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Know your websiteWhether you are the marketing manager or webmaster (or both) of your business, you know the products and services on your website better than anyone else. And that means you are in the best position to evaluate your website and assess how a visitor may interact with and respond to the content on your site. Imagining yourself as your prospective customer and fine-tuning your site as necessary can result in a better experience for that prospective customer, and thus better results for you.Some elements to consider as you evaluate your website are:Site structure or sitemap: Are your products and services organized in a way that makes sense from your visitor's perspective? Specific landing pages can help these prospective customers find exactly what they are looking for. For example, if a prospective customer is searching for 'women's snowboarding pants,' the ideal landing page may feature women's snowboarding pants in all brands and styles. If she is searching for a specific brand of snowboarding pants, the ideal landing page may feature all types of snowboarding pants by that specific manufacturer.Layout and design: Visitors to your site may respond more favorably to a site that is straightforward, clean, and simple to navigate than one that is flashy or slick. Those who do not find what they are looking for tend to leave the site within the first several seconds.Ease of use: When visitors come to your site, they should be able to quickly understand how to navigate your site and find the information they're looking for. Navigation and search bars allow your prospective customers to look for more specific items or different styles. Clearly marked buttons that read 'Sign Up Now!' or 'Add to Cart' encourage further action from these prospective customers. On the other hand, broken links, inaccurate or unfinished landing pages and other obstacles make it more difficult for prospective customers to become actual customers.Know your goals Your goals, or desired results, are perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind when setting up a new account or optimizing an existing account. Are you more interested in branding your business, garnering clicks, or maximizing your return on investment? It is important to clearly identify and prioritize what specific goals you want to achieve and design your campaigns around those goals.Depending on what your primary goal is, you may want to consider the following tips:Maximizing clicks: If your aim is to cast the widest net to draw as much relevant traffic to your site as possible, you may want to consider running on a broader range of keyword variations. Keep in mind, however, that running on very general, irrelevant keywords will negatively affect your clickthrough rate, Quality Score, minimum bids and positioning.Optimizing for Ad Performance: One component of improving ad performance is maximizing your clickthrough rate. If this is your goal, the first step is to filter out irrelevant searches by refining your keyword list and incorporating negative keywords where appropriate. In addition, your ad text should ideally reflect a user's search as closely as possible. If you are running on a keyword such as 'San Francisco travel tours,' your ad text should also highlight travel tours in San Francisco.Promoting brand awareness: If you want to promote your brand, you may decide to run a cost-per-impression campaign in addition to a cost-per-click campaign. You may want to supplement your text ads and incorporate image and video ads in your campaign. You could also employ site-targeting to show your ad to people who aren't actively searching for your business but may still be interested in what you sell. Maximizing ROI: Maximizing your return on investment calls for a little more understanding about the sales cycle unique to your product or service, and how keyword searches can reflect which stage a user might be in that cycle. If you want to separate the serious buyers from the online equivalent of window shoppers, your structure, ad text and keyword lists can be designed to target specific kinds of users. For instance, users searching on variations such as 'reviews' or 'ratings' are probably still researching the product, and you can filter out such searches by including those words as negative keywords.Last but not least, it is important to determine how you will measure the impact of your optimization so you can clearly evaluate your campaign's performance before and after the optimization. If you are feeling extra scientific, you may want to test altered campaigns against a control group to see what works best for you. Google offers some powerful tools that can help you better track campaign performance, including Analytics, conversion tracking, and the Reports Center tab in your account.
Today, we began rolling out improvements to the Quality Score algorithm, which will update the Quality Score for keywords in your account over the next 3 to 4 days. As I mentioned last week, the goal of this change is to improve the quality of ads that we serve to our users by making it easier for high quality ads to enter the auction while also discouraging low quality ads. In addition, this change improves our ability to set minimum bids for keywords where we have limited data. As a result, you may see the minimum bid for your keywords increase or decrease based on the updated algorithm.To better understand the quality of your keywords after this change, we suggest that you enable the Quality Score column. This will allow you to quickly view the quality of the keywords in each of your ad groups so that you can make improvements. For example, if you notice that the minimum bid increases for a number of your keywords, you may want to consider optimizing your ad group to make it more relevant or deleting the keywords that have high minimum bids.
We know that you want to keep up to speed on trends in your industry to make the most out of your campaigns. Now, to help you find more of the information that you need, we've created a new resource for our retail advertisers: the Retail Knowledge Center. Here you'll find a wealth of material including information about setting up and optimizing your campaigns, as well as recommended Google products for your business. You can also join a discussion forum, read case studies from other retail advertisers, and peruse recent industry news items.If you have comments, questions, or suggestions on the Retail Knowledge Center, please share them with us at retail-knowledge@google.com. We're working hard to add similar information for advertisers in other industries. Stay tuned to Inside AdWords for updates.
As you may have heard us say before, we believe that ads provide valuable information when they are highly relevant and targeted to a user's query. In order to serve high quality ads to our users, we use the Quality Score to set minimum bids for keywords based on keyword clickthrough rate (CTR), ad text relevance, the historical performance of the keyword on Google, and the user experience on the ad's landing page. Keywords with a higher Quality Score are rewarded with a lower minimum bid, so it costs less for those ads to be eligible for display. Low quality keywords receive higher minimum bids, often making them inactive for search because their maximum CPC does not meet the minimum bid. In addition, since we also consider quality when we rank ads, higher quality ads benefit from higher placement on the page and a lower cost-per-click on average. So, high quality ads are not only more relevant for your potential customers, but can also help you improve your ROI by lowering your advertising costs.We're constantly working on ways to improve our Quality Score evaluation and provide you with more information about the Quality Score for your keywords. Over the next week, we'll be releasing two changes focusing on transparency and quality, which I've outlined below:Transparency - Later this week, we're releasing an optional Quality Score column that shows the minimum bid for all of the keywords within an ad group as well as a Great, OK, or Poor quality label for your keyword. You can select this column by clicking 'Customize Columns' in one of your ad groups (selecting this will also automatically populate the column for all other ad groups within that campaign). Use the quality label to get a quick overview of the quality of your keywords, or look at the minimum bid for a granular understanding of your Quality Score. Remember, the lower the minimum bid is for a keyword, the higher the Quality Score, and vice versa.Quality - Next week, we're launching improvements to the Quality Score algorithm that sets minimum bids for keywords in order to improve the quality of ads that we serve to our users. These changes should make it easier for high quality ads to enter the auction while also discouraging low quality ads. First, we're improving the way that we set minimum bids for keywords where we have limited data. For example, if the system does not have any data on a keyword, we'll try to assign that keyword a lower initial minimum bid until we have enough data to make a more accurate assessment of the Quality Score for that keyword in your account. Second, we're improving the Quality Score algorithm to make it more accurate in predicting the quality of all ads. This will improve the overall quality of ads that we serve by lowering minimum bids for high quality ads and raising minimum bids for low quality ads. We expect that the higher minimum bids for low quality ads will reduce the number of low quality ads we show to our users.So, what does this mean for you? As a result of this update, you may notice that the minimum bids increase for some of your keywords and decrease for others. To better understand the impact of this change, we suggest that you implement the Quality Score column. This will allow you to better monitor whether your minimum bids increase or decrease based on our changes. If you find that the minimum bids for any of your keywords increase, making your keyword inactive for search, please consider optimizing your campaign instead of raising your maximum CPC to the minimum bid. We recommend changes such as choosing a keyword that is more specific to the product or service that you offer or editing your ad text to make it more relevant to the keyword before you simply raise your minimum bid. By improving your quality we hope to provide the highest quality ads to our users while also providing you with the highest quality leads to maintain great ROI.
Site targeting is a feature that allows advertisers to choose individual sites in the content network where they want their ads to appear. Currently, advertisers using site targeting place bids on a cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) basis. In March, we plan to begin testing a new site targeting feature to increase the flexibility and control advertisers have with site-targeted campaigns: cost-per-click (CPC) bidding.CPC bidding has often been requested by advertisers who would like to utilize site targeting, but are not comfortable bidding on a CPM basis. Here are two examples of how CPC bidding can enhance your site targeting experience:Increased flexibility. Select the content network sites you want your ads to appear on and choose the bidding option that fits your needs. If clicks are your goal, try CPC bidding so you pay only when you get the result you want.Full control. Create new CPC site-targeted campaigns, or switch your existing campaigns between CPC and CPM at any time. As always, you retain full control over your budgets and bids.If you're an AdWords advertiser located in the US and are interested in participating in the CPC site targeting beta, please fill out this short web form: http://services.google.com/ads_inquiry/cpc_sitetargeting. Please note that we are only able to select a limited number of advertisers from all that apply. If you're selected as a beta participant, we will contact you within the next couple of weeks.To learn more about site targeting, click here.
Can you give us a quick overview of Google Checkout?We launched Checkout last year to improve the experience of online shoppers. Typically people start their shopping process with search, and Checkout improves that experience with the Google Checkout shopping cart badge -- an image next to ads that use Checkout that helps users identify fast, secure places to shop. Once they click through to the store, we also make it easier to buy with a single Google sign-in -- that way, shoppers don't have to re-enter their purchasing information every time they buy online.You mentioned the shopping cart badge on AdWords ads - why are you using that?When people begin shopping by searching online, they're looking for places to shop that are convenient and secure. The Google Checkout badge makes it easier to find these places by displaying a badge (or image) on the AdWords ads of participating Checkout stores. The badge is like a little sign on the AdWords ad that helps shoppers find stores that accept Google Checkout.You've been testing different badges. Any updates to report?Yes, we're constantly testing different badge images to see what provides the best experience for shoppers. Recently we updated the image of the badge from a shopping cart to a Checkout button because we find the new design helps people find convenient and secure places to shop more easily.Where should advertisers go to learn more about Checkout?Advertisers can take a closer look on the Google Checkout homepage.
An optimization can be as small as adding a few negative keywords or as large-scale as reorganizing your entire account in several phases. As you prepare to optimize, it helps to first take a step back and assess what kind of results you'd like to see, and how you will achieve and measure these results. The 'AdWords Optimization Tips' series will cover four major areas for optimizing any account: assessment, structure, keywords and ad text. Today, we're covering the first half of assessment -- knowing your industry and audience. While you are probably already researching and analyzing your industry and audience, we wanted to provide a few questions that may help you think about your AdWords account in a new way. We'll also offer some tips on how to begin researching the answers to these questions.Know your industryWhether you are in retail or finance, an independent small business owner or a marketer for a large corporation, it helps to begin with a holistic perspective on the products and services you offer and how they fit into a broader industry landscape. For example, one factor to consider is the scope of your product range -- do you offer a wide variety of products or a very specific type of product? What makes your business different from others in your market? The strategy you take when entering a competitive market like high-end jewelry may be very different from the way you might advertise a niche product only a handful of specialists offer. You may also take into account elements like seasonality (holidays, fiscal years) or industry trends.To keep up with the latest competitive dynamics and industry trends that affect your online business goals, you may want to:Try searching for your product/service on Google and look at both the natural search listings and sponsored links. Pay attention to what types of strategies, ad text, and promotions other similar businesses may be using in their ads, and try to think of ways to differentiate yourself.Join a trade association, subscribe to industry magazines, and possibly even attend trade shows to learn about the latest competitive dynamics in your industry and what trends may be impacting your sales at any given time.Keep up with the latest news that affect your industry through the Internet by subscribing to specific RSS feeds, reading wikis, online forums and product reviews to keep up with the concerns of your customer base and other businesses like yours.Staying up to date with industry trends can help you better organize your campaigns, allocate your advertising budget across different products, time your campaign launches, manage CPC bids, and make your ads stand out.Know your audienceUnderstanding your customer base and learning more about the audience you would like to reach in your advertising can often influence the way you structure an account, the keywords you choose to include, and especially the ad text variations you test. Targeting an upscale clientele focused on luxury items is very different from attracting bargain hunters. Try to think beyond age and gender, though these may still factor into your strategy. Is your product or service something everyone uses on a daily basis or something only a small subset of people, such as chemical engineers, can understand or describe? You may want to sell the same product to both Internet-savvy teens and their more technology-shy parents, but may need to have different advertising strategies to reach the two different audiences. Also, users in different regions (cities, states or countries) may respond differently to your products and services.To really think like your customer, you may want to:Use the Keyword Tool to help understand how potential customers could be searching for your product or service. A florist in Vancouver might look up 'Vancouver flowers' or 'flower delivery' to see what synonyms and keyword variations exist for these terms. You may discover that the term you use to describe your product/service may differ from the way your customers would describe it.Use Google Analytics to gain a wealth of information and knowledge about your audience, from their geographic location to their referring links.Familiarize yourself with the unique buying cycle of your industry by thinking about user searches, so you can adjust your keywords, ad text, or budget accordingly. For example, someone searching for 'hybrid cars' may not be as close to buying an automobile as someone searching for the specific make, model, and year of a vehicle.Be open to the idea that your true audience may not be exactly who you think they are. Some video games, for instance, have a surprising number of female fans, often mothers who originally bought the games for their children!Keeping an accurate profile of your target audience(s) in mind will help you choose the right keywords and ad text to reach that audience, and also help you filter out users who are unlikely to click through or convert for you.
The AdWords Operations team will soon be moving, and we want to decorate our new building with photos of our advertisers as a way of recognizing that we owe our success to you. We'll be showing the photos in the new building because seeing your faces inspires us and reminds us that we're here to help make our advertisers more successful.If you want to share your photo, visit this page for all the details. Along with your photo, we ask that you include your name, your customer ID number (so we can match you up with your account), your business name, and a description of the photo. High resolution images, greater than 5 megapixels, are best. We'd also love it if you could include a paragraph describing your business and how you are using AdWords. If we use your photo we'll also send you a small thank you gift. Thanks for helping to make our offices a happier, smilier place.
On Saturday, February 10th, the AdWords system will be unavailable from approximately 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. PST due to system maintenance. While you won't be able to log into your accounts during this time, your campaigns will continue to run as usual. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Working on the Click Quality team, I’m one of a number of people who investigate suspicious traffic to determine if invalid click activity has occurred. These thorough investigations analyze a number of factors, including IP address, duplicate clicks, and various other clicking patterns. It is rare that invalid clicks are not detected by our automatic filters, but when we find them we immediately credit the advertiser's account. If you'd like us to investigate suspicious activity in your account, please fill out this form. If and when you do, providing detailed information, such as your web logs, will greatly assist with our investigation, so we ask that you include any reports indicating suspicious IP addresses, referrers, or requests. Our team will respond to you as soon as we complete our investigation of your account. And, please be patient, as a thorough investigation can take 3-5 business days.Our job is to look into advertiser concerns and complaints and we’re happy to answer any questions you have. However, before submitting an investigation request, you may want to do a little checking on your own because, over the years, we've found that in many cases the activity that the advertiser has pointed out isn't actually due to click fraud. I've provided a list of some of the more common concerns below, along with tips and tools to help you better understand and monitor suspicious activity in your account.Concern: I’ve seen huge fluctuations in my spend, traffic, or ROI.Review your account to see if you’ve made recent changes to your daily budget, maximum CPCs, or ad distribution preferences. Making changes to any of these can increase your reach and change your conversion rate as new visitors may have different buying patterns.Traffic on the Google content network can also fluctuate from day to day as your ads match new sites. To better control your spend on the content network, make sure that you implement content bids or set up a separate campaign that is targeted just to the content network.If you're not currently tracking your conversions, we recommend that you use a conversion tracking tool, such as Google conversion tracking or Google Analytics, in order to monitor your ROI.Concern: There are discrepancies in my web logs. You may have noticed that the clicks in your web logs are different than the number of clicks that are reported in your account. If you find that there are fewer clicks reported in your web logs than in your account, we suggest that you run an invalid clicks report because many of your clicks may have been automatically filtered.If you've seen more clicks in your account than in your web logs, make sure that your tracking software is counting clicks from the Google Network. You can can make sure your tracking URLs are set up correctly here. Or, you can use auto-tagging to more easily identify AdWords clicks in your web logs.Concern: I have multiple clicks coming from the same IP address.There are several legitimate reasons that you may see multiple clicks from a single IP address in your web logs. For example, if a user refreshes their browser after clicking on your ad, this may appear as multiple ad clicks in your logs, however, you are only charged for one click. Also, some service providers, such as AOL, assign the same IP address to a large number of users, so multiple users visiting your page may appear as a single IP (or a few very similar IPs). In order to determine if clicks from the same IP address are unique, you can use auto-tagging. Auto-tagging will show you if multiple clicks were the result of a user refreshing their browser or if they represent a new click on your ad.Concern: My competitors are clicking on my ads.Our filters are able to recognize the vast majority of invalid clicks that come from a competitor who is repeatedly clicking on your ads. These clicks should be filtered out before they reach your account so you will not be charged.To determine the number of clicks that we've automatically filtered from your account, you can run an invalid clicks report.I hope this list will help you better determine if suspicious clicks in your account are legitimate, or invalid. As I mentioned earlier, if, at any point, you'd like us to investigate suspicious activity in your account or have any questions, please get in touch with us.
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