Understanding the full value of mobile: adidas and RadioShack drive in-store traffic with mobile

We live in a multi-screen world where people are constantly connected and moving seamlessly across devices. Not only do mobile devices keep us connected anytime and anywhere, but they play an increasingly important role in shopping, both online and offline. With mobile, consumers no longer just take linear paths to purchase that begin and end on the same device. Instead, there are a range of customer journeys - like starting on a smartphone and ultimately buying in-store, continuing on a different device, or making a phone call.

This era of mobility is bridging the digital and physical worlds, so marketers need to fully understand mobile’s impact both online and offline, and evaluate how each of these actions applies to their business. Here’s a look at two brands who’ve invested in understanding the full value of their mobile efforts:

adidas
Being locally relevant is key for any brick and mortar business, and adidas worked with its agency iProspect to leverage mobile’s power to reach local customers. They recognized that in order to build an effective mobile presence, they had to pivot their thinking to understand how mobile drives value beyond mobile commerce, particularly in-store sales. “If we look at a 1:1 response or 1:1 measurement of what our media budget is driving on a mobile site, we're missing a big part of that picture. As performance marketers, a lot of the times we look at direct responses, and what mobile is requiring us to do is redefining direct response," says Kerri Smith, head of mobility at iProspect.

adidas and iProspect partnered to estimate the value of each store locator click on their mobile website. Based on internal benchmarks, iProspect theorized that 1 out of every 5 people who visited the mobile site store locator page went into an adidas store. In-store conversion data from adidas indicated that around 13% of shoppers who go into stores completed a purchase, and that their average order value is $71. Since an active search usually demonstrates stronger intent to purchase, iProspect applied a 20% conversion rate and an $80 average order value. As a result, they determined that 4% of the people who clicked on a store locator translated into an actual sale for adidas, meaning that each store locator click is worth $3.20.

To put that in perspective, for a hypothetical mobile investment of $1 million, in-store sales from store locator clicks was an extra $1.58 million beyond direct mobile purchases. [Download the full case study here]

RadioShack
To fully understand how mobile drives in-store sales, RadioShack collaborated with its agency Mindshare to redefine mobile success: “User behavior is much different on smartphone compared to the desktop experience. It became obvious that to be successful, we had to measure mobile performance by focusing on different criteria,” says Lisa Little, Search Marketing Manager at RadioShack.

RadioShack worked with Mindshare to understand how mobile impacted foot traffic into stores. Using mobile search ads to promote their mobile site, they found that 36% of the clicks were going to the store locator page. Based on internal studies, the teams estimated that 40-60% of people who used the store locator on a mobile device visited a store. RadioShack’s internal analytics team also determined that approximately 85% of customers who visited the store as a result of the store locator made a purchase in store. [Download the full case study here]

A holistic view of the mobile customer
This new model can help marketers better understand the return on investment they’re getting from their mobile efforts. Both companies also found mobile success because they developed a holistic view of their mobile customers and created strong synergies across all marketing channels. For example, RadioShack’s social, email, digital, video and search marketing teams work collectively to create the best user experience possible for mobile customers. Little says, “This allows us to better understand the behavioral path of our customers, from the initial research phase through the final purchase stage including all the marketing they were exposed to along the way. To be successful, you have to adopt this holistic vision of the mobile user behavior.”

Posted by: Julie Pottier, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

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Enhanced campaigns in AdWords Editor 10.0

You can now use AdWords Editor to upgrade and manage enhanced campaigns. Once you install AdWords Editor 10.0, you'll be able to:

• Upgrade campaigns to enhanced, either individually or in bulk.
• Set campaign level bid adjustments for mobile devices. 
• Set bid adjustments for targeted locations.
• Specify device preferences for individual ads (Mobile or All). 

For more details about these changes and other updates, see our AdWords Editor 10.0 release notes. For a detailed description of enhanced campaigns, please visit this overview article in the AdWords Help Center.

The next time you launch AdWords Editor, you'll see a prompt to upgrade to version 10.0. 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 10.0 from the AdWords Editor website. 

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 June 28, 2013.

Posted by Rob Newton, Inside AdWords crew

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Updates to AdWords Terms & Conditions In Some Countries

The following changes apply to customers in all countries and territories in North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America except Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil.

If you’re using AdWords, you’ve agreed to our Terms and Conditions. These are important so we have a common understanding in basic areas like policy, cancellation, payment, dispute resolution and liability.  

With the advancements in our ad platforms and global growth, we need to make a few changes to keep up. So we'll be rolling out an updated set of Terms and Conditions on February 27th to AdWords customers throughout North America, Central America, and South America (full list).

What’s New
One of the main changes you’ll notice in the updated terms is that they accommodate new advertising products and services. For example, we offer third-party ad serving in some situations, so you’ll see provisions about how we resolve ad serving disputes. Other changes include updated links to our policies and better consistency among our advertising terms globally.

Important Action Needed
You will have 45 days to review and accept the new AdWords Terms and Conditions. If you don’t accept them within 45 days, your ad serving may be paused until you’ve reviewed and agreed to them.

To review and accept the new AdWords Terms and Conditions, just sign in to your account at https://adwords.google.com. You’ll automatically be taken to a page with the updated terms and conditions. Then click to indicate your acceptance.

More Information

We encourage you to read through the updated terms carefully.  For more information about this change to our Terms and Conditions, including a complete list of countries and territories where these changes apply, please visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Mark Martel, the Google Ads Team

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Enhanced campaigns: Making it easier for customers to reach you with upgraded call extensions and sitelinks

People are constantly connected and searching from all kinds of devices. Advertisers are looking for ways to quickly provide customers with the right information, in formats that make sense for where they are, the time of day, and the device they’re using. As part of AdWords enhanced campaigns, we upgraded call extensions and sitelinks with several new features to help you reach customers in more relevant ways across these varying contexts.

In this post and a Learn with Google Webinar this Thursday, February 28th, at 10am PST (sign-up here), we’ll provide a closer look at these new features, and give you practical examples for how to use them to drive better business results.

Improved extensions for the multi-device world
In our world of constant connectivity, people expect to have the information they’re looking for right at their fingertips. Sitelinks provide your customers with links to any part of your website, directly within the ad. On average, ads with sitelinks have a 30% higher click-through rate compared to standalone ads. With enhanced campaigns, you can now customize sitelinks at the ad group level, in addition to the campaign level. You can also customize sitelinks specifically for mobile devices:

People are often looking for ways to connect with you directly on the phone. In fact, there are more than 27 million calls per month through our ads call products on mobile and desktop. In addition to calling you directly from a smartphone, people may wish to find your business’ phone number when searching from devices without call functionality like computers and tablets. With enhanced campaigns, you can now show your business phone number or a Google forwarding number in call extensions on computers and tablets. Additionally, Google forwarding numbers are now free on all devices. Learn more

Precise extension scheduling for more granular control
Many advertisers customize their ad content to align with their business hours or special events like sales and promotions. With enhanced campaigns, you can now schedule the specific dates, days of the week, or times of day for your call extensions and sitelinks, at either the ad group or campaign levels. So instead of having to manually turn ads on or off to run specific extensions, you can now schedule them ahead of time.

Example: A multi-national sporting goods business has a website and physical stores in 5 major cities. With enhanced campaigns, Mary, their online marketing manager, can align her AdWords schedule with the operations of the business. Mary runs call extensions between 10am and 6pm when her stores are staffed. After 6pm, she schedules ads to point to the website instead of the call extension. For weekend sales and promotions, she can schedule sitelinks pointing customers directly to her “Sale” page. Scheduling enables sitelinks to appear exactly at the times that Mary sets (e.g., 12 midnight on Saturday) instead of having to manually turn them on at that time.

Advanced reporting for sitelinks and new conversion types
Many advertisers drive leads or conduct business over the phone, so they value phone calls as much as, or more than, clicks to their website. To give you greater visibility into the full value of your ad spend, AdWords reports now count phone calls as conversions, making it easier to compare calls alongside more traditional conversion types like online sales. For example, you can now specify that calls longer than 60 seconds count as conversions.

We’ve also made reporting for individual sitelinks more precise and actionable. You can now manage and track sitelinks individually to ensure that each one drives the right ROI. You can also take advantage of per-link approvals so if one link is disapproved, your other links can still run.

Continuing the above example: Mary uses the new detailed per-link reports to manage individual sitelinks. Below, you can see that the “Swimming” sitelink only got 16 clicks, while the other sitelinks for the sporting goods store got 100+ clicks each. With this precise data, Mary made the informed decision to replace the “Swimming” sitelink with another one, like “Soccer.”

Mary further segments her data with the "This Extension vs. Other” feature. Here, you can see that two clicks occurred specifically on the “Running” sitelink while 137 clicks occurred on the other parts of the sitelink, like the headline.

Feedback
We really value your feedback to help us make AdWords even better. In fact, many of the new features that we described today are a result of your ideas and suggestions. Please continue to share your thoughts using this form so we can continue to improve the product.

Posted by Scott Silver, Senior Director, Ads Engineering

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DoubleClick Digital Marketing helps you create, buy and manage your video and mobile campaigns

In today’s digital marketing landscape, it’s becoming increasingly crucial for campaigns to span multiple screens and ad formats in a cohesive way. Online video is the fastest growing form of display advertising, projected to grow 2.5 times to $6.5B by 2016. And total mobile ad spend is projected to grow ~4.5 times to $22.4B in 2016, representing ~35% of all digital ad spend by 2016.

Given these transformations, we are working hard to build best-in-class tools for our integrated platform that make it easier for you to create, buy and manage successful campaigns across all formats and screens. Today, we’re announcing a series of improvements that aim to help you accomplish this.

The DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform now helps you:

Create more beautiful video and mobile ads in DoubleClick Studio.

Build robust interactive in-stream video ads in DoubleClick Studio, and use the new IAB rising stars formats to turn your standard 15-second TV commercial into a longer, engaged viewer experience. Check out our demo below!

Preview and test your mobile ads as they will actually appear on mobile and tablet devices. Scan a QR code on your phone or use our Mobile Ads Showcase App to push your ads to mobile and tablet for testing.

Buy video inventory in real time on DoubleClick Bid Manager, and access more mobile and video inventory on DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

With DoubleClick Bid Manager (DoubleClick’s DSP and real-time bidding platform), you’ll soon be able to programmatically buy and report on your video campaigns in the same place as the rest of your display media. We’ll be offering a video beta for select clients in the coming weeks. Contact your sales rep for more info.

Buyers can now find skippable in-stream video inventory and expandable/interstitial mobile inventory from across the web on DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Ad Exchange continues to grow its available inventory across high-quality content, helping you expand your creative palette.



Manage all of your ads - across devices, formats and channels - with enhanced campaign support in DoubleClick Search and a single reporting interface in DoubleClick for Advertisers.

DoubleClick Search (DS) will be supporting AdWords enhanced campaigns over the next few weeks, to help you better reach your customers across locations and devices. By using enhanced campaigns through DoubleClick Search you additionally gain holistic measurement, a streamlined, easy workflow, and better bid decisions based on your Floodlight conversion data.

Track all the metrics for your Trueview in-stream video ads in DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA). Thanks to one new trafficking tag, even though the ads aren’t served through DFA,  you can still pull the metrics back into DFA and compare them with the rest of your placements.

With an integrated platform of DoubleClick products that work better together, you not only benefit from top-notch individual products, but you also benefit from the efficiencies, insight, and performance gained when all of your campaign’s assets and data exist in one spot.

For more information about our DoubleClick platform, visit our website.

Posted by Jason Miller, Director of Product Management for DoubleClick

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AdWords Enhanced Campaigns 202: sitelinks, and call extensions

This Thursday, please join us as we continue our enhanced campaigns webinar series.  In Enhanced Campaigns 202, you will learn about how sitelinks, and call extensions have been improved with enhanced campaigns to work in a multi-device world.

You can read up on enhanced campaigns and keep up with future announcements on the Inside AdWords blog.

Posted by Mark Martel, the Google Ads team

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A look back at a merry multi-screen holiday season

Note: this was posted earlier today on the Google Mobile Ads Blog.

This past holiday season, homes were aglow with the twinkling lights of large screens (like laptops, desktops and tablets) and mobile phones alike. In our holiday consumer survey, conducted in partnership with Nielsen, we found that consumers relied on their devices more this holiday season, moving fluidly between devices based on their setting and context. 63% of consumers frequently used more than one digital device to shop for gifts this holiday season, and 67% of consumers believe that “having access to multiple devices makes it easier to shop”.

Another important finding was that more screens means more shopping. People using one device to research and shop made online and offline purchases across an average of six product categories (like electronics, apparel, auto parts, etc), while those that used two devices purchased across eight categories, and people who used all three devices shopped across an average of nine categories.

In many cases, consumers discovered a business on one device, for example on their smartphone while in a store, and would then engage further with that business on another device at a later time. We saw that 65% of holiday shoppers were frequently engaging in this sequential behavior throughout all of their shopping. For multi-screen shoppers, different devices fulfill specific objectives. For example, smartphones were the preferred device for contacting or navigating to a business with 71% of shoppers using a store locator on their phone, while 82% of shoppers used a larger device like PC or tablet for making online purchases.

These same multi-screen trends carried us into 2013 as people used multiple devices to make and keep new years resolutions. Looking at search query behavior around New Years, we saw an interesting twist on the classic resolution of becoming more healthy. People used their smartphones on January 1st to look up things like gym memberships, diets, or cleanses, and then the following day, searches for those same words spiked on tablets and desktops as people continued their research on these devices at home or at work. This behavior demonstrated the growing trend of using multiple devices in combination to help make everyday decisions.

Implications for businesses
This multi-screen consumer behavior doesn't fade away with the holiday. In fact, better understanding how people searched, shopped and seamlessly moved between multiple screens during the holiday can give us insight into this new constantly connected consumer. So what can businesses do about it?

One good answer is to think context. All these new search patterns have created new opportunities for businesses to be more relevant to people’s context. Context signals like time of day, general location, and the kind of device a person is using, provide powerful insights into what they may be looking for and where they are in the buying cycle.

Within AdWords, advertisers now have the opportunity to use enhanced campaigns, which help them reach people across all devices with smarter ads that are relevant to their intent and context. Learn more about enhanced campaigns here.

This multi-screen behavior will only continue throughout the year. As device penetration grows and multi-screen behavior becomes the norm, those businesses that evolve their marketing strategy along with it will remain the most relevant and see the greatest results.

Posted by: Adam Grunewald, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

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Google Shopping global transition is underway

On February 13, Google Shopping results in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Brazil, Australia, Switzerland and the Czech Republic began to transition to a new commercial experience built on Product Listing Ads. If you’re a merchant in one of these countries and you’re currently promoting your products on Google Shopping for free, you’ll need to create a Product Listing Ad campaign to maintain your traffic and presence. You can learn more about this transition in our recent announcement.

KEEP YOUR PRODUCTS VISIBLE
To ensure that your products remain eligible for promotion on Google Shopping, we’ve built an easy way for you to create Product Listing Ads.

You can complete the following three simple steps in Merchant Center:

1. Set up a basic Product Listing Ad campaign
   You’ll be able to create a new AdWords account in Merchant Center if you don’t already have one.
2. Customize your campaign
   Set a daily budget and one single maximum cost-per-click bid. You can modify these settings any time after you create your campaign.
3. Provide your billing information
   You’ll be taken to your AdWords account to provide or confirm your billing information.

For a detailed step-by-step guide to getting started with Product Listing Ads and to apply for a promotional credit (available for a limited time only), please visit this page.

PROMOTE YOUR PRODUCTS ACROSS DEVICES
With the recent launch of AdWords enhanced campaigns, it’s now easier than ever to promote your products across devices. This is crucial in a world where people are constantly connected and moving from one device to another. We encourage you to upgrade existing product listing ad campaigns to an enhanced campaign with appropriate bid adjustments.

If you need help getting started with Google Shopping, please visit the Google Shopping website or email us through this form.

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

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Enhanced campaigns: New bidding tools and mobile bid adjustments

Today, people are constantly connected and searching from all kinds of devices. Advertisers are looking for ways to reach people with ads that are relevant to their context, like their location, the time of day and the device they are using. With an enhanced campaign, you can easily vary your bids across devices, locations, and time of day – all within a single campaign.

Example: A multichannel retailer wants to reach people close to their stores searching for “party supplies.” Using bid adjustments, with three simple entries, they can bid 50% higher for people searching up to a mile away, 20% lower for searches on weekdays, and 25% higher for searches on smartphones.

In this post and a Learn with Google webinar this Thursday, February 21st, at 10am PST (sign-up here), we’ll look more closely at the new bidding tools and mobile bid adjustments. This Thursday’s webinar will also dive deeper into some of the improvements with mobile ads.

Bid adjustments
With an enhanced campaign, you start by setting default bids that reach all devices. You can then set bid adjustments to increase or decrease your bids for mobile devices and different contexts – like location and time of day. Setting higher bids when and where you’re more likely to satisfy a customer’s intent can boost your ad’s visibility and potentially lead to more visits and sales. Setting lower bids for contexts where your lead quality or average order value is lower can improve your ROI, although you may see fewer visits and lower total sales.

Bidding for devices with larger screens, like desktops, laptops and tablets, is grouped together in enhanced campaigns. We and others in the industry see that users’ search behavior on these larger devices is very similar, and likewise, overall advertiser performance is very similar across these devices.

Bid adjustments combine using multiplication. If you set multiple location-based bid adjustments, only the most specific adjustment will apply.

Continuing the example above: The retailer’s max CPC bid for the keyword [party supplies] is $1. When someone searches for “party supplies” on a smartphone within a mile radius from the store on Wednesday, then the location, time, and mobile bid adjustments set will apply. So this retailer’s CPC bid for this particular search would be adjusted to $1.50 ($1 x (100% + 50%) x (100% - 20%) x (100% + 25%) = $1.50).

The AdWords interface provides a calculator to show you how multiple bid adjustments might combine to affect your bids.

(click image to expand)

Valuing mobile and setting a mobile bid adjustment
People can take a wide range of actions on smartphones. Beyond purchasing directly from your mobile site, customers might call your business, click on driving directions to visit a store, download an app, or even convert on another device later. But traditional online conversion reporting may not show the full consumer journey across devices and can therefore lead to undervaluing mobile. Savvy marketers are looking deeper to consider the full value that mobile brings to their business. Check out how Radio Shack, a large multi-channel consumer electronics retailer, approaches their mobile bidding and measurement strategy here as an example.

With an enhanced campaign, you can choose a mobile bid adjustment to influence your ad position, clicks and cost on mobile devices. For a bit of perspective, here are a few of examples of how advertisers set their mobile bids as a percentage of desktop over the course of the last several months (actual CPCs may differ).

• On average, advertisers in the Australian retail sector set mobile bids to 103% of desktop.
  
• On average, advertisers in the US real estate sector set mobile bids to 91% of desktop.
  
• On average, advertisers in the Canadian travel sector set mobile bids to 88% of desktop.
  

With each campaign you upgrade to an enhanced campaign, you’ll see the estimated change in impressions, clicks and cost depending on your selected mobile bid adjustment. The suggested bid adjustment shows you how similar advertisers bid on mobile compared to other devices.

(click image to expand)

Experienced search marketers know that bids are one of many factors that influence overall campaign performance, along with keywords, ads, extensions, and landing pages. So after setting a mobile bid adjustment, periodically measure your results and make changes as needed to better meet your campaign goals.

Feedback
We want you to succeed with AdWords, so we’re very interested in hearing your feedback. As you begin using enhanced campaigns, please share your thoughts using this form so we can continue to improve the product.

Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Group Product Manager

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It's the first Anniversary for the AdWords Community. Let's celebrate in style!

It's our first anniversary and we want to thank you!

A year has passed since we launched the new English AdWords Community website on the February 14th. It’s been exciting and it’s certainly been emotional, but wow…what a year it’s been.

We’re immensely proud of what we’ve achieved together with you in the past 12 months and we’re even more proud of how the AdWords Community has developed. The AdWords Community became an important place for AdWords customers globally looking for support and guidance they need to grow their ROI, their sales and their overall online businesses.

That’s all down to the AdWords Top Contributors and all members of the AdWords Online Community. So, a personal ‘thank you’ to each one of you for making this past year so exciting.

We have so many exciting things planned for this year to add even more value to our AdWords Community, so please stay tuned!

But now, let’s all raise a glass and say one big “Happy first anniversary to the AdWords Community”. To celebrate in style, we’ve gone a little birthday crazy and prepared a small surprise for you.

Please enjoy it!

If interested, please visit also our global Communities: Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian, Italian, French, Traditional Chinese, and Polish.

AdWords Community Team

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DoubleClick Search tools to help you remember those three little words this Valentine’s Day: return on investment

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Search blog.

Let’s face it: managing your search campaigns can seem a lot like being in a relationship. Both can be fickle, require lots of work and time, and need the right amount of attention to get the best results -- especially during Valentine’s Day. When everything is going smoothly, you’re feeling confident and on top of your game; but, without commitment and focus, your search management romance can quickly fizzle.

Here at DoubleClick Search, we know it's important for you and your campaigns to be getting along well as more consumers turn to search to find the best deals. This is especially true during high-traffic retail holidays; in fact, online sales are up 28% over last 2 years(1), with $210 billion in web-influenced sales expected for this year(2). This means huge opportunities for search marketers to reach shoppers looking for deals -- but it can also mean a lot of extra work.  

So with that, we want to make sure your search management relationship doesn’t fall flat this year. Below are a few DoubleClick Search solutions to put the kick back in your step and help you keep focus on those other three little words this Valentine’s Day: return on investment.

Communication is key
Good communication is a fundamental part of a healthy relationship; after all, being left in the dark can quickly compound problems and stifle new opportunities to grow. Stay connected with a few tools from DoubleClick Search that’ll help you better understand and capture new opportunities:

	Chart bid history. Take the guesswork out of the relationship. With the ability to chart your bid history, DoubleClick Search gives you full transparency into bidding decisions to visually represent your keyword bids over time, and help you better manage to your unique goals.
	Bi-directional sync. Communication is a two-way street. With bi-directional sync, the changes you make in AdWords or adCenter show up in DoubleClick Search with the click of a button. You can even schedule syncs to automatically occur or repeat. (Now, if only it were this easy in a relationship!)
	Display remarketing from search ads. Don’t leave the conversation hanging. Leverage cross-channel opportunities from the DoubleClick integrated platform with display remarketing from search ads, which lets you “follow up” on search ad clicks and remarket to specific audiences across ad exchanges, via DoubleClick Bid Manager or the Google Display Network, based on their interaction with your paid search ads.

Explore together
Being routine with your campaigns can quickly have you falling into a rut. Exciting launches filled with new keyword additions and optimization can quickly turn into the comfortable complacency of ordering in pizza, watching reruns on TV, and running your campaigns on autopilot. Don’t settle for the ho-hum; stay committed to the next chapter of your search campaigns with DoubleClick Search tools, to make sure they pay off:

	Landing page testing. Show your search campaign some love by pairing your keywords with the best landing page. With landing page testing in DoubleClick Search, split traffic between several landing pages and then compare the results to help choose the landing page that delivers the best results.
	Formula columns. Be creative -- ditch the spreadsheets and explore new surroundings with Formula columns that allow you to create your own customized columns directly in the DoubleClick Search interface. Access a wide variety of different metrics computed from DoubleClick Search data, or rename columns.

Don’t wait until the last minute
...Not with dinner reservations, and certainly not with your search campaigns. Relationships require regular maintenance; read the signs early and understand your campaign needs to make the most informed decisions for the best results. Here are a few DoubleClick Search tools that can help you analyze your campaigns up to the minute, so you can plan accordingly:

Instant conversions. Stop the procrastination blame-game and act on every signal, as it happens. DoubleClick Search now loads instant conversion data from Floodlight in all its reports -- in addition to the engine performance data we already update in near-real time -- to bring you the freshest, most reliable campaign data. Conversion data in DoubleClick Search is updated automatically throughout the day, minutes after a conversion happens.

Happy Valentine’s Day from DoubleClick Search! 

To follow more updates from DoubleClick Search, subscribe to the DoubleClick Search Blog.

(1) Source: ComScore Inc. Press Release, 2011
(2) GroupM research: From intent to in-store: Search’s role in the new retail shopper profile, 2011

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AdWords Express is now available through My Client Center

As AdWords Express continues to grow (now available internationally in 15 countries), our AdWords Premier SMB Partners have asked us to make it easier for them to tap into AdWords Express for their clients. We’re happy to announce that starting today, these partners, along with agencies and other third parties, can create and manage AdWords Express accounts at scale through My Client Center (MCC).

Using AdWords Express via MCC can save agencies and other third parties time and overhead by eliminating day-to-day management for local, small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). AdWords Express complements existing AdWords services provided by agencies today by offering them a new option to help SMBs get started quickly with online marketing. Third parties can now create new accounts by simply selecting ‘AdWords Express’ through the MCC. Get more details and instructions on using AdWords Express through MCC in the AdWords Express Help Center.

Steve Curry, President and CEO of 411.ca, a site serving millions of Canadians, has the following to say about AdWords Express:

"We have been using AdWords Express through MCC in a beta trial and have found it to be very simple to set up. Since AdWords Express doesn't need ongoing account optimization, it's a great tool for us to be able to efficiently deliver a valuable advertising solution to our SMB advertisers.” 

For more resources on My Client Center and other tools to effectively manage large accounts at scale, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Nicholas Boos, Product Manager

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Optimizing for conversions made easy with Search Funnels data in your AdWords tabs

Search Funnels show you how users search for products before converting, allowing you to make better informed decisions in AdWords. Now, we're making it easier than ever to incorporate Search Funnels data into your everyday optimizations by introducing new Search Funnels columns that you can simply add to your campaign, ad group, keyword and ads tabs.  You should see this feature available in your account within the next couple of days.

If you’ve enabled conversion tracking, you’ll be able to see a new section within the column customizer for Search Funnels.  This section will allow you to add columns for many common Search Funnels metrics, such as assist clicks, click assisted conversions, and assist impressions.

If you’ve already enabled AdWords conversion tracking and are ready to get started, you can try some of our favorite optimization techniques:

• Find keywords that are best at assisting conversions -  Look for keywords with low conversion rates and a high click-assisted conversions / last-click conversion ratio. These keywords contribute significant conversion assists, meaning they are important early in the buying cycle as they drive visitors who are still researching your site. Consider setting up automated rules to increase your bids when conversion assists cross a certain threshold.   Also, try creating a separate ad group for these keywords with ads that are geared more towards research than immediate purchase.
• Pay your assist keywords their fair share -  Make sure you’re not underbidding for keywords with assist clicks. You could be missing conversions if your bid management strategy only accounts for last-click conversions. Keywords with assist clicks are in the click path of users who eventually convert, so it’s important to assign value to these keywords.
• Update your underperforming ads - Consider revising ads that have impression-assisted conversions and have a strong average position. These ads were shown to users who eventually converted but who did not click. Entice potential customers to visit your site with stronger call-to-action phrases in your ad creative. You may also want to consider raising your bids on these keywords if your average position is low to ensure that people see your ads.

Success in action

Jimdo, an international Internet company helping people build their own websites, talked to us about their success using Search Funnels columns:

Using the Search Funnels columns in AdWords has allowed us to both improve the volume of sales and efficiency that AdWords delivers.

By using these columns, and in particular the ratio of assisted conversions to last click conversions, we are able to identify and value keywords that play an important role in the upper funnel. Now knowing their importance, we improved our bids for these keywords, and have seen overall conversions increase by 30% and our ROI increase by 16%.

For more details on how to enable Search Funnels columns in your core reports, visit our help center.

Posted By Dan Friedman, Product Manager, AdWords

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Learn more about enhanced campaigns

Last week we announced enhanced campaigns, which let you more easily adjust your ads and bids depending on your customers’ location, device, and time of day - all within a single campaign.

We’ll be hosting several Learn with Google webinars about enhanced campaigns over the next few weeks. This Thursday, February 14 at 10am PST, Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President of Engineering, and Jason Spero, Global Sales Director, will provide an overview of enhanced campaigns and Q&A. Please sign up here to attend.

Also look for more information and details about enhanced campaigns over the next few weeks here on our blog.

Posted by Mark Martel, the Google Ads team

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Enhancing AdWords for a constantly connected world

Today we’re upgrading AdWords, by rolling out enhanced campaigns. This is a first step to help you more simply and smartly manage your ad campaigns in today’s multi-device world.

Why enhanced campaigns?
People are constantly connected and moving from one device to another to communicate, shop and stay entertained. In fact, a recent study of multi-device consumers found that 90% move sequentially between several screens to accomplish a task. There’s also a proliferation of new devices — PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, hybrid devices, mini-tablets, televisions, and more. And there are many more digital screens and devices to come, with the lines between them continuing to blur. For example, as devices converge, consumer behaviors on tablets and desktops are becoming very similar.

This creates great opportunities for businesses, but can also make marketing more complex and time-consuming. For example, a pizza restaurant probably wants to show one ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 1pm on their PC at work (perhaps a link to an online order form or menu), and a different ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 8pm on a smartphone a half-mile from the restaurant (perhaps a click-to-call phone number and restaurant locator). Signals like location, time of day, and the capabilities of the device people are using have become increasingly important in showing them the right ad.

With enhanced campaigns, instead of having to cobble together and compare several separate campaigns, reports and ad extensions to do this, the pizza restaurant can easily manage all of this in one single place. Enhanced campaigns help you reach people with the right ads, based on their context like location, time of day and device type, across all devices without having to set up and manage several separate campaigns.



Key features
Here’s an overview of some key features.

1. Powerful marketing tools for the multi-device world
   People want search results that are relevant for the context they are in — their device, location and the time of day. Enhanced campaigns help you better manage your campaigns and budgets for this multi-device world. With bid adjustments, you can manage bids for your ads across devices, locations, time of day and more — all from a single campaign.
   
   Example: A breakfast cafe wants to reach people nearby searching for "coffee" or "breakfast" on a smartphone. Using bid adjustments, with three simple entries, they can bid 25% higher for people searching a half-mile away, 20% lower for searches after 11am, and 50% higher for searches on smartphones. These bid adjustments can apply to all ads and all keywords in one single campaign.
   
   
2. Smarter ads optimized for varying user contexts
   People on the go or near your store may be looking for different things than someone sitting at their desk. With enhanced campaigns, you’ll show ads across devices with the right ad text, sitelink, app or extension, without having to edit each campaign for every possible combination of devices, location and time of day.
   
   Example: A national retailer with both physical locations and a website can show ads with click-to-call and location extensions for people searching on their smartphones, while showing an ad for their e-commerce website to people searching on a PC — all within a single campaign.
   
   
3. Advanced reports to measure new conversion types
   Technology is enabling people to take action on your ads in new ways. Potential customers may see your ad and download your app, or they may call you. It’s been hard for marketers to easily measure and compare these interactions. To help you measure the full value of your campaigns, enhanced campaigns enables you to easily count calls and app downloads as conversions in your AdWords reports.
   
   Example: You can count phone calls of 60 seconds or longer that result from a click-to-call ad as a conversion in your AdWords reports, and compare them to other conversions like leads, sales and downloads.
   

Upgrading to enhanced campaigns
Enhanced campaigns will roll out to advertisers as an option over the next few weeks, and we plan to upgrade all campaigns in mid-2013.

Enhanced campaigns are designed to help you succeed in a multi-screen world, but we know that transitioning may involve some initial changes. Here are some resources to help you:

• Website
  
• Help Center
  
• Upgrade videos and guides
  
• AdWords Community forum
  

Over the coming weeks we’ll dive into the new features with tips and best practices on the Inside AdWords blog and on our Google+ page. We’d love your feedback.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President of Engineering

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Dashboards, Advanced Segments, And Custom Reports For Your Business Needs

A version of this post originally appeared on the Google Analytics Blog.

We’ve heard you loud and clear that getting started on Google Analytics can be challenging. It’s such a robust tool with a variety of reports, filters, and customizations that for a new user it can be overwhelming to figure out where to look first for the data and insights that will enable you to make better decisions. For more advanced users it can be time consuming to build out different variations of reports and dashboards to get the clearest snapshot of your performance. That is why we’ve created the Google Analytics Solution Gallery.

The Google Analytics Solution Gallery hosts the top Dashboards, Advanced Segments and Custom Reports which you can quickly and easily import into your own account to see how your website is performing on key metrics. It helps you to filter through the noise to see the metrics that matter for your type of business: Ecommerce, Brand, Content Publishers. If you're not familiar with Dashboards, Advanced Segments and Custom Reports, check out these links to our help center for detailed descriptions on how they work and the insights they can help provide.

Examples

Here are a few examples of the solutions that can be downloaded into your Google Analytics account to see how the analysis works with your data.

Note: You should already have an Analytics account with data to have these solutions be effective for you.

• AdWords (Google CPC) Performance - Use this segment to analyze the performance of AdWords traffic. You can also create segments to compare your CPC traffic from other sources and compare performance between them.
• 6+ Keywords - Learn which long-tail keywords with more than six words your visitors are using to find your site. Then refine your pay-per-click ads and SEO to drive more qualified visitors to your site.
• Paid vs. Organic Search Performance - Do you know the behavioral differences between users who click on your paid ads and those who click on your organic search results? Use this report to understand the different ways they interact with your site and how to improve performance based on these findings.

How do I add these to my account?

We’ve designed it so it’s easy to get started. Simply go to the Google Analytics Solution Gallery, pick from the drop drown menu the solutions that will be most helpful for your business. Select from Publisher, Ecommerce, Social, Mobile, Brand, etc.. . Hit “Download” for the solution you want to see in your account. If you are not already logged into Google Analytics we’ll ask you to sign in. Then you’ll be asked if you want to accept this solution into your account and what Web Profile do you want to apply it to. After you select that it will be in your account and your own data will populate the report.

We’re planning on expanding on this list of top solutions throughout the year so be sure to check back and see what we’ve added. A big thank you to Justin Cutroni & Avinash Kaushik for supplying many of the solutions currently available.

Ian Myszenski, Product Marketing Manager, Google Analytics Team 

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Simplify your AdWords management with automated rules

Marketers benefit when they have more time to think strategically and spend less time on repetitive tasks.  We were excited when we launched automated rules in 2010 to provide you with the benefit of 24-hour account management while leaving you free to focus on other things.

Looking across the web, search professionals have been sharing ways they’ve used automated rules to help manage their campaigns.

1. Prioritize your time over the holidays with these ideas from Krystal Kenlan (WebPageFX):
• Schedule ads for special events/holidays
• Pause campaigns that spend certain budget partway through the month
• Pause low-performing ads based on metrics
2. Swap ads while you sleep as Ally Malick (SEER Interactive) suggests:
• Upload your promotional/new price point ads in a paused state and make sure these ads have a unique identifying phrase (i.e. “Doorbuster Sale” or “Ends Friday!”) so you can segment them using a text filter (another option for this is to use labels)
• Create an automated rule to pause all ads currently running 
• Create another automated rule to enable the new promotional ads
3. Save money with these three rules from Dan Williams (Periscopix) 
• Decrease bids by 10% on keywords that trigger an ad in the top three spots but have not led to a conversion
• Set a maximum bid first, then set a rule to increase bids on all keywords not displaying on the first page
• Set rules that help you fine tune for optimal ad position (not necessarily the top!)
4. Save time with automated rules ideas by Joel Chudleigh (Deep Footprints)
• Pause keywords that have had many clicks but have not converted
• Increase your bids on keywords that have a relatively low CPA
• Decrease your bids keywords that have a high CPA and a position between 1 and 5
• Increase your bids on keywords in positions lower than 7

Automated rules are available to all AdWords accounts and if you regularly perform manual tasks in your account, we encourage you to give this feature a try. And once you’ve done so, we’d love to hear your feedback for how we can make automated rules even better. So do let us know how it goes!

Posted by Maria Nikishyna, Inside AdWords Crew

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