Our way of keeping up with the constant Web 2.0 changes.
Regardless of the year or economic climate, it’s always been important to optimize the return on your advertising investment–but now it’s more important than ever. Google Analytics specializes in providing you with the metrics you need to make informed advertising decisions.
By linking your Google AdWords and Analytics accounts, you can optimize your AdWords investment even more effectively [...]
In the spirit of the holidays, we would like to offer tips on how to increase visibility into your e-commerce performance and your advertising spend using Google Analytics. For many, seasonality influences purchasing decisions and affects business revenues. Analytics can help keep a close eye on your advertising spend and e-commerce trends to run a [...]
As many of you know, we’re constantly evaluating our AdWords program policies to keep them current and effective. This means making changes from time to time by either adding new policies, such as the endangered species policy, or updating existing policies, such as the Display URL policy.
This fall, we changed our policy around beer, for [...]
Last week, we posted about recent improvements we’ve made to the display ad builder. Now we’d like to share some best practices for using the tool. Hopefully these tips will help you get off to a running start with your new display campaigns:
Customize your ads to make them stand out. Here are some ways you can do that:
Choose the color scheme [...]
We recently announced the launch of AdWords display ad builder, and now we’ve made it more widely available and easier to use. Display ad builder is a tool that lets you create and customize display ads, allowing you to easily expand your AdWords campaigns beyond text advertising. We’ve had an overwhelmingly positive response from our [...]
Keyword targeting can sometimes feel like a guessing game. Potential customers are performing hundreds of millions of searches on Google, most of which you don’t even know about. With so many searches, you have to guess which ones might be relevant for each of your landing pages, and hope you find the right audience for [...]
We’re always working on improvements that will help us show the most relevant ads to our searchers, and we’re excited to tell you that we’ll soon introduce two changes designed to enhance how we calculate Quality Score and rank ads. The first change helps better evaluate the precise quality of your ad - regardless of [...]
One of our favorite and most useful posts from last year was an in-depth look at cost-per-click behavior during the 2006 holiday season by none other than Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian. In the post Hal explained how CPC’s and CPA’s (cost-per-actions) vary over time to affect advertisers’ ROI.
This year we have two new posts [...]
Recently, the AdWords Help Forum started posting weekly tips to help advertisers improve their campaigns. This got us thinking… why not share the love with our blog readers? In this spirit, we’ll periodically share some of these tips and tricks with you, covering everything from new tools to optimization strategies.
Today, we’ll start with unlocking the [...]
For many of you the fourth quarter is the busiest and biggest season, and in this economy analytics are more important than ever. With holiday traffic starting in November and peaking in early-December, now is the time to make sure your site is in the best shape to maximize holiday traffic and revenue.
To help you [...]
We’re happy to let you know that we’ve changed the way your Campaign Summary and Ad Group Summary pages present statistics in order to give you additional level of detail into your campaign performance. Previously, these pages divided statistics into two categories: search, which included Google and search partners, and the content network.
Now, we show one set [...]
Today we released the AdWords display ad builder, which lets you create professional-looking display ads in AdWords without needing to hire a designer or start from scratch. If you’ve wanted to expand beyond your text ad campaigns, or if you’ve been looking for an easier way to build display ads, this tool can help.
This new [...]
Google Analytics is full of insights that can benefit your AdWords account, and your business. To help you make the most of this information, we’ve started an introductory video series called“Google Analytics in 60 Seconds.” The first two videos explain two easy ways to refine your targeting. You can find them below and as part of [...]
We’re excited to announce that the Conversion Optimizer is now available to many more campaigns. Any campaign using AdWords Conversion Tracking with at least 50 conversions in the last 30 days is now eligible to use the Conversion Optimizer. Additionally, thanks to improved technology, the Conversion Optimizer now delivers better performance overall.
The Conversion Optimizer uses your conversion [...]
Many of our retail advertisers are busy preparing their stores for the busiest shopping season of the year, so we’ve compiled some tips and tools that can help you optimize your ad campaigns, marketing channels, and website.
Here’s an example tip you’ll find: specifically mentioning any special holiday promotions you are running in your ad text drives additional [...]
On Tuesday, we released version 6.5 of AdWords Editor. This release includes several features to help you navigate and manage your account, such as a new Keyword Opportunities tool, horizontal scrolling in the data view, and auto-sizing columns. You can learn more about these and other new features in the release notes.
If you’re already using AdWords Editor, you’ll be [...]
Today on (Ad)Word of the Day, we’ll be covering landing page from the AdWords Glossary:
An active webpage where customers will ‘land’ when they click your ad. The web address for this page is often called a ‘destination URL’ or ‘clickthrough URL.’
Your landing pages are most effective when they are consistent with your ads. For example, if your ad is [...]
If you currently use or have considered using AdWords conversion tracking, we have news that may be of interest to you. Conversion tracking users are no longer required to display the “Google Site Stats” logo on the conversion pages of their web sites.
Previously, a small but visible text block that read “Google Site Stats” automatically appeared [...]
Last month, we posted about upcoming Quality Score improvements — and today, we’re following up to notify you that these changes will take effect in all advertisers’ accounts over the next few days. In addition, we’d like to answer a number of the more common questions we’ve recently heard from our advertisers.
To briefly summarize our earlier post, we have incorporated [...]
In this installment of Google Analytics 101, we’ll take a brief look at another important statistic visible from the Dashboard: Traffic Sources. When you first set up your account and sign in, Analytics shows a Dashboard module containing a pie chart of all of your Traffic Sources. These sources include any that are unrelated to your AdWords [...]
We think it’s important for all publishers, both new and veteran, to understand the role they play in our ad network ecosystem. While AdSense is designed for publishers to monetize their websites with Google ads, it’s also designed to extend the reach for our AdWords advertisers, providing them with ad real estate whose value is [...]
In our past content network posts, we’ve discussed how search and content network performance can differ. In particular, clickthrough and conversion rates aren’t always comparable between the content network and the search network, since users browsing content commonly approach ads differently than users searching actively for a particular topic. As a result, we use smart pricing to protect advertiser ROI [...]
A new report is now available in the AdWords Report Center: the Geographic Performance report. This report provides you with an understanding of the geographic distribution of your impressions, clicks, and conversions down to the ad group level. Do you know if you’re getting more clicks from snowy Juneau, Alaska, or sunny Miami, Florida? Now you [...]
In July 2005, AdWords introduced minimum bids for keywords based on Quality Score. This system allows us to show very high quality ads to Google users, while also giving advertisers control over their keywords. Since 2005, we’ve improved Quality Score in many ways, such as the inclusion of landing page quality and landing page load time as factors. Along the [...]
Today, at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, CA, the Website Optimizer team announced the launch of several highly requested product updates. For those unfamiliar with Website Optimizer, it’s Google’s free content testing and optimization tool. It allows you to test different variations of your site content to determine what will be most effective at getting you [...]
Due to the success of the AdWords Seminars program, we’ve recently added a third level which builds upon the two existing AdWords Seminar levels. To help our attendees find the right session(s) that will best meet their need, we’ve renamed the sessions as AdWords 101, 201, and 301. These new sessions will be held in various cities [...]
We’re happy to announce that we’ll soon be enabling a number of new features made possible by a new DoubleClick ad serving cookie on our content network. All advertisers will soon be able to take advantage of features like frequency capping, better reach and frequency reporting, and view-through conversions.
Many of these features will be launching [...]
In June, we updated Google Trends with numbers and the ability to download results to a spreadsheet. We received a lot of great feedback from agencies and advertisers on how they’re using the new version; from identifying new growth markets to optimizing their Google AdWords campaigns.
We have Elan Dekel and Niv Efron to tell us about a [...]
For today’s installment of (Ad)Word of the Day, we’re looking at keyword insertion from the AdWords Glossary:
Keyword insertion is an advanced feature used to dynamically update your ad text with your chosen keywords. You insert a special modification tag into your ad text to enable this feature for your ads.
Keyword insertion is a powerful feature that can save you [...]
From time to time we like to address common questions that many of our advertisers have. Here’s a frequent one about how ad impressions are calculated:
Q: If my ad appears on the third page of a search result, does it count as an impression if a user does not go to the third page of [...]
We all know the importance of measuring the impact of your ad campaigns. That’s why, today, we’re discussing the term conversion from the AdWords Glossary, which is defined as follows:
When a user completes an action on your site, such as buying something or requesting more information.
In AdWords, a conversion occurs when a user clicks on your ad, then proceeds [...]
Today we released version 6.0.1 of AdWords Editor. In response to user feedback, it’s now possible to download performance statistics for selected campaigns and ad groups, instead of always downloading statistics for the whole account. Once you’ve installed version 6.0.1, you’ll be able to download selected statistics by following these instructions.
Unlike our last release, this update won’t [...]
Earlier this year, we launched the Google Business Channel, a YouTube channel that brings you the latest on AdWords and Google’s other business solutions, in video format.
And as part of the Advertiser Education Series on the channel, we’ve just added three videos that cover various aspects of the Google content network. This series is meant to help our advertisers [...]
When you use keywords in your ad groups to contextually target your ads, we match them to relevant pages across the hundreds of thousands of sites on the Google content network. But have you ever wanted to bid more (or less) for a specific content network site you’re contextually targeting? Or write customized ad text for a precise group of [...]
Negative keywords are a great way to help ensure that only your targeted audience will see your ad. This can help reduce your costs and improve your advertising return.
Press the play button below to watch a short video on negative keywords and learn about these topics:
what are negative keywords
why you should use them in your campaign
how [...]
Based on advertiser feedback, and our commitment to provide useful tools and information for our advertisers, we’ve now added search volume data to the Keyword Tool. Now, when you use the Keyword Tool to search for relevant keywords to include in your keyword list, you’ll be able to see the approximate number of search queries matching your keywords [...]
Did you know that we have an AdWords Glossary? It’s a great resource for learning more about AdWords; so we’re starting a new series here at Inside AdWords entitled (Ad)Word of the Day. Each post in the series will cover one term in the glossary and talk a little bit about it.
For our inaugural post, we’ll start with ad variations:
Ad [...]
If you’re a media planner at an ad agency, you know that planning an online display buy can be challenging, particularly in scaling your campaign’s reach while keeping it relevant for your target audience. Plus, how do you keep track of the millions of sites out there that might be just right for your campaign?
To [...]
The Conversion Optimizer, our free cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bidding feature for AdWords, came out of beta in January. One of the top requests we’ve heard is from advertisers wanting to use the Conversion Optimizer with AdWords Editor and the AdWords API. Today, we are pleased to announce that the Conversion Optimizer is now supported by both AdWords Editor and the AdWords [...]
You may know that the Google Website Optimizer is a great tool to help you improve the effectiveness of your website, but you might not know where to start. Or perhaps you’re in the middle of a test, but need some guidance. To provide you with the support you need, we launched the Google Website Optimizer Service Plans. [...]
Google designs its products with user experience as the number one priority. Early in Google’s history, our founders, Larry and Sergey, articulated this philosophy in Ten things Google has found to be true. One of these principles is “Fast is better than slow.” We’ve found this rule to be especially applicable to the landing pages of [...]
One of the most common questions the Website Optimizer team gets asked by advertisers is whether or not Website Optimizer will work with content management systems (CMS). This morning, the team launched a new Technology Partner program to call attention to those global CMS providers that have been certified as fully compatible with Website Optimizer.
If you’d like to use Website Optimizer [...]
Our advertisers have often asked: ‘What kinds of web sites make up the Google content network?’
To help answer this question, we just re-launched the Partners page on the Google content network microsite to include a more comprehensive set of examples of where your ads can appear. After all, the content network is comprised of hundreds of thousands of web sites, [...]