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The state of California, where my office is located, shows under my ad. Why is that there? I'm not sure I want it there, so how do I get rid of it?
Your site may already be included in our crawl index, but we want to ensure that you also know how you can supplement these results with Google Base - you can submit the products or services that you offer directly to Google Base making them eligible to show on Google.com when a user searches on a relevant query.Google Base allows you to easily submit all types of online and offline information; whether it's a large selection of shoes that you sell online or information about your consulting service, we'll make it easier for people to find it on Google. If your product or service isn't online yet, we can help you put it there -- for free.For example, let's say you use AdWords to advertise your job search service. With Google Base, you can include specific information about job offers like title, job description, location and salary and we'll display them in relevant search results on Google, helping you to increase awareness about your service. The more details you include about the information you want to share, the greater the likelihood it will be found by those looking for exactly what you have to offer.If you're ready to submit information to Google Base, there are currently three ways to do so: you can upload individual items manually via a web form, submit multiple items through a bulk upload, or use our just-released API.No matter how you choose to submit your info, we hope you'll find this to be a worthwhile addition to the targeted traffic you are already getting from your AdWords campaigns.
Starting at 4am PDT tomorrow, August 23, the AdWords video ad upload tool will be down for maintenance for approximately 48 hours. During this time you will not be able to upload or modify click-to-play video ads in your AdWords account. However, if you've already created a video ad, it will continue to run normally during this time.Then, on Saturday, August 26th, the AdWords system will be temporarily unavailable from approximately 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. PDT due to system maintenance. As with the case mentioned above, though you won't be able to log in or make any changes to your account during this time, your ads will continue to run as normal.We apologize for any inconvenience that this system maintenance may cause.
My campaign was going along just fine, but all of a sudden in the Status column, it says something like "Ended July 31, 2006". Why is that? I didn't do anything, and haven't even made any changes at all for at least a couple of weeks. And even more important, how do I get it running again? I'm losing business, and want to get my ads running again!
Whether you own a day spa, hardware store, or dry cleaner, there's a good chance that customers in your neighborhood are looking for you on Google. Now you can take advantage of this opportunity by reaching new customers and retaining existing business, at no cost to you.Through printable coupons on Google Maps, you can offer customers discounts or promotions at the moment they're looking for you. Customers can print out the coupons they find on your business listing page and redeem them at your physical store location.How do you set-up a coupon? Any local business, including those run by AdWords advertisers, can create and offer coupons for free through the Local Business Center. First, you need to create and update your business listing, as it would appear on Google Maps, to ensure that people know how to reach you by phone, email, or online. Once your listing has been verified, you can login to your Local Business Center account and create, edit, and manage coupons for free.This is a great way to get your business in front of your customers as they browse Google Maps - if you'd like additional information, take a minute to learn more about adding your business and coupons.
Scheduled reports now begin running (at 1 a.m.) in the local time zone you set for your AdWords account. In addition, for those using an MCC account, scheduled MCC reports begin running (at 5 a.m.) in the local time zone of your MCC account.
The new Google Checkout blog for sellers is a way to help you get the most out of Google Checkout. We'll be sharing information on feature enhancements, product updates, Q&A from the customer support team, and useful tips.For those of you unfamiliar with Google Checkout, it's a new checkout process that makes searching and buying faster and easier. For shoppers, a special Google Checkout shopping cart icon identifies participating merchants and makes it easier to buy from them through a single login--shoppers don't have to re-enter purchasing information every time a purchase is made. For sellers, it helps you sell more online and process $10 in sales for free for every dollar you spend on AdWords advertising.So, if you're already using Google Checkout, be sure to take a look at the new blog. If you don't have a Checkout account and would like one, you can sign up here.
You may already know that Local Business Ads allow you to create an enhanced text ad with photos and icons that will give you greater visibility when potential customers search for your business on Google Maps (see screenshot below). In addition, we'll even show a regular text version of your local business ad when users in your area are searching for your business on Google.com.To enhance local business ads, we've recently introduced the ability to use your own icon as the marker on the Google Map. The icon is 16 pixels by 16 pixels and is similar to a favicon that you see in your favorite web browser. (We've highlighted the custom map marker icons in red in the screenshot below.)To recap, local business ads are priced the same way as standard keyword-targeted ads -- that is, you only pay when a user clicks on the ad to get to your your webpage from Google Maps, Google.com, or one of our partners on the Google search network. You can use local business ads to promote business locations in the US, Canada or the UK. To get started with local business ads, just follow the steps listed here.
A rigorous technical analysis by Google engineers has found fundamental flaws in the work of several click fraud consultants – flaws that help explain why widely quoted estimates of the size of the click fraud problem are exaggerated. We would like to share this research so that advertisers can be aware of these problems and so these consultants can use the information to improve their services.We provide detailed analysis and explanation of this work here. Two key findings are below, which explain the fundamental flaw we have seen in all of the reports we examined – fictitious clicks: events which are reported as fraudulent, but are never recorded or charged as ad clicks by Google:Fictitious ad clicks because of mischaracterizing events. This finding may be the most significant flaw responsible for exaggerated click fraud claims. The problem lies in the fact that many click fraud consultants don’t count actual ad clicks. Rather, to determine the number of ad clicks, they use a number of other signals, including counting visits to a particular webpage. As a result, the consultants count page reloads and subsequent visits on an advertiser’s site as multiple clicks on the advertiser’s Google ad. This generates fictitious ad clicks in the consultant’s reports. For example, if a user browses deeper into an advertiser’s site, then hits the back button, this causes a potential reload of the original landing page, which a consultant would record as an additional ad click – even though no Google ad click actually occurred.Fictitious ad clicks due to conflation across advertisers and ad networks. Some consultants “cookie” users and track their activity across their network of client advertisers. One often-used consultant implements the cookie in such a way that clicks on Yahoo ads can be counted as clicks on Google ads, and vice versa.These kinds of flaws in methodology cause click counts in consultant reports to be artificially inflated. One clear indication that the consultants’ results are flawed: they’re not even getting the total number of clicks correct. We have seen some instances of reports showing 1.5 times the number of clicks in our logs – for example, in one case 1,278 clicks were claimed as being “fraudulent” by the consultant while only 850 actually even appeared as clicks in Google’s logs.More evidence of the consultants’ defective methodology is revealed when looking at conversion rates. We found clicks identified as “fraudulent” in reports often converted at nearly the same rate (and in some cases better) compared to other clicks. In one case, “fraudulent clicks” converted 5.1% of the time — only a bit less than the advertiser’s overall conversion rate of 5.8%.Our report provides detailed case studies for three third-party auditing firms – AdWatcher, ClickFacts, and Click Forensics – which represent the vast majority of the last 100 reports advertisers have submitted to us. All of the reports we’ve seen from these consultants exhibit the serious problems we have described above. The pervasiveness of these problems concerns us, especially because advertisers may be hurting their businesses by changing their campaign settings based on erroneous information. We will continue to devote attention to this issue to keep our advertisers well-informed, and perhaps help third-party auditing firms improve their methods so that they can provide value to advertisers.If you would like to know more about the general issue of invalid clicks and how we manage them, we have posted previously here and here. If you would like to learn more about how to track invalid clicks in your account, you can find information about our Invalid Clicks reporting feature here.
Those of you following AdWords may have noticed that we've been trying to tell advertisers more and show them more about invalid clicks. We also think there is more the industry as a whole can do to promote transparency on the issue, which is why we're participating in the Industry-wide Click Measurement Working Group. The effort is coordinated by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Media Rating Council (MRC) with a goal of developing "a detailed definition of a 'click' and the standard against which clicks are measured and counted including the identification of invalid clicks and/or fraudulent clicks."More information about the announcement can be found in the press release from the IAB.
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