Improved transparency and choice with ads on search and Gmail

Our AdWords engineers are constantly working to make ads more relevant and useful. We're also working to give users more transparency and choice with the ads that they see. These efforts help maintain user trust, which is fundamental to the effectiveness of AdWords.

New features for users

Starting today we’re placing a "Why these ads?" link on Google search results and Gmail (known as Google Mail in some countries).

When a user clicks the link, it expands to explain details about why each ad was shown.

A user can also access the Ads Preferences Manager for search and Gmail.

Here, the user can choose to block ads from specific advertisers or opt out of personalized ads. Because we can show fewer, more relevant ads when users have opted-in to see personalized ads, we describe these benefits with text and video to help them make an informed choice.

Potential impact on advertisers
As an advertiser, you might wonder how these changes could impact your AdWords performance. When a user opts out of personalized ads on search and Gmail, your ads can still reach them but the targeting might be a bit less precise. If users block your ads, they won’t see your ads in the future. The number of blocks you’ve accumulated does not directly affect calculations of your Quality Score and Ad Rank.

Users must be signed in to Google for their ads preferences to apply.

More details
You can learn more about the new Ads Preferences Manager for search and Gmail at the Web Search Help Center. You can also visit Good to Know, a new site for users on how to manage their data on Google and across the web.

Posted by Ginsu Yoon, Group Product Manager

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Meet the family: TrueView video ads deliver on cost-per-view pricing model

If you use TrueView video ads or interested in video advertising, we invite you to check out the Agency blog where we just posted some news and recent stats on this new suite of cost-per-view video ads. To learn more about the TrueView family of ad formats, visit the website here.

Posted by Lauren Barbato, Inside AdWords crew

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Location Targeting gets a makeover

Today, many businesses are using location targeting in their online ad campaigns to reach the right customers and improve campaign performance. Online agency iProspect, for example, uses location targeting to focus on top performing geographic areas for their client Talbots. As a result, they were able to lower their cost-per-click (CPC) by 36 percent, driving higher quality leads at a lower cost.

To provide an even better experience for our advertisers, we've connected the location targeting feature within AdWords to Google Maps. This will allow us to provide more information about locations, make relevant location suggestions, and improve the level of accuracy of our location targeting. We think these changes will make location targeting an even more useful tool for improving your campaign results.

Today we're announcing the first of these changes: a makeover to the location targeting interface within AdWords. The new Location Targeting Tool will make it easier to discover and obtain more detail on potential target locations.

Easily discover locations

Let's say that you want to target your latest AdWords campaign to New York City. On your Campaign Settings tab, as you type "New York" into the search box in the location targeting section, you'll instantly see helpful search suggestions. The suggestions include (1) matches like the city of New York, (2) locations that enclose New York (such as the state of New York), and (3) related locations that may be near the location that you've entered, have a similar name, or enclose a location that has a similar name. You can then pick the options that make the most sense for your business and quickly make the appropriate selection.





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You can also view your locations via a map, which shows more detailed location outlines. The new tool also allows you to view the boundaries of multiple locations that you've selected simultaneously, so you can see how much area the city of New York (smaller area shaded in blue) covers in relation to the entire New York metro area (larger area shaded in gray). Once you choose a location, you can easily add, exclude, or view nearby locations by clicking the appropriate links.

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More detail on locations

We now offer reach numbers to help you estimate the audience within your selected target. These reach numbers are based on the number of users seen on Google properties and may differ significantly from census numbers. Reach should be used only as general guidance to help you determine the relative number of users in a location target compared to other locations. For example, you can see from the screenshot below that targeting the Dallas metro area could result in three times the reach of the city of Dallas.

Additionally, we will use the 'Limited reach' label to indicate locations where we may not be able to associate users with a selected location based on their devices' Internet Protocol (IP) address. In these instances, we will primarily be using user intent data rather than device location data to target these locations.

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When you target a radius (also known as proximity targeting), we'll show 'Locations within this target' so you know exactly which areas are covered by your radius. You can also choose to 'Add all' of the individual locations within your radius.

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Additional Changes

Beyond the new features mentioned above, here are a few more changes to be aware of when planning your campaign.

Increased location targeting limits: We've increased the location target limits from 300 to 10,000 locations (plus 500 additional proximity targets) per campaign.

Polygon targeting migration: For existing polygon targets, you will see a 'feature removal planned' badge which will signify that we will continue to support this feature through the end of the year. We recommend using the Target a radius feature which now allows you to selectively add locations within your radius target.  You can also run a geographic performance report to get an idea of which locations received traffic within your custom shapes and target those individual locations.

We hope you enjoy the new Location Targeting Tool and explore ways to use geographic reports and location targeting to optimize your campaigns. As always, we welcome your feedback through the Contact Us link in AdWords and we encourage you to review our FAQs through the AdWords Help Center for more details.

Posted by Smita Hashim, Group Product Manager, Local Ads Quality

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Retiring support for Internet Explorer 6

By the end of this year, advertisers accessing the AdWords web interface will be required to use Internet Explorer 7 or 8, or any other compatible browser to log in into their account.

If you are still accessing AdWords with Internet Explorer 6, you’ll see a notice in your account encouraging you to upgrade as soon as possible. For optimal performance and a faster experience, we recommend you use the latest version of your preferred browser to access AdWords.

You can also use the following links to download other browsers that are compatible with AdWords:

• Chrome
• Firefox
• Safari
• Internet Explorer

Please visit our Help Center if you have additional questions.

Posted by Lauren Barbato, Inside AdWords crew

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Small business and the power of video: Announcing “My Business Story” by Google and American Express

Let’s say you’re a custom sneaker maker. Or you run a yoga retreat center. Or maybe you even sell vegan Vietnamese out of a gourmet food truck. Your business has its own unique story to tell. If you had the chance to show the world what your business is all about -- from its founding roots to the ways it changes your customers’ lives -- would you take it?

Today you have that chance. We’re pleased to be presenting "My Business Story®" alongside American Express. “My Business Story” is a program for small businesses to tell their stories through video, leading up to the second annual "Small Business Saturday," a day set aside to encourage communities to spend and support local businesses by shopping small.

And since Google research has shown that companies who use video can expect better customer engagement and retention, we are launching a new video tool so that small business owners can create personalized, professional-quality videos about their business.

Once you’ve got your video crafted, business owners are invited to submit it to the contest for an opportunity to appear in the YouTube homepage ad on Friday, November 25th, which is viewed by an estimated 22 million people in the United States every day. Thirty-six small businesses will be featured in the ad and will receive an online ad campaign worth $5,000 from Google and American Express. All submissions will be viewed and judged by an independent panel of experts. The deadline for the contest entry is Tuesday, November 15, but entry is not required to use the My Business Story editing tool.

Happy editing! We’re eager to see what you come up with.

Posted by Marisa Currie, Product Marketing Manager

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Introducing bid-per-call in AdWords

Over the next few weeks in the US and UK, we'll be rolling out the ability for advertisers to bid for phone calls -- in addition to bidding for clicks -- when they show Google search ads on computers and tablets.

Potential for more calls

Let's say your business sees phone calls as a valuable lead source. You're willing to pay up to $5 for a phone call and up to $1 for a click from a prospective customer who searched for "caribbean cruise" on Google search.

Today, a combination of your ad's Quality Score and max cost-per-click (CPC) bid determine your Ad Rank, which influences your ad's position. But with bid-per-call, your bid for phone calls and phone call Quality Score can directly factor into your Ad Rank, too. Higher ranked ads are more likely to be seen and can therefore generate more phone calls (and clicks, too).

Setup and reporting 

To take advantage of bid-per-call, select the option to use a Google forwarding number when you set up Call Extensions so that our systems can measure when a call to your business occurs. With bid-per-call, you'll also get the benefit of detailed call reporting right in AdWords, which includes:

• Summaries of completed calls, phone-through rate (PTR), and phone call cost on the Ad Group and Campaign tabs. 
• Details for each call, including call time, duration, caller area code, and the ad group that drove the call on the Dimensions tab. 

Eligibility requirements 

At this time, bid-per-call is available only in the US and UK. Max CPP bids are set at the ad group level. And each ad group must meet certain minimum click and call thresholds. If you're already using Call Metrics, you must enter a Max CPP bid in order to activate bid-per-call.

More details 

In the AdWords Help Center, you can find details on how bid-per-call works with Ad Rank and the AdWords auction, and general FAQs about call extensions. For the latest updates on bid-per-call and other useful features, please visit Google Ad Innovations.

Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Product Manager

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Making local online advertising easy with Google AdWords Express

Today, we're officially introducing AdWords Express in the UK and Germany. AdWords Express is a faster and simpler way to start advertising online in under five minutes and is designed to help local businesses that aren't already AdWords advertisers create effective campaigns. Watch the video below to see how you can create and run an online campaign from start to finish in just a few clicks:

AdWords Express helps potential customers find your website or Place page and gives you a quick and straightforward way to connect with them and grow your business. You simply provide some basic business information, choose some wording for your text ad, select a monthly budget and your campaign is ready to go.

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After you sign up, the campaign will be automatically managed for you. AdWords Express will figure out which searches should trigger your ad to appear and displays it when these searches happen. Your ad will be shown in the Ads section of search results pages—on the top or right hand side—and in Google Maps with a distinctive blue pin. Customers can see your ad whether they’re searching on laptops or mobile phones.

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As with all our ad products, you pay only when a customer clicks on your ad. To make things even easier, AdWords Express optimizes your ads to get the most out of your advertising campaign and budget.

Many businesses are already finding success through AdWords, but we know many of you are looking for an easier way to begin advertising online. Visit www.google.co.uk/adwords/express to sign up or learn more about how it works.

Posted by Kiley McEvoy, Product Manager, AdWords Express

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Introducing Dynamic Search Ads (beta)

For many online businesses, each day you might have hundreds of new listings, items that temporarily change availability, or items that are permanently removed from stock. And at the same time, user search behavior can be a moving target -- each day, 16% of searches that occur, Google has never seen before. So even well-managed AdWords campaigns containing thousands of keywords can miss relevant searches, experience delays getting ads written for new products, or get out of sync with what's actually available on your web site.  That's not great for advertisers. It's also not great for end users, who appreciate relevant ads linked to landing pages with in-stock items that perfectly match what they're searching for.

To help with these challenges, we're launching Dynamic Search Ads, a new way to target relevant searches with dynamic ads generated right from your website. Dynamic Search Ads complement your existing keyword-targeted ads to help you sell more with less effort.

Dynamic Targeting, Ads and Landing Pages

With Dynamic Search Ads, we maintain a fresh index of your inventory using Google's organic web crawling technology.

When a relevant search occurs, we dynamically generate an ad with a headline based on the query, and the text based on your most relevant landing page.

The ad enters the auction and competes normally -- but we'll hold it back for any search where you also have an eligible keyword-targeted ad. So you get additive results from broader exposure for more of your in-stock inventory, without disrupting your existing keyword campaigns.

User Experience & Performance

Ads are answers. And when users see ads and landing pages that deliver exactly what they're searching for, they're more likely to click and convert. So it's not surprising that we've seen solid performance in limited testing so far. While results vary, the majority of advertisers in our pilot have seen 5-10% increase in clicks and conversions with satisfactory ROI.

Some advertisers have the potential for better results. ApartmentHomeLiving.com, a leading U.S. apartment shopping website, is one example. Lawrence Cotter, General Manager, manages their huge online inventory of apartment listings that's constantly changing and growing. Over the past 5 years, his AdWords campaigns have topped 15 million keywords. Several weeks after implementing Dynamic Search Ads, he reported:

"Using Dynamic Search Ads increased conversions by almost 50% with an average cost-per-conversion that's 73% less than our traditional search ads. Dynamic Search Ads are doing a really good job finding the right searches to tap into, creating good ads, and getting visitors to the most relevant page on our site."  

You're In Control

You can choose to target your whole site, specific categories of products on your site, pages containing certain words, or pages containing certain strings in your URL. And all controls can be used as negatives, along with traditional keyword negatives, to refine your targeting and prevent the promotion of out-of-stock items.

Reporting and optimization work in familiar fashion. You get full reporting on searches that generated clicks, destination pages that matched ads, ad headlines that were generated, as well as average CPC, clicks, and conversions. Many popular third party tracking systems are also supported. To optimize, use familiar techniques like adjusting your max CPC bid and negatives.

Availability & More Details

At this time, Dynamic Search Ads are available in all countries and languages as a limited beta. You can join the interest list by contacting your Google account representative or signing up here. To learn more, please visit our Help Center FAQs.

Posted by Baris Gultekin, Director, AdWords Product Management

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Think Mobile Webinar - November 2nd

Not sure how to most effectively leverage and measure your mobile marketing campaigns? Well, you’re not alone. While mobile is an incredible new way to distribute content and reach customers on the go, it also presents a unique challenge when it comes to measuring the impact of our mobile efforts (which may include applications, advertisements and/or mobile-optimized websites).

Tune in on November 2nd for Google’s Think Mobile webinar, Mobile Advertising: Right Person, Right Time, Right Message - Finally!, led by Avinash Kaushik, Digital Marketing Evangelist. Avinash will share tips and best practices for mobile marketing campaigns, new metrics unique to mobile, and how best to measure mobile ads and websites.

• When: Wednesday, November 2, 2011 9-10:30am PST/ 12-1:30pm EST
• How: Register here

Posted by Andrew Truong, Inside AdWords crew

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Find your audience with the Google Display Network

Advertising is about getting your message in front of the right people. Whether you need to increase brand awareness or maximize ROI on direct response campaigns, your challenge continues to be about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.

How can you do this intelligently, and at scale? Audience Solutions on the Google Display Network (GDN) provides the insight you need, connecting potential customers by with exactly what they are looking for -- when they are ready to buy.

Please join Google in our upcoming webinar to learn more about audience targeting strategies for your campaigns using Audience Solutions on the Google Display Network. We’ll discuss the following topics:

• Enhance search: Making the most of your search investment through Remarketing
• Deeper insights: Gaining insights about your current customers to expand your audience
• Extend reach: Reaching new audiences based on their interests and purchase intent
• ROI Optimization: Taking advantage of transparency and controls to optimize your campaigns

Register here for the webinar to be held on November 1st, 2011 at 10:00am PST / 12:00pm CST / 1:00pm EST. You can also preview a video of this invite here.

Posted by Lauren Barbato, Inside AdWords crew

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+1 button to start appearing on display ads today

(Editor's Note, 5/21/12: We have updated the links in the post below to lead to the most recent Help Center articles.)

Starting today, if you’re running display ads through the Google Display Network, you may begin seeing the +1 button and annotations with your ads. Now, with a single click, people can recommend your ads’ landing pages to their friends and contacts.

As we explained in our initial announcement several weeks ago, we believe that incorporating personal recommendations into display ads has the potential to change the way people view advertising. A display ad becomes much more powerful when people can see which of their friends and contacts have chosen to endorse it.

We’re working to add the +1 button and annotations to all eligible inventory over the next couple weeks. So while you might not see them immediately, we’re working hard to roll them out to all advertisers as quickly as possible.

To learn more, you can read our initial announcement or visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords Team

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Ads quality improvements rolling out globally

When searching on Google, users appreciate results that are relevant and deliver a great experience after they click. In August, we announced trials in Brazil, Spanish-speaking Latin America, Spain, and Portugal1 that increased the weight given to relevance and landing page quality in determining Quality Score and how ads are ranked on Google. The goal was to improve the user experience with search ads. Based on the results we’ve been seeing, we’re now rolling these changes out globally over the coming weeks.

As the changes roll out, some campaigns will see variation in keyword Quality Scores and typical ad position. Within a couple weeks, things should stabilize and we expect most campaigns will not see a significant change in overall performance.

Just like today, campaigns with better-performing ads for user queries will continue to see higher Quality Scores, lower average cost per click and higher position on results pages. The 1-10 Quality Score in the AdWords interface will continue to represent the general quality of your keyword when exactly matching a search on Google. Increases in bid and Quality Score will continue to increase Ad Rank. And the same basic approach to improving your results with AdWords applies.

Posted by Adam Juda, Group Product Manager, Ads Quality

1Google Translate versions of the local Inside AdWords announcements: Brazil, Spanish-speaking Latin America, Spain, Portugal.

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Ads are just answers

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

When CafePress first started printing shirts in 1999, online retail was still a nascent industry and Google had yet to sell its first ad. Soon CafePress started selling products through search ads on Google, and their business took off. Today, CafePress hosts millions of shops online where customers can choose from more than 325 million products on nearly any topic, from wall art to phone cases.

Just as CafePress has broadened its offerings over time, we've also worked to improve and expand our search advertising products. What started as three lines of simple text has evolved into ads that are multimedia-rich, location-aware and socially-amplified.

Today CafePress uses Sitelinks to direct people to specific pages of their website, helping customers find what they’re looking for faster. On average, ads with three rows of links, or three-line Sitelinks, are more than 50 percent likely to get clicked on than ads without Sitelinks. More than 200,000 advertisers have joined CafePress in using Sitelinks in at least one campaign.

Monday at Advertising Week in New York City, I’ll be talking about how advertisers have been quick to adopt these new formats since we first began experimenting nearly two years ago. Businesses from the smallest retailer in Idaho to the largest Fortune 500 company in New York have seen how these innovations in search advertising can help grow successful businesses. In fact, roughly one-third of searches with ads show an enhanced ad format.

Here are a few ways these new ad formats are helping people find valuable information faster:

Visual. Not only can you find theater times for a new movie, you can watch the trailer directly in the ad. Media ads put the sight, sound and motion of video into search ads. With Product Ads, people can see an image, price and merchant name, providing a more visual shopping experience. Because this format is often so useful, people are twice as likely to click on a Product Ad as they are to click on a standard text ad in the same location, and today, hundreds of millions of products are available through Product Ads.

Local. More than 20 percent of desktop searches on Google are related to location. On mobile, this climbs to 40 percent. Location-aware search ads can help you find what you’re looking for more easily by putting thousands of local businesses on the map—literally. More than 270,000 of our advertisers use Location Extensions to attach a business address on at least one ad campaign, connecting more than 1.4 million locations in the U.S. via ads. And, with our mobile ad formats, not only can you call a restaurant directly from the ad, you can also find out how far away the restaurant is located and view a map with directions.

Social. With the +1 button people are able to find and recommend businesses with their friends. Since introducing the +1 button earlier this year, we now have more than 5 billion impressions on publisher sites a day. If you’re a business owner, the +1 button enables your customers to share your products and special offers easily with their network of friends, amplifying your existing marketing campaigns.

We're continuing to experiment with search ads to help businesses like CafePress grow by connecting with the right customers. Starting today, you can drop by our site to check out what’s new with search ads and learn about all the improvements we’ve been working on recently.

We’re developing ads that provide richer information to you because we believe that search ads should be both beautiful and informative, and as useful to you as an answer.

Posted by Nick Fox, Vice President of Product Management

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