go online, especially if they use its marketing services, both the free and the paid ones.

Google AdWords is the key paid service, but Google says it has integrated all of its products and services to offer SMEs optimisation for their businesses. Most recently, it launched Google+ for Business or Google+ Page and Google Global Market Finder to help SMEs expand their business throughout the world through Google’s networks. 

“Google AdWords is to help SMEs that already have their own websites, while Google+ for Business is to help SMEs that do not have websites to be present online and benefit from all Google’s products and services, especially Google Search and Google AdWords,” she said.

Currently, there are more than 100 million businesses on Google+ Pages, while there are around 350 million Google+ users worldwide. 

More than 100 agencies are helping SMEs in Thailand with Google’s online marketing solutions including website development, consulting, and marketing-campaign development. 

She said two new features added on to Google AdWords were Social Extension and Post Ads. 

The Social Extension feature will integrate brands’ Google+ page into Google AdWords, which will be displayed on Google Search. Currently, Google Search has 100 million searches every month worldwide. Meanwhile, Post Ads feature will turn existing display adverts on Google’s network into “social ads”. 

Post Ads is to turn a brand’s post on Google+ into a display ad on Google’s network, while Social Extension is meant to show how many comments and how much social engagement that brand has, Pornthip said.