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People are living their lives online and engaging with your business in new ways.  With smartphones in hand, consumers are increasingly looking for products or services while on the go and then placing a call right away. In fact, 70% of mobile searchers call a business directly from search results.*

Today we’re introducing call-only campaigns, a new and easy way for businesses to reach potential customers by prominently showing your phone number, business description and call button -- right when people are searching.

Uniquely built for businesses that value phone calls more than website clicks

Call-only campaigns are specially designed to only show on mobile devices that can make phone calls. This means every click you pay for can be a phone call to your business.

Bid just for phone calls

Since every click goes towards a phone call, you can design a bidding strategy based specifically on your CPA or ROAS goal for calls. This helps you maximize the value of every call to your business.

“Our customers are increasingly calling us on their mobile devices to get an insurance quote. The great part about call-only ads is that they give us the ability to bid based on the value of a call so we can meet the specific ROI goals that we have set up for sales that come through the phone."

Jason Johnson

Marketing Director, Clearlink Insurance

Customize ads focused on a single call to action - phone calls

Tailor your ads for phone calls with creatives like “speak to a specialist today" or “call to make an appointment" to let people know they can easily reach your business without needing to visit your site.

For BizLab, a national telecommunications retailer, most conversions happen offline over the phone.  "The new call-only ads have improved lead volume and conversion rates by targeting mobile devices with ads, like “call now” that are simply focused on driving calls.”

Catherine Wilson

Senior PPC Analyst, BizLab

Another major internet provider uses call-only campaigns to connect customers quickly and easily with their sales team. “With a phone call as the only call to action, call-only ads improve the mobile shopping experience by eliminating the intermediary step of visiting our website. They provide an easy way for consumers to get the product they want by calling into our sales center directly. Better customer experience coupled with an increase in calls & sales provides a win-win for both consumers and advertisers.”

Josh Leibner

Director of Paid Search at Red Ventures, marketing partner for large businesses

Learn more

If you’re currently using the call extensions setting to create call-only ads, you can find details on how to upgrade to call-only campaigns in the AdWords Help Center.

Want to get more out of AdWords?  Sign up to receive our monthly Google Best Practices newsletter.

Posted by Amit Agarwal, Product Manager, AdWords

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*Google/Ipsos, The Role of Click to Call in the Path to Purchase, September, 2013.

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Did you know that over 200 products and feature updates launched in AdWords last year? With so many updates, many advertisers have shared that it can be hard to keep track of all the changes. On top of that, advertisers are looking for guidance about how to use AdWords so that they can better manage their accounts. We're listening.

Starting today, you will find two new resources in the Learn tab of the Help Center that we hope will keep you on top of all the new AdWords innovations and help you understand how they work. The first is a chronological list of product updates. This “New AdWords Features” page shows you what’s happening in AdWords all in a single place: from reporting improvements to new ad format launches. For example, if you visit the page today you’ll see that eligible Flash ads can now be automatically converted to HTML5 on the Google Display Network. You'll also see that we recently rolled out a service release for AdWords Editor, which included some improvements to reporting.

Each listing offers a short description of the change with links to pages with more details. In many cases, these links will take you to a page with product how-to videos or customer stories.

The second resource that we’ve added to the Learn tab in the Help Center is all about making our advertisers better at AdWords: the Google Best Practices series.

This series offers actionable advice and straightforward tips to help you get the most out of AdWords. The guidance we offer spans many topics, from writing effective search ads to successfully implementing bid automation. This series, Google's official advice on AdWords, can help form the foundation of your paid search strategies.

We hope these new resources make it easier to stay up to date with AdWords as a “one-stop shop” for discovering new innovations and helpful best practices. Bookmark them now!

Posted by Matt Lawson, Director, Performance Ads Marketing

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Like sunshine and the beach, or dogs and tennis balls, Google AdWords and Google Analytics are great by themselves but even better together. You'll get high-performance insights into your ads and your website when you link your AdWords and Analytics accounts. Google Analytics does a vital job in this pairing: it shows you what happened after users clicked on your AdWords ads.

We’ve put together a new Best Practices guide, Better Together: AdWords and Google Analytics, to help you get deep insight into your performance. When you analyze performance with the combination of GA and AdWords you can find all sorts of actionable info:

• Which parts of your account drive actual on-site engagement
• Which keywords attract new users to your site
• What messaging and landing pages connect with the different users on your site
• How your business compares across your entire industry

To whet your appetite, here’s a rundown of ten useful GA reports included in the guide (with links that lead you directly to these reports in your own GA account).  Like what you see here?  View the full version of our complete coverage of GA + AW goodness.

Love Analytics and AdWords being paired together?  Please take our survey about your past success and what else we can do to improve the experience.

Want to get more out of AdWords?  Sign up to receive our monthly Google Best Practices newsletter.

Posted by Matt Lawson, Director, Performance Ads Marketing

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URL management just got easier 

Constant connectivity has increased the ways that people engage with your business, meaning more data and metrics for you to use to manage ad performance.  That’s why we are introducing Upgraded URLs to provide an easier and faster way to manage and track important information about each click on your AdWords ads*.

Upgraded URLs offer several benefits for advertisers, including:

• less time spent managing URL tracking updates
• reduced crawl and load times on your website
• new ValueTrack parameters that help you gain additional insights about your ads. Learn more.

Johannes Lipka, Product & Solution Manager at eProfessional GmbH, says: “Upgraded URLs have been one of the most time-saving tools we’ve used in AdWords. It’s allowed us to change custom tracking parameters for a group of URLs all in one place, without re-setting ad stats. We plan to upgrade our clients’ accounts over to Upgraded URLs as soon as possible.”

Destination URLs today

If you use URL tracking today, you’ll notice that Destination URLs are made up of two components:

1. Landing page URL This is the URL that customers see in their browsers when they get to your landing page after clicking on your ad.
2. Tracking This section includes information like redirects to third party tracking services, ValueTrack parameters, or custom creative IDs.

In the example below, blue represents the landing page, and green represents the tracking information.

www.example.com?creative=12345

With destination URLs, anytime you need to adjust tracking, you have to update the entire destination URL. This triggers a re-review of your entire destination URL and your ads stop running while your URL is re-reviewed -- causing you to lose time and potential new business.

What’s changing with Upgraded URLs

Upgraded URLs let you enter the landing page portion of your URL and your tracking information separately in AdWords. Now you have the option to update your tracking information at your account, campaign or ad group without having to re-set your ad stats.

Let’s see how the example URL above could be constructed using the new upgraded URL fields.

Final URL is where you’ll enter your website’s landing page URL.

The landing page 'www.example.com' is now entered in the Final URL Field

Tracking templates are where you enter your tracking information and tell AdWords how to assemble your URLs. Now, if you’d like to scale your tracking updates across multiple URLs, you can use a shared tracking template at the account, campaign or ad group level. If you’d prefer to manage your URL tracking information at the individual URL level, you can use a tracking template at the ad, keyword, or sitelink level.

In the example below, we’ve used a tracking template at the account level to apply our tracking information across all of the URLs in the account.

Tracking information for all URLs in the account is placed in the account level tracking template

Custom parameters let you customize the information you’d like to monitor as well as the specific values that get inserted into your URLs when your ad clicks are triggered. For example, if you’d like to insert the value 12345 whenever this specific ad is clicked, you can set the custom parameter {_mycreative} in this ad.

Enter '_mycreative' in the custom parameter field to insert 12345 whenever that ad is clicked

New URLs, new insights

As part of this upgrade, you’ll gain access to many new insights about your ad clicks.

New ValueTrack parameters let you track additional insights about your business. For example, if you’d like to track how many ad clicks were triggered for your creative by location, you can use the new {loc_physical_ms} ValueTrack parameter. To optimally use the new ValueTrack parameters, you can set them up at the account level so you can track these values across all the URLs in your account. Learn about the new value track parameters.

The valuetrack for location {location_physical_ms} is in green in the account level tracking template

Next steps

We’ll be rolling out Upgraded URLs to all advertisers starting this week. We encourage all advertisers who use tracking in their URLs to upgrade to the new system by July 1, 2015. Starting on that date, your URLs will begin updating to the new structure.

If you're using a tracking platform to manage your URLs, we encourage working with them to manage these changes.

To learn how you can start using Upgraded URLs for your new ad URLs, please see our article on Help Center.

Want to stay on top of more AdWords Best Practices?  Sign up to receive our monthly newsletter.

Posted by Leo Sei, Product Manager, Google AdWords

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*Everywhere we say ads, we also mean other targeting options available for the Search Network, Display Network, and Shopping.

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When shoppers search for the best deals online, they want to know the full cost of an item -- including the cost of shipping. In fact, we’ve seen that unexpected shipping costs are a common reason for users abandoning their online shopping purchases. That’s why we’ve been focused on making it even easier for you to showcase the right shipping cost to online shoppers, when they’re ready to buy.

Carrier-calculated rates in Google Merchant Center are an easy and convenient way to set up accurate shipping rates if you use one of the supported carriers. In the US, several major carriers recently announced that they’ve begun applying dimensional weight pricing when calculating the rates of their shipments. With this change, package pricing not only factors in the weight of the package, but also its dimensions.

To help you show accurate shipping rates for your items, we’re introducing support for dimensional weight shipping rates in Google Merchant Center. This update lets you define the dimensions of your packages used in shipping taking into account the length, width, and height of a package -- in addition to the weight you already provide.

We’ve created three new attributes that you can add to your product data to provide the dimensions of shipping packages for an item: ‘shipping length’, ‘shipping width’, and ‘shipping height’. Starting today, when you include these attributes, Google will calculate carrier-calculated shipping rates for supported carriers by taking into account dimensional weights. This ensures that calculated rates reflect dimensional shipping rates to provide users with the most accurate costs.

To learn more about dimensional shipping, visit our Help Center article, and select ‘United States’ at the top.

Posted by Sven Herschel, Product Manager for Google Merchant Center 

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Online advertising helps fund content and businesses on the web, from small family-owned shops to large publishers. While online advertising helps the web to work for all of us, this ecosystem can also attract bad actors that aim to misuse ads for harmful or deceptive purposes.

We work hard to keep our advertising ecosystem clean for users, advertisers, and publishers, and continue to invest substantial resources to stop bad advertising practices. We have a team of analysts who work around the clock to protect users, and continue to hone our detection technology to identify bad ads and stop bad actors as it’s a vital part of keeping our ads ecosystem clean.

As an example, last summer our analysis technology flagged a set of accounts as suspicious. To the human eye, the ads looked like ordinary rental property ads that met our policies. After we dug in deeper, we discovered that the system was right to be suspicious - the vacation rentals turned out to be a scam and the rental properties didn't exist. Our systems learn from incidents like these, helping us more effectively catch and remove bad ads and advertisers.

For the past several years, we’ve shared insight into our efforts to fight bad actors on the web. Today, we’re sharing new data on how we fought bad advertising practices over the past year. Overall, we disabled more than 524 million bad ads and banned more than 214,000 advertisers in 2014. While this represents a tiny fraction of the total ads on our platform - the vast majority of advertisers follow our policies and act responsibly - we continue to remain vigilant to protect users against bad advertising practices.

Here’s a look into some of the trends we fought against last year:

• Combating counterfeiters: Our relentless crackdown on counterfeit goods is producing powerful results. We banned 7,000 advertisers for promoting counterfeit goods, down from 14,000 in 2013 (and 82,000 in 2012), demonstrating that counterfeiters are increasingly unable to circumvent our advanced enforcement systems.
• Protecting against malicious software: To protect the safety and security of our users, we stop all ads pointing to sites where we find malware - whether it’s spyware, adware or other types of malicious software. Last year we removed 250,000 sites from our network for hiding forms of malware. 
• Weighing in against weight loss scams: While many advertisers selling dietary supplements provide accurate information, some bad actors use outrageous claims to entice consumers. In 2014 TrustInAds.org, a group which includes Google, AOL, Yahoo and others, released a report showing that we had collectively removed or rejected more than 2.5 million ads related to weight loss and dietary supplements over the past 18 months. 

Here’s a look at our work to get rid of bad advertising practices in 2014:

This is a constantly evolving fight. Bad actors continually create more sophisticated systems and scams, so we too are continually evolving our practices, technology, and methodology in fighting these bad ads. The security of our users is the foundation of our ecosystem, and we’ll continue to work tirelessly to keep people safe online. If you’d like to provide feedback on specific ads or our policies, check out our online form.

Posted by Vikaram Gupta, Director, Ads Engineering