Dialing up on click-to-call

Mobile technology is making it easier than ever for people to research products and connect with businesses while they’re on the go. But we all know that sometimes it helps to speak to a real person before making a purchase decision. In fact, research shows that 52% of smartphone users have called a business after looking for local information on their mobile devices. Calls are key in helping consumers connect with businesses in the digital age, so incorporating a click-to-call strategy on mobile is crucial for any company that does business over the phone.

Companies big and small have put click-to-call functionality front and center in their mobile ads to reach customers on the go, and have seen impressive results. For instance, Comcast incorporated click-to-call ads into their mobile strategy, and now find mobile drives more than 10% of online sales. Esurance also reduced their cost per acquisition by 20-30% compared to other channels by using Google mobile ads with click-to-call. With more than 20 million calls made through Google click-to-call ads each month, it’s clear that mobile works when driving calls to businesses. In fact, our studies have shown that adding Call Extensions to mobile ad campaigns have improved advertisers’ average click-through rates by about 6-8%.

But as any business knows, getting customers to call is only half the battle. That’s why we’ve invested in features like Google call forwarding numbers, which show detailed reporting on calls generated from your ad campaign such as call start and end time, duration and caller area code. Having this valuable information can help advertisers understand how effective their ad campaigns are at driving calls as well as the quality of those calls. Advertisers using Google call forwarding numbers see calls last over six minutes on average.



We’re working hard to continually improve the click-to-call experience for advertisers and consumers. Here are a few of the things that our team has recently been hard at work on:

• Click-to-call button - We recently introduced a new click-to-call button for ads leveraging Call Extensions, which people can easily tap to call businesses. Early results indicate that this new design positively impacts advertiser click-through rates and call volume.
• Expanding availability of Google call forwarding numbers - We’re also focused on bringing Google call forwarding numbers to more advertisers so they can better measure the full value that mobile is driving through calls. Already available in US and UK, we recently expanded availability to Germany and plan to expand availability to additional countries in the coming months.
• Call Extensions for in-app ads - We also recently introduced Call Extensions for ads showing in apps on the Google Display Network. Now in addition to click-to-call ads across the mobile web, advertisers can also drive calls from ads in more than 300,000 mobile apps.

New click-to-call button

If you haven’t yet tried Call Extensions in your mobile campaigns, you can find instructions for enabling in our Help Center. We will also be hosting a webinar on December 5th focused on tracking call performance in your AdWords campaigns. To register for this webinar, click here.

Posted by Anurag Agrawal, Product Manager, Mobile Search Ads

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A free month of advertising from AdWords Express

The holidays are a busy time for everyone, and small businesses are certainly no exception. To help businesses reach new customers this season and keep the holiday spirit rolling into 2013, we have a special offer for new AdWords Express users in the U.S. If you sign up for AdWords Express before December 16, 2012, you’ll receive a free advertising credit in January worth what you spend between now and the end of this year.*

Since AdWords Express launched in July 2011 in the United States, we’ve seen businesses from toy stores to tree farms use AdWords Express to get their businesses discovered online. After 16 busy months, AdWords Express has expanded its borders to 12 additional countries and 9 languages, so that gift shops in Germany, heating contractors in the U.K., and surf shops in Australia can get on the map in front of potential customers in time for the holiday season.

Watch these businesses talk about how they use AdWords Express to maximize sales in the busy season:

Remember, the sooner you start advertising online, the more holiday customers you can reach and the more free advertising credit you can earn, so visit google.com/adwords/express today.

Happy holidays from the AdWords Express team!

Posted by Enrique Muñoz Torres, Sr. Product Manager, AdWords Express

*Terms and Conditions

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Google Tag Manager: Video and Q&A

Have you ever struggled with implementing new marketing and measurement tools on your website? For many people, deploying data collection “tags” (like conversion tracking, remarketing, audience reporting and analytics) can take weeks or months. Worse, the tag implementation is often incorrect, meaning you’re missing out on valuable information about your site and its users.

It doesn’t need to be difficult. We recently held a webinar to introduce users to Google Tag Manager, a free tool that helps marketers and IT departments manage their marketing and measurement tags quickly and easily. Watch the video here to learn more about:

• Overall benefits and features of using Google Tag Manager
• A quick demonstration of how to deploy a new tracking tag
• Tips for getting your company started with Google Tag Manager

In addition to this webinar, we’ll be hosting a technical webinar in January to help new users through the nuts and bolts of installing Google Tag Manager (with lots of concrete examples). Stay tuned -- we’ll share registration information in a future blog post, or you can check back on the Learn with Google webinar site.

Read on for responses to some of the top questions we received during the webinar.

Questions and Answers

Where can I find out more about the core concepts described in the webinar?
To learn more about the Google Tag Manager management interface, please visit our Help Center -- you may want to start with our Before you Begin article. There you can find more information about key concepts like Tags, Rules, and Macros. For developers interested in how to implement Google Tag Manager, please visit our developer documentation. Or if you’d like help with implementation, you can contact one of our Partners. You can also ask questions (and find responses to questions from others) on the Google Tag Manager product forum.

What happens to historical data if we move to Google Tag Manager?
All of your historical data should be preserved when you move to Google Tag Manager. Google Tag Manager only changes the way that tags are deployed and managed on your site, it does not change the way data is collected.

How would you migrate a tag?
Follow these steps to migrate tags -- whether it’s a single tag or all the tags on your site. If you’re just getting started, take a look at our Before you Begin article.

• Create a Google Tag Manager Account and a Container associated with that account.
• Install that Container code snippet on every page of your website (so that it appears immediately after the opening <body> tag). The container should be empty.
• Map your site - thinking about what data you want to collect, what events you want to track, and which tags you want to use to track that data. You should think about where your current tags are implemented, but now is a great time to rethink your overall data collection goals and start fresh.
• (Optional) If you would like to make use of the Data Layer functionality, create a data layer on the pages where you wish to pass information or fire tags
• Create Tags, Rules and Macros within the Google Tag Manager interface according to the map you just created. Make sure to apply the correct Rules to your Tags to make sure they fire in the right place.
• Test the changes you’ve made in Google Tag Manager using debug and preview mode.
• Then push a version of your site live that has removed the hard-coded tags from within the page. At this time, also Publish your changes using the Publishing feature of Google Tag Manager, which pushes the changes live to the site.

For more precise details on these steps, read our developer documents about migration.

Can you add tags to events or buttons?
Definitely! In order to use Google Tag Manager to fire tags on events and buttons, follow these steps (for more detail, read our developer document on event handlers):

• On your page, proactively add the dataLayer.push({ ‘event’: ‘myEventName’}) to the event handlers for all events and buttons you might want to track.
• Create a new rule where “event equals myEventName”.
• Associate this rule with any tag you’d like to fire when the specified event happens.

Can hard-coded tags and tag manager co-exist? Do I have to remove my other tracking tags?
We strongly recommend that you completely migrate all your tags, so you can take advantage of the benefits of managing and updating those tags within Google Tag Manager. However, if a full migration seems too hard, you can use Google Tag Manager in parallel with hard-coded tags. Some of our users use Google Tag Manager to only manage adding new tags.

If you choose to do a partial migration to Google Tag Manager, you need to be very careful to make sure you don’t accidentally start double-counting your tags. If you decided to deploy a tag via Google Tag Manager, make sure that you don’t have a version of the same tag firing on the same page.

Can you build your own custom tag templates? And how do I become a recognized Tag Vendor within Google Tag Manager?
Custom Tag templates within Google Tag Manager allow you to copy/paste any HTML or Image tags directly into Google Tag Manager and fire it based on your predefined rules and macros. To turn it into a template, use the {{macro_name}} syntax to populate the tag code with dynamic values. We will also do a syntax check to ensure that when you copy your 3rd party tag, it will fire as intended.

If you’re interested in having your tag added to the list of predefined templates, apply to become a Tag Vendor within Google Tag Manager by completing this interest form.

How does this work with Google Analytics? How do you do things like track pageview and track event within Google Analytics?
Google Tag Manager is a convenient way to correctly deploy Google Analytics across your site. To use Google Analytics within Google Tag Manager, simply create a Tag with the Google Analytics tag template. You can select the “Track Type” as either a pageview, an event, or a transaction.

Make sure you have some version of the Google Analytics tag firing across all pages on your site. A good way to do this would be to have a basic tag firing on all pages, but blocking on pages where your more customized tags are firing (like the thank you page where you’d be firing a specialized transaction tag type).

Can the Google Tag Manager snippet be placed in <head>? How about in my footer?
The recommended best practice is to have the Google Tag Manager snippet at the top of the <body> to maximize data collection, but some clients may find it easier to implement the Container snippet elsewhere in the in the page, like the footer.

Do not place the Google Tag Manager snippet in <head> (for the IT folks: this is because there is an iframe in the <noscript> case, which can have unpredictable results in some browsers).

No matter where you install the container snippet, you will need to make sure that this snippet of code is on every page of their site. Google Tag Manager will still work if you only deploy it on part of your site, but Google Tag Manager’s rule based system will only work on pages where the snippet is deployed. For more details, read our developer documents.

Does Google Tag Manager replace Doubleclick Floodlight?
No, Google Tag Manager does not replace Floodlight -- they are complementary. Floodlight is a conversion pixel for DoubleClick products (Floodlight tags can now be deployed within Google Tag Manager), and Google Tag Manager is a tag management system or “container tag” for multiple tagging technologies. Floodlight has previously been used by some users as a container tag as well, but moving forward, Google Tag Manager is a way to deploy all tracking technology.

You also have the ability to pass custom floodlight variables through Google Tag Manager into Floodlight, through the Data Layer. For more information, please review the material in the Developers Guide.

We hope this webinar and this blog post will help you as you get started with Google Tag Manager, and we look forward to seeing you at our technical webinar in January. (Registration details coming soon).

Cross posted from the Google Analytics blog, originally posted by Laura Holmes, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

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Helping you be more productive with the AdWords interface

We know for many of you, the holiday season is the busiest and most important time of the year. So, there's no better time to bring you some improvements in the AdWords interface that save you time and help you manage your campaigns more effectively. 

What’s new

1. Keyword column in search terms report
Have you ever looked at your search terms report and wondered what search term the query was matched out from? Now, we’ve added a "Keyword" column so you can see the precise keyword that matched someone's search term and triggered your ad. Based on the fit you see between the matched keyword and the search term, you might choose to make adjustments to your keyword lists, add negatives to campaigns or ad groups,  adjust your ads or bids, or adjust your landing pages.

To see this new column in AdWords, first open a search terms report. Next, click the “Columns” drop-down button and click "Customize columns." Now, as you see in the image below with red boxes, click “Attributes,” and finally click “Add.”



2. Campaign diagnostics
When you’re busy jumping from task to task, wouldn’t it be nice to know there’s a diagnostic system running in AdWords to alert you of potential errors or conflicts in your campaign? Over the next couple weeks, that’s exactly what we’ll be rolling out. 

Running in the background, our systems will look for potential errors or conflicts in your account. If a potential problem is diagnosed, you’ll see a polite alert so you can address it immediately. For example, if you add a negative keyword that blocks other keywords in your campaign, it could be helpful to know so you don’t inadvertently block yourself from appearing on searches that you value highly. Over time, with your feedback, we’ll refine these diagnostics and add more.

Other recent improvements

Be sure you’re also taking advantage of other recent innovations in the AdWords interface to help you be more productive and make better decisions with your campaigns. Here’s a recap with links to learn more and get started with each one.

• Faster editing across your account. Need to adjust all your bids by 10%? Or find and replace a word in all your ads? Making changes like these across your entire account just got a lot faster and easier.

• Shared campaign budgets. Now, a budget can be shared by multiple AdWords campaigns in the same account. Shared budgets can simplify how you manage spending for multiple AdWords campaigns with common marketing goals. And it can potentially improve your overall account performance.

• Impression share reporting improvements. We’ve recently added distinct search and display columns for impression share data. There’s now “hour of day” segmentation so that you can evaluate how your ad coverage varies by the hour. And with filters, charts, and automated rules support, you’ll be more productive analyzing and optimizing your campaigns using impression share data than ever.  

• Email-only alerts with automated rules. Automated rules let you make changes in your account automatically based on requirements that you specify. Now, automated rules can also be used to simply send an e-mail alert. If you like the idea of knowing when certain conditions occur within your account but you aren’t comfortable with certain changes being made in response automatically, then you’ll want to check this out.

• Program your campaigns with AdWords scripts. If you’re an AdWords power user and want to take the level of automation, integration, or custom reporting up a notch, now all you’ll need is some Javascript knowledge. Updating your ads in real-time with new numeric data from a pricing database, adjusting bids and keywords based on your inventory data, or pulling key data into a custom dashboard are just a few potential uses.

There’s a passionate team at Google dedicated to improving your experience and productivity with our AdWords campaign management tools. So if you’ve got feedback or a great idea for a new feature (or get stuck and need help!), please contact us.

Posted by Paul Feng, Director, AdWords Product Management

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AdWords for Business Credit - Now More Availability in the US

Last July, more than 1,400 small and medium sized businesses from across the US participated in the pilot of AdWords Business Credit, a credit card specifically for AdWords.  While a variety of different businesses benefited from the card — from Kuru Footwear to Cascadia Tents — their reasons for using AdWords Business Credit were pretty consistent.  AdWords Business Credit helps businesses pay for their advertising campaigns, keeps closer track of their spending, and most of all, frees up some ‘extra credit’ so they can invest in their businesses even further.

Get Bats Out was one of these businesses; here’s their story:

We want to make it easier for more businesses like Michael’s to manage their AdWords account so they have more time to focus on running their businesses.  That’s why we’ve recently begun to invite more businesses in the US to sign-up for AdWords Business Credit.  

Here are some details about the card:

• In the US, AdWords Business Credit will offer an APR as low as 8.99%*, the same rate as in the pilot. 
• Ample credit limit for AdWords advertising purchases and no annual fees
• We’re teaming up with Comenity Capital Bank in the US, who issues the card.

After a successful US pilot and our UK launch earlier this month, we’re looking forward to expanding this program in the US, and beyond.

Posted by Brent Callinicos, VP Treasurer

*Rates range from 8.99% to 18.99% and depend on your creditworthiness as determined by Comenity Capital Bank.

**This video testimonial reflects the opinion of the advertiser and was provided at Google’s request.

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Get local in time for the holidays and beyond

This holiday season, make it easy for your customers to find, visit, and call your business with AdWords location targeting and location extensions. Location targeting shows your ads to customers in specific geographic areas you want to reach, while location extensions dynamically attach your business address and phone number to your ads. Today, we are announcing a few improvements to these two features and making them available in more countries to help your business “get local” for the holidays.

What’s new

1. Introducing airport targeting: A new way to reach travelers on the go
Whether people are checking a flight status or passing time before take-off, mobile and tablet devices have become indispensable for airport-goers. With the launch of airport targeting, businesses are now able to connect with potential customers on mobile, tablet or laptop devices in more than 350 airports around the world via AdWords.  



With airport targeting, you can offer relevant, last-minute travel and entertainment opportunities, promote your mobile application to airport travelers, amplify interest in your in-airport campaigns, build your brands with mobile display ads, and much more.  Plus, you can easily review the performance of these campaigns using geographic performance reports.  

2. Location extensions and sitelinks show together
Location extensions can now be shown alongside one-line sitelinks in text ads (on desktop and laptop computers) and will continue to show with two-line and three-line sitelinks. If you have a multi-channel business, consider using location extensions in addition to sitelinks to help you highlight specific areas of your business. 
    


3. Larger, more useful maps
Location extensions on desktop and laptop computers will now appear with a larger, more engaging map panel that will replace the current expandable map. When the location extension address is clicked, this new map panel appears to the right of the top search results.

  

Early testing suggests that users will click to see locations on a map more frequently than with our previous design.  

4. Better location matching for customers
Features such as postal code targeting in the U.S., have enabled us to show closer and more relevant locations to your customers from within your location extensions. At the same time, if you have a specialty or destination business such as a niche boutique or a ski resort, your location extensions can be shown to people who are located nearby, but who aren’t within your business’s postal code -- so you also can attract customers who are willing to travel longer distances to visit your business.

5. Online conversion reporting for Location Extensions
If you use AdWords conversion tracking, you probably want to know how location extensions affect your online conversion rates. Earlier this year, we included online conversion data within ad extensions reports to help you analyze the overall impact of location extensions on online conversions and measure your online conversions per location more effectively.

6. Geo-targeting and location extensions available in more countries
In addition to previously announced updates to location extensions and geo-targeting options in more countries, we’re excited to make location extensions available in Argentina, Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, UAE, and Vietnam.

We have also expanded geo-targeting options in the following countries: counties in the United Kingdom, departments in France, and cities in Argentina, Russia, and United Arab Emirates.

Here’s a full list of location targets available globally.

Get local
We hope these improvements will make it easier for you to highlight your local business information for customers, both during and after this busy holiday season. If you’re new to local ads, or would just like to learn more, check out our help center for step-by-step instructions on setting up location extensions and location targeting. And, you can always contact AdWords support.

Posted by Smita Hashim, Group Product Manager

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Google Shopping goes global

On May 31, we announced a new initiative to improve our shopping experience over time. We designed this initiative to help shoppers better research purchases, compare different products and their features and prices, and then connect with merchants to make their purchase.

As part of this new initiative, called Google Shopping, we transitioned Google Product Search in the U.S. to a commercial model built on Product Listing Ads. We made this transition because we believe that having a commercial relationship with merchants will lead to better, more up to date product data -- which will mean better shopping results for users and in turn, higher quality traffic for merchants.

We completed the transition in the U.S. on October 17 and have seen a great deal of success so far.

Google Shopping – international rollout
With that success in mind, we are pleased to announce that we are rolling out this commercial model for Google Shopping, built on Product Listing Ads, in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Brazil, Australia and Switzerland. We think this will bring the same high-quality shopping experience to people -- and positive results to merchants – around the world.

In order to give merchants time to make this transition and optimize their campaigns, we’re rolling out the new model gradually, via several steps. The first major change will take place on February 13, 2013, when visually cleaner results for shopping queries, including some new commercial formats on Google.com that will display products in a single unit, will replace current search results. These new commercial formats will be labeled as "Sponsored" and appear in the space currently occupied by AdWords ads.

These visually cleaner results for shopping queries will enable shoppers to refine a search by brand or price, and feature larger product images to provide a better sense of a product’s attributes. Starting today, we’ll begin testing this new format for a small percentage of searches.

The transition to the commercial model will be complete by the end of Q2 2013. We’ll also be offering some incentives; details will follow, on this blog and via email, in the coming weeks.

To learn more and get started merchants can visit: http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2456103

Ranking in Google Shopping, when the full transition is complete in the countries listed above, will be based on a combination of relevance and bid price.

A better shopping experience
These changes will create a better shopping experience that will benefit both shoppers and merchants. Shoppers will find products in one convenient place and quickly be able to compare features, find the best prices, read reviews, and identify great merchants -- while advertisers will be given more granular control over product listings and traffic.

We look forward to continuing to evolve the experience with the help of our merchant partners, to help people find what they’re looking for at lightning speed -- and to help businesses of all sizes reach people at the moment of interest, with helpful information.

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

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AdWords Hangout-on-air: Boosting your AdWords campaign with Dynamic Search Ads

Dynamic Search Ads are an efficient new way to target relevant searches with ads generated directly from your website. They generate incremental leads and sales by promoting your business on more commercial queries than you’re reaching today. After a year of refinements and successful beta testing, we recently announced Dynamic Search Ads are available to everyone.

Please join us live on Friday November 16th at 9:30 am PST for an AdWords Hangout-on-air aimed at helping you get started successfully with Dynamic Search Ads. We’ll provide an overview of how Dynamic Search Ads work, how to set them up, tips for reporting and optimization, and more.

To join us live on Friday, just sign into Google+ and visit our event page, where you can RSVP now and add a reminder to your calendar.

Posted by Mark Martel, the Google Ads team

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Join us for ClickZ Academy’s bid optimization webinar, Choosing the Right Bid Optimization Platform to Drive Paid Search Results

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Search blog

Search marketing today is changing faster than ever before, and as a result, marketers are increasingly turning to powerful bid optimization platforms to help them scale their keyword bidding and take advantage of new opportunities. However, with so many tools in the market -- including our own DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite -- search marketers need to carefully evaluate different platforms before investing in one.

We invite you to join us and paid search luminary Kevin Lee, Executive Chairman at Didit, for a ClickZ Academy webinar, Choosing the Right Bid Optimization Platform to Drive Paid Search Results.
Join us for ClickZ Academy’s bid optimization webinar, Choosing the Right Bid Optimization Platform to Drive Paid Search Results

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

• How automated bid optimization can help search marketers meet their unique business goals
• Why smart, fast, and flexible platforms are a must in an increasingly-complex search landscape
• How to navigate the balance between automation and control to achieve the best results

Register today to attend the webinar. Live Q&A will follow.

Date: November 19, 2012
Time: 1:00pm ET / 10:00am PT

To follow our bid optimization blog post series on the 7 factors to consider when choosing a bid optimization platform, subscribe to the DoubleClick Search blog.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team.

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Deck the halls with tools for shopping

I love shopping for gifts for my family and friends, but it’s not always easy. Fortunately, the Google Shopping team has built several new tools to help you (and me!) get an early and stress-free start on holiday shopping.

Explore products in 360-degree detail on Google Shopping
Having trouble imagining what a toy actually looks like from the online picture? Now, when searching for a subset of toys on Google Shopping, you can see 360-degree photos of the products. These interactive images bring the in-store feeling of holding and touching a product to your online browsing.

Look for the “3D” swivel icon on the product image to see a toy in 360-degree view, on HTML5 enabled browsers. We’ve also put together a Holiday Toy Collection featuring this enhanced imagery—explore the collection on this site. 360-degree imagery is coming for other types of products soon.

If you’re a retailer or manufacturer interested in displaying these rich images of your products on Google Shopping, please fill out this form.

Use Shortlists to stay organized and collaborate with friends 
New in Google Shopping, Shortlists make it easier to research products and plan purchases with friends and family. Instead of using bookmarked websites and docs containing long lists of URLs, or back-and-forth emails with friends, you can now consolidate all your shopping research in one place. With Shortlists, you can easily:

• Keep track of products you like from Google Shopping and across the web
• View product photos, prices and specs side by side
• Share your Shortlist with friends, who can add their own ideas

Create a Shortlist by visiting google.com/shopping/shortlists or clicking the “Add to Shortlist” button as you browse products on Google Shopping.

Discover great deals and store promotions on Google Shopping
To help you make the most of your holiday budget, Google Shopping now shows discounts or promotions on the products you're viewing. If discounts or promotions are available, you can click on the link and visit the retailer’s site to redeem the offer.

That’s not all...a few more new Google Shopping features

Here are a few of the other tools we’ve created to make your holiday shopping a little easier:

• Not sure you’ve found the perfect gift? Read reviews from people you know and write your own product reviews on Google Shopping.
• Found an item that’s almost perfect but not quite? Now you can view “visually similar” results  for even more types of products and categories, including jewelry, coats, handbags and more.
• Buying an important gift? Look for the Google Trusted Store logo as you shop. It indicates a store ships quickly and delivers excellent customer service. 
• Shopping on the go? Browse for gift ideas, find local sales and research products with the new and improved Google Shopper 3.0, currently available for Android.
• Still need some inspiration? Browse holiday catalogs from the top retailers directly on Google Shopping.

Happy holiday shopping!

Posted by Vineet Buch, Group Product Manager, Google Shopping

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AdWords Editor 9.9 is now available

We're pleased to introduce AdWords Editor version 9.9, now available for Windows and Mac. Changes in this version include Google Display Network updates, import and export improvements, and new campaign settings. Here's an overview of the changes:

Google Display Network updates
Manage your ad group flexible reach settings with the new "Flexible reach" panel on the ad groups tab, or by using CSV import. We've also simplified the campaign-level Display Network settings (now simply "Enabled" or "Disabled").

Import and export improvements
You can now use CSV import to update your campaign-level settings for the Google Search Network and Google Display Network. You can also choose how AdWords Editor handles importation of duplicate ads with different URLs.

New campaign settings
We've added a new option for device targeting (BlackBerry) and a new ad rotation setting (Rotate indefinitely).

For more details about these changes and other updates in the new version, read the 9.9 release notes.

The next time you launch AdWords Editor, you'll see a prompt to upgrade to version 9.9. To learn more about upgrading, including how to keep unposted changes and comments when you upgrade, please review these instructions. You can also download version 9.9 from the AdWords Editor website.

Note: Support for previous versions of AdWords Editor will continue for four months to allow you time to upgrade. To ensure uninterrupted use of AdWords Editor, you will need to upgrade by March 13, 2013.

Posted by Mark Martel, Google Ads Team

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Lighten the load this season with the DoubleClick Search Guide to the Holidays

The busiest shopping days of the holiday season - and a yearly challenge for marketers - are just around the corner. As a search marketer, how do you succeed during this time of the year, to reach the right people with the right message, when it matters? 

Starting this week,  we will be sharing tips and ideas for getting the most out of AdWords and ensuring you are merry and stress-free this holiday season.

Today, we share the DoubleClick Search Guide for the Holidays (cross-posted from the DoubleClick Search Blog).

In our DoubleClick Search Guide for the Holidays, we outline past seasonal insights along with current trends we’re seeing, to help you discover how to win this holiday season with DoubleClick Search solutions that’ll let your search go faster, smarter, and better. You’ll learn how to best take advantage of the season’s trends with our intuitive workflow and improve your campaign performance with strategic, time-saving features. The guide covers tips and best practices on:

• Top 2012 holiday trends and recommendations
• Automating Your Workflow
• Display remarketing from search ads
• Performance Bidding Suite
• Mobile
• Reporting
• Support Resources

Plan for success this season with the DS Holiday Guide: click here to access the guide.

To view a demo of the features highlighted in our guide and ask live questions, attend our live webinar on November 14th. Sign up today!

Happy Holidays from the DoubleClick Search Services Team!

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Google Tag Manager: Webinar, GoPro case study, and product updates

Just over a month ago, we launched Google Tag Manager, a free tool that makes it easy for marketers to add and update website tags—including conversion tracking, site analytics, remarketing and more—with just a few clicks. Since then, we’ve released the product in 35 languages, we’ve added new tagging capabilities for Google Analytics, and we’ve been hard at work building more enhancements.

To help you get the most out of Google Tag Manager, we’ve scheduled a webinar next week with Product Manager Laura Holmes to walk through the tool and go over implementation basics:

Webinar: Getting Started with Google Tag Manager
Date: Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Time: 10am PST / 1pm EST / 6pm GMT
Register: goo.gl/YTulu

We’ve also been hearing great feedback from our users, including GoPro, the world’s leader in wearable and gear-mountable cameras and digital devices. With the growing popularity of GoPro products and accompanying complexity of their digital marketing activities, GoPro found itself with dozens of tags measuring countless engagement activities across its web properties. It was critical to find a way to implement and maintain marketing tags that would scale with the marketing organization. Analytics Pros, a Google Analytics Certified Partner and Google Tag Manager specialist, led a comprehensive migration to Google Tag Manager -- and GoPro stakeholders were delighted with the results:

“Google Tag Manager centralizes our tags into a single location that gives our marketing and analytics teams the flexibility to make tagging updates within minutes without burdening IT.”
- Lee Topar, Director of Online Marketing, GoPro

Download the full case study.

We hope you’ll join us at the webinar next Tuesday the 13th. If you’re not able to attend, we’ll be posting a recording of the webinar about a week afterwards here on the blog and on YouTube, and you can also read more about Google Tag Manager on the website or the help center.

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager

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Making large-scale changes faster and easier in AdWords

Have you ever needed to adjust your AdWords bids by 5% for several thousand keywords? Or had to find and replace a bit of text in your ad copy across a couple hundred ads? Maybe you’ve changed your web address and need to update all of your visible URLs and destination URLs across your account.

We love making AdWords faster, simpler and more beautiful. So I’m happy to announce our new bulk editing features in the AdWords interface. With these tools, you’ll be able to more quickly and easily make large-scale changes across your entire account.

Initial preview
Initially, we’re releasing these bulk editing features to a limited number of AdWords accounts to collect your feedback and ensure everything works as expected. We hope to expand availability to everyone in the coming weeks.

Update (Dec. 4, 2012): These features are now available in all AdWords accounts globally.

Do more, quickly and easily
Here's a summary of the kinds of changes you'll be able to make.

Keywords	Search and replace text in the keyword or destination URL Append text to the keyword or destination URL Set new bids, including increasing to first page or top of page CPC Increase or decrease bids Change keyword match types Add/remove labels
Ads	Search and replace text in the ad or URL Append text to the ad or URL Change the capitalization of the text Add/remove labels
Ad Groups	Increase or decrease bids Set new bids Add/remove labels
Campaigns	Increase or decrease budgets Set new budgets Add/remove labels

You’ll be able to preview changes before you apply them. If you’re making a lot of changes, they’ll run in the background. That means you can leave the page and do other things in your account (or even log out entirely!) while bulk changes are in progress. A progress bar lets you know how close your changes are to completion. You can review your changes after they’re done.

Below is an example of how easy it is to change “Road bike” to “Commuter bike” in over 25,000 ads with a single click.



Keeping things simple
As these new editing features become available in AdWords, you might also notice a few changes to buttons and menus to reduce redundancy and keep things simple for new users.

The “Edit” button will become an “Edit” drop-down menu. We’ll also be phasing out the “Edit in table” view since its multi-item editing capabilities will be far surpassed. Now when making a change to an individual campaign element, you can just click on it to enter editing mode.

More details and feedback
We’ll be updating articles throughout the AdWords help center, including our AdWords glossary entry on bulk edits, as we roll out these new editing features.

Please share your comments about the new bulk editing features with us if you use them over the next few weeks. Your feedback helps us make AdWords even better.

Posted by Prashant Baheti, AdWords Product Manager

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App promoters: Are you prepared for a surge in downloads this holiday season?

With 29% of shoppers planning to purchase smartphones this holiday season, there’s no doubt that some of the shiniest new mobile devices will be wrapped up under the tree this Christmas. Little time will be wasted before happy new smartphone and tablet owners begin searching for the best apps to fill these new devices. So it’s no surprise that according to Google Trends, during the week following Christmas last year, searches for “best tablet apps” rose by more than 70%, while searches for “free phone apps” jumped by about 37%. The holidays are prime time for app promotion, so it’s important for marketers to make sure their app stands out from the crowd.

Maximizing reach with search and display ads
Whether you have a shopping companion app, a banking app, or a mobile gaming app, it’s important to reach the right audience to drive downloads and increase awareness. Many marketers have made mobile work for them by using search and display strategies together to raise interest and drive downloads of their app.

TripIt, a mobile travel organizer, used click-to-download ads on Google Search and the Google Display Network to promote their app to business travelers on the road. By creating and optimizing display ads within other apps, TripIt increased downloads by more than 75% and slashed cost-per-download by more than 96%. According to Rhonda Hanson, senior director of search marketing, promoting their app with mobile ads allowed TripIt to, “redirect the dollars we've saved on app promotion to improving our app and providing a better trip-organizer service to our business travelers.” Download the full case study here.

Maximizing ROI with Conversion Optimizer
Savvy advertisers also know they can take app promotion to the next level with optimization tools. Leading mobile game developer GREE promoted their apps to gamers using Google Search click-to-download ads along with image and text ads on the Google Display Network. To make sure they were getting the best return on investment for their in-app display ads, they used Conversion Optimizer for apps to reach their cost-per-download targets. This automated campaign optimization helped them improve app download rates by 150%, decrease cost-per-download by 52% and improve click-through rates by 49%. Download the full case study here.

If you haven’t already created your holiday app strategy, it’s not too late. Here are some things you can do to win across search and display:

1. Make sure you’re reaching people when they search for apps like yours and help them easily download your app with click-to-download ads and mobile app extensions
2. Reach relevant users within over 300,000 premium apps on the Google Display Network with image and text ads
3. Track downloads on Android and iOS with AdWords conversion tracking and optimize ROI with the automated bidding feature, the Conversion Optimizer for apps
4. Measure in-app user activity with Mobile App Analytics in order to optimize
5. Increase app promotion campaign budgets for the holidays to account for additional ad clicks

For more on how you can drive cost-effective app downloads with Google AdWords, check out this recorded Learn with Google webinar.

Posted by Jessica Sapick, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

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