Read More

Sitelinks are an important part of successful ads.  They show value to potential customers before a click occurs, while also being (along with other extensions) a factor of ad rank.  User interaction with sitelinks is so strong that you should consider them a basic part of your ad text - title, description, display URL and sitelinks.  Optimize the messaging in this space routinely, just as you do with ad text.

Many advertisers aren’t taking advantage of this excellent feature just yet, so before we start optimizing you may need to implement them.  Adding sitelinks boosts the average CTR on an ad by 10-20% (+20-50% when the search is one of your branded terms), so that implementation should be time well spent.

Make sure to have at least six active sitelinks for desktop and four active sitelinks for mobile, but remember that you can go all the way up to twenty total per ad group or campaign.  Sitelinks allow 25 characters for the link itself, and that space allows for testing.  We’ve found that somewhat shorter sitelinks are the most effective, though, so try to keep them closer to 18-20 characters for desktop and 12-15 characters for mobile.

We think sitelinks are a great proven feature, and we also think that they can be made better.

Reporting on Sitelinks

Start by knowing how you’re doing.

When reviewing these statistics, remember to compare sitelinks to one another and not to overall ad performance (as CTR on sitelinks is almost universally lower than a click on an ad, even though an ad with sitelinks will perform better than an ad without sitelinks).  You can also look at a sitelink’s contribution to the entire creative.  If you segment by “This Extension vs. Other” you can see if that extension is encouraging clicks on the headline or other links.

Identify your strong performers in terms of CTR (on the link itself or the surrounding ad), conversion rate, and conversion volume to establish a baseline of what target you can shoot for with low performers.  If certain sitelinks aren’t receiving a lot of impressions they’ve been passed over by the system, which means that you could probably work on improving those first.

(Quick aside - Beyond normal reporting, it’s also a good idea to do a simple sense check.  Are those the six {or twenty} pages that would be the most useful for your customers?  Even if CTR or impressions are low, is there a minority of your users that will find that sitelink very useful?  You may want to keep that link in place for them.)

Once you’ve found what’s not working, try out new text to improve performance.  If CTR is fine but your conversion rate is lagging, you could be sending traffic to the wrong page or setting user expectations incorrectly with a misleading link.  As with your ads, even top performers could potentially be improved upon.  Think about something new you may want to try.

When viewing your sitelink data, the info is available at the ad, ad group, campaign, and account level.  Add or remove these columns on the Ad Extensions tab to determine just how specific you want your info to be.

Testing Your Sitelinks

Pure A/B testing isn’t possible because each sitelink must point to different content.  When you’re identifying what’s lagging behind, recognize that other variables can muddle your results (things like ad tests, bid changes or seasonality).  You can try out variations of sitelinks in different campaigns or sets of ad groups to see what works better, but it’s still not going to be a perfect solution.  Recognize the imperfection of this whenever reviewing your results.

Sitelink testing shouldn’t be as frequent as your ad testing (due to the lack of A/B testing).  Monthly or quarterly reviews might make sense for you, depending on your volume.

Apply ad copy testing principles to your new sitelinks.  Think of distinct calls to action and benefits that relate to a user’s search and the page you’re directing them to.  You can also take lessons from previous ad tests and apply them.  For example, you can use losing (but still strong) ad copy as your sitelinks or their descriptions.

Sitelinks with Additional Detail

You also have the option to add additional detail to your sitelinks, which is great opportunity to prove value to customers before they click.  At present, sitelinks automatically serve descriptions where appropriate.  That feature is going away in the near future, though, so add in descriptions yourself sooner rather than later.

Mobile Sitelinks

Try to speak to mobile users.  Think about mobile intent and how it differs from desktop, and then reflect that way of thinking in your sitelinks.  You’ll also want to keep mobile sitelinks shorter (to around 12-15 characters) to ensure they aren’t cut off.

Closing

You can show users valuable information about your site right in your ads via sitelinks.  It’s imperative that they’re present, and once they’re there you should focus on making them as good as they can be (just as you do with the ads themselves).  Sitelinks not only increase the relevance of your ads, they increase the relevance of the user experience you deliver after the click.

Posted by Matt Lawson, Director, Performance Ads Marketing

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post. Read More

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Read More

Ad extensions are a way to give potential customers useful and relevant info beyond a regular text ad.  You can win a customer’s consideration, convince her of your value, or drive her right to a conversion.  Ask yourself which extensions would fit with your keywords and fulfill a potential user’s needs.

People engage with ads that have extensions.  Seller ratings give users confidence in your website.  Call extensions connect customers right to your employees.  Advertisers spend lots of time optimizing their ad text (which is great), but you should know that implementing extensions is typically a more impactful way to improve CTR.   An ad extension adds value to potential customers just by being present.  Additionally, with the recent changes to ad rank, extensions have become an increasingly important part of getting your ads noticed.

Every type of extension that we offer is intended to benefit our users, which translates to a higher CTR for you.  Many, such as sitelinks, show improvements of 10-20%.

There are tangible and measurable gains to giving users more information, and extensions are auto-optimized to show the best possible combination on each and every auction.  Sometimes the “best possible combination” translates to areas aside from CTR - users may get value from seeing a phone number on a desktop ad (i.e. a direct connection to your business via a phone number) even if that doesn’t translate to a routine click.

We’ve also found that more information is a good thing, which means that ads with multiple extensions perform better than ads with only one extension.  Identify which extensions work for your business and implement them.  The best combination of these extensions is automatically determined on an auction-by-auction basis.

Enabling extensions is a good thing, but remember that your extensions are most likely not going to show 100% of the time.  Only certain positions are eligible to show certain extensions.

There are lots of extensions in existence (and even more in beta).  While this set of options will continue to evolve, here is what is presently available and where they can appear on the page:

Note: Search Partner site owners choose what, if any, formats they allow, so not everything will show by default.

As you can see, placement on the results page determines which of your extensions can be shown.  If you know you have great extensions in place for users, watch your average position and placement to ensure that your extensions are showing as often as possible.

Things to Remember

We try to show as many relevant formats as possible in the available space.  Since there are so many moving pieces, there’s no way to prioritize which extensions you want to show.  Enable whatever makes sense for your customers and let the AdWords system decide within those options.  The specific extensions that are displayed are a function of your previous performance, user context and available space on the page.

Clicks on extensions are typically charged the same price you would be charged for a click on your ad.  There are a few exceptions, though.  The below types of interactions are all free:

• Phone calls from your forwarding number on call extensions that show on desktops/tablets 
• Links to reviews from seller ratings extensions
• Clicks to the review site on your review extensions
• Clicks on +1 button or a link to your Google+ page

In many cases there isn’t a lot to optimize for extensions.  Implementation is the only step to take for a practitioner, but that doesn’t mean you can enable them and never think of them again.  Be aware of what’s going on in your account so that you know you’re saying the things your customers want to hear.

Reporting on Extensions

Report on how your extensions are doing by taking a quick snapshot of before and after implementation.  Take note of when you turned on certain extensions and compare dates in the interface to ensure you’re heading the right direction.  This isn’t going to be a perfect solution, as there are lots of other variables present over that same timeframe, but it should give you directional evidence regarding your account’s performance.

Segment your reports by click type to see detailed performance for many of your extensions.  Anything that’s active in that time period will appear as its own type of click.  There isn’t any reporting on the extensions that appear automatically (seller ratings, social annotations, previous visit annotations).

Extensions are a proven way to provide value to users and increase your ad’s CTR.  Implementing every type of extension that makes sense for you should benefit both your users and your account.

Stay tuned for Part II of the Field Guide.  We’ll cover details about the available extensions and things that practitioners should keep in mind when implementing them.

Posted by Matt Lawson, Director, Performance Ads Marketing

Read More

Over the past several years, we’ve been working on a gradual redesign for many Google products like Search, Maps, and Gmail. The goal of this redesign is not only to give Google products a consistent look and feel across the web, but also to provide users with a simple and beautiful user experience that helps you get tasks done quickly and efficiently. Today, we’re announcing that this new Google look and feel will be rolling out to AdWords, giving more screen real estate to the tools and reports you love, and helping you focus on improving your performance.

Beautiful, consistent, simple

We recognize that if you use more than one Google service, you want colors to be consistent and controls to be in the same place across everything you use so you can get to them quickly and easily.  We also know it’s no fun to have to scroll down as soon as you log into your account to see the things that are important to you. By updating AdWords to the look and feel that we use across Google, you’ll spend less time getting where you want to go in your account, and more time focusing on growing your business.

What has changed in my account?

We’d like to highlight the changes you’ll see in your account so you don’t miss a beat the first time you see the new design.

Billing, Account Settings (formerly My account) and Help have moved under the gear icon.  In the past, you might have looked in a few different places before finding important menu items in your account.  We’ve made Billing, Account settings, and Help easy to find by placing them in the same gear menu used in Gmail and Calendar.

Charts, tables, and tools have more space on the page.  Important information in your campaign management tabs is now above the fold.  We’ve given more screen space to the charts, tables, and tools you care about most so you’ll spend less time scrolling and more time optimizing.

You should see these changes roll out to your account in the next few weeks.  We hope that the new design will help you better navigate through your account and focus more on your data so you continue to grow your business. For more information about the redesign, please visit our AdWords Help Center.

Posted by the AdWords User Experience Design and Research Team 

Read More

Last year, we placed a small [X] mute control button in the top right hand corner of most of our Display ads which gives users the ability to control ads they no longer wish to see. To date, users have muted millions of ads and we have used these signals to make ads more relevant and useful.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be expanding the ways users can give us feedback about ads by introducing a series of short surveys in English-speaking countries which will appear after an ad is muted.

Here’s one example:

These surveys will help us understand why users mute ads, serve better ads to users, spot publishers and advertisers in violation of Google’s policies, and help improve ad and placement quality for the broader advertising ecosystem.

Investing in ad controls with tools like Ads Settings and Mute This Ad enables us to deliver better experiences for users and better results for advertisers and publishers.

Posted by Michael Aiello, Product Manager

Read More

Advertising helps fund great web services and enables companies of all sizes to grow their businesses online.  However, this economy can also attract bad actors that want to abuse online advertising tools for harmful or deceptive purposes.

We've allocated substantial technical, financial, and human resources to stopping bad advertising practices and protecting users on the web.  Hundreds of our engineers, policy experts and others have dedicated their careers to this work.

Following up on our 2012 report, below is an overview of how we fought bad ads and bad ad-funded content in 2013.

Stopping more bad ads from fewer bad sources

We removed more than 350 million bad ads from our systems in 2013.  To put that in perspective, if someone looked at each of these for one second, it would take them more than ten years to see them all.  This was a significant increase from approximately 220 million ads removed in 2012.  This trend has been consistent in the last several years and we attribute it to several factors, including: the growth of online advertising overall and constant improvement of our detection systems.

The number of advertisers we disabled, however, dropped from over 850,000 in 2012 to more than 270,000 in 2013.  In part, we attribute this decline to scammers — counterfeiters, for example — being thwarted by our safety screens and searching for less-secure targets.

Counter-attacking counterfeiters 

We continue to see positive results in our work to combat counterfeiters.  Attempts to market counterfeit goods on AdWords decreased by 47% in 2012 and 82% in 2013.  In parallel, the volume of complaints about these ads dropped by 85% in 2012 and by another 78% in 2013.

As these numbers have declined, we’re pleased to report that we’ve also banned fewer bad advertisers for counterfeit violations.  Last year, we banned approximately 14,000 advertisers for trying to sell counterfeit goods  — a decline of more than 80% compared to 2012.

Preventing good ads from funding bad content

Maintaining a healthy ads ecosystem isn’t just about stopping bad ads and advertisers; we closely monitor the sites and mobile apps that show our ads as well.  Early last year, we outlined some of this work, with a particular focus on our efforts to stop scammy ad-funded software, like toolbars, that provides a poor user-experience.

By the end of 2013, we had blacklisted more than 200,000 total publisher pages, an encouraging decline from last year, and disapproved more than 3,000,000 attempts to join our AdSense network.  We also removed more than 250,000 publisher accounts for various policy violations.  This includes more than 5,000 account removals for violating our copyright policies, an increase of more than 25% compared to 2012.

Here’s a more complete overview of our work to bust bad advertising practices in 2013:

Click to see full size infographic

This is an ever-evolving and ongoing fight.  Bad actors are relentless, often very sophisticated and will not rest on their laurels.  But neither will we.  Nothing is more important than the security of our users and we’ll continue to work tirelessly to keep them safe online.

Posted by Mike Hochberg, Director, Ads Engineering

Read More

We’re excited to announce that this year Learn with Google webinars are moving to Hangouts On Air. These sessions will include all of the best practices, how-to’s, and information as before, but with the ease and benefits of the Hangout platform. Join us for one of our upcoming Hangouts On Air and learn the best ways to succeed with digital.

Check out our upcoming Learn with Google Hangouts On Air in the coming months and register today. Each link will take you to a registration page to sign up. After registering, you will be given the link to the Google+ event page where you can watch Hangout On Air broadcast or a replay. All of the Learn with Google Hangouts On Air are accessible through the Google Ads Google+ page. Be sure to look for additional Hangouts on Air as we will continue to add more to the schedule in the coming months.

January
28 The Right Keywords for your Ideal Customers
30 The Future is Here: Buying Viewable Impressions Online

February
5 Location Makes your Messages More Relevant
20 Unlocking Performance with Search Network with Display Select
26 The Performance Marketer's Field Guide to Mobile Targeting
27 Real Time Bidding with Audience Targeting

March
4   RLSA 201: Optimization and Growth Strategies
6   Shopping Campaigns: An Overview of New Features and Benefits
13 Going Local with Product Listing Ads

Hangouts On Air are held Tuesdays through Thursdays at 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern through the Google Ads Google+ page.

Learn with Google is a program to help businesses succeed through winning moments that matter, enabling better decisions and constantly innovating. We hope that you’ll use these best practices and how-to’s to maximize the impact of digital and grow your business. We’re looking forward to seeing you at an upcoming session!

Matt Ludwig, Marketing Coordinator, Learn with Google

Read More

We're excited about the results we've seen advertisers drive using innovations in AdWords throughout 2013. I wanted to recap a few of the improvements that stand out for me in terms of helping advertisers better connect with consumers and grow their business. I'd also like to share a glimpse at some of the improvements we're planning in AdWords in 2014 and ask for your suggestions and feedback.

Succeeding in a constantly connected world
People are constantly connected and moving from one device to another as they communicate, shop and stay entertained. So last February, we introduced enhanced campaigns for AdWords. With enhanced campaigns, it became much simpler to manage campaigns across multiple devices while optimizing for your customers' intent and context -- like their location and time of day. Along the way, we shared lots of best practices and case studies showing ways to improve your website and grow your business by engaging customers on screens of all sizes.

On top of the new enhanced campaign architecture, and over the course of the year, we went on to add powerful bidding tools, a new audience dimension for search ads, and advanced conversion measurement.

Saving time and increasing performance with powerful new bidding tools
Setting bids to get the best results is important, but it can also be difficult and time consuming. That's why many advertisers use automated tools to save time and more consistently achieve their performance goals. So in addition to the manual bid adjustments in enhanced campaigns (see our "Bid Like a Pro" guide), we launched new, more flexible automated bidding strategies. Flexible bid strategies let you selectively apply strategies like Target Cost Per Action or Target Top of Page Position within your campaigns, so you can choose the most appropriate manual or automated bid strategy for your keywords and ad groups. Several of our automated strategies, including the new Target Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) strategy, use unique real-time prediction systems that automatically adjust your bid for each auction based on the expected value of a potential click. Many advertisers and agencies, including Point It, have tested and found strong results.

Unlocking new potential with an audience dimension for search ads
Advertisers have consistently asked us for the ability to tailor search ads to the needs of their best customers. So in June, we introduced a valuable new audience-based capability to search ads: The ability to tailor your bids, ads or even keywords based on a user's previous visits to your website. Thousands of advertisers, such as Tirendo and WorldStores, have since taken advantage of bidding more optimally for past site visitors to increase their ad visibility, drive incremental sales, and improve ROI using remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA).  

Delivering advanced conversion reporting and more holistic insights 
Many businesses, like American Apparel and Room & Board, count on AdWords to drive phone calls, visits in store, and orders placed through a sales rep. This year, we've made significant strides in making these conversion objectives measurable in AdWords so you can better optimize and allocate budget. We added the ability to measure conversions across accounts, import conversions into AdWords from a CRM system, and count phone calls as AdWords conversions.

We also introduced a new metric, estimated cross-device conversions, to help you better measure conversions that start with an ad click on one device and end with an online conversion on a different device.

Amplifying your productivity and your business in 2014
As we look ahead into 2014, we're thinking a lot about ways to amplify your productivity in AdWords. We want you to keep the power, but streamline the work. So you can expect substantial improvements around workflow efficiency, campaign planning, analysis and reporting, opportunity identification, and testing.

We're also developing ways we can make it easier to run AdWords campaigns as a direct extension of your business. This means providing ways to bring your business and website data more directly into AdWords, and allowing campaign elements to work in a more seamless, dynamic, and optimized manner.

And we'll continue innovating with new ways to measure marketing performance in a constantly connected world.

What's on your wish list for 2014?
We get a lot of great ideas from your suggestions and feedback, so please keep it coming. Tell us what's on your wish list for 2014 at http://g.co/awfeedback. You can also keep up with all the latest updates on AdWords on our Google+ page.

We're excited to make AdWords even better for you in 2014. Thanks again for your partnership.

Jerry Dischler, VP Product Management, Search Ads