Check out and subscribe to the new Google Ads blog.
This week, you may have noticed an Advanced Search link next to the search box on the Campaign Management page, as well as on the Tools page of your account. These new links bring you to our suite of account management tools, such as the Find and Edit Max CPCs tool. While we haven't changed the way you use these tools to make account-wide changes, we hope this makes searching your account easier and faster. So, if you need to find ad text across multiple campaigns or keywords that meet certain criteria such as number of clicks, average position, or clickthrough rate, these searches are now just a click away.
Google Base is an extension of Google's existing content collection efforts like the web crawl, Google Sitemaps, Google Book Search, and Google Video. It's a place where you can post all sorts of information and have it show up on Google.com and other relevant properties like Froogle and Google Local for free.The goal of Google Base is to improve the overall quality and breadth of Google Search results by collecting an even wider diversity of content. Allowing content owners to describe and assign attributes to the information they submit will help us use this meta-data to better target search results to what users are looking for.
Google Base can direct traffic to specific URLs on your own websites for free! It complements Google AdWords by driving additional traffic to your sites from another Google property. Though you can't control the rank of your site in the search results, Google Base allows you to help decide how people find you -- you can add relevant item details and define your own keywords to help others find your stuff more easily.
We make it easy for you to post lots of items at once through feeds or bulk uploads in tab-delimited, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom formats. In addition, you can create custom attributes in your bulk upload files. Attributes, or item details, are words or phrases that help describe the characteristics or qualities of your items. For example, if you're trying to describe a recipe you want to share, you might include attributes such as 'Cuisine: French', 'Main Ingredient: Eggs', and 'Course: Breakfast'. You can also add images in JPEG and GIF formats.
Since its launch, Google Base has proven useful for both personal and business use. People have uploaded their favorite recipes, podcast links, events, personal profiles, clinical trial information, and even protein databases. And, as expected, a subset of Google Base items have been listed for sale. To improve the user experience for these item types, we're planning to start letting people buy Google Base commercial items using their Google Accounts.Many of you may already use your Google Account to sign in and pay for a number of Google services, like Google Video and Google Earth. Now we're introducing similar functionality for Google Base: buyers will have a convenient and secure way to purchase Google Base items by credit card, and sellers can take advantage of easy to use transaction processing as they manage their Google Base items. We're starting off with a very small number of sellers, and we expect to include more over the next several months. If you're interested in getting an announcement when this feature is generally available, let us know.By providing buyers and sellers a convenient and secure way to purchase and sell Google Base items, we hope to make it even easier for people to use Google Base to post and distribute a wide range of content, from details about a family reunion to a used bike for sale.
On my Campaign Summary page, the number of clicks and impressions has not accurately been displayed. This has led me to a big charge of $52.39 which I was not aware of. According to my Campaign Summary, I have only accrued $11.23 in clicks... If there is something I'm missing please let me know as soon as possible. - Five days with AdWords
On Friday, February 24th, the AdWords system will be unavailable from approximately 8 p.m. to 12 a.m. PST due to system maintenance. While you won't be able to log into your accounts during this short downtime, your campaigns will continue to run as usual. We apologize for any inconvenience.
I wish you would have more descriptive subject lines. I file most of your bloggings in an email file...and sometimes go back to them. "Now, where is that note on how to advertise on selected content match sites only?" I ask myself but the titles of the email says things like "Advertise smarter" or "Because you don't want Hallowee..." Notice how that last one got cut off, which is typical, since most of your email already has [Inside AdWords] taking up valuable subject line real estate. Nuf said. - Robbin
Okay, I'm new at this, but I'm finding these explanations rather mystifying. I have to click on all these words, read more mystifying stuff. How about walking us through an EXAMPLE or two of what you mean? That would really help.
How about some case studies? - Ted F.
I suggest...you use examples of different small businesses in a “narrative” to show your customers how your service, the Internet and related can be used relative to improving their marketing... - Wayne C.
Dear Inside AdWords Reader,We want to take this opportunity to express our appreciation for you, our blog readers. Your positive reactions to the blog have made our late night brainstorming and writing sessions worthwhile. We’re happy that you find our blog useful and that you continue to read us, whether it be on the website, via our posts-by-email, or via our site feed. We thank you for your continued support—and wish you a very Happy Valentine’s Day. Love, Arielle, Blake, Sarah & VivianThe Inside AdWords crew
Love,
Arielle, Blake, Sarah & VivianThe Inside AdWords crew
Sitemaps now shows you a list of the most common words in your site's content and in external links to your site. This can help you build and refine your keyword lists to target your audience. It also gives you additional information about why your site might come up for particular search queries. To make your site more crawl-friendly, don't forget about your robots.txt file. As Matt Cutts explained in a recent blog post, "The robots.txt file is one of the easiest things for a webmaster to make a mistake on.” Your robots.txt file is a sort of note to web crawlers that tells them which pages on your site it may and may not crawl. Having an over-protective robots.txt can limit how many of your pages can be indexed in Google and discovered in the natural search results. With the newest release of Google Sitemaps, you can get a report that shows you Googlebot's view of your robots.txt file. This way, you or your webmaster can find out if you've accidentally blocked Google from crawling parts of your website.And, if you're not quite clear on how Sitemaps can help your site, here’s a neat new Sitemaps success story about how it's helping a fellow advertiser, ApartmentRatings.com -- check it out!
Once you have an awesome web analytics service like Google Analytics, the next thing you'll want is a community where you can get answers and help out fellow Analytics users -- 24/7. We heard from our friends over in AdWords about how helpful their online forum AdWords Help has been to advertisers, so we followed suit and built our own forum called Analytics Help.Powered by Google Groups, Analytics Help is a place where you can discuss Google Analytics with other users. Our vision for this forum is for it to become a resourceful, diverse community where you can post questions, share knowledge and best practices, and meet other Analytics users. And when we say diverse, we mean it! Beginner or expert, AdWords advertiser or not, webmaster or marketer, you'll be able to communicate with Analytics users all over the world. In other words, you're in good company when you visit the forum.So on that note, we'd like to invite you to stop by and check it out. So far, membership is at 1619 and growing. We hope you'll make it 1620. ;-)In addition to the forum, the Analytics Help Center is also a helpful resource for getting answers to frequently asked questions, how-to articles, troubleshooting instructions, and more. You may notice forum members referencing the Help Center in their posts from time to time. Also, to find out what industry experts recommend to optimize your marketing efforts and site content, take a seat at Conversion University, where you can learn more about driving traffic to your site and converting visitors into customers.
I would like to suggest that you allow advertisers to put in a backup credit card in case there is a problem with the primary card. I've had 2 cases recently where my credit card was declined and all campaigns stopped. If this happens when I'm away on a trip, it's not good to have all campaigns stop for a period of time until I get back to a computer.
Allow for more than one credit card as an emergency backup (this will allow customers not to go offline).
Can campaign performance (clicks, impressions, etc) be observed by country/region? I am planning to expand my current campaign from the US only to worldwide. – Jessica M.
Recently I have changed most of the destination URLs in our ads from going to our homepage to going straight to specific pages on our site. My question is: is there an easy way to look at search through all of the destination URLs in my account to make sure that I haven’t missed any? – Don M.
Is there an easy way to differentiate between my organic search hits and my paid hits? I think even if I create a different landing page that I only use for my pay-per-click ads, there is a strong likelihood that the page would be crawled by Google and therefore show up in unpaid search results. – Ed P.
Although we'd like to give all of our advertisers access to AdWords Editor (we really would!), for now, we have limited the number of users so that we can manage the load on our systems. Our goal is to make this product available to all advertisers as soon as possible, so if you haven't received an invitation to try out the product, please be patient. We'll be selecting beta participants from advertisers opted into participating in market research, so if you're interested in being a part of this and other limited betas, you may wish to opt-in to "Market research" on the User Preferences page of your AdWords account.
Official guides to help you get the most out of AdWords.
FOLLOW GUIDES
Get AdWords advanced tips and product updates right in your inbox.
GET THE NEWSLETTER
Follow