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Whether you're just learning about AdWords Editor now or you've been with us since the beginning, we hope you'll find the following list of favorite features useful.10. Find duplicate keywords in your account with just two clicks of your mouse.9. Copy or cut and paste between ad groups, campaigns, or even across accounts.8. Make bulk changes to destination URLs using the Add/Update Multiple tools or Advanced URL Changes.7. If you need to edit your keywords or ads in a spreadsheet, copy the items to edit from the data view and paste them into a spreadsheet. Make your changes, then paste the contents of the spreadsheet directly into the appropriate Add/Update Multiple tool.6. Undelete and activate previously deleted text ads.5. Search your account quickly. Perform simple word searches, or do an Advanced Search to find items that meet the multiple criteria that you specify.4. Easily find and edit bids, destination URLs, and text for ads, keywords, or sites.3. Submit multiple exception requests at once.2. Automatically organize your keywords into ad groups based on common themes.1. Save a snapshot of your account for archiving or for sharing. Later, you can import the archive file to restore your prior account settings.
Pay-per-action advertising is a new pricing model that allows you to pay only for completed actions that you define, such as a lead, a sale, or a pageview, after a user has clicked on your ad on a publisher's site. You'll define an action, set up conversion tracking, and create ads that publishers in the Google content network can then choose to place in new ad units on their site. Let's run through the details:Ad placement: Pay-per-action ads are only shown on sites in the Google content network. Publishers choose specific pay-per-action ads that are relevant to their site and can place them in a new ad unit on their page.Ad formats: You can create text ads, image ads, or our new text link ad format in your pay-per-action campaign. Text link ads are brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher's page. These Javascript-based ads will display like regular hyperlinks and allow publishers to embed these links inline with other text to promote your product or service.Pricing: You define a fixed amount that you'd like to pay for a completed action based on the value of that action to your business. You'll only pay when that action is completed, not for a click or impression. For example, you may wish to pay $1 every time a user fills out a lead form on your site and $5 when a purchase is made.Tracking: Google conversion tracking allows us to determine when an action that you've specified has been completed on your site. If you're already using conversion tracking, you'll be able to quickly enable existing actions for your pay-per-action campaign by adding the amount that you're willing to pay. For new conversion tracking users, you'll need to add a small amount of code to your website after you define your actions.Beta Test Requirements: At this time, the pay-per-action beta test is only available to advertisers in the United States. In addition, you must already be using conversion tracking or be able to implement conversion tracking code on your website so that we can track your completed actions.Over the next few weeks, we'll begin adding advertisers to our beta test. If you're an AdWords advertiser located in the US and are interested in participating in this beta, please fill out this short web form. We'll let you know as soon as you've been added to the test and will continue to add advertisers on a rolling basis.
Deciding between campaigns and ad groupsOne of the most important aspects of structuring an account is deciding whether to use campaigns or ad groups to meet your advertising goals. And one of the most common questions asked by new, and sometimes even experienced, AdWords advertisers is 'What is the difference between a campaign and an ad group?' Campaigns and ad groups are different levels of organization within your account, each with different settings. Campaigns allow you to set your daily budget, target languages and locations, start and end dates, and ad distribution preferences (i.e., whether or not to show ads on the Google Network). Ad groups, on the other hand, allow you to set maximum cost-per-click (CPC), specific ad text, keyword list, and landing page destination URLs. Each campaign can contain up to 100 ad groups.When deciding whether to create a campaign or ad group for a particular product, service, or section of your website, consider how these settings will help you achieve your goals. One of the most common reasons to create separate campaigns in your account is to set different daily budgets. You may decide to devote more budget to some of your best-selling or most profitable products. Separate ad groups, on the other hand, may be created whenever you'd like to set different maximum CPCs for keywords that may be highly competitive or lower converting. Regardless of how you choose to structure your account, it's important to remain flexible in your strategy -- the structure you envision when you begin may need further refining as you continue to optimize.Deciding how to organize campaigns and ad groupsThere is almost an infinite number of ways to configure your campaigns and the ad groups within them, and AdWords allows you to easily customize according to your business needs. Below are some common ways to structure an account:Products and services: If a sporting goods store offers a vast range of products, it may make sense to set up separate campaigns for the different product areas: Camping, Men's Athletic Wear, Hunting, etc. Within the 'Camping' campaign, the advertiser could set up separate ad groups set up for the various items that fall under camping, such as 'Tents,' 'Cookware,' and 'Sleeping Bags.' And within the 'Men's Athletic Wear' campaign, there could be separate ad groups for 'Athletic Socks,' 'Basketball Shorts,' and 'Knee pads.'Brand Names: A website that sells a variety of brand-name products may find that branded keywords convert better than generic product descriptions. To test this, the advertiser may want to designate separate ad groups or even separate campaigns for each brand, depending on the variety of products under a given brand label. If you want to use trademarked brand names of a trademark owner who has filed a complaint with Google, you will need permission from the trademark owner in order to use the trademark in your ad text.Websites: For advertisers promoting a variety of products or services from different companies and websites, such as affiliates or agencies, each company or website should have its own campaign or even a separate account.Geographic Location: Service providers that are geographically-targeted, such as furniture stores, real estate developers or car dealerships, may designate a different campaign for each state and then a different ad group for each city or metropolitan area.Seasonal products and services: Products that are affected by seasonality should be organized into their own campaigns or ad groups so that these can be paused and resumed according to the season. A flower delivery shop may run different campaigns or ad groups for Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, graduation season, and so forth.Themes or functions: A company that provides only a few products or services may still want to set up separate campaigns or ad groups because the same product or service may appeal to a variety of needs. A catering company may want to run separate campaigns or ad groups for 'Weddings,' 'Corporate Events,' or 'Birthdays.'Structuring your account effectively will allow you more flexibility in managing your keywords and ad text, controlling budgets, and setting strategic bids. If you think your account structure could use some changes, you may want to test different configurations until you feel that your account is manageable and helping you achieve your advertising goals.
We'd like to invite advertisers to read the new quarterly AdWords Technology Business to Business Newsletter. The inaugural issue features a number of optimization tips tailored to the Tech BtoB industry, including improving your keyword lists, getting the right traffic to your site, building the best landing pages, and making the most of the Google content network. This issue also includes a brief introduction to Google Apps, our hosted services for communication and collaboration. Future editions of the newsletter will include more optimization tips, industry trends, and suggestions for Tech BtoB advertisers.
We thought a lot about how to expand the reach of our message, and radio seemed like a great opportunity – it's a 'main stream America' type of channel, but we had zero experience in it. My impression was it was something for bigger companies, or at least companies with bigger pockets and a bigger appetite for risk. Then we learned about Google Audio Ads and thought 'not only does it address our concerns but we can custom fit it to our budget and marketing goals.' So we decided to take the big plunge into radio. We've been really pleased with the experience.
To avoid losing any unposted changes when upgrading to the next version of AdWords Editor, export an archive of your account. After you've completed the upgrade, re-download your account, import the archive file, and find your account information intact, including any unposted changes and comments.
The Local Business Center helps your business stand out on Google Maps. With these new features, you can create richer listings and include more information about your business:Add photos to your listingGoogle Maps now includes images in local search results. Suppose you own a restaurant in San Francisco that specializes in pastries. A potential customer, craving something sweet, searches Google Maps for "dessert in san francisco." In addition to the business name and location, she will now also find photos of your double chocolate cheesecake with raspberry glaze when looking at your full listing.Describe your business with custom attributesDetails matter. In addition to common pieces of information like store hours and accepted payment types, you can include custom information specific to your business. For example, a gelateria could include a list of all the flavors it offers.Track your statsWhen it comes to knowing how your listing is working for you, there's nothing like statistics. And now, when you login to Local Business Center you can see the number of impressions your listing has received over the last 30 days.Place your map marker with precisionIf you find that your location on the map isn't exactly right, you can now fix it. When creating or editing your listing, click "Fix incorrect marker location," and simply drag your map marker to your business's exact location.
On Saturday, March 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.
Recently, an advertiser wrote into the AdWords support team, alarmed that his average CPC had increased suddenly from $0.65 to $1.40. He had no idea what caused this spike, nor could he recall making any recent changes that would prompt such a dramatic increase. Fortunately, the My Change History tool, which is available within all advertiser accounts, is invaluable in uncovering factors that may lead to unexpected account behavior. I helped the advertiser filter his account’s CPC changes and we found that a few days earlier, a user with his same AdWords account login had, in fact, increased a campaign’s maximum CPCs to $1.60. This change would explain the dramatic increase in average CPC.Even after seeing his account's logged changes, the advertiser still could not recall making the CPC increases and thought it must have been an error. Just to be sure, he checked with his manager who rarely makes changes to the account but does login on occasion. It turned out the CPC increases were in fact, made by his manager and were not an error. To avoid any future confusion over account changes, I suggested that he and his manager make use of multiple logins.If several individuals make changes to the same AdWords account, but are sharing one user login and password, troubleshooting account changes using the My Change History tool can be difficult or impossible. With multiple logins, each person can create their own AdWords login and password and any changes they make will be recorded in My Change History under their respective login.Once we got everything straightened out, the advertiser was happy to know that he could always turn to the My Change History tool to troubleshoot any account problems easily, especially now that he and his manager were using their own separate logins.
As part of our effort to provide you with more information on invalid clicks, we wanted to give you some additional background on how our systems, processes, and teams work together to manage click fraud for our advertisers, while also sharing what the overall landscape of invalid click detection at Google looks like.Let’s dive right in with an overview of how it works. At a high level, we have a three stage-system for invalid click detection: (1) our real-time filters, (2) offline analysis, and (3) reactive investigations. The diagram below gives a more detailed explanation of what each does:As you can see, the invalid clicks detected in the first two stages are the result of proactive work by Google. In stage one, we automatically filter most of these clicks before they even reach your account to protect against malicious activity and optimize your return on investment (ROI). The much smaller amounts of invalid clicks found in stage two are reflected in Click Quality Adjustments listed on your billing summary page. In either case, you don’t need to take any action or write to us to receive this protection. The third stage only includes the relatively rare cases where advertisers are affected by undetected click fraud. In those cases, an advertiser writes to us, we conduct an investigation, and if we find signs of undetected click fraud, we mark those clicks as invalid and give a refund to the advertiser.So, how many invalid clicks are detected proactively vs. reactively? Here’s the breakdown:Impact vs. activityClick fraud is similar to email spam in a lot of ways. The most significant similarity is that the seriousness of the problem is not measured by how much spam is sent, but rather how much gets into a user’s inbox. When looking at click fraud, the most important measure is not the “activity” metric – which measures the volume of invalid clicks that occur overall – but the “impact” metric. The activity metric could go up or down significantly and the impact on advertisers would not change if filters are catching the invalid clicks. So far, we have only publicly shared this activity metric, which we have disclosed as being less than 10% of all clicks, and explain in more detail next. After that explanation, we want to talk about the impact metric for the first time. This measures what percentage of all clicks are clicks reported by advertisers which, after investigation, turn out to be invalid and have not already been caught by Google. Explaining these topics is complicated, but we’re going to give it a try. Here goes.Activity - invalid clicks fluctuate constantly but average less than 10% of all clicksOur invalid clicks rate – the activity rate – has remained in the range of less than 10% of all clicks every quarter since we launched AdWords in 2002. At Google’s current revenue rate, every percentage point of invalid clicks we throw out represents over $100 million/year in potential revenue foregone.Because it is difficult to definitively determine the “intent” of a click in many cases, the number of invalid clicks that we filter also include those filtered for reasons separate from fraudulent intent. Cases of provable click fraud attempts constitute a small minority of the clicks we mark as invalid. There are many greyer cases of possible click fraud attempts (but without clear scientific “proof”), for which we still choose not to charge advertisers. For example, we have an automated rule which filters out the second click of all double clicks as a matter of policy. We mark this kind of activity as invalid simply to optimize advertiser ROI. Those clicks are included in our “activity” metric and are also a good reason we use the term “invalid” clicks instead of fraud.This combined approach is the essence of click fraud management: the goal is to cast the net of invalid clicks sufficiently wide in order to have a high degree of confidence that actual malicious behavior is effectively filtered out. By proactively filtering clicks worth potentially hundreds of millions of dollars every year, we are able to provide very effective protection against attempted click fraud.Impact - less than 0.02% of all clicks are reactively detected as invalidOur Click Quality team investigates every inquiry we receive from advertisers who believe they may have been affected by undetected click fraud. Many of these cases are misunderstandings, but in most cases where malicious activity is found, the clicks have already been filtered out (and not charged for) by our real-time filters. Because of the broad operation of our proactive detection, the relatively rare cases we find of advertisers being affected by undetected click fraud constitute less than 0.02% of all clicks.Put another way, for every ten thousand clicks on Google AdWords ads, fewer than two are reactively detected cases of possible click fraud. This proportion has stayed within this range every quarter since we launched AdWords, even as the issue of click fraud has received more widespread media attention. In the cases of reactively detected invalid clicks, a refund or credit is provided to the advertiser, and we utilize the discovery as a feedback mechanism to improve our proactive detection systems.What do these numbers mean for me as an advertiser?It is important to understand that the network-wide invalid clicks rate is separate from an individual advertiser’s invalid clicks rate. The invalid clicks rate is what we call an open loop number, which means that the more invalid activity we detect, the more protection we provide. A machine attempting a click fraud attack can send any number of clicks, even exceeding the maximum number of clicks that are allowed based on an advertiser's daily budget, but our systems will automatically filter these clicks so that the advertiser is not impacted. For example, an advertiser with a $10 daily budget could be attacked by someone attempting click fraud consisting of $1 million worth of clicks. When our filters protect against that attack, the advertiser’s invalid clicks rate would increase dramatically – meaning we were filtering out a very high proportion of their clicks – and their campaign would be unharmed. Similarly, that attack alone would increase the overall invalid clicks rate on our network, even though it was limited to a single advertiser. In this manner, a large attack focused on just a few advertisers can actually manipulate Google’s overall invalid clicks rate for that day, so this is an externally manipulable number.Thus, the overall invalid clicks rate, as well as its day-to-day fluctuations, has almost no relation to the invalid clicks rate for an individual advertiser. In order to provide the real data to our advertisers, we launched the invalid clicks report in the AdWords Report Center last year. This feature provides the precise number of clicks we are filtering out on each of an advertiser’s campaigns.We are disclosing these network-wide figures in order to provide greater transparency to Google advertisers and the marketplace as a whole. These figures illustrate the significant level of proactive protection we provide, and how this has resulted in minimizing the actual impact of click fraud on advertisers. As noted above, these network figures do not have any bearing on what individual advertisers may experience, and you should refer to your invalid clicks report for that data.Moving forwardClick fraud protection is something we take very seriously, and it requires a great deal of research and development to do effectively. We believe we lead the industry in terms of our level of investment as well as the effectiveness of the protection we provide, but we also look forward to continuing to innovate and invest in this area of our advertising system just as we do in others. It is clearly in the long-term best interests of both Google and the industry as a whole to effectively protect advertisers against click fraud. This is why we are also working with dozens of other companies to establish industry standards for click fraud protection, as one of the founders of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Click Measurement Working Group.Ultimately, the biggest benefit of the pay-per-click advertising model is that advertisers can measure the performance of their campaigns extremely accurately, and thus the most important metric that both our advertisers and Google are focused on is providing the best possible return on investment.
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