Keep thinking Auto

Last week we brought together top marketing executives, industry visionaries, and agency leaders to discuss vehicle shoppers' recent return to the auto marketplace at Google’s Think Auto 2011: Green Light, Go! event.

Speaking to a room full of excited marketers, Guy Kawasaki, author of Enchantment; John Ross, CEO of Shopper Sciences; and Google’s Lorraine Twohill, VP of Global Marketing, gave their thoughts on how to reach the "constantly connected" auto consumer and how this affords greater opportunities to deliver relevant and engaging brand experiences.

In order to share these innovative perspectives with as many people as possible, the event was live streamed on YouTube. If you missed the live stream, you can watch the recorded session on the Google Business channel here. Additionally, be sure to visit our Think Auto site, where you can view presentations and videos from the event.

Posted by the Google Auto Team

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“Mobile”-ize your business with Google Sites

A poor mobile web experience can negatively shape a consumer’s opinion of your brand or your company altogether. In a recent study, we found that 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site that they had trouble accessing from their phone, and 40% go to a competitor’s. By the end of this year, more than half of all Americans will own a smartphone. Your customers are mobile—are you?

Today, we’re excited to announce a brand new tool to help your business get “mobile”-ized: Google Sites mobile landing pages. With Google Sites mobile landing pages, you can build yourself a professional mobile landing page in minutes for free—and without any coding experience.

(click for full size image)

Why use Google Sites mobile landing pages?

• It’s easy. Creating a Google Site is as easy as editing a document, which means there's no markup language for you to learn—just get started.
• It’s free. Google Sites is one of many free products offered by Google.
• It’s measurable. One-click Google Analytics integration allows you to monitor your site's traffic.
• It’s fast. Create your mobile landing page in minutes by starting from one of five pre-loaded templates. You can also start from scratch with the custom template.

(click for full size image)

Watch the video below to see how “small” businessman, Bob, transformed his business using Google Sites:


Visit sites.google.com/mobilize to get started today!

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

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Animal Planet leverages rich media and video advertising across platforms to engage viewers for River Monsters premiere

Mobile, video and rich media advertising are changing the way that businesses capture user attention by bringing together the power of sight, sound, and motion to engage audiences like never before. For example, to build awareness for the new season of their popular River Monsters series, Animal Planet, the "Surprisingly Human" TV network, launched an integrated media campaign across platforms to bring the show to life with the broadest audience possible - driving more than 900k YouTube video views in the weeks leading up to the premiere.

The River Monsters campaign ran across both the YouTube and AdMob networks, delivering users a sneak peak of the upcoming season whether they were on their desktop computers or their mobile phones. Rich media display ads on YouTube enabled the star of the show to pop out of the YouTube Channel to introduce new creatures to potential viewers, while video advertising offered a glimpse at upcoming episodes of the new season.

On the YouTube desktop website, users were able to interact with the River Monsters whether they were searching for their favorite video, watching partner content, or browsing the homepage. Ads led visitors to a custom mimicry gadget on the Animal Planet Brand Channel, where the host of the show jumped out of the ad to highlight the most exciting portions of the featured video.

(click for full size image)

In-Stream Ads on YouTube are also available in the YouTube Android app, enabling Animal Planet to extend this engagement opportunity to mobile users. Including Interactive Video Ads on the AdMob network further expanded the mobile campaign, giving users the opportunity to watch a preview of the River Monsters show, share the video through social media, learn more on the show’s mobile website, and watch additional videos - all from within the mobile ad.

(click for full size image)

To stir up even more excitement on the day of the premiere, a Rich Media Masthead on the YouTube homepage revealed clips from the upcoming episode and reminded users to tune in.

(click for full size image)

The River Monsters campaign was hugely successful:

• YouTube advertising generated more than 930,000 video views on the River Monster clips
• Nearly 2,000 users subscribed to the River Monsters Brand Channel
• Mobile In-Stream Overlay Ads received more than 3 million impressions, with 84% of mobile users completing the video
• Interactive Video Ads on AdMob generated another 6 million impressions, with 75,000 users engaging with one of the interactive elements in the ad creative

The combination of compelling rich media and video advertising on both desktop and mobile created an engaging experience that increased social buzz around the show and led to a premiere that exceeded expectations.

Posted by Vicky Homan, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

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+1 around the world

A few months ago we released the +1 button on English search ads and organic search results on google.com. More recently, we’ve made the +1 button available to sites across the web, making it easier for people who love your site to help their friends and other users find your content in Google search.

Today, +1s will start appearing on ads and organic search results for Google pages globally. We'll be starting with sites like google.co.uk, google.de, google.co.jp and google.fr, and then expanding quickly to most other Google search sites soon after.

We’ve also partnered with a few more sites in Europe, Japan, India, Australia and New Zealand where you’ll start seeing +1 buttons in the coming days.

(Click for full size)

You can also add the +1 button to your international websites by going to the +1 button tool on Google Webmaster Central where it's already available in 44 languages.

We expect that personal annotations will help users know when your ads and organic search results are relevant to them, increasing the chances that they'll end up on your site.
Think of +1 buttons as an enhancement that can help already successful search campaigns perform even better, now, at a global level.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

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Learn about the latest in Video Ads on Ad Innovations

Google offers the world's largest online video audience, based on users of Google.com search, our partnerships with top video publishers across the Google Display Network, and the reach of YouTube, the world's largest video property. On YouTube alone, users generate 3 billion video views daily and upload 48 new hours of video per minute. The online video market is huge for users, and we believe this means it also holds a lot of potential for online advertisers.

For those of you who are already passionate about this large and growing market, we’ve just launched a Video page on Ad Innovations -- your destination for exploring our latest advertising developments.

On this page, you can learn about new video innovations that can help you prepare your campaigns and promote your business.

Prepare your campaign

• Ad Creation Marketplace - Hire a professional to create a TV or video ad that fits your needs, budget, and deadlines.
• YouTube Video Targeting Tool - Search by keyword or audience to find YouTube videos where you might want to advertise.
• YouTube Insight - Learn about the video likes and dislikes of audiences you define.

Promote your business

• TrueView video ads by YouTube - Give users choice and control over which advertisers' messages they want to see and when. Pay only when a user chooses to view your ad, increasing your view count on YouTube.
• Video extensions - Include click-to-play videos for trailers, previews, and product demonstrations that play right below your ads on Google.com.
• Media Ads - Discover new ways to target, pay for, and experience video ads on Google.com.

Check out our new Video innovations page and send us feedback on these new features. We’ll add more items to this page as we bring new video advertising features to you.

If you're new to video advertising, start with the basics. We have online resources available where you can learn about all our video advertising solutions including YouTube advertising.

Posted by Lauren Barbato, Inside AdWords crew

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Getting Started with Automated Rules

Earlier this year, we launched Automated Rules, a feature that lets you save time by scheduling automatic changes to your account based on criteria that you specify. Since then, tens of thousands of advertisers have created rules to manage their accounts more effectively and even deploy more advanced strategies.

Whether you're new to Automated Rules or already an expert, we wanted to share with you some of the most popular examples of rules that AdWords users have created. We hope that these examples can help you take better advantage of the feature.

Click here for details on how to set up these types of rules. You'll need to adjust them to meet your business needs and goals. Let us know what you think of these examples, and send us your favorite rules.

Scheduling ads

• Turning on/off special ads for a promotional event
• Turning on/off certain ads on a repeating basis (e.g., every weekend)
• Turning on/off a special ad campaign for a promotional event

Pausing low-performing ads or keywords

• Pausing low-performing keywords based on success metrics (e.g., high cost per conversion)
• Pausing low-performing ads based on success metrics (e.g., low CTR)

Bids and bid scheduling

• Adjusting bids for keywords based on cost per conversion
• Changing bids to reach a desired average position
• Raising bids to ensure ads show on the first page
• Bid scheduling (e.g., a higher bid during certain hours of the day)

Controlling budgets and cost

• Increasing budget for campaigns that convert well (using cost per conversion)
• Budget scheduling (e.g., higher budget on certain days of the week)
• Pausing campaigns that have spent a certain amount partway through the month
• Pausing campaigns that have received a certain number of clicks partway through the day

General examples

• Understanding how to make a rule work on one, several or all campaigns
• Excluding keywords from a rule

To learn more about Automated Rules, please visit Ad Innovations. Happy automating!

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

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Reach your audience with interest categories

Whether the goal is to generate awareness or drive sales, marketers share a common objective: reach people likely to be interested in their product or service. With contextual targeting on the Google Display Network, you can find people the very moment they express interest by browsing relevant content. But what happens if someone who has been browsing for cameras then goes on to read a separate news site or favorite blog? A marketer for a camera company would like to show that interested user an ad, but they can't use contextual targeting to reach them, since the site is unrelated.

Over a year ago, we announced a beta of interest categories on the Google Display Network. We've been slowly expanding the availability of this feature, and as of today, interest categories are now available to all AdWords advertisers. It works like this: our system looks at the types of pages a user visits, taking into account how recently and frequently those pages have been visited, and then associates their browser with relevant interest categories. Using these categories, you can show ads to the people most likely to purchase your products or services, and you can reach them across all types of sites in the Google Display Network in addition to contextually relevant sites.

With over 1,000 interest categories from ecotourism to mobile phones, we’re confident you'll find a category that fits your business. And with over 500 million users interested in these categories who visit the Display Network every day, you’ll be able to reach a huge number of potential customers. You pay only for clicks or impressions at auction prices, as always. Our beta advertisers have used interest categories to successfully meet all kinds of goals, from an advertiser increasing brand lift by 40% to a shoe retailer driving 400% more conversions at a lower advertising cost per sale.

As we’ve made interest categories available to more advertisers, we’ve remained committed to providing users with the highest level of control and transparency. Users may, at any time, view and edit interest categories or permanently opt out of receiving interest-based ads entirely with the Ads Preferences Manager. Also, we label our ads with the AdChoices logo to give users notice and choice about the ads they see.

We hope you'll use these interest categories to enhance your advertiser campaigns. We think you'll find them an effective way to reach more interested users, increase awareness of your products and services, and ultimately drive more sales. You can visit our Help Center to learn more.

-Jon Krafcik, Product Manager, Google Display Network

Posted by Lauren Barbato, Inside AdWords crew

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Learn more about AdWords with our new YouTube channel

Recently we made all the AdWords Online Classroom videos available on YouTube. Now you can easily watch videos on new and simple ways to improve your ads.

For example, boost your performance by including a strong and compelling call-to-action in your ads like "Buy Online Now." Here’s one of our favorite videos for improving your AdWords results:



Here are a few other videos you can watch to learn more about AdWords:

• Getting started
• How to measure success
• Beyond the basics

Happy learning from the AdWords Online Classroom team.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

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Think with Google: "Word of Mouth" study shows Google directly informs 146 million brand conversations a day

There are more than 2.4 billion conversations about brands every day, according to our latest "Word of Mouth" study with Keller Fay. More than half of consumers involved in these conversations say they’re likely to make a purchase based on what they talk about. We wanted to know more about how media and the Internet play into all this conversation, so we took a look at what effect the Internet and search have on word of mouth. The study shows how media and marketing channels provided content before, during, and after consumer conversations by surveying 3,000 adults across 12 categories.

It turns out that while most people still talk about brands face to face, their conversations are informed by the Internet more than any other media source. And when they’re online, users go to search sites more than any other. This is even more true after conversations, especially those sparked by TV. People follow up by searching for more information and prices more than any other online activity, including social media.

Check out this video or see here on Think Insights for more information on the full study!

Posted by Lisa Shieh, Inside AdWords crew

Editor's note (Wednesday, June 22, 2011, 2:45 pm): The post originally said that there are 2.4 million brand conversations happening every day. The correct number is in fact 2.4 billion, so the post has been updated to reflect this.

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Google’s Think Auto Event - Live Stream - June 21st

As vehicle shoppers make a resounding return to the auto market, Think Auto will arm advertisers with new ideas and tools to help capture these shoppers. The "constantly connected" lifestyle of today’s consumer affords greater opportunity to deliver relevant and engaging brand experiences. How do these new consumer behaviors apply to brand marketers' strategies today and in the future?

Tune in and find out as Google's Lorraine Twohill, VP of Global Marketing, introduces five concrete principles to drive both positive brand image and product usage.

• Live streaming begins on June 21, 2011, at 12:35 pm EDT
• Register here
• Following us? Use #thinkevents for this event

We'll reveal new insights on today's automotive shopper during the "Path to Purchase" section, which will uncover new consumer behavior during the vehicle shopping process.

Guy Kawasaki, the final keynote speaker and author of Enchantment, will surely excite the audience as he explores new thinking on influencing and igniting action, both through individual interactions and marketing at scale. Hope to see you there.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

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Webinar: Implementing the +1 Button

A few weeks ago, we launched the +1 button for your site, which can help your site stand out by making it easy for visitors to recommend your pages on Google search. As a result, the +1 button could bring more, better-qualified traffic from your search results and ads. But how do you make sure this experience is user friendly? Where should you position the +1 button? How do you make sure the correct URL is getting +1’d?

On Tuesday, June 21 at 3pm ET, please join Timothy Jordan, Google Developer Advocate, to learn how to best implement the +1 button on your site. He’ll talk about the technical implementation details as well as best practices to ensure the button has maximum impact. During the webinar, we’ll review the topics below and save time for Q&A:

• Getting started
• Best practices
• Advanced options
• Measurement

If you'd like to attend, please register here. For more information on how the +1 button affects your ads, visit Ad Innovations.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords Crew

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Rimm-Kaufman Group discusses their experience with Product Listing Ads

Recently we had a chance to catch up with Matthew Mierzejewski of Rimm-Kaufman Group (RKG) to discuss his experience managing Product Listing Ads for his clients.

Founded in 2003, RKG is a data-driven online marketing firm that specializes in paid search marketing, multichannel attribution management, and display advertising. RKG has 170 clients that range from start-ups to the Fortune 500 and that include both B2C and B2B direct marketers. In August of 2008, RKG was named to Inc. Magazine's list of the Top 500 Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America.

Matthew Mierzejewski, RKG’s VP of Client Services, has been working with Product Listing Ads for clients since they launched last year, and he’s offered to share some of his results and recommendations for other saavy marketers here:

Inside AdWords (IA): What initially drew your interest to Product Listing Ads?
Matthew Mierzejewski (MM): We have many retail clients who are looking for scalable ways to increase their presence in search. Because Google managed the targeting for Product Listing Ads, we wanted to see how much incremental traffic we could gather outside of our existing keyword-targeted campaigns. Also, the prominent ad listings with highly relevant product images are an extremely attractive ad space to play in.

IA: Was the implementation challenging?
MM: Most of our retail clients are already using Merchant Center to get free traffic in Google Product Search. For those clients, the basic CPC implementation was pretty simple. Furthermore, working with Google to implement some additional attributes was helpful and has allowed us to accurately track and improve our ROI.

IA: How much incremental traffic should an advertiser expect from Product Listing Ads?
MM: It varies a fair amount based on product category and bid level, but we see some clients getting up to 10% additional traffic from Product Listing Ads. These are clients who have already done a lot of work with their core keyword-targeted accounts, so it was great for them to have another tool available.

IA: How do the conversion rates for Product Listing Ads compare to keyword-target text ads in search?
MM: We've seen conversion rates up to 10% higher on Product Listing Ads compared to average text ad conversion rates. Taking it one step further and looking at queries that serve both a Product Listing Ad and a text ad to the same product-level landing page, we're seeing Product Listing Ads in some cases with a 30% higher conversion rate. With all other elements being held equal, we conclude that since the user is able to see the exact item of interest, price, and often a promotional message, they are more likely to convert per click in Product Listing Ads versus text ads.

IA: How do the costs for Product Listing Ads compare to keyword-targeted text ads in search?
MM: In general, where the data is significant and we're bidding effectively to ROI targets, we're bidding and paying up to 15% more on Product Listing Ads compared to text ads. Though, as I called out earlier, in many cases we're seeing a greater return on Product Listing Ads traffic, so we can afford to be slightly more aggressive [with our bids].

IA: How do results vary between clients who use cost-per-click (CPC) pricing versus those who use the cost-per-action (CPA) pricing?
MM: We don’t see much difference in terms of conversion rates between CPC and CPA pricing. Though, in general, clients who use CPC pricing have been able to get more volume than those who are using CPA pricing. We like the idea of CPA pricing, but if we optimize our CPC bids we’re able to meet our ROI goals just as easily. It’s all a matter of testing and optimizing.

IA: Who do Product Listing Ads work best for?
MM: Advertisers with products that already do well in natural product search are ideal, since they know that users are already searching for their products. In general, when a user’s query can closely match a specific product in your Merchant Center feed, you’ll do better. For example, canon eos 60d will do better than men's suit coat. Think of it as objective versus subjective user intent that a robot would have a hard time parsing out.

IA: What advanced tips do you have for an advertiser using Product Listing Ads?
MM: Advertisers should be using some combination of, if not all available, Merchant Center parameters available to them: adwords_grouping, adwords_labels, adwords_publish, and adwords_redirect. Those attributes should be used to set up granular product targets inside of AdWords. Segmenting those bids will ensure proper ROI goals can be met. Sometimes this means using multiple attributes together to get the best result.
Finally, you should consider utilizing promotional messages for various product targets. These can easily differentiate your ad from the competition and can lead to higher CTRs and CRs if you can afford the offers.

We’d like to thank Matthew and RKG for taking the time to talk to us about their experience with Product Listing Ads so far. To learn more, including how to get started and best practices, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

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Google Display Network introduces new performance bundle

Today, innovations in targeting, optimization, and measurement can help you achieve greater performance with your Display Network campaigns. We’re investing heavily in these areas, and we’re pleased to announce several tools that give you better measurement, transparency and value for your display advertising campaigns.
Better measurement
1. Relative CTR: User behavior on web pages varies depending on the type of page users are on. For example, users may interact with ads on a product review page differently than with ads on a blog. Clickthrough rate (CTR) tells you how often users click on your ads, but CTR can’t tell you how your ads perform compared to other ads on the same page.
To better gauge the performance of your Display Network campaigns, Relative CTR shows you how your ads perform relative to other ads running in the same places on the GDN, letting you benchmark your performance across the Display Network. For example, if your display ads have a CTR of 0.04%, while other ads in the same places on the GDN have a CTR of 0.02%, your Relative CTR is (0.04)/(0.02) = 2x.
The screenshot below shows how Relative CTR looks in AdWords:

(click for full size image)

Why does Relative CTR matter?
At first glance, a CTR of 0.04% may seem low. But knowing that this is two times the CTR of competing ads tells you that your ads are actually performing, on a CTR basis, better than ads on the same page. This means that your ad creative matches the websites your ads are appearing on and that your audience is responding to your message.
Alternatively, you may see that your Relative CTR is 0.5x, meaning that your ads are only getting half of the average clickthrough rate. This means that your ads may not be resonating with the users you’d like to reach and that you may be able to improve performance by refining your ad creatives.
To view relative CTR within your AdWords account, go to the "Ad groups" tab, select "Customize columns" from the "Columns" drop-down menu, and select "Relative CTR.” Relative CTR will appear at the campaign or ad group level.
2. Impression Share (IS): With the auction model, multiple advertisers compete for the same ad spots on a web page. To help measure your online presence, we’ve created impression share, which represents the percentage of times that your ads were shown out of the total available impressions for which your ads were eligible to appear on the GDN. In other words, impression share provides you with your online share of voice.
Based on IS data, you can increase your share of voice by adjusting your budget or improving your Ad Rank. The Lost IS (budget) metric tells you how many impressions you're losing due to your budget, while Lost IS (rank) tells you how many impressions you’re losing due to Ad Rank.
For example, you may see that you're losing 25% of impression share due to budget restrictions and must increase this campaign’s daily budget to get more impressions. Or you might see that you're losing 35% of impression share due to Ad Rank and may need to raise bids or improve your creatives.
Greater transparency
With your ads running across millions of sites on the GDN, it can be difficult to keep track of where your ads are and aren’t running. The Content Ads Diagnostic Tool (CADT) tells you why your ads aren’t showing on the Display Network. For example, you may see that your placement-targeted ad groups are not running because they lost the auction:

(click for full size image)

You can also see when your ad is running, and on what specific placements:

(click for full size image)

We'll start releasing CADT to a small number of advertisers in mid-June and will launch a full release in early July.
Better value for your online display dollars
Users often need to scroll to see your ads on a webpage. When a user does not scroll far enough to view your ad, these unseen impressions hurt your advertising effectiveness and result in wasted spend. We recently launched a feature called the Unseen Impression Filter that ensures that CPM advertisers are not charged for impressions that users have a low probability of viewing.
For example, say that a user lands on a publisher site where your ad serves below the fold:

(click for full size image)

You'll only be charged when we predict that a user will actually scroll to see your ad:

(click for full size image)

Note that this feature is automatically enabled and does not require any controls or set-up.
Wrapping up
All four of these tools and features -- Relative CTR, Impression Share, Content Ads Diagnostic Tool, and Unseen Impression Filter¹ -- are available in all AdWords languages. For more information, please visit our Help Center.
Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

¹This product has been deprecated. For information on buying viewable impressions, see here. 

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There’s a perfect ad for everyone

On Thursday, June 9th, Neal Mohan, Google's VP of Display Advertising, delivered a keynote at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Innovation Days @ Internet Week. The talk is entitled “There’s a perfect ad for everyone,” and during it Neal made six predictions about how display advertising will change for the better by 2015.

You can view the recording at google.com/watchthisspace.

The talk was about the new technologies in display advertising that are resulting in better user experiences, better advertiser results and incredible growth for the industry. We’re investing significantly to help improve display advertising for advertisers, publishers and users. But we’re poised to make even greater advances in the years ahead. We’re at the beginning of a user-focused revolution, where people connect and respond to display ads in ways we’ve never seen before.

If you watch the talk, let us know what you think by following us and sending us a note.

Posted by Lauren Barbato, Inside AdWords crew

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This Wednesday, Attend a Live Online Webinar on AdWords Campaign Experiments

We’d like to invite you to our first live, interactive webinar on AdWords Campaign Experiments this Wednesday, June 15 from 9 to 10 am PDT.

In case you’re not already familiar with AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE), it's a free tool in AdWords that helps you test and precisely measure the impact of changes to your keywords, bids, ads, ad groups, placements, and more. ACE reduces the guesswork and potential risk involved with making changes to your campaign. Its split-testing approach gives you valid measurements regardless of external changes in demand, competitor movements, or other sales and marketing activity.
Our live webinar will provide you with:

• an introduction to ACE
• a description of ACE’s primary benefits over traditional methods of testing and optimization
• a list of campaign elements you can test
• best practices for using ACE
• ACE success stories from AdWords advertisers like you

Don’t miss out on this opportunity to learn about ACE and ask our team questions - live! Register now to participate and see you Wednesday!

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

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June 8 is World IPv6 Day

Editor’s Note: We published a version of this post yesterday with a couple inaccuracies. We took down the post temporarily while we made corrections.

On June 8, together with major web companies such as Facebook and Yahoo!, we will enable IPv6 on our main websites for 24 hours. We do not anticipate any significant impact on AdWords, AdSense and DoubleClick users or their campaigns. Google supports IPv6 because it’s critical to the future of the open web. With limited address space, the Internet is bursting at the seams, and IPv6 is the best solution.

The good news is that most users don’t need to do anything special to prepare for World IPv6 Day. Our current measurements suggest that the vast majority (99.95%) will be unaffected. However, in rare cases, people may experience connectivity problems, often due to misconfigured or misbehaving home network devices.

Want to check to see if your connection is IPv6 ready?

Visit our IPv6 test website. It will verify IPv6 compatibility, and provide tips for troubleshooting if needed.

Learn more about IPv6, or read about World IPv6 Day.

Posted by Lisa Shieh, Inside AdWords crew

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Embedded format now available for Ad Sitelinks

Since we launched Ad Sitelinks back in 2009, we’ve worked to extend the format to appear on more queries and more devices. We’ve also enhanced Ad Sitelinks with smart serving to automatically show your highest-performing Sitelinks more frequently. Today we’re introducing a new feature of Ad Sitelinks, embedded sitelinks, that makes it even easier to integrate targeted links within your ads.

With the embedded format of Ad Sitelinks, there are no additional lines appended to your text ad. Instead, text in your ad that exactly matches one or more of the sitelinks in your campaign will automatically be linked to that sitelink’s destination URL. With embedded sitelinks, potential customers can pick the part of your ad that applies directly to their current interests and visit the most specific page for that topic.

(Example of text ad with embedded sitelinks)

For example, if you sell home goods, your ad may mention that you sell appliances, furniture, and flatware. If you have separate sitelinks set up for the words “appliances,” “furniture,” and “flatware,” those words would be hyperlinked in your ad text, leading potential customers to a page for the specific part of the ad that drew their interest. We believe that these targeted destination URLs may encourage more users to click on your ad and make it easier for them to find what they’re searching for when they arrive on your site.

To show with embedded sitelinks, your campaign must be enabled for Ad Sitelinks. Also, your ad must appear above the search results, and part of your ad text must exactly match one or more of your Ad Sitelinks. Additionally, embedded sitelinks will only show for ads that don’t meet one or more of the requirements for one- or two-line Ad Sitelinks.

Embedded sitelinks are now available to AdWords users globally, excluding China, Japan and Korea. To learn more about Ad Sitelinks and the new embedded sitelinks feature, you can visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

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New My Client Center feature provides easier account management across agencies

Today's post comes cross posted from the AdWords agency blog:

We’ve just released a new My Client Center (MCC) feature called multiple links, which makes it easier for agencies, SEMs, AdWords API developers, other 3rd party providers and clients to work together while taking advantage of the benefits of the MCC structure. It enables up to five MCCs to link to and manage a single AdWords account as necessary. Multiple links also removes the distinction that Google currently has between UI/API and API-only links.

FAQs to help you make the most of this feature:

• How will the process change for linking an MCC account to a child account?
  The process for linking remains the same. The only change is that when you click on the button “Link Account,” you will no longer see the radio button asking you to identify the access level you require (‘User Interface and API’ or ‘API only’)
• Now that there are up to five MCCs linked to an account, which MCC will be the bill-to?
  Even though an AdWords account can be linked to up to five MCCs, there will still only be one active budget at a time. Same as today, each budget can be associated with only one Manager Defined Order and each MDO can in turn be associated with only one MCC. Hence, for each budget period, at most one MCC will be billed for the account.
• Will having up to five MCCs linked to an account impact who is doing account management?
  Anyone who has access to any of the MCCs linked to an account may make changes.
• Is there any chance that two users of different MCCs could make conflicting changes to the account?
  Yes, this may happen. To reduce the chances of conflicting changes being made, we recommend having clear communication amongst all users about roles and responsibilities for account management.

Additional FAQs for multiple links can be found in the MCC section of the AdWords Help Center.

In addition, if you wish to learn more about multiple links and optional-login accounts in detail, we’ll be hosting a webinar on Wednesday, June 8 2011 at 9amPST / 12pmEST. Register here. Event password: googleMCC.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crewPosted by Agency Blog Team

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5 New AdWords Campaign Experiments Demo Videos

A number of advertisers have told us that they want to try AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE), but they’re not sure what to test. If you’re one of these advertisers, we’ve just created five demo videos that walk you through some example experiments you might want to try.

With our new videos, you can learn how to divide your experiment into control and experiment groups as well as how to run these four experiment types:

• Keyword match types (e.g., How does adding a modified broad match keyword affect my account?)
• Bids (e.g., What happens if I increase my bids by 10%?)
• Ad creatives (e.g., How does new ad text and a new display URL affect my performance?)
• Ad groups (e.g., Does a broader or more tightly themed ad group structure work better for me?)

We hope these videos help inspire you to run experiments in ACE! In case you need a refresher on how to set up your first experiment, watch our step-by-step video guides here.



Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

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Add +1 to help your ads stand out

People make choices about your website many times each day--whenever your pages appear in Google search results. What if the people who love your site could help their friends and other users find your great content right at the moment of decision?

That’s why we introduced the +1 button on Google search in March. +1 annotations show your customers which pages people they trust have found and enjoyed first, making it easier to find content they’re likely to care about.

Since we announced +1, we’ve gotten requests from Google search users and advertisers alike for +1 buttons in more places than just search results. That’s why today we’re making the +1 button available to sites across the web. Sometimes you want to recommend a web page after you’ve visited it. After all, how do you know you want to suggest that great hotel deal in Madrid if you haven’t checked it out yet?

We’ve partnered with a few sites where you'll see +1 buttons over the coming days:

You'll also start to see +1 buttons on other Google properties such as Android Market, Blogger, Product Search and YouTube.

Adding +1 buttons to your pages is a great way to help your ads stand out on Google. By giving your visitors more chances to +1 your pages, your search ads and organic results might appear with +1 annotations more often. This could lead to more--and better qualified--traffic to your site.

click for full size image

To get started, visit the +1 button tool on Google Webmaster Central, where you’ll configure small snippets of JavaScript to add to the pages where you want +1 buttons to appear. You can pick from a few different button sizes and styles, so choose the +1 button that best matches your site’s layout.

When a user clicks +1, that +1 applies to the URL of the page they’re on. There are some easy ways to ensure your +1s apply as often as possible to the pages appearing in Google search results.

To stay current on updates to the +1 button large and small, please subscribe to the Google Publisher Button Announce Group. For advanced tips and tricks, check our Google Code site. For information about how the +1 button affects your search ads, check out the AdWords Help Center.

If your site primarily caters to users outside of the US and Canada, you can install the +1 button code now; the +1 button is already supported in 44 languages. However, keep in mind that +1 annotations currently only appear for English search results on Google.com. We’re working on releasing +1 to other domains in the future.

If you have customers who love your content (and we bet you do), encourage them to spread the word! Add the +1 button to help your ads stand out with a personal recommendation right at the moment of decision, on Google search.


Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

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