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On Saturday, July 29th, the AdWords system will be unavailable from approximately 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. PDT due to system maintenance. While you won't be able to log into your account during this time, your campaigns will continue to run as usual. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Today, we’re announcing the launch of a new AdWords feature enabling advertisers to have a much more detailed picture of invalid click activity in their account. The metrics of “invalid clicks” and “invalid clicks rate” will show virtually all the invalid clicks affecting an account.These clicks are filtered in real-time by our systems before advertisers are charged for them. The resulting data will of course differ from one advertiser to the next. In addition, a much smaller number of invalid clicks may also be credited to advertisers’ accounts after-the-fact, as the result of a publisher being terminated from the AdSense program for invalid click activity. These will appear as account-level credits.One of the most controversial issues related to the topic of click fraud has been estimating how big the problem is. Estimates from third-parties (usually from consultants who have a financial incentive to make the problem seem very large) have been both inconsistent and greatly exaggerated due to their methodologies. Advertisers have always been able to compare their log data with their AdWords charges to calculate an estimate of the number of invalid clicks in their own account. This new tool will make estimating invalid click activity much easier.Remember, when we determine that clicks are invalid, you aren’t charged for them, and they don’t affect your other campaign statistics. You may include the invalid clicks and invalid click rate columns in yearly, quarterly, monthly, and daily reports. More information about the new reporting can be found here.
Earlier this year we posted about backup credit cards. For those who haven’t taken advantage of this new billing feature, a backup credit card ensures continuous delivery of your ads, even if your primary credit card gets declined. (Note that if both credit cards are declined, your ads may stop running and you’ll need to log into your account and edit your billing information.)
Additionally, in response to customer requests, we’re now showing the last four digits of the credit card used to process a payment on the Billing Summary page. This makes it much easier for you to distinguish which credit card (e.g. primary or secondary) was used.
Bismarck: Why is video such a compelling advertising medium?Todd: With video, you tug at people's emotions and this provides for a higher recall rate than a static image or a text ad.Bismarck: Can video work online?Todd: The Internet gives everybody a voice. Small advertisers are able to get the same level of engagement and reach that the large companies, such as Nike, have been getting on broadcast TV for decades, and, at a fraction of the cost. With regard to cost per individual user reached, there is nothing out there that performs better.Bismarck: Are video ads for everyone?Todd: Videos are as integral to a company's presence as is their website.Bismarck: Now for the best practices. What should advertisers look for when creating a starter image?Todd: Consider the goal of the starter image - it is to entice the user to hit play, so you want to make sure that the starter image grabs the user's attention, but remains relevant to the actual video ad. Use bold, vibrant colors and try to limit text to a minimum.Bismarck: What kind of content should be included in the video ad?Todd: Again, make sure to keep the user's attention. Try to tell a story - and stay clear of the product-based infomercial. Use people - owners, customers and the like to tell their story with the product.Bismarck: How about animation? Does it work?Todd: We use animation when we're trying to explain a complex idea, but whenever possible, we try to use real people.Bismarck: Is there an ideal length for an ad?Todd: Most ads will be watched for less than 30 seconds, so make sure that even if you make your ad longer than 30 seconds, that you front-load your important messages. Movie trailers or short films are obviously watched longer, but even they start to see a drop off at around 90 seconds.Bismarck: Anything else you would like to share with our advertisers?Todd: One more thing - avoid using scripts unless you're hiring actors to help you shoot the ad. You want your users or potential customers to believe you and scripting comes off as phony in many instances.Bismarck: Thank you for your time.Todd: My pleasure.
As you may recall, we began incorporating advertiser landing page quality into the Quality Score back in December 2005. Following that change, advertisers who are not providing useful landing pages to our users will have lower Quality Scores that in turn result in higher minimum bid requirements for their keywords. We realize that some minimum bids may be too high to be cost-effective -- indeed, these high minimum bids are our way of motivating advertisers to either improve their landing pages or to simply stop using AdWords for those pages, while still giving some control over which keywords to advertise on. Although it is counter-intuitive to some who hear it, we'd rather show one less ad than to show an ad which leads to a poor user experience -- since long-term user trust in AdWords is of overarching importance.From time-to-time, we improve our algorithms for evaluating landing page quality (often based on feedback from our end-users), and next week we're launching another such improvement. Thus, over the coming days a small number of advertisers who are providing a low quality user experience on their landing pages will see increases in their minimum bids. It is important to note, however, that the vast majority of advertisers will not be affected at all by this change, as they link to quality landing pages.If you do see an increase in minimum bids and you feel that your landing page is providing a great user experience, please contact AdWords support and we'll take a look. Also, for useful guidelines which will help to define what users look for in a high quality site, we hope you'll take a look at the landing page and site quality guidelines, from the AdWords Help Center.
We are the only "widget" company in Santa Barbara County. When someone does a search using for example "widgets Santa Barbara" our sponsored link shows up at the top of the list. This is how it should be and it means that AdWords is working properly. However, why is it that our site does not show up in the free results?
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