Inside AdWords: August 2010

Get design tips to boost the impact of your display ad

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

While the right text and placement of your display ad are always crucial, you should also make sure that your ad is well designed. But how exactly can you ensure that your ad stands out on a web page, looks professional and is consistent with your overall brand message?
On Thursday, September 2nd, we’ll be holding a short one-off live course on effective display ad design. The session will give you a set of practical design tips including key insights on using color, font and images. The focus will be on the Display Ad Builder tool, although the tips are applicable to display design in general. The course is suitable for anyone interested in display advertising.
The course will be held on Thursday, September 2nd at: 3pm - 4pm BST / GMT+1 (London), 10am-11am EDT (New York), 7am-8am PDT (San Francisco).
Sign up here to attend.
Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

Upcoming Free Webinar: Increase ROI with Enhanced CPC

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

announcedMax CPC campaigns

How Enhanced CPC works and benefits your campaign performance

How Enhanced CPC complements your current bidding strategy, including 3rd party bid management solutions

Key differences between Enhanced CPC and Conversion Optimizer and how to select the best bidding option for your campaign

More advertiser control on YouTube

Monday, August 30, 2010

Today's post comes from the Official YouTube Blog:We’re constantly working to give advertisers control and flexibility over their YouTube campaigns. We place great value on this because ads are an extension of what a company represents as a business, and we want YouTube to be a place where that reputation and image can flourish.

To that end, we’ve been rolling out features to keep advertisers in control of their campaigns. We announced one such example last week, when we launched a feature that gives select advertisers the ability to voluntarily age-restrict their videos. But there’s more work to do.

To date, we’ve given advertisers the ability to pick and choose individual videos on YouTube to target using our Video Targeting Tool. But one of the most frequently requested features we’ve heard from advertisers is the ability to exclude individual videos and channels from the campaigns they run on our site. Today, we’re excited to announce video and channel exclusions, a way for advertisers to pick specific YouTube videos and channel URLs that they don’t want their ads to appear on.

Here’s an example: let’s say you run a vegan bakery. You want to strike a balance between good exposure for your baked goods online, while staying true to your company values in offering items free of animal or dairy-products. Now you can indicate which videos are not the best fit for your audience. Since your customers are probably not watching "Homewrecker Hot Dog," you can provide this video exclusion under the "Networks" tab.

(click for full size image)

Similarly, you might run a keyword-targeted campaign on bakery-related keywords and exclude whole channels that you don’t feel suit your audience. So if FoodNetworkTV has videos centered mostly around cooking meat dishes, you have the controls to prevent ads from showing on that channel and specific videos.

Alternatively, if your ads are appearing on a video that has content you deem inappropriate for your audience, or perhaps isn’t performing in terms of click-through rate or conversions, you can optimize your campaign by using this new feature to exclude it.

Google has also been investing significantly in ensuring brand safety, transparency and control for advertisers across the Google Display Network. We’re hoping that these added layers of control will make your campaign targeting even more precise. Keep sending us your feedback so we can make future product improvements.

Baljeet Singh, Senior Product Manager recently watched “AH NOM NOM: Wholesome Bakery Best Vegan Bakery Food Cart In San Francisco” Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

Analyze Competition live in all English language accounts

Friday, August 27, 2010

In June we announced the Analyze Competition feature in the Opportunities tab. At first, this feature was only available to a small number of advertisers using the English language AdWords interface, but now this feature is available to all English language accounts.
Analyze Competition helps you understand how your AdWords performance compares to that of other advertisers competing on similar keyword categories. Using the data in Analyze Competition, we hope you can make more informed decisions about which types of optimization changes are right for your account.
In addition to the feature’s core functionality, you can now also see the Google search terms that triggered your ad for each of the most specific sub-categories in your account. Click a category name to see more specific sub-categories. When the category name is no longer a link, you’ll know you’re at the most specific sub-category -- this is where you’ll see a "See search terms" link. Seeing the search terms that triggered your ad can serve as inspiration for new keyword ideas or help you understand if your keywords have been miscategorized by our system. If you see that the search terms listed for a given category are not related to the keywords in your ad groups, you may consider making keywords more specific or adding new negative keywords.
We hope to bring even more features to Analyze Competition in the future. To learn more about Analyze Competition, visit the Help Center, or watch this short video. You can also visit our page on the Ad Innovations site, which is the destination site for the newest, most innovative developments in AdWords.
Posted by Jason Shafton, Inside AdWords crew

Update your Google Advertising Professionals Qualification to the Google Certification Program by October 31

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

We recently launched the Google Certification Program and we’re glad that thousands of you all over the world have taken the new exams and joined the program. This certification program replaces the Google Advertising Professionals program. To provide you with time to make the transition, we’ve run both programs side by side during a six month grace period which ends in October. To retain certified status and continue using the badge within your marketing collateral, you’ll need to meet the requirements of the new program.

What’s the difference between the two programs? With the Google Certification Program, we’re offering updated learning materials written by Google experts. We’ve developed four in-depth exams on AdWords management called Fundamentals, Advanced Search, Advanced Display and Advanced Reporting & Analysis. The exams are designed to prove proficiency in these areas and are being widely adopted by employees of search marketing agencies. In addition to this, we launched Google Partner Search, a directory to help advertisers find agencies to manage their campaigns. Currently, all Google Advertising Professionals who have opted in are part of Google Partner Search, but this will not be the case by the end of October.

We’re informing all of you who have qualified under the old Google Advertising Professionals program to update to the Google Certification Program. In order to do so, a company must meet a minimum AdWords spend level, and have at least one employee become individually qualified under the Google Certification Program.

If you have an employee that already qualified under the old program, this is a great time for them to update their skills through the Google Certification Program. Upon completion, just update your company profile so that advertisers can find you using Google Partner Search.

To learn more about the Google Certification Program visit our Help Center.

Posted by Jason Shafton, Inside AdWords crew

AdWords myths: understanding the AdWords auction

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Over the past few weeks, we’ve covered a few common areas of confusion related to AdWords, including billing and spending, and keywords. This week, we’d like to wrap up this blog series by offering some helpful info on the AdWords auction.
If you have questions about how the AdWords auction works, a great place to start is with this introductory video from Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist.

(click to watch on YouTube)
One of the most important factors in deciding your ad’s position within the auction is its Quality Score. To learn more about how Quality Score is defined, and how to improve it, you can visit the Search Ads Quality Getting Started Guide.
Finally, remember that if you’d like to understand how bidding can affect your ad's performance in the auction, you can use the bid simulator. It will provide you with click, cost, and impression data estimating how your ad could have performed over the last seven days had you used a different bid.
These resources should give you more insight into how the AdWords auction works.
This concludes our AdWords Myths series. We hope it’s helped clarify a few things you may have been wondering about AdWords.
Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

New course to help you improve your bids

Monday, August 23, 2010

value per click

(US)

(UK)

(AU)

AdWords system maintenance on August 21st

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Inside AdWords

Introducing the AdWords Small Business Corner, a new forum discussion category for SMBs

Thursday, August 19, 2010

We’ve heard from many of you that you’d like to be able to easily share tips for developing a successful AdWords strategy with others like you. To help you do that, we’ve created a new category in the AdWords Help Forum: the Small Business Corner. The Small Business Corner is designed to give those of you who are running your own AdWords accounts the opportunity to share best practices in discussions with your peers so that you can make sure your AdWords account is doing all it can to support your business goals.
This new category is not about troubleshooting specific account issues, but rather about sharing and learning from the experiences of others. To give you a preview of the kinds of topics that we hope to discuss, here are a few conversation starters that we had in mind:

Choosing the right tools to measure results
How to write great ads
Finding the right frequency to sign in to AdWords

Of course, this category is about your interests and needs, so we hope you’ll suggest the small business-related topics that you’d like to cover. For any other topics, please consider the other existing forum categories available to you.
Getting startedTo join the conversation now, just visit the Small Business Corner. If you’re new to the AdWords Help Forum, you may want to create a Google Profile (while signed in to your AdWords account), introducing yourself and your business before jumping in. In the meantime, you can check out the introductory discussion thread here.
Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

New Tutorial: Exporting Google Display Network Placements from Ad Planner into AdWords

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

DoubleClick Ad Planner helps you research and identify the web sites most likely to attract your audience. With Ad Planner, you can select sites, add them to your media plan and easily export them directly into your AdWords account as a new campaign, or add them to an existing campaign or ad group.
Many of you requested this feature because you wanted an easy way to plan and buy Google Display Network (GDN) campaigns using Ad Planner.
Exporting to AdWords is easy and this online tutorial will show you how to take advantage of it. In this video, you’ll learn more about:

Creating a media plan and finding GDN placements
Exporting your plan to AdWords
Setting up a new campaign or adding to existing campaign in AdWords

Click here to watch the video

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

New My Client Center features: search across accounts and labels

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

If you use My Client Center (MCC), over the last few weeks you might have noticed that we've added some new features to your MCC interface. We've introduced search across accounts, labels, and simplified dashboard buttons.

Search across accounts

With this feature, you can search across all of the accounts linked to your MCC. When you search, your results will include accounts, campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords, and placements that match your search term. Let's say you want to find all keywords related to Canada. Just enter the search term "canada" and we'll show you results that match that term. Learn more

(view full size image)

Labels

Labels help you organize your accounts into groups or flag clients that require attention. You can identify important clients with the label "High Priority," mark active vs. inactive accounts, or identify accounts belonging to the same client. Then, you can filter your dashboard to quickly view all accounts with a specific label. Learn more

(watch on YouTube)

Simplified dashboard buttons

We noticed that as we added features to the new MCC interface, the buttons on the dashboard were getting a bit crowded. We’ve made some changes to clean things up and make it easier for you to quickly manage your client accounts.

(view full size image)

To let us know what you think of these features and the new interface, click "Send Feedback" in your account.

Posted by Jason Shafton, Inside AdWords crew

Increase ROI & Conversions with Enhanced CPC

Monday, August 16, 2010

How does it work?model airplanemodel airplane kitsbuild model airplanes

(click to watch on YouTube)

Adjust your bid depending on how well a particular search or display network partner site in the Google network has converted for you in the past

Recognize when specific words within a keyword (e.g. 'kits') convert well and adjust your bid when users search on variations of these terms (e.g. 'model airplane kits for children')

Detect attributes such as the user's location, language settings, browser, and operating system and analyze how these attributes may impact the likelihood of your ad converting

How to get startedConversion Tracking

(click to view full size image)FAQGoogle Ad Innovations

Get started with mobile advertising with a new online course

Monday, August 16, 2010

We’ve just added a new course to the AdWords Online Classroom all about mobile advertising and how you can start using it to reach more customers.
Did you know that there are now 4 billion mobile phone owners globally? Half of all new internet connections come from mobile devices, and by 2014 it's reported that there will be more mobile internet users than desktop internet users.* We offer a number of innovative ad formats to help you reach mobile users looking for products and services.
This course is suitable for anyone who’d like to learn more about mobile advertising and how to easily set up your AdWords account to target more users on mobile devices.
Click on the country flag most appropriate to you to watch this course now!

Click for U.S. course

Click for U.K. course

Click for Australia course

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

*Morgan Stanley report, 'Internet Trends' published on April 12, 2010.

Google Display Network series: Measure everything. Optimize relentlessly.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

In the last three weeks, we showed you tools to effectively plan your display advertising campaigns, develop compelling ads, and target your ads to reach precisely the right audience across millions of both popular and niche sites in the Google Display Network (GDN). In today’s final post, we’ll dive into measuring and improving your online display campaigns with powerful, free tools that bring accountability to your display advertising investment.
Campaign reporting and optimizationOn the GDN, you have real-time reporting for every site and URL where your ads ran. You can view basic metrics like impressions, clicks, clickthrough rate (CTR) and cost, or, by implementing our free AdWords Conversion Tracking, you can measure conversion metrics to determine your campaign’s return on investment (ROI). We also recently introduced viewthrough conversion reporting to provide a more complete picture of your display campaign performance.
With rich site- and URL-level data like this, you can see exactly what’s working and respond on the fly. This means you can increase bids for sites generating lots of sales or decrease bids for, or exclude, poorer-performing sites.
With Conversion Tracking enabled, you can also unleash our bid management tool, Conversion Optimizer, to help increase your conversions while decreasing your cost-per-acquisition (CPA). One of the most powerful bid management tools available, the average campaign using Conversion Optimizer sees a 21% lift in conversions with a 14% lower CPA*.
Web analytics and optimizationYour campaign’s performance is heavily influenced by the experience visitors have on your site.Google Analytics is a free tool that helps you measure user behavior on your site, providing metrics like time spent on your site, page views, traffic sources, bounce rate, and more. Using this information, you can identify areas on your site you need to improve to increase conversion rates and ultimately, your ROI. Although Google Analytics works independently of Conversion Tracking, it’s possible to automatically import your Analytics data into Conversion Tracking, enabling you to consolidate reporting and optimization across these measurement tools.
While Google Analytics tells you what’s happening on your site, Website Optimizer empowers you to change it. You can show your visitors multiple versions of a page or elements on a page to test which are most effective, thereby getting more of your visitors to convert into customers.
Measurement beyond the clickFinally, research shows that the impact of display ads extends beyond immediate clicks and conversions. After seeing display ads, many users search for the advertised product or brand, or visit the advertiser’s web site days or weeks after having seen a display ad, even if they didn’t click on it.
Recently, we launched Campaign Insights to help you measure the impact of your display campaigns beyond immediate clicks and conversions. Campaign Insights calculates the incremental lift in both online search activity and website visits that result from a display ad campaign. By comparing a data set of thousands of advertisers who saw a particular display ad with an equivalent group that did not see the ad, we can determine the incremental change directly attributable to the display campaign. With this insight, you can establish your display campaign performance, beyond just immediate clicks.
This post ends our series on the Google Display Network. Over the past four weeks, we hope you’ve discovered new ways Google can help you run successful display campaigns. For more on the GDN, please visit our microsite.
Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew
* Analysis compares performance of Conversion Optimizer campaigns over the course of a year with a control set of campaigns and represents the average impact of Conversion Optimizer. Actual impact may vary form campaign to campaign.

DIRECTV partners with Google TV Ads

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Cross-posted from the Google TV Ads Blog

Today, we’re announcing a strategic partnership with DIRECTV through which Google TV Ads will offer inventory on a broad selection of television networks available on DIRECTV.

DIRECTV’s national satellite inventory on Bloomberg Television, Centric, Chiller, Current TV, Fit TV, Fox Business, Fuel, G4, Ovation, Sleuth and TV Guide will be available through the Google TV Ads platform across all dayparts, including primetime. DIRECTV is the largest satellite provider in the U.S. and the second largest television distributor by household reach. This partnership, combined with our existing relationship with DISH Network, means that you’ll be able to reach up to 30 million satellite households with Google TV Ads.

We’re partnering with DIRECTV because of our shared commitment to innovation in the television advertising space. You’ll have the ability to target this new inventory along with over 98 other cable networks already offered through our platform. To learn more about advertising with Google TV Ads, visit www.google.com/tvads.

Posted By Mike Steib, Director of Emerging Platforms

Introducing the Google Small Business Blog

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Google Small Business Blog

Most every business, including ours, starts small. These days, technology is giving businesses even more ways to grow bigger... faster.

In our recent Small Business series on the Official Google Blog, a handful of real-life entrepreneurs have shared their experiences building companies from scratch and embracing Internet tools that have taken their businesses to the next level. We’ve received fantastic feedback about these posts, and realized that there’s a healthy appetite among small- and medium-sized business owners who want to know all about the latest web tools and tricks. Fortunately, we have lots more to share with you, too!

That’s why we’re introducing the Google Small Business Blog, a central hub that brings together all the information about our products, features and projects of specific interest to the small business community. Rather than having to sleuth around in many different locations for details about templates for creating video ads on YouTube, tips for your employees using Gmail or how to respond to the business reviews on your Place Page, you can find all of this helpful information right here in one place.

Of course, we’ll continue to post relevant news about individual services such as AdWords, Apps, Google Places and YouTube on their respective “home” blogs, but feel free to visit or subscribe to this Google Small Business Blog to get everything relating to your small business needs. We’re starting small today, but who knows what tomorrow will have in store!

Posted by Deanna Yick, Small Business Blog Team

Updated Keyword Tool - Coming out of Beta

Monday, August 09, 2010

beta version of the updated Keyword ToolKeyword ToolSearch-based Keyword Toolupdated Keyword Tool

Flexible search options: Search by any combination of keyword, website/URL, and category (where available) and receive a single set of results

Easy keyword refinement: Filter results by word or keyword match type

Advanced options: View statistics for mobile search and use data filters based on local searches, search and ad share, and more

Removing Duplicate Keywords: When you access the Keyword Tool from within an ad group, keywords that are already in that ad group will appear with an “Already in ad group” message next to them

(view full size image)

Adding Negative keywords: Now, you can easily add keyword ideas as negatives right from your keyword idea list. Just click on a keyword and use the drop down menu to select and save your negative keyword

(view full size image)access the tool without signing in to AdWordsOpportunities tabAdWords Help CenterPosted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

Update to Canadian, UK and Ireland ad text trademark policy

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

adjustedupdate to our policyexistsFAQ

AdWords Campaign Experiments full US rollout and new tracking tag

Tuesday, August 03, 2010

We’re excited to announce that AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) is rolling out to all U.S. advertisers. ACE is a free tool that makes it easier to test and precisely measure the impact of changes to your keywords, bids, ad groups and placements. Over the last two months, advertisers in our beta have reported that ACE has helped them feel more confident in the impact of their campaign changes, making it easier and less risky to try different strategies and optimize more frequently.

Without ACE, you might evaluate optimizations by comparing key metrics before and 2-4 weeks after making campaign changes. Differences in those key metrics are assumed to be the result of the changes. But fluctuations in demand, shifts in competitor tactics, and even changes in the weather can complicate things.

With ACE, experimental campaigns run side-by-side with the original campaign in a simultaneous split test. This approach lets you run shorter tests that start and stop whenever you like, with less concern about your results being affected by seasonality or other factors. You get more precise impact estimates and more chances throughout the year to test and improve performance.

Over the next few weeks, most U.S. advertisers will automatically see ACE under Campaign Settings when they sign in to AdWords. If you’re in the U.S., you can also choose to sign up for priority access. If you’re outside the U.S., please stay tuned. We look forward to announcing availability in more countries and languages soon.

To learn more about using ACE, check out these videos and the Help Center FAQ.

To make tracking your experiments easier, we've added the ValueTrack parameter {aceid} that enables your tracking system to identify if a click came from the control split or the experiment split of a campaign. You can then segment and compare to understand the impact of an experiment on metrics available in your analytics system.

If your website is www.example.com, you can assign the following destination URL tag for AdWords keywords or creatives: www.example.com?type={aceid}

The new tag will be active later this week. For more details on using ValueTrack tags and ACE, please visit our Help Center.

PostPosted by Helen Schindler, Inside AdWords crew

AdWords Myths - common misperceptions about keywords

Monday, August 02, 2010

check it outMyth # 3: Your conversion rate can impact your quality scoreFactconversion trackingMyth # 4: The AdWords keyword tool suggests keywords to useFactkeyword toolthose that you might have excluded as negative keywordsMyth # 5: Upper and lower case letters in AdWords keywords matterFact

“NYC” is the same as “nyc”

“Android Phone” is the same as “android phone”

Inside AdWords

We've moved!

Get design tips to boost the impact of your display ad

Upcoming Free Webinar: Increase ROI with Enhanced CPC

More advertiser control on YouTube

Analyze Competition live in all English language accounts

Update your Google Advertising Professionals Qualification to the Google Certification Program by October 31

AdWords myths: understanding the AdWords auction

New course to help you improve your bids

AdWords system maintenance on August 21st

Introducing the AdWords Small Business Corner, a new forum discussion category for SMBs

New Tutorial: Exporting Google Display Network Placements from Ad Planner into AdWords

New My Client Center features: search across accounts and labels

Increase ROI & Conversions with Enhanced CPC

Get started with mobile advertising with a new online course

Google Display Network series: Measure everything. Optimize relentlessly.

DIRECTV partners with Google TV Ads

Introducing the Google Small Business Blog

Updated Keyword Tool - Coming out of Beta

Update to Canadian, UK and Ireland ad text trademark policy

AdWords Campaign Experiments full US rollout and new tracking tag

AdWords Myths - common misperceptions about keywords

Google Best Practices

Best Practices Newsletter

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