Take your social strategy to the next level with Learn with Google Hangouts and Webinars

Over the next few weeks, we’re offering five opportunities to learn more about Google+ for your business. We kick off with a Learn with Google Hangout on Air with bestselling author +Chris Brogan on November 5th at 10am PT / 1pm ET. Chris will cover tactics for successful social marketing and discuss his new book, “Google+ for Business: How Google's Social Network Changes Everything.” RSVP for the Hangout on the Google+ Event page.

Learn Chris’s recipes for how to grow and engage your Google+ community to build your brand and drive your business’s visibility and conversions. Hear about Chris’s own experiences helping companies succeed in their content marketing and social projects. Chris Brogan is a New York Times bestselling author, CEO of Human Business Works, and advises companies on marketing, business strategy, communications and more.

If you have a question for Chris, leave your question as a comment on the Google+ Event.

Boost your success with Google+

Want to learn more about using Google+ for your business? Sign up for our Learn with Google webinars. Here are some great upcoming webinars to help you get the most out of social for your business:

• Social Media Best Practices for a Successful Holiday Season (Wed, Oct 31, 10am PT / 1pm ET)
• Social that Adds Up: Performance and Measurement (Thurs, Nov 8, 10am PT / 1pm ET)
• Supercharge your Social Media Initiatives with Video (Wed, Nov 14, 10am PT / 1pm ET)
• Building a Digital Brand with Google+ (Thurs, Dec 6, 10am PT / 1pm ET)

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Customer Support in the Digital Age: A Recap of AdWords Communities Summit Hangouts

The AdWords Communities Global Summit 2012 took place on October 16-17th at Google’s Headquarters in Mountain View, California.  This event brought together over 50 of the most prolific contributors to the AdWords Communities from 20 countries. These experts deserve a heartfelt thanks for selflessly investing their time in providing guidance to other advertisers on the AdWords Communities forums. The Summit brought together Google’s Small and Medium Business (SMB) and support teams, product managers, as well as external speakers for two action-packed days covering the evolution of AdWords customer support in the digital age and the future of online Communities at Google.

Two of the sessions were also broadcast via Hangouts On Air.  In the first session, Deepak Khandelwal, Vice President of Global Customer Services and Sophie Bromberg, Director of Online Help, discussed the progress that AdWords customer support has made in the past year in helping to make Google a better company for Small-Medium Businesses (SMBs) to do business with. 

In the day's second session, a panel of members of Google's SMB team answered questions on the future of AdWords support and advertising. They discussed opportunities to use technology to make customer support more streamlined and customized, as well as emerging advertising opportunities in mobile, video, and social.

On the second day we honed in on the topic of online Communities. The program included workshops on content writing as well as breakout sessions for individual markets where Community members had the opportunity to help shape the future direction of the market-specific Communities.

Visit the official Google AdWords Community to meet our experts and join the Community! 

Posted by Ezra Brettler, Google Ads Team

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Upcoming Learn with Google Hangout: Holiday Bidding Strategies on Google Shopping

Entering the busy holiday season, we all need a little help. That’s why we’re shimmying down the chimney with a bag full of goodies to make the web work for your business.

What you used to know as Product Search in the U.S. has just transitioned to a new commercial experience, based on Product Listing Ads, called "Google Shopping." We’re making it easier for retailers of all sizes to compete and acquire customers more efficiently.

In this session you'll hear about best practices for succeeding in the new Google Shopping experience. We'll cover campaign structure and bidding strategies -- from simple to advanced -- with a special focus on holiday products and promotions. We'll also share retailer success stories. And, we'll take a quick look at upcoming features.

Break out the hot cocoa and join us this Monday, October 29th (10am PT/1pm ET) for a Hangout on Air with Jon Venverloh, Head of Platforms for Google Shopping. Visit the Learn with Google page to register and see our whole series.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Posted by: Erin Molnar, Marketing Coordinator, Learn with Google

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Boost your results with Dynamic Search Ads, now available to all

Last October we introduced Dynamic Search Ads, an efficient new way to target relevant searches with ads generated directly from your website. Now, after a year of refinements and successful beta testing, we’re making Dynamic Search Ads available to all advertisers in the next few days.

Boosting Results, Efficiently
Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) generate incremental leads and sales by promoting your business on more commercial queries than you’re reaching today. After all, even well-managed AdWords campaigns containing thousands and thousands of keywords can miss relevant searches, experience delays getting ads written for new products, and get out of sync with what's actually available on your website.

If you’re not already familiar with how Dynamic Search Ads work, you may want to read about the targeting controls available, reporting and optimization features, and support for third-party PPC tracking.

Successful Beta Test
Many of our beta testers set up DSA to run alongside their existing large-scale search campaigns. And DSA delivered.

• Incremental and efficient results. On average, Dynamic Search Ads boosted beta testers’ traffic and conversion volume from AdWords by 10% and outperformed their non-exact keywords by 10% on clickthrough rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC) and cost per action (CPA).
• Success. A few examples of successful DSA beta testers include:
• Jonathan Meager, Marketing Manager at Gear4music (.pdf case study)
• Matt Wilkinson, Director of Search and Media at Rosetta and Steve Baruch, VP of eCommerce at MSC Industrial Supply (.pdf case study)
• Larry Cotter, GM at Apartment Home Living (video case study).

We also made numerous product improvements during the beta test including:

• Bid auto-optimization. Since one of our chief goals for DSA was more results with less work, we devised a system to automatically ratchet bids downward whenever specific queries for an advertiser produce lower conversion rates or user engagement levels. As a result, your ROI for Dynamic Search Ads can improve over time automatically. 
• Website crawl frequency. Any indexed page with a matched DSA impression will be crawled at least once daily (update: please see clarification below). Pages with more impressions and clicks may be crawled more frequently. So DSA will now better reflect the latest products and inventory conditions on your web site. That means more clicks, higher conversion rates and better ROI.
• Mobile and tablet support. Given the growing importance of mobile campaigns, we developed full support for DSA on mobile and tablet platforms.
• Extension support. Dynamic Search Ads support the same ad extensions as other search ads.  
• Conversion Optimizer compatibility. Once enabled, many beta test participants reported success using the combination of DSA and Conversion Optimizer to simultaneously expand their campaign reach while automatically optimizing bids to meet their average CPA goal.

Get Started
Now any business interested in boosting their AdWords results can try DSA. You can find starting points on creating a DSA campaign and setting up dynamic targets in the AdWords help center.

If you’re interested in learning even more about Dynamic Search Ads, please stay tuned to our blog. More information and an invitation to join us for a Hangout on Air will be coming soon.

Posted by Tarun Jain, AdWords Product Manager

Update (10/29/12):
Because of our own prioritization to crawl pages with more impressions and clicks more frequently, as well as other potential limitations on crawl frequency determined by your web host or internet service provider, there may be some indexed pages with a matched DSA impression that are not crawled each day. We’re sorry for any mixup this may have caused.

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iOS app promoters can now measure downloads with AdWords

Apps are a powerful way to keep your most loyal users engaged, and can also be a real driver of revenue for marketers big and small. When advertising apps, the key is to know what’s working and what’s not. While advertisers have already been able to measure their Android app downloads within AdWords, we’ve now launched the ability to track iOS downloads that were driven by in-app display ad campaigns.

To set up iOS conversion tracking, advertisers need to create a single code snippet in their AdWords account and install it in their app. This snippet is accessible in the AdWords interface in the same place where advertisers have been able to codelessly track Android downloads. With iOS conversion tracking, marketers can better understand which campaigns are most effective at driving app downloads. These enhanced insights help marketers iterate on app promotion strategies to reach their return on investment goals, with the help of features like the Conversion Optimizer for apps.

Figuring out what ads are working is key for marketers like Sho Masuda, Vice President of Player Marketing for GREE, a leading mobile social game app developer. GREE has used click to download and in-app advertising solutions with AdWords to promote their app, and Masuda says, "Google’s host of tracking and optimization tools help us quickly iterate and maximize ROI across our app promotion campaigns. iOS conversion tracking will help us gain even deeper insights into our Google app promotion efforts for our iOS apps.

If you’d like to learn more about how to track value beyond the app download, you can watch a
recording of our Learn with Google webinar “Understanding your App Users with Google Analytics” here.

Posted by Morgan Hallmon, Product Manager

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Upcoming Improvements for Conversion Optimizer and Enhanced CPC Users

Using AdWords Conversion Optimizer or Enhanced CPC can help you get more conversions at lower cost, and reduce the time required to manually optimize your bids. When using either one, changing your ad rotation from “Optimize for clicks” to “Optimize for conversions” increases conversions by an average of 5%. That’s because “Optimize for conversions” shows your higher-converting ads more often.

To help you get better performance with AdWords, we’ll be linking these options more closely together in a series of changes that we plan to roll out during the week of November 12th, 2012.

What’s changing

• New ad rotation default when using Conversion Optimizer or Enhanced CPC. When you first activate Conversion Optimizer or Enhanced CPC in a campaign, your ad rotation setting will change to “Optimize for conversions” by default. We recommend this setting to get the most conversions, but you’re free to change to a different option.
• Eligible campaigns will switch to “Optimize for conversions.”As we announced last December, all campaigns using Conversion Optimizer or Enhanced CPC which are set to use “Optimize for clicks” will be switched to “Optimize for conversions.” You can opt out of this update via this form up until November 9th, but you may miss out on getting more conversions by doing so.
  
  Update: The migration of eligible Conversion Optimizer and Enhanced CPC campaigns will now occur during the week of 11/26.
  
  
• “Rotate evenly” change for campaigns using Conversion Optimizer or Enhanced CPC. As we announced earlier this month, campaigns set to “Rotate evenly” automatically begin to optimize for clicks when ads in an ad group are unchanged for 90 days. Similarly, when using Conversion Optimizer or Enhanced CPC, campaigns set to “Rotate evenly” will automatically begin to optimize for conversions when ads in an ad group are unchanged after 90 days.

After these changes roll out, you’ll still have control over your ad rotation settings and can make changes at any time.

More information

To learn more about the Conversion Optimizer and Enhanced CPC, you can watch the following short videos. For more details on ad rotation, please visit the AdWords Help Center.

Conversion Optimizer
 

Enhanced CPC


Posted by Wilfred Yeung, Product Manager

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Showcase your promotions and get your customers’ attention

Shoppers are savvier than ever. They use social recommendations, web searches and smartphone apps to make informed purchase decisions. So how can a retailer stand out and get a shopper’s attention?

Today, we're rolling out a new way for retailers to reach shoppers at the moment of interest. Retailers can now add promotions to their product listings on Google Shopping to make them stand out. In addition, they can distribute their promotions on other Google properties such as Google Maps for Android and the Google Offers app, and attract shoppers to their store.


Promotions are highlighted in product listings on Google Shopping

In a few simple steps retailers can create a promotions list, map it to the right products in Google Shopping and upload to Google Merchant Center. Our system supports user specific redemption codes and associated reporting, enabling retailers to measure the performance of each promotion.

Shoppers can see nearby promotions while searching in Google Maps for Android

This is one of the many steps we’re taking to provide traffic, technology and tools to help retailers grow their business. Over 25 well-known U.S. retailers, including 1-800-flowers.com, OfficeMax®, Inc., Tommy Hilfiger, Express, Chico’s, Overstock, Guitar Center, Drugstore.com and Wayfair, are already part of this program. In the coming months, we plan to expand the program to include more retailers. If you are interested in featuring your promotions on Google properties, you can learn more here.

Posted by Niti Mangtani, Group Product Manager, Google Offers and Michaela Feller, Product Manager, Google Shopping

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Measure Your Success: Call Reporting Now Available in AdWords Express

How did you find us? There's a good reason so many business surveys include this question: understanding how people connect with your business is important. When people search for local businesses on Google, they may want to check out a website, but there's a good chance they'll want to just give you a call. That's why we initially launched call reporting for AdWords customers—to help businesses use search to connect with people over the phone. Now, we're expanding this feature to AdWords Express customers so local businesses can benefit as well. Call reporting allows you to quantify the offline value of your ads by seeing how many phone calls your ads generate.

How search ads can make your phones ring
When you sign up for call reporting, we will replace the phone number in your Google Search ads across desktop, mobile, and tablet with a toll-free Google forwarding number. When customers call this number, we’ll automatically forward the call to your business and report in your dashboard that the call was made. This allows you to keep track of how many calls your ad is generating for your business. You can see it all right in your AdWords Express dashboard.



Okay, I’m in! How can I do this?
To edit your call reporting preferences, go to your AdWords Express dashboard. Click the ‘Manage your ads’ tab and you’ll see a checkbox for call reporting. If this is selected, on your dashboard you will see calls in addition to clicks and views for your ad.



Currently, call reporting is available for US businesses using AdWords Express. For more information on how it works, set up, and pricing, please visit the AdWords Express Help Center.
Posted by: Venkat Rao, Associate Product Manager, AdWords Express

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**Cancellation** Session 1, Hangouts on Air: Customer Support in the Digital Age

On Monday, we posted the schedule for our upcoming Hangout on Air: Customer Support in the Digital Age.  Regrettably, Session 1 with Avinash Kaushik, discussing the “bleeding edge” of digital marketing, will no longer be broadcast.  Session 1 was scheduled to occur October 16th at 9:00AM PDT.  We apologize for the inconvenience and hope that those of you who were planning on watching that session will join us for our three other sessions, hosted on the Google Ads Google + page:

• Session 2: Deepak Khandelwal, Vice President of Global Customer Services and Sophie Bromberg, Director of Online Help, will discuss the progress that AdWords customer support has made in recent years - 10:15 am PDT, RSVP here
• Session 3: Eric Feron, Manager of Global AdWords Communities and Social, and Dave McCann, Online Sales and Operations Manager will walk us through “magical” support and AdWords Communities moments - 11:00am PDT, RSVP here
• Session 4: Françoise Brougher, Vice President of SMB Sales & Operations, Deepak Khandelwal, and Brad Green, Engineering Manager will take part in a fireside Q&A on AdWords Support - 11:25am PDT, RSVP here

Follow the ‘RSVP here’ link to visit the associated Google+ event page. The Hangout On Air live stream videos will be embedded in these pages a few minutes before the beginning of each session.  Thanks, and again we apologize for any inconvenience. 

Posted by Rob Newton, Google Ads Team

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Hangouts On Air: Customer Support in the Digital Age

As the digital media landscape continues to evolve, there are a series of new opportunities to engage with users. How has this transformed the nature of AdWords customer support? At the AdWords Communities Global Summit, taking place October 16-17 at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, several prominent Google speakers will attempt to answer this question.

On Tuesday October 16, the first day of the Summit, we will be broadcasting the morning’s sessions via four Google+ Hangouts On Air hosted on the Google Ads Google+ page.

• Session 1: Avinash Kaushik, Digital Marketing Evangelist, will take us on a journey to the “bleeding edge” of digital marketing - October 16th, 9:00am PDT, RSVP here
• Session 2: Deepak Khandelwal, Vice President of Global Customer Services and Sophie Bromberg, Director of Online Help, will discuss the progress that AdWords customer support has made in recent years - 10:15 am PDT, RSVP here
• Session 3: Eric Feron, Manager of Global AdWords Communities and Social, and Dave McCann, Online Sales and Operations Manager will walk us through “magical” support and AdWords Communities moments - 11:00am PDT, RSVP here
• Session 4: Françoise Brougher, Vice President of SMB Sales & Operations, Deepak Khandelwal, and Brad Green, Engineering Manager will take part in a fireside Q&A on AdWords Support - 11:25am PDT, RSVP here

Follow the ‘RSVP here’ link to visit the associated Google+ event page. The Hangout On Air live stream videos will be embedded in these pages a few minutes before the beginning of each session.

Posted by Ezra Brettler, Google Ads Team

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‘Extra Credit’ for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses

Small business owners are used to being pressed: for resources, for time, and especially for credit.  Juggling expenses across different credit cards and managing seasonal business spikes and valleys doesn’t leave much room for other spending, like investing in a new oven at a pizzeria or treating a great customer to dinner.

To make it easier for small businesses to pay for their AdWords campaigns and track their spending, last July we piloted AdWords Business Credit in the US, a credit card specifically for AdWords.  More than 1,400 businesses from a variety of industries participated in the pilot — from Kuru Footwear to ‘Get Bats Out’ bat removal—and their feedback was overwhelmingly positive.  In a survey conducted after the pilot launched, 74% of respondents said they now use AdWords Business Credit as their primary form of AdWords payment.

Starting today, we’ll invite businesses to use AdWords Business Credit in the UK and extend more invitations in the US later this month. Here are a few details about the cards:

• In the UK, AdWords Business Credit will have a variable 11.9% APR Representative.   In the US, AdWords Business Credit will offer an APR as low as 8.99%*, the same rate as in the pilot. Neither card will have annual fees, and they will both have an ample credit limit for AdWords.
• We’re teaming up with Barclaycard, part of the Barclays group, in the UK and Comenity Capital Bank in the US to issue the card. Both are MasterCard cards.
• AdWords Business Credit can only be used for AdWords advertising purchases.

Every day, AdWords enables more than one million businesses, the majority of which are SMBs, to connect with their customers online. We hope AdWords Business Credit will give Small and Medium Sized Businesses more flexibility—some ‘extra credit’—so they're able to focus on growing their businesses even further.

Signed by: Brent Callinicos, VP Treasurer

*Depending on creditworthiness, rates range from 8.99% to 18.99%.

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Win Moments that Matter with Learn with Google Webinars

As we’re nearing the end of 2012, we’ve all got business goals to meet. Some of you might even be prepping for your busiest season. Today, we’re announcing our next series of Learn with Google webinars, which will arm you with the tools you need to get the most out of your holiday ad dollars. We’ve got a special series on remarketing as well as a few holiday-specific strategies to help you navigate the season successfully. Over the next couple of months, 20 webinars will teach you tips and how-to’s to help make the web work for your business.

Check out the full schedule of webinars below:

• 10/16 [Search] Drive Traffic to your Locations with your Online Campaigns 
• 10/18 [Video] TrueView Video Advertising Strategies for the Holidays
• 10/23 [Mobile] Understanding your App Users with Google Analytics
• 10/24 [Research] Real-Time Insights with Google Consumer Surveys
• 10/25 [Display] Remarketing Series: Getting Started with Remarketing
• 10/30 [YouTube] TrueView Video Advertising for Agencies
• 10/31 [Social] Social Media Best Practices for a Successful Holiday Season
• 11/01 [Video] Optimizing TrueView Video Ad Campaigns
• 11/02 [Analytics] Attribution Modeling for Digital Success     
• 11/06 [Video] YouTube Analytics for Advertisers
• 11/07 [Video] Remarketing Series: YouTube and Video Remarketing
• 11/08 [Social] Social that Adds Up: Performance and Measurement 
• 11/13 [Analytics] Getting Started with Google Tag Manager
• 11/14 [Social] Supercharge your Social Media Initiatives with Video   
• 11/15 [Display] Remarketing Series: Getting Started with the New Remarketing Tag
• 11/27 [Display] Remarketing Series: Getting Started with Similar Audiences
• 11/29 [Mobile] New Tablet Research: How to Win on the Third Screen
• 12/05 [Mobile] Capturing the Full Value of Mobile with Click-to-Call and Call Metrics
• 12/06 [Social] Building a Digital Brand with Google+
• 12/12 [Analytics] Remarketing Series: Remarketing with Google Analytics

All webinars are at 10 PT/ 1 ET.

Visit our webinar page to register for any of the sessions and to access past webinars on-demand. You can also stay up-to-date on the schedule by adding our Learn with Google Webinar calendar to your own Google calendar to automatically see upcoming webinars.

Learn with Google is a program to help businesses succeed through winning moments that matter, enabling better decisions and constantly innovating. 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 seeing you at an upcoming session!

Posted by Erin Molnar, Marketing Coordinator

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Make better decisions in AdWords with your Google Analytics data

If you’re already using Google Analytics, you know how useful it can be to help you make better decisions and improve your online marketing. Now, we’re making it possible to use your Google Analytics data right in AdWords. After setting up AdWords to import your Google Analytics data, you’ll have access to Bounce Rate, Pages Per Visit, and Average Visit Duration columns directly in the AdWords interface. With more performance data available right where you’re managing your campaigns, you can make better informed decisions and improve your AdWords ROI.

Using your Google Analytics data
With Google Analytics you can find insights that matter, including how visitors arrive at your website, how they use it, and how you can keep them coming back. Here are some ways you can take advantage of the new Google Analytics data available in AdWords to improve your results.

• Attract more engaged users. If highly engaged users are an important goal, sort your ad groups to find the ones that deliver visitors who stay on your site the longest (“Average Visit Duration” or “Pages Per Visit”), and bid more for these.
• Discover opportunities to convert more engaged visitors. You might find certain keywords or ads that have relatively low conversion rates, but great engagement metrics. You could lower your bids by a little and move on. Or you could see this as a great opportunity to convert clearly engaged visitors into buyers. By adjusting your offer, adding an incentive (like a coupon or discount code), or making your call to action more obvious and accessible, you might be able to improve your ROI and your conversion volume. To look for these types of opportunities, create a filter based on conversion rate and sort by Average Visit Duration, Pages per visit, or Bounce Rate.
• Identify ads with badly matched landing pages or inaccurate targeting. Pages with both low conversion rates and low engagement metrics (low Average Visit Duration or High Bounce Rate) could indicate a poor landing page for a particular ad or keyword. It might also suggest inaccurate targeting. To identify and troubleshoot these problems, set up a filter for low conversion rate and low engagement rate and regularly monitor it. Since you’re using Google Analytics, you can easily set up A/B testing on the landing page using a Content Experiment.
  

Success in action
Casamundo, the biggest vacation rental listing service in Europe, has been an early tester of this new feature. They've used Google Analytics since 2008 and over the past 5 years they've grown and refined their AdWords campaigns to over 50 million active keywords across 10 languages. Their analysis shows that converting visitors research vacation rentals over an average of 7.4 visits, so understanding whether their ads and keywords can create strong engagement is vital to their business and how they optimize their AdWords campaigns. Seeing high bounce rates and low average time on site for a keyword means that the offer or destination page might not be a good match for that keyword.

Having easier access to Google Analytics data right in AdWords has helped Torge Kahl, Online Marketing Manager, at Casamundo make better decisions and make optimizations more quickly. According to Torge:

“The combination of using both Google AdWords and Google Analytics has proved to be the perfect set of tools for us to achieve our goals, and we're very happy to see this combination get more integrated and powerful. Using Analytics data right within AdWords has let me better optimize our account and significantly improve the return on our AdWords investment."

More details
Please visit the AdWords Help Center for step-by-step directions on how to connect your Google Analytics profile data to your AdWords account and for more details.

To exchange tips and ask questions of others, please visit the AdWords community. You can always contact AdWords support for help if you need it.

Posted by Dan Friedman, AdWords Product Manager

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Google Shopping: transition update and new functionality in time for the holidays

Over the last 4 months, Google Shopping has been moving to a commercial model built on Product Listing Ads. One of the reasons we decided to make this transition was to get better data from merchants in order to build a better shopping experience for users. We are very pleased with the participation from retailers in our new model and many are starting to report success.

Starting on October 17, Google Shopping results in the US will come only from merchants who are Product Listing Ads advertisers. We will be ranking these results based on relevance, with bidding as an additional factor. The ranking of natural search results on Google.com will not change.

Help for the Holidays 

For merchants who have not yet made the transition, it’s not too late to get your products on Google Shopping and optimized in time for the holiday season. You can do so by signing up for Product Listing Ads; please visit www.google.com/ads/shopping for more information. For merchants attending SMX East in New York City this week, we would love to hear from you during the Google Shopping Q&A session on October 4 at 2:30 PM local time. We look forward to making ourselves available to answer any questions you may have regarding Product Listing Ads on Google Shopping.

For help optimizing your Product Listing Ads, check out our Google Shopping best practices guide or watch our optimization video. Additionally, we’ll be hosting a ‘Bidding Strategies for the Holidays’ Hangout on Air on Monday, October 29 at 10:00am PST. Visit the Ads Google+ page to join the Hangout.

A New Way to Optimize Campaigns

We’ve gotten a lot of requests for tools that make it easier to manage campaigns at a more granular level, so we’re pleased to announce the availability of product level bidding. This addition to the Product Listing Ads toolkit will help merchants during the holiday season and beyond in a number of ways.

• Optimize bids for individual products. You can now improve your Product Listing Ad performance by setting your cost per click bid at the item level. This functionality should help you meet your volume and profit targets at the product level.
• Easily create product targets. It is now possible to create product targets using the product ID in your Merchant Center feed to manage your bids at the product level.

We believe this feature will create new opportunities for optimization by allowing you to easily target individual products, and will help you make the most out of your Google Shopping campaigns.

For more information on product targets please visit the AdWords Help Center.

We look forward to releasing more tools and features in the coming months to help you reach new customers on Google Shopping. Stay tuned!

Posted by Sameer Samat, Vice President of Product Management, Google Shopping

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Helping Brands Light Up the Web

When creativity and technology work hand in hand, brands can build amazing things online...not only helping them connect with their customers in the right moment, but also funding digital content and creating dazzling ads that users love. I spoke yesterday at Advertising Week about how we can partner more closely with brands to win the moments that matter. And today, we’re adding a few new tools to the toolbox for brand marketers.

A large canvas, at scale
We’re introducing our lightbox ad format, the first of a new family of display ads that allow marketers to pay only when a user engages. The lightbox starts as a standard display ad, making it scalable, but after a two-second hover, expands to a super-sized canvas. In internal tests, we’ve seen that this smart hover feature eliminates nearly 100% of accidental expansions and increases engagement by 6-8X over standard click-to-expand ads. The result: users only engage with the ads they really want to see and brand marketers only pay for truly engaged views.

Engagement matters
We also have some new insights on how our existing engagement-driven formats on YouTube and the Google Display Network, such as the TrueView family of video ads, have effectively helped brands reach their audience online. We looked at the sales impact during and two weeks after 92 different ad campaigns, and found that on average every $1 invested in YouTube delivered a $1.70 return in sales--2.4x more efficient than the television spend for these campaigns. These ads also help achieve branding goals: we found, on average, that ads on YouTube and the Google Display Network drive a 36% increase in visits to your website and a 36% increase in searches for your brand online (Google Internal Data, 2012).

Google BrandLab brings brands to life on the web
Finally, while we believe magic moments can happen online, sometimes, nothing beats a face-to-face conversation. To help more brands harness the full potential of the web, we’ve recently created a physical space where we can collaborate with brands and agencies on winning all the moments that matter -- the Google BrandLab at our YouTube headquarters. We’ve already had a number of advertisers at BrandLab including Capital One, Coca-Cola, Nissan, and Toyota, and look forward to helping even more brands use Google technologies in creative and impactful ways.

We hope these new tools take their place in the brand-building toolbox alongside some of our other offerings like our platform for crowdsourced creativity, the Creative Sandbox Gallery; brand-friendly metrics, and YouTube Original Channels. We want to make the web work for brands in a big way, these are just a few early steps. Look for more to come on this front in the months to come.

Posted by Jim Lecinski, Vice President, Brand Solutions

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An update on ad rotation options

Back in June, we responded to feedback about changes to how ad rotation works in AdWords. First, we increased the time period in which campaigns set to “Rotate evenly” would shift to optimizing ads for clicks. The new period is 90 days instead of 30 days. Second, we provided a form to opt-out of the changes. Third, we said that if opt-out demand was significant, then we’d provide the option to rotate ads indefinitely directly in the AdWords interface.

Rotate indefinitely option
To date, fewer than 1% of accounts have opted out of the ad rotation changes. But we’ve decided to provide the option for ads to “Rotate indefinitely” in the AdWords web interface anyway.

If you select “Rotate indefinitely” option for your campaign, we will show lower-performing ads about as often as higher-performing ads. For most advertisers, this may result in fewer, more expensive clicks and your ad appearing in a lower position. So we generally don't recommend "Rotate indefinitely." But the choice is yours.

To view or adjust ad rotation in the AdWords interface, click on the Settings tab of the desired campaign. Then, in the "Advanced settings" section, click “Ad delivery: Ad rotation, frequency capping.”

Form discontinued
With every option now available directly in the AdWords interface, today we’re discontinuing the ad rotation change opt-out request form. If you previously requested to opt-out of the ad rotation changes, we will change campaigns in your account that are set to “Rotate evenly” to “Rotate indefinitely” near the end of October. For all new campaigns where you want ads to rotate indefinitely, you should select the option directly in AdWords and not rely on the opt-out submitted earlier via the form.

Feedback
We do a lot of testing to gauge the potential impact of AdWords changes on both users and advertisers. But we also rely on your direct feedback and suggestions to continue to make AdWords more effective and useful. We’re always listening through our Google client services teams, our AdWords Community, social media channels (including our Google+ page), and commentary on other sites across the web.

Posted by Mark Martel, Google Ads Team

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Impression share reporting changes coming soon

In early November, AdWords impression share (IS) reporting will get some improvements to give you better insights, including new columns and hour of day segmentation. Along with these improvements, we’re also announcing some changes in the availability of certain historical IS data.

What’s new
Here’s a list of the improvements.

1. Distinct search and display columns. We’re adding new columns to cleanly separate search and display impression share.
2. “Hour of day” segmentation. Based on your feedback, we’re enabling “Hour of day” segmentation so you can evaluate how your ad coverage varies by the hour.
3. Filters, charts and rules. You’ll be able to apply filters, see charts, and create automated rules using IS metrics.
4. Accuracy. We’re improving the accuracy of how we calculate impression share data.

Changes to existing columns and historical IS data
As we launch these improvements, there will also be some changes to the availability of historical IS reporting data. We’ll also be phasing out the existing columns. Below are the key milestones.

Milestone	Existing IS Columns	New IS Columns
Early November 2012	Historical IS data in existing columns will only be available going back to October 1, 2012	New IS columns appear for the first time with historical IS data available going back to October 1, 2012
February 2013	Existing IS columns and data permanently retired	Historical IS data available in new IS columns back to October 1, 2012

Up until February 2013, data will continue updating in the existing IS columns. Once the existing IS columns and data are retired, you’ll only have access to the new IS columns.

Preserving pre-October 2012 historical IS data
If you rely on historical IS data for reporting or decision making, please plan ahead and take action before November.

To preserve an offline copy of your pre-October historical IS data with the existing columns, you must download all desired reports before the start of November 2012. After early November you’ll only have historical IS data for the existing columns going back to October 1, 2012.

We’ll post again around the time of the November milestone. In the meantime, please contact AdWords support if you have questions.

Posted Dan Friedman, AdWords Product Manager

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Digital marketing made (much) easier: Introducing Google Tag Manager

(Cross posted from the Analytics Blog)

Over the past few years, we’ve seen massive improvements in digital marketing sophistication and capabilities. Today there’s a rich suite of tools allowing marketers to gain better insights, reach audiences in new ways, and develop improved marketing campaigns so users have better web experiences. Yet many modern marketing tools—like web analytics, conversion tracking, remarketing, and more—depend on adding "tags" to your website.

Website tags help enable today’s sophisticated digital marketing technologies

Tags are tiny bits of website code can help provide useful insights, but they can also cause challenges. Too many tags can make sites slow and clunky; incorrectly applied tags can distort your measurement; and it can be time-consuming for the IT department or webmaster team to add new tags—leading to lost time, lost data, and lost conversions.

We’ve been hard at work to help take the pain out of tagging for everyone. That’s why today, we’re announcing our first release of Google Tag Manager. We’re launching globally in English, and the product will soon be available in many other languages.

Google Tag Manager is a free tool that consolidates your website tags with a single snippet of code and lets you manage everything from a web interface. You can add and update your own tags, with just a few clicks, whenever you want, without bugging the IT folks or rewriting site code. It gives marketers greater flexibility, and lets webmasters focus on other important tasks. Take a quick look at how easy it is to set up an account and manage your tags:

Google Tag Manager is built to handle your tagging needs, and it works with Google and non-Google website tags. We’ve packed in lots of great features, including:

• Asynchronous tag loading—so your tags can fire faster without getting in each other's way, and without slowing down the user-visible part of the page
• Easy-to-use tag templates, so marketers can quickly add tags with our web interface, as well as support for custom tags
• Error-prevention tools like Preview mode (so you can see proposed changes before implementing them), the Debug Console, and Version History to ensure that new tags won’t break your site
• User permissions and multi-account functionality to make it easy for large teams and agencies and clients to work together with appropriate levels of access
• Plus we have exciting plans to add great new features over the next several months

We’re also happy to announce our tag vendor program: If your company provides tag technology and you’d like Google Tag Manager to include a template for your tag, please contact us here to become a tag vendor.

Dozens of companies have already begun using Google Tag Manager and have seen great results. Ameet Arurkar, Director of Search Engine Marketing at QuinStreet, reports:

“Google Tag Manager took one big chunk of time out of the tagging process. What took 2 weeks now takes less than a day—sometimes just hours. We, the campaign managers, now make the call on which tags to use, and we can implement the tags ourselves.”

“Google Tag Manager just makes business sense. Why would we want to manually add hundreds of tags for our pages?”

Setting up Google Tag Manager is quick and easy—you create an account, add one snippet of code to your site, then start managing tags. If you want more help, contact a Google Certified Partner—they’ve been carefully vetted and meet rigorous qualification standards.

Get started today at www.google.com/tagmanager.

Posted by Laura Holmes, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

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