Inside AdWords

How Google+ has helped Cadbury connect with over 1.2 million people

2012-05-23T13:46:00.000-07:00

Cadbury has become the European brand with the largest number of followers on Google+, currently at 1.2 million. Their Google+ success is having a strong impact on their overall marketing strategy, especially by improving the performance of their Search campaigns. The question is how exactly did they do this?

Their first step was to create a Google+ page. As featured in a previous blog post, Cadbury used hangouts to interact in real time with Olympic athletes and chocolate experts, and to participate in creating the chocolate replica Google+ page. By promoting their hangouts, Cadbury grew their Google+ follower base by 150,000 people.

They also used circles to segment their followers according to their chocolate preferences and unveiled a brand-new product launch, the Dairy Milk Bubbly Bar, which has achieved a strong impact, already sales are over £8M.

However, where they are seeing tremendous results is in their search campaigns. Since they started using social extensions, which links Cadbury’s Google+ page to its AdWords campaigns, they have achieved a 17% uplift in CTR across all their AdWords campaigns. Now when you search for “Cadbury” and see the relevant ad, recommendations from your friends are displayed directly with it, making the ad much more relevant to you. By clicking on the social extension, you directly land on Cadbury’s Google+ page and can start following all the great content they are posting.

And since Cadbury installed the Google+ badge on its homepage, it’s now easier than ever for fans to follow the brand; Cadbury gains 10,000 new followers on average per day and have had an increase of 7.5% of traffic from Google URLs. To continue benefiting from their Google+ success, Cadbury are looking to include a Google+ social stream that will pull in their most recent updates into a re-launch of their homepage, which will be happening soon. Stay tuned to learn how Cadbury continue to innovate to make their Google+ experience a success!

Learn more about Cadbury’s success with Google+ by reading the full case study here.

Posted by Natalia Cano, Product Marketing Manager Google+ For Businesses

Make smarter decisions with the new Auction insights report

2012-05-22T07:21:00.000-07:00

A key component of developing a search ads strategy is understanding what other advertisers are doing, and using this intelligence to optimize campaigns for top performance. To empower advertisers to make better informed optimization decisions, we’re launching the Auction insights report.

We currently provide Impression share columns within campaign and ad group reports that show the percentage of impressions received, compared to the estimated number of impressions for which they were eligible. While this report gives valuable insight into missed opportunities in aggregate, it also raises additional questions -- who competes in the same auctions, and can performance data be made available at a more detailed level?

With the Auction insights report, you can compare your performance with other advertisers who compete in the same set of auctions as you do. You can see how often your ads rank higher than other advertisers’ ads on the search results page, and how often your ads appear compared to theirs based on your estimated possible impressions. This information can help you make strategic decisions about bids, budgets, and keyword choices by showing you where you are succeeding and where you may be missing opportunities for improved performance.

The Auction insights report provides data at the keyword-level, and provides five different statistics: impression share, average position, overlap rate, position above rate, and top of page percent:

Note: Mock data only.

Reports can be generated for one keyword at a time, and data is only available for keywords that meet a minimum threshold of activity for the time period specified. If you see this icon () to the left of a keyword in your statistics table on the Keyword tab, you’ll know that the Auction insights report is available for that keyword.

Note: This report provides information on other advertisers that participated in the same auctions as you. This does not indicate that the other advertisers have the same keywords, match types, or other targeting settings as you. The other advertisers’ metrics shown are based only on instances when your ads were also estimated to be eligible to appear. These reports will not reveal the actual keywords, quality, or settings from your campaign, and it will not give you insight into the same information for others.

While this information is already available by performing queries on Google search -- and many already attempt to estimate this data by scanning the ads that appear -- this report will make it easier to access and understand this information. It is available at no additional cost to advertisers whose keywords have a minimum threshold of activity.

This report will be rolling out over the next few days. For more information on the Auction insights report, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Bhanu Narasimhan, Group Product Manager, AdWords

Mark your calendars for DoubleClick Insights on June 5th

2012-05-21T16:42:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Publisher Blog)

From our vantage point, we see unprecedented opportunity as the digital media world continues to grow and diversify. What does this mean for the future of buying and selling ads online?

Tune in and watch Google's Neal Mohan, VP of Display Advertising, sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital ecosystem's swift evolution, and how advertisers and publishers can work better together to chart a path to capitalize on every opportunity, while simultaneously addressing the challenges we face.

The live stream will start on June 5th, 2012, at 9:00am PST, and you’ll be able to watch from your computer, tablet, or mobile device.

Please register for this virtual event by visiting the DoubleClick Insights Live Stream page.

DoubleClick Insights
Tuesday, June 5th 2012
9:00am - 1:00pm PST
Set event reminder today

Following us on Twitter? Use the #dclkinsights as you're watching the event.

Posted by Stephen Kliff and Scott Brown, DoubleClick Marketing

Happy Birthday DoubleClick Search V3

2012-05-18T13:42:00.005-07:00

DoubleClick Search V3 is one year old! Over the last year we've focused on:

Campaign Management
Deeper Insights
Bid Optimization
Better Results

To learn more about a year of DoubleClick innovation, visit the DoubleClick Search blog.

Posted by Allison Sommer, Inside AdWords crew

Announcement: Custom alerts will sunset on June 30, 2012

2012-05-17T11:06:00.000-07:00

When we first created custom alerts, we wanted to provide advertisers with a way to be notified when certain behaviors or changes occurred in their AdWords account. Over time, we observed that most advertisers wanted to take action when such triggers occurred within their accounts. Many of these actions can now be done by creating automated rules - a tool within AdWords that enables you to schedule automatic changes to specific parts of your account based on the criteria that you specify.

Based on automated rules adoption, we have decided to sunset custom alerts. Starting June 15, we will disable creation of new alerts and by the end of June, we will stop triggering existing alerts. This means that on June 30, you will not see custom alerts in your AdWords account. If you selected email as your notification method, this means you will no longer receive alert emails.

We are actively working to bring you an email-only option in automated rules so you can be notified when a rule requirements are met without taking any action. In the meantime, check out some of the common ways you can use automated rules to save you time in managing your account.

Posted by Prashant Baheti, AdWords Product Manager

Announcing the next series of Learn with Google webinars!

2012-05-16T10:00:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year, we introduced the Learn with Google webinar program, and we were delighted to see thousands of you show up to learn about a variety of Google advertising products and solutions. Today, we’re happy to announce the continuation of our series with 10 new webinars over the next few months. During each webinar we’ll share tips and how-to’s to help make the web work for your business.

Check out our upcoming live webinars below:

May 23 at 10am PDT: Getting Started with Google Analytics
May 24 at 9am PDT: Building Blocks of Digital Attribution
May 31 at 10am PDT: Introduction to TrueView for YouTube
June 5 at 10am PDT: GoMo: Mobilize your Site with Quick and Easy New Tools
June 6 at 10am PDT: Our Mobile Planet: Understanding U.S. Smartphone Consumers
June 7 at 10am PDT: Introducing Mobile Apps Inventory in AdWords
June 12 at 10am PDT: Get Local with ZIP Code Targeting to Increase Sales/Leads
June 14 at 10am PDT: Search Optimization: Tips, Tricks, and Tools
June 19 at 10am PDT: Bringing the Power and Control of Search to Display
July 10 at 10am PDT: Account Management Tools for Large Advertisers and Agencies

Visit our webinar page to register for any of the sessions and to access past webinars on-demand. We’ll be adding new webinars as they’re scheduled, so check back regularly for updates. You can also stay up-to-date on the schedule by downloading our Learn with Google Webinar calendar to automatically see upcoming webinars in your Google Calendar.

Whether your goal is to engage the right customers in the moments that matter, make better decisions, or go bigger, faster, 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 having you at an upcoming Learn with Google webinar!

Posted by Erin Green, Marketing Coordinator

Younger viewers say hello to online video in 2012

2012-05-16T09:11:00.000-07:00

As more consumers reach for their smartphones, tablets and laptops for news and entertainment, there’s a new segment of viewers that watch less than two hours of TV per day - the “light TV viewer.” Around 31% of adults 18 to 49 are light TV viewers. And this segment is growing - households that opted for broadband internet instead of cable TV grew 22.8 percent over the past year, according to the latest Cross Platform Report from Nielsen.

To understand how this trend will impact advertisers in 2012, we partnered with Nielsen to conduct six cross-media studies looking at viewership patterns and campaign effectiveness across TV, YouTube and the Google Display Network (GDN). The conclusion? The light TV viewer is more efficiently reached with cross media campaigns on YouTube and the GDN than with TV alone.

The Light TV viewer
Consumers in this group tend to be younger (49 years old and below), diverse, college-educated, high-income, social-networking, and influential consumers. Our research found that light TV viewers overall averaged only 39 minutes of TV a day. Since this audience watches significantly less TV than the general population, they can be difficult to reach with TV advertising alone.

Additional reach, lower cost
On average, YouTube and GDN campaigns added 4 percentage points of incremental reach to light TV viewers - and it cost 92 percent less to achieve these results online than it would have on TV. The research also showed that TV failed to reach 63 percent of light TV viewers.

By shifting budget from TV networks that primarily reach the “heavy TV viewer” audience to YouTube and the GDN, you could more efficiently reach light TV viewers. In our study, a projection done for Reebok found that advertiser could decrease impressions to heavy TV viewers by 40 percent and increase impressions delivered to light TV viewers by 76 percent, showing more ads to a valuable, hard-to-reach audience.

Increased frequency and recall
Finally, our research showed that online campaigns added much-needed frequency to help increase brand recall for the light TV viewer. Combining YouTube and GDN drove a 27 percent increase in impressions, since even light TV viewers exposed to both TV and online ads saw more online ads than TV.

Overall, the results suggest that adding YouTube and the GDN to your TV network campaigns improves effectiveness in several powerful ways, helping to:

Reach a valuable, complementary, younger audience
Add much-needed frequency to light TV viewers
Deliver media more evenly across light and heavy TV viewers, reducing waste
Do all of this both efficiently and affordably

To learn more about how to reach the lightest TV viewer, visit Think Insights to view more findings from the full study.

Posted by Sheethal Shobowale, Advertising Research Manager

*MediaMark
**Nielsen

Celebrate the best in digital creativity with Google+ at Internet Week New York and the Webby Awards

2012-05-15T10:03:00.001-07:00

Once again, Internet Week New York is in full force, and we hope that you'll come and join Google+ for some of the festivities as the city’s digital thinkers, from developers to ad agency execs, collaborate on a week of panels and parties:

IAB Innovation Days: On Wednesday, May 16 at 1:45pm, Kate Stanford, Group Product Marketing Manager for Social Ads, will be giving a presentation at IAB Innovation Days at Skylight Soho about connecting with customers through a joint strategy across mobile and social platforms.

The Webby Awards: On Monday, May 21 at 5:30 PM, celebrate with the whole digital industry and Google+ at the 16th Annual Webby Awards, where we’ll be hosting an exclusive backstage Hangout On Air from the Webbys Google+ page during the show. Whether you're there in person, watching the live stream, or watching our Hangout, expect plenty of surprises and laughs. Connect with the Webby Awards on Google+ for more updates, and if you're there, say hello to the Google+ and Google Creative Lab teams at the afterparty!

We’re excited to share our thoughts about the future of digital advertising and marketing and proud to be part of New York’s technology scene. We hope to see you out and about!

Posted by Caroline McCarthy, Product Marketing Manager, Google+

AdWords Editor users: Migrate to v9.7.1 before June 12, 2012

2012-05-11T13:30:00.000-07:00

As of June 12, 2012, AdWords Editor versions 9.0 and prior will be sunset. After this date, changes made via these versions will not be implemented in your AdWords account. Please download the latest version (9.7.1.) at your earliest convenience, but no later than June 12, 2012.

You can upgrade to version 9.7.1 through the auto-update prompt or download the latest version from the AdWords Editor website. After you install the new version, you’ll need to download your account again. To preserve your comments and unposted changes, select the ‘Backup then Upgrade’ option in the automatic upgrade prompt, then import the backup file after downloading the account.

For a complete list of version-specific changes, please see our release notes. To see which version you're using, go to the Help menu > About AdWords Editor.

Posted by Allison Sommer, Inside AdWords Crew

Model bid changes at scale with campaign bid simulator

2012-05-11T09:57:00.002-07:00

When we launched bid simulator in 2009, we wanted to make it easy for you to understand the impact of bids on your advertising results. Until now, you’ve been able to access bid simulator at the keyword and ad group level.

To allow you to more easily simulate and apply bid changes at scale, we’re pleased to announce the launch of campaign bid simulator.

To access campaign bid simulator, go to the Opportunities tab and select “campaign bid simulator” from the left navigation tree.

With campaign bid simulator, you can:

View bid changes in aggregate and model changes even when keywords or ad groups might not have enough data for this on their own.
See what might happen if you increased or decreased all your bids by a specific percentage (10%, for example).
See whether you may need to increase your campaign budget to ensure it doesn’t become limited by budget at the new bid value.
Model what happens if you changed all your bids in the campaign to a single value.
Download the bid-simulation data at the account or campaign level.
Download an AdWords Editor-compatible file with bid amounts at the simulated level and the ad groups and keywords to which they should be applied.

Note: this is mock data only and should not be seen as a real or accurate simulation

For more information, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Sheridan Kates, Product Manager, AdWords

Welcome new AdWords Top Contributors!

2012-05-09T12:20:00.001-07:00

This week, the English AdWords Community team is pleased to welcome three new members to the AdWords Top Contributor program: Moshe Avichai, Pankaj Sabharwal, and Scott Dunroe. The Top Contributor program recognizes advanced AdWords experts who have dedicated their time and passion for AdWords to helping other users in the Community. Read their stories below about how they first got involved in the AdWords Community.

Moshe Avichai (aka “MosheTLV”)

With a start of my engineering consulting business and use of AdWords, I wanted to gain a better understanding of the advertising system. AdWords forum was my starting point to get answers to my questions.

Pankaj Sabharwal (aka “pankaj1782”)

I realized how much my AdWords knowledge improved since I discovered the forum. Ever since then, it has become my hobby to help other users in the AdWords Community. I love interacting with the Community because it has users ranging from beginners to Adwords Experts.

Scott Dunroe (aka “ScottyD”)

The ability to interact with some of the most knowledgeable individuals in the AdWords industry is a real privilege. But the best feeling of all is helping novice members with their AdWords related questions and then seeing them gradually become active members themselves.

Our three new Top Contributors will be active in the Community along with the other Top Contributors and our thousands of users to help you with all your AdWords questions. Join the conversation!

Posted by the AdWords Community Team

GoMo: Mark your calendar to ‘Hangout on Air’ and learn how to build a mobile site in minutes

2012-05-07T12:22:00.002-07:00

Did you know that 40% of mobile web users reported that they’ve turned to a competitor’s site after a bad mobile experience1? With about half of all Americans now owning a smartphone2, it’s time for businesses to meet user expectations by delivering a mobile experience as good as the desktop experience. In short, it’s time to step up to the plate and build a site optimized for the mobile web.

Google can help. We recently teamed up with DudaMobile to release a free mobile site builder. In three easy steps you’re able to get started with mobile: (1) enter your site’s URL, (2) customize your site and (3) redirect mobile users automatically to the new mobile-friendly version. It’s free and takes just a few minutes to complete!

Join us on Thursday, May 10th at 1pm EST/10am PST and watch as Google showcases how two businesses, Top Mast Resort in Massachusetts and Sava’s Restaurant in Michigan, go mobile and build mobile-friendly sites--live on air.

You’ll see how Top Mast is preparing to take advantage of mobile travel purchase intent - which is five times higher than online travel purchase intent, according to InsightExpress. You’ll also see Sava’s move ahead of 95% of restaurants that do not have mobile-friendly sites, according to a study by Restaurant Science.

Finally, you’ll hear from the CMO of Dudamobile, Dennis Mink; he’ll talk about best practices when using the mobile site builder and walk through important questions to ask yourself when building a mobile-friendly site.

Details on how to tune in

Sign into Google+ on Thursday, May 10th at 1pm EST/10am PST

Go to the Think with Google Google+ page

Look for the stream post and click to enter the live stream

Be sure to set a reminder in your calendar! If you have questions before or during the Hangout, post them with the hashtag #GoMoSite as a comment on the Google+ page.

Posted by Suzanne Mumford, Google Mobile Ads Marketing

Sources: (1) Gomez 2011 (2) Nielsen February 2012

AdWords Community now available on your phone!

2012-05-02T10:00:00.000-07:00

Ever wish you could reach out to other advertisers with just a click, even when you're not behind your computer? We’ve got some good news for you - AdWords Community is now optimized for all web-enabled mobile devices!

Like PPCBossman and many other Community users, you can get AdWords Community mobile on your smartphone and stay connected anywhere and at any time:

Ask your AdWords questions as soon as they come to mind.
Post answers/articles and help other members.
Instantly browse any thread you want to re-visit.

Sign up is as easy as opening www.en.adwords-community.com in your mobile browser (ensure you type in the www) with no additional applications. It auto-captures your mobile email (you can choose to use a different email) - simply choose your username and get started!

The simple interface with finger-friendly buttons lets you easily use all all the Community features just like on your desktop. One member theitiuk says this increases his accessibility to reach out to the Community at any time from anywhere. PPCBossman, who is a regular user, finds the functionality almost identical to the desktop version.

Try it out, bookmark it on your phone and let us know what you think by posting your comments and suggestions on the AdWords Community.

Posted by Rashmi Singh, Ad Policy Specialist

Learn about Display Network Advertising with Google AdWords

2012-05-01T09:37:00.000-07:00

Join us every Wednesday at 11am PST on the Google+ Your Business page to learn about the tools that Google offers your business. This week, we’re excited to bring you a Hangout On Air about advertising on the Google Display Network.

The Display Network is a powerful tool that can help you reach potential customers that may not be actively looking for you on search engines. In fact, 95% of users’ time is spent outside of search. During the Hangout, we’ll show you how to harness the Display Network to select appropriate targeting options and identify important performance metrics for your business. Join us to learn more about topics like image ads, branding your business, and re-engaging users who have previously visited your site. In addition, we’re excited to invite two Top Contributors, Kim and Theresa, from the AdWords Community to share their personal experience advertising on the Display Network.

Just sign into Google+ and add the Google+ Your Business page to your circles. Post questions ahead of time - simply look for the post that we put up every Monday morning soliciting your questions. Then, on Wednesday, navigate to your Stream where you’ll be able to view our Hangout live with just one click!

We’re excited to see you, answer your questions, and teach you a little about AdWords!

Posted by Allison Sommer, Inside AdWords crew

Making Search Ads work for businesses with mobile apps

2012-04-30T10:37:00.000-07:00

Mobile search is a powerful channel for businesses to engage with customers that are searching for them or for their application. Last year, we introduced improvements to click-to-download ads, and for publishers, launched Custom Search Ads for Mobile Apps. Today we’d like to share several new features that will make it even easier for AdWords advertisers to promote, track and monetize their mobile app. For the first time, businesses can use AdWords mobile search ads as a holistic solution to promote, monetize and track their app downloads.

Promote your app using the new Mobile App Extension

All AdWords advertisers will receive the option to use a new Ad Extension - the Mobile App extension; a new way to promote their mobile apps. Not all mobile users searching for a business may know that the business has an app. The Mobile App extension allows advertisers to append a mobile app download link to their search ads. With this extension, advertisers can promote their mobile app to users who may simply be searching for their brand, product or service.

The mobile app extension gives advertisers a new distribution channel for their mobile apps and users a new discovery medium. Beta participants saw a 6% lift in CTR for campaigns using Mobile App extensions, compared to control campaigns.

The new Mobile App Extension found in the “Ad Extensions” tab. Use its new ‘app picker’ function to easily find your company’s app in Google Play Store or iTunes App Store

GrubHub, a web and mobile service that connects diners to restaurants and simplifies online ordering for delivery and pick up, was an early beta tester of the Mobile App extension. In addition to pointing mobile customers searching for food delivery services to their mobile website, they used the mobile app extension to add an additional link to their app download page. Abby Hunt from the GrubHub team explains the importance of reaching customers on mobile: “GrubHub is dedicated to feeding our diners anytime, anywhere - this is why it is important for us to reach our diners on their mobile devices. Hungry people are checking their mobile devices on the way home from work or walking to class, and where they are."

GrubHub was an early tester of the Mobile App extension, allowing hungry customers searching for their business the option of accessing information on their mobile site or app via an ad.

Enriching click-to-download ads with more useful app information
Advertisers running campaigns solely focused on promoting and driving downloads of their app will benefit from recent changes that add more useful information to their click-to-download ads. Last year, we added mobile app icons next to the text ad. We’ve now incorporated richer information about your mobile app right in the ad unit itself. When a user searches and your click-to-download ad appears, they’ll be able to see image previews, a description of your app, and when applicable, pricing and rating information.

All this new information in the click-to-download ad is automatically drawn from the Google Play Store and iTunes App Store. We hope that customers will benefit from recent changes that make click-to-download ads more engaging and for users searching on Google.

Quicken Loans Inc., the nation’s largest online home lender and a top five retail lender uses click-to-download ads to promote their Mortgage Calculator App. They’ve seen a rapid increase in the number of customer searching for them on mobile. Greg Broda, Paid Search Partner Manager at Quicken Loans explains: "When it came time to promote the new Quicken Loans Mortgage Calculator app, the decision to utilize Google’s mobile click-to-download ad platform was a no-brainer. The placement has allowed us to share the app with a very targeted and engaged group of users."

Quicken Loans runs click-to-download ads, now complete with app previews and pricing information, that point users to their app download page.

Track Android app downloads through AdWords
Businesses will now be able to track downloads of their Android app from their AdWords campaigns as an AdWords conversion. This means that when a user downloads a mobile app from the Google Play store via a click-to-download ad or a mobile app extension, we will count their download as a conversion. For more information on how to set this up, visit this page.

Monetizing your mobile app with Custom Search Ads for Mobile Apps

We’ve now brought Custom Search Ads to tablet apps via the recent launch of a new AdMob SDK. Tablet and mobile app users will receive ads relevant to what they're searching for inside an app, and businesses running mobile apps will have a new tool to monetize their content and services.

Mobile apps represent a significant opportunity for businesses to reach their customers, and mobile search is an important channel to reach these customers. We’re looking forward to bringing new products in the coming year that will help businesses grow by promoting, tracking, and monetizing their mobile apps with Google.

Posted by Anurag Agrawal, Product Manager, Mobile Search Ads

New Changes to Ad Rotation

2012-04-30T10:01:00.000-07:00

AdWords currently offers three ad rotation settings: optimize for clicks, optimize for conversions, and rotate evenly. Using the “rotate” setting for ad rotation is helpful for testing new creatives, but when run indefinitely can inhibit advertiser performance and deliver less relevant ads to our users.

Starting next week, the “rotate” setting for ad rotation will change. Instead of rotating creatives for an indefinite period of time, this setting will only rotate for a period of 30 days. After that, the setting will then optimize to show the ads expected to generate the most clicks. Every time a creative is enabled or edited, the ads in that ad group will rotate more evenly for a new period of 30 days.

This change will be rolling out next week. At that time, ad groups with creatives that haven’t been added or modified in the past thirty days will see this new ad rotation behavior. Otherwise, this change will begin 30 days after your last creative was enabled or edited.

This change will enable us to provide users with the most relevant ad experience and should help advertisers improve the performance of their AdWords accounts. For more information on this change, please visit this article in our AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Karen Yao, Senior Product Manager

Webinar: Driving Online Conversions with Remarketing

2012-04-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

Join the UK Google Online Media Specialist team for a live "Driving Online Conversions with Remarketing" webinar on Tuesday May 1st at 3:00 PM GMT (10:00 AM EST / 7:00 AM PST).

97% of website visitors do not convert the first time they visit. Remarketing can help you re-engage with your potential customers and bring them back to your website to buy your products. Join our live webinar to see how you can use remarketing to increase your online conversions by helping close the deal with customers who were not ready to make a purchase the first time around.

Key areas that will be covered include:

What remarketing is and how it works
Reasons to use remarketing
A step-by-step set-up guide
Campaign optimization tips

This webinar will be presented by a Google Online Media Specialist and will include Q&A. The session is suitable for advertisers who are already running campaigns on the GDN, as well as those who have not yet used the GDN.

Register now!

Post Posted by Allison Sommer, Inside AdWords crew

Making campaign planning and build-out faster and more accurate

2012-04-25T15:51:00.000-07:00

We've been listening closely to your suggestions on how to reduce the guesswork involved with building new campaigns. To help improve the campaign building process, we’re rolling out improvements to the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator.

Improvements to the Keyword Tool
To help improve campaign management, we’ve made improvements to the Keyword Tool including:

See keyword ideas grouped by themes: With the updated Keyword Tool, you can easily view suggestions for new ad group themes and quickly choose to add ad groups directly to your account.
Seamless Traffic Estimator integration: Easily view Traffic Estimator data for the keywords you select in the Keyword Tool to make better campaign strategy decisions.

Click to view larger image

Improvements to Traffic Estimator
We’ve updated the Traffic Estimator to help advertisers build a more effective bidding and budgeting strategy. Changes to the Traffic Estimator include:

Graph your performance estimates:
Structure your keywords into ad groups: You can now create draft ad groups within the Traffic Estimator and easily view traffic and bid estimates for each of your draft ad groups.
Add campaigns to your account: When you’re satisfied with your campaign structure, you can add the draft campaign directly to your account.

Click to view larger image

We’re also improving the quality and accuracy of the traffic estimates by using performance history to better gauge traffic estimates. This means that going forward you’ll have to log in to AdWords to use Traffic Estimator.

You’ll find the updated Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator in the AdWords interface over the next couple of weeks. To learn more about the updates to the Keyword Tool, you can visit this article in our Help Center and this article to learn more about the Traffic Estimator.

Posted by Deepti Bhatnagar, AdWords Product Manager

Increasing transparency in Quality Score

2012-04-24T13:58:00.000-07:00

Today, we’re introducing more details about your Quality Score in AdWords.

Using the status hover for a keyword in the Keywords tab, you’ll see the traditional 1-10 numeric score and new ratings for each main factor in Quality Score. The new ratings have a relative scale so you’ll understand whether your performance expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience is average, above average, or below average compared to other advertisers.

We’ve heard from advertisers that having more insight on Quality Score can help you better focus efforts to improve performance. Improving ads quality is great for users, too.

One final note: This launch gives you information you can use to improve your Quality Score, but it doesn’t change how Quality Score or ad rank are calculated.

Posted Jen Huang, AdWords Product Manager

Slice and dice your data using AdWords labels

2012-04-24T09:57:00.000-07:00

We are excited to announce the launch of account labels. Starting this week, you can organize your account’s keywords, ads, ad groups and campaigns into custom groupings so you can quickly and easily filter and report on the data that is of most interest to you. To see the opportunities that labels enable, let’s meet Bob.

Bob is an online retailer who sells apparel and accessories for men and women. He has campaigns for shoes, clothes and bags for each of his three major markets (New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania) and within the campaigns has separate ad groups for generic and brand keywords. This structure (ex: New York - Shoes - Generic and Massachusetts - Shoes - Generic) means that he has the same ads and keywords spread across different parts of his account. Before today, Bob could not easily sort his account or run a report to see how well sneakers are selling across geographies.

Enter labels.

Now Bob can create the label “sneakers” and apply it to all sneaker-related keywords across his account. He can then filter by this label on the Keywords tab to only see sneaker keywords, or he can run a keyword labels report to aggregate performance by label. These reports allow him to then compare --for example-- how sneakers perform against all other shoes, or other labeled groups.

Labels can be used to organize your campaign elements in any way you choose. Report on brand keyword performance versus all other non-branded keyword performance. Measure how ads that mention “free trial” perform versus ads that mention “free demo”. Or simply label your favorite keywords so you can quickly review them every morning.

Labels will begin rolling out this week to all AdWords accounts. For more information, please visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Jon Diorio, Senior Product Manager, AdWords

Helping all businesses play big on YouTube

2012-04-23T05:24:00.005-07:00

With a global audience of more than 800 million monthly visitors to YouTube, every day can feel like you’re advertising in the Super Bowl, and one video can launch a business. Many have had success growing their business on YouTube, by creating videos that demonstrate their products, share customers testimonials, or simply showcase how their business works.

Take TRX, for example. When former Navy Seal Randy Hetrick wanted to expand TRX as a business, he knew he needed to use video to show potential customers how the TRX suspension training system worked and demonstrate its effectiveness. After using YouTube Analytics to hone their optimal video length and broadening their reach with TrueView video ads, they saw a 5X increase in traffic, 2X increase in conversions, and most importantly, a 2X increase in revenue.

To help even more businesses play big with video, today we’re introducing a number of new products, resources, and tools:

Google AdWords for video now available to all. Similar to search advertising - where you pay for clicks and set budgets with bids - we created a new model for video advertising. With Google AdWords for video, you only pay when someone chooses to watch your ad and you can create and manage video campaigns from the same platform as your search and display ads. You can create an account and start promoting your first video in less than 5 minutes. With AdWords for video you can:

Find the right audience: AdWords for video provides a range of options to reach the right audience. For example, you can promote your video by keyword to appear in YouTube search results, or you can choose to show your ad against content your customers are most interested in - such as sports or music. Connect with your audience on YouTube and the Google Display Network, which includes millions of websites. AdWords for video links to your YouTube account so you can easily start a video campaign with your existing videos.
Measure the effectiveness of your spend: On average, we’ve found that YouTube video ads drive a 20 percent increase in traffic to your website and a 5 percent increase in searches for your business (Google Campaign Insights, 2011). With AdWords for video you can find out how viewers are engaging with your brand during and after they watch your ad. You can see how many viewers watched your entire video, visited your website, stayed on your channel to watch another video, or subscribed to your channel, after viewing your ad.
Only pay for engaged views: With TrueView video ads you only pay when viewers choose to watch your ad so you aren’t charged when viewers skip your ad if they aren’t interested or have already seen your video. This means your ad budget is focused on viewers interested in your video. By displaying a call-to-action overlay on your video you can talk about a sale or specific offer to your viewers, share more information about your business, or drive traffic to your website.

$50 million in free advertising. We’re giving away $50 million in free Google AdWords advertising to help more than 500,000 businesses get into video. If you are new to AdWords, you can receive a $75 credit when you sign up. To put that into context, with $75 your video campaign can reach more than 1,500 of your most valuable customers on YouTube for one month. Request your free credit here.

Advertiser Playbook and support. To share best practices and tips on how video can be a core part of your business toolkit, we created a YouTube Advertiser Playbook. The Playbook covers everything from creating interesting content to promoting your video with ads. If you need help making a video, our My Business Story is a free tool you can use to create your first video. AdWords advertisers can also call our free phone support line, 866-2-GOOGLE, to get started with AdWords for video.

YouTube Ambassador program. To recognize business owners that are already using YouTube to grow their business, we’re naming 9 businesses from across the country to our first ever YouTube Ambassador program. These businesses have seen outstanding success in reaching new customers, building a brand, and engaging their fans with video. Hear their stories and learn more about the YouTube Ambassador program on the Official Google Blog.

Hear more from TRX fitness, a company that has built its business with YouTube

If you have a video you want to promote, get started with AdWords for video. And, join our YouTube for Marketers page on Google+ to stay up-to-date on our latest video marketing innovations.

Baljeet Singh, Group Product Manager, YouTube

Advanced sign-in security to protect your AdWords account

2012-04-19T14:19:00.003-07:00

Has anyone you know lost control of their online accounts? Cases like the "Mugged in London" scam demonstrate why it's important to take steps to help secure your activities online. If you reuse the same password on multiple sites and one of those sites gets hacked, or your password was stolen through a phishing scam, it can be used to access some of your most closely-held information.

We continually strive to develop solutions to prevent security breaches like these. So last year, we developed an advanced opt-in security feature for Google Accounts called 2-step verification. This feature makes your Google Account (and thereby also your AdWords account) significantly more secure by helping to verify that you're the real owner of your account. It does this by requiring two independent factors for authentication, much like you might see on your banking website: your password, plus a code obtained using your phone.

To make your AdWords account more secure, you can apply this 2-step verification to your Google account. While this is an extra step, it's one that significantly improves the security of your AdWords account because it requires the powerful combination of both something you know—your username and password—and something that only you should have—your phone.

Learn more about 2-step verification and get started at our Help Center. And for more about staying safe online, see our ongoing security blog series or visit http://www.staysafeonline.org/. Be safe!

Posted by Andy Lutz, Inside AdWords crew

New matching behavior for phrase and exact match keywords

2012-04-17T14:08:00.000-07:00

Consider these three exact and phrase match keywords in AdWords.
[waterproof sunblock] "bollard cover" [single serving coffee maker]

Now have a look at these two rows of search queries.
1. waterproof sunblock buy bollard cover single serving coffee maker
2. waterpoof sunblock buy bollard covers single serve coffee maker

Today, only the search queries in the upper row (1) are considered a match and allowed to trigger an ad that can appear in the results. The close variants in the bottom row (2) are not considered a match by AdWords, despite the similarity in user intent.

This will change soon. Starting in mid-May, phrase and exact match keywords will match close variants, including misspellings, singular/plural forms, stemmings, accents and abbreviations. Based on our research and testing, we believe these changes will be broadly beneficial for users and advertisers.

Focusing on user intent
People aren’t perfect spellers or typists. At least 7% of search queries contain a misspelling, and the longer the query, the higher the rate.

Even with perfect spelling, two people searching for the same thing often use slightly different variations, such as “kid scooters” and “kid’s scooter” or “bamboo floor” and “bamboo flooring.”

Google’s organic search systems detect and compensate for misspellings and close variants.

We know users are happier when they get search results that reflect their intent and help them achieve their desired action, even if it’s not a precise match for what they’ve typed. So we’re extending this behavior to ads.

Benefits for many advertisers, control for all
Our early experiments looked at the impact on advertisers getting a third or more of their clicks from phrase or exact match. On average, the new matching behavior increased AdWords search clicks by 3%, with comparable CPCs. Keep in mind that results may vary by advertiser.

We’ve been testing this new improvement with advertisers, and participants have seen positive results. “Previously we spent a lot of time making sure to include hundreds of versions of brand misspellings and to include plural forms of all our keywords,” said Dana Freund, Senior SEM Manager at GameDuell. “With the improvements to exact and phrase match we don’t have to worry about these keywords anymore. We get more relevant impressions for a smaller number of keywords, and it’s been a significant time saver for us.”

If you don’t want the potential for more clicks and prefer to maintain the current matching behavior in your campaign, you’ll still have that option. In the coming weeks, we’ll begin rolling out controls which will allow you to adjust your keyword matching options. Once they’re live, log in to AdWords and select the campaign settings tab. Under “Advanced settings” select Keyword matching options:

Again, these controls will begin rolling out in the coming weeks to all AdWords accounts. But, to be clear, the new matching behavior won’t actually start until mid-May.

For more details on keyword matching behavior, reporting changes, and other frequently asked questions, please visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Jen Huang, AdWords Product Manager

Introducing the AdWords Community Top Contributors Program

2012-04-12T10:07:00.002-07:00

You may have noticed that some members of our AdWords Community are true AdWords experts. Not only do they participate actively in discussions, but they're eager to help other members, which provides a huge benefit to the community. That's why we've created the AdWords Top Contributors Program to reward them for their efforts.

Members who qualify for the program receive the title of Top Contributor in the Community, which helps show the world that they’re truly AdWords experts. Other perks include:
A profile on our AdWords Top Contributors page.
Access to private forums with Google team members.
Inclusion in the Trusted Testers program to test out cool new features before anyone else.
Product updates directly from the AdWords team.
Hangouts with AdWords Community Leads on Google+.
Trainings given by the AdWords team.

In addition to these perks, in 2011, we invited our Top Contributors (TCs) to the Googleplex, in Mountain View, California, for the Top Contributor Summit. It was an opportunity for TCs to talk with Google executives and AdWords Product Managers, and offer their valuable feedback to the teams.

Top Contributors are also eligible to get the annual AdWords Top Contributor badge to put on their websites. It's another way for them to show their AdWords expertise, and it's only granted to those TCs that go above and beyond in their contribution to the Community.

This year’s recipients for the annual AdWords Top Contributor badge have just been announced! Congratulations to:

And congratulations to all our AdWords Top Contributors globally!

Visit the AdWords Community to learn more about the AdWords Top Contributor program and get to know our Top Contributors.

Posted by Lauren Barbato, Inside AdWords crew

Get Local with AdWords

2012-04-05T07:09:00.009-07:00

Get organized this spring with new location features in AdWords and share your stories

Over the past 30 years, California Closet Company has grown from the brainchild of a college student organizing his dorm room closet to a successful business with more than 77 franchise locations. To reach customers across the U.S. and internationally, the company centered their digital marketing strategy on creating locally relevant campaigns.

It’s no surprise that local campaigns are a focus for many businesses--from finding directions to looking up a phone number, more people are going online to find local information. In fact, more than 20% of searches on Google are related to location, and people often act quickly on local searches. Research shows that using smartphones, 88% of people who search for local information take action within a day.

To help you organize your local ad campaigns this spring, we’re introducing three new features in AdWords to help you create ads that are more relevant to local customers.

Target customers by zip code

If you customize your direct mail, outdoor ads, or newspaper ads at a postal code level, you now can easily do the same in AdWords in the US. We are introducing the ability to target more than 30,000 US ZIP Codes with your AdWords campaigns.

You will be able to add up to 1,000 postal codes at a time to your search ad campaigns with AdWords Location Targeting. Plus, you can get feedback on the performance of your local campaigns by viewing campaign performance statistics at the postal code level.

"Location targeting within AdWords helped us double lead volume and cut the cost to acquire new customers in half,” said Lois Erbay, Director of Marketing, California Closet Company. “We plan on building on that success by using ZIP Code targeting to create even more locally relevant campaigns for our customers.”

More locally relevant ads in less time

To help you easily create a custom ad title, text, display URL, and/or destination URL for all of your locations at scale, we’ve developed location insertion for location extensions. You’ll no longer need to create multiple ads for multiple locations--this new feature automatically inserts the city, phone number, or zip code of your local business into your ad text.

For example, if your ad text says: “Find a {lb.city:Local} Store or Shop Online,” a user viewing your ad in Chicago would see: “Find a Chicago Store or Shop Online.” This new feature cuts out all the work to building out ad text featuring local information for all your locations.

Ad with location insertion in the text and display URL

“We’ve had amazing success manually customizing our creative with local information for our top markets, which shows us that customers want locally-relevant results when it comes to a service like storage,” said Chris Laczi, Advertising Director, Uncle Bob's Self Storage. “That’s why we’re very excited about location insertion. It will simplify the task of creating locally customized ads for our 400+ locations, and we expect it will greatly enhance conversion rate of our ads.”

You must have location extensions set up and running in order to enable location insertion. Location insertion will work even if your location extensions don’t show because of other extensions. We detect location based on where your customer is physically located or by the geographic locations she may have shown interest in.

Find out more about location insertion and location extensions.

Better clarity and control

When we launched advanced location targeting in March 2011, we provided you with more control over how you geographically target your ads. Based on advertiser feedback, we’re implementing four additional enhancements that will make location targeting options clearer and more powerful. Read more about these enhancements in the Help Center and in this blog post.

There is significant opportunity for businesses to reach local customers online and win moments that matter by delivering the right ad in the right context. Stay tuned for more information on how ZIP Code targeting can help you grow your business.

We want to hear from you about your success in getting local with AdWords--share your story here and we might reach out to you to participate in our upcoming blog posts.

Posted by Richard Holden, Product Management Director