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Posted by Vivian, Inside AdWords crew
I’ve noticed that, as our advertisers expand their AdWords campaigns to support growing businesses that managing these larger accounts becomes a challenge. Advertisers have come up to me and told me that they appreciate how much traffic AdWords drives to their sites, but it gets incrementally harder to manage their campaigns as they add more keywords and ads. To help our advertisers with this problem, I’ve been working with my team on a set of account management tools that make changes across an account easy and quick.We’ve launched three of these tools to help all advertisers manage their keywords, CPCs, and ad text. Now, rather than making these changes for individual items, you can make hundreds of thousands of changes in a matter of minutes. The names of these tools are pretty self-explanatory, but I wanted to point out some specific examples of common uses for them. The Find/Edit Max CPCs tool allows you to change your CPC settings for thousands of keywords at once. You can change the CPC to a set price or increase all bids by a fixed percent or fixed amount. Some examples can be seen here. The Find/Edit Ad Text tool allows you to change the text of several ads at the same time. Learn more about how you might use it here. The Find/Edit Keyword tool allows you to edit keyword match types, delete keywords, and remove keyword-level destination URLs en masse. Take a look at some specific examples of things you can do with this tool here. These tools all support powerful filtering and searching options. For example, you can find all the keywords that are appearing above a certain position or performing below a particular CTR. If you want to find the subset of ads that have the word “roses” in them, you can just search for that word. Or even go one step further and take advantage of the download as .csv feature to generate high-performing keyword lists or a record of your best ads.So, feel free to try them out – they can be useful to accounts of all sizes. Just log in and go the ‘Tools’ page (there’s a link to that under the “Campaign Management” tab). Under the ‘Modify your Campaigns’ heading on the right side, you’ll find all three tools listed.
We recently released a new product called Google Sitemaps - a free, easy way for you to help people discover more of your web pages. It's a web crawling system that enables you to directly inform Google about when you make changes to your web pages or create new ones. That, in turn, enables Google to crawl your site more effectively and comprehensively. Learn more here.
On June 24, 2005, advertisers will be unable to login to their AdWords accounts from approximately 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. PDT [?] due to system maintenance. Please rest assured that your campaigns will continue to run normally during this short downtime, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
The AdWords API is our way of opening up AdWords to the world. Using the API, developers and advertisers can write creative applications to manage their accounts. I like to think of it this way: if the AdWords online interface were a finely prepared meal, then the AdWords API would be all the raw ingredients. Instead of serving the meal to you directly, we’re letting you go in the kitchen to prepare it your own way.Since late January, developers around the world have been programming amazing applications with the API. Googlers are also using the API to create tools to automate some of their work. We’ve seen large customers improve their productivity when handling hefty keyword lists, and smaller advertisers who have increased their ROI through more efficient bid management. We heard about one customer who sells tiramisu in the UK and how she used the API to change her bids as her product got closer to its expiration date and her inventory levels dropped. Other customers have hired third party developers to use the SOAP-based API for reporting purposes; one example is automating the process of importing AdWords campaign reports into financial management systems. You’ll find more of these success stories and active discussions on our developer forum.The API certainly isn’t for everyone, but if you have the technical resources to write even a simple program to automate some of your campaign management tasks, be sure to check it out. You can also read more about the API at our blog.
If you have multiple campaigns with riveting (yet unrevealing) titles such as "Campaign #1", "Campaign #7," and "Campaign #23", then consider renaming your campaigns to describe the Ad Groups they contain.If you do this, you'll save time that might otherwise be spent searching for your "teddy bear" ads in a couple of dozen numbered campaigns.Want to quickly change "Campaign #17" into "All Stuffed Animals"? Then just visit the appropriate "Edit Campaign Settings" page. Once there, it'll only take you a moment or two.
AdWords text ads can be incredibly effective, but we're constantly searching for ways to make them better, both for users and for you. We're pulling the curtain off of Site Targeting, a new set of features that will help you reach prospects in a whole new way. Here's what you can now do with AdWords:Target Sites (Not just Keywords)Now, you can select specific content sites where you want your ads to show. This will allow you to precisely communicate with those individuals who are most likely to be interested in your offerings.Get CreativeWithin site-targeted campaigns, you can use not only text and image ad formats, but also animated image ads.Make an ImpressionSite-targeted campaigns allow you to bid for placement on a CPM (cost-per-thousand-impressions) basis. These ads will compete in the same auction with CPC (cost-per-click) ads.
Everyone should check to see if their business is listed correctly on Google. To find out, visit Google Local or Google Maps and search for your business. If you find anything you'd like to change, you can add or update your business information at the Google Local Business Center. This way, when someone's looking for you on Google Local or Google Maps, they'll be able to get accurate, up-to-date information.
If you are using your web server logs to help you track your clicks and referrers, add tracking code to your destination URLs to help you identify which clicks are coming from Google AdWords. For example:www.yoursite.com?referrer={ifsearch:GoogleAdWordsSearch}{ifcontent:GoogleAdWordsContent}If that sounds like an alien language to you, then we'll tell you lots more here.
"Would you please tell me why I can't see my ad from the "Friendly Tapir" campaign? I think I've set everything up correctly, and I still have budget left for the day. So why is my ad not appearing?"
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