Enhanced Campaigns for Display: Powerful Bidding Tools for a Multi-Device World

Last month we announced enhanced campaigns to help advertisers more simply and scalably reach their customers in a multi-screen world.  Today, we’ll look more closely at how enhanced campaigns work with your display campaigns.

Why Enhanced Campaigns For Display
In this constantly connected world, our customers are accessing information across multiple devices, and might look at 10 different sources - online reviews, newspaper and magazine articles, recommendations from friends and more - before making a purchase. Display advertising captures these signals and is an important part of connecting with consumers in this multi-screen world.  But determining the best way to reach the right person with the right ad is more complex than ever. Enhanced campaigns for display help you reach people with the right ads, based on people’s context like their location, time of day and device type -- all from a single campaign.

Key Features
Search and display use very different signals. In search, we use keywords to capture users’ intent. For instance, a travel booking website knows that a user searching for ‘Rome Vacation Packages’ is looking for a vacation in Rome. In Display campaigns, advertisers use a variety of other signals to reach their target customers with the right ad. In this example, a travel website may use:

• Interest Categories: to reach customers interested in “Rome”
• Demographics: to reach people 35-44, who have historically spent 3x the average
• Topic Targeting: to reach people browsing travel websites
• Remarketing: to reach customers who booked a vacation with them last year

In today’s constantly connected world, someone's intent and the actions they're looking to take may differ depending on their context, signals such as time of day, location and device:

• Time of day: Travelers typically book between 9am and 6pm
• Location: “People in the US” who may convert more often than people in Italy
• Device: Mobile users tend to browse on their smartphones, then book on their desktop

With enhanced campaigns, instead of having to create multiple campaigns, this travel website can easily manage all of this in one place. In a single campaign they can adjust bids across these various signals to reach the right people with the right ads.

Learn More
More tips on how to use enhanced campaigns for display are available in the AdWords Help Center. To learn more on how you can take advantage of Enhanced Campaigns for Display, register for our upcoming webinar this Thursday March 21st, at 10am PST.

Posted by Christian Oestlien, Product Management Director for the Google Display Network

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Tarun Jain, AdWords Product Manager

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

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AdWords Editor users: Upgrade to version 9.8.1 before October 28, 2012

As we announced in June, AdWords Editor versions 9.5.1 and 9.7.1 will no longer be supported after October 28, 2012. If you continue using version 9.5.1 or 9.7.1 after this date, you'll encounter errors downloading accounts, posting changes to campaign settings, or checking changes. To avoid these issues, please upgrade to the latest version (9.8.1) at your earliest convenience.

You can upgrade to version 9.8.1 through the auto-update prompt that appears when you run AdWords Editor. To preserve unposted changes and comments, select the "Backup then Upgrade" option in the prompt. You can also download the latest version from the AdWords Editor website.

For a complete list of version-specific changes, please see our release notes. To see which version you're using, go to the Help menu > About AdWords Editor (Windows) or the AdWords Editor menu > About AdWords Editor (Mac).

Posted by Andy Lutz, Inside AdWords crew

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Keeping AdWords Policies Current

Recently, we’ve been explaining how our systems and policies stop unwanted ads from showing on Google and elsewhere. One part of these efforts is our constant review of our policies for advertisers, to make sure they keep up with evolving practices on the web that can harm users’ experiences.

We regularly update our AdWords policies, clarify what they mean, and step up their enforcement where needed to ensure the best experience for our users and business partners. This year, we’ve already rolled out more than 30 updates to our policies, and today we’re updating our AdWords policies on Software Principles, Arbitrage, Advertiser Claims, and Relevance, Clarity and Accuracy. We’re announcing these updates now to enable advertisers to review their accounts and ensure that they’re in compliance; they’ll come into effect on October 15.

Details of these updates can be found here, along with more information for advertisers about how they can come into compliance with our policies. Here’s a quick overview:

• We've added several specific examples of the kinds of advertiser behavior typically associated with arbitrage (sites that are designed solely or predominantly to show ads).
• We've made it even clearer how advertisers must be fully transparent in their ads when describing the experiences on their landing pages.
• We've beefed up our rules about the use of keyword insertion in ads.
• We've reworked our AdWords policy governing Software Principles to ensure that users are given important information before downloading software on their computers and that the software is not harmful or hard-to-uninstall.  We're also starting to make updates for various AdSense partners who have individual agreements.

The web and its ecosystem of advertisers, publishers, and users continue to evolve rapidly. Over time, practices develop that can lead to a negative experience for users. In addition, some actors become more sophisticated in their ability to defeat the intent of our policies. Today’s changes make the guidance clearer for everyone and tighten the rules and enforcement needed to keep the online advertising ecosystem clear, consistent, and useful for consumers. The bottom line is that these revised policies and increased enforcement will help provide everyone with a safer, more trustworthy experience online.

Posted by Mansi Goel, Global Advertising Policy Lead

Updated February 1 to refer to the commencement of AdSense updates

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AdWords scripts - now available to all AdWords users

In June we announced the limited release of AdWords scripts, a new AdWords tool that enables you to make changes to an AdWords account, such as updating keywords and ad copy or outputting account statistics, by writing simple JavaScript programs. Today we’re pleased to announce that AdWords scripts is available to all advertisers globally. In addition, we’re launching several frequently requested features that enable advertisers to:

• Run more complex scripts - We extended the length of script executions from 5 minutes to 30 minutes, allowing you to make more complex changes. In addition, we’ve expanded the entity limit to 100K. 
• Use real-time data to manage campaigns - We’re adding support for Ad Parameters, which allow you to update numeric values in ads without having to delete and re-enter ad copy or wait for policy checks. Here’s a tutorial showing the use of US Geological Survey data to insert dynamic ad text. 
• Automate scripts with scheduling - You can now schedule scripts to run a single time, daily, weekly, or monthly.

To help you get started with AdWords scripts, we’re hosting two training events next week.

• On Tuesday, September 11th at 11:30am PST / 2:30am EST, we’ll be hosting a Hangout on Air through Google Developers Live, targeted to advertisers with more advanced coding skills. Questions asked via Moderator will be answered at the end of the presentation. 

• On Thursday, September 13th at 10amPST / 1pmEST, we’ll be hosting a Learn with Google webinar targeted to advertisers with basic JavaScript experience. During this webinar, we will provide an overview of what can be accomplished with Scripts, walk through ways to customize pre-set Scripts, and show you how to write Scripts from scratch. Click here to register.

Additional resources, including a getting started guide and tutorials, are available at https://developers.google.com/adwords/scripts/. You can also join the AdWords Scripts Forum to get help or share advice on AdWords scripts.  

Posted by Katie Miller, Google Ads Team

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Some Changes to DoubleClick Ad Planner

We are constantly evaluating our products to make sure that we are investing in tools that create the most value for our customers. Sometimes this requires making some changes...as we will be with DoubleClick Ad Planner. Starting on September 5, 2012, DoubleClick Ad Planner will become a tool dedicated to researching placements across the 2 million sites comprising the Google Display Network. Our goal will be to make this a best-in-class planning product for the GDN. It will also get a new name: the Google Display Network Ad Planner.

In order to maintain the highest level of quality planning data and to invest in new functionality, we will also need to discontinue some existing features. You will start to see, for example, that certain filters and demographic data will no longer be available in Ad Planner.

Next Steps

• Please visit our Ad Planner Help Center for a full list of changes. 
• If there is any data or media plans that you will need after this change that will no longer be available, please export and save them before September 5th. 

Thanks for your support and understanding as we continue to focus on developing new monetization features for publishers and advertisers.

Posted by Vincent Lacey, Product Manager

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More ‘Flexible’ Targeting on the Google Display Network

Last month we introduced the Display Network tab, a new interface in AdWords dedicated to making display buying easier and more efficient by combining your targeting, bidding and optimizing in one place. To give you even more control over your display ads, we’re pleased to announce the new Flexible reach targeting setting on the new Display Network tab.

In the next couple of weeks, the Networks and devices section of your Settings tab in AdWords will include a new targeting option called “Flexible reach.” Flexible reach enables you to fine-tune where your ads show by choosing your settings at the ad group level instead of the campaign level. This will give you more control over where your ads appear and who sees them.


Why the Change?
Today, you can manage your display targeting on the campaign level by selecting Broad reach or Specific reach.

• When you select Broad reach, your ads are shown on pages that match your primary targeting method.
• When you select Specific reach, your ads will show on pages that match all of your targeting methods.

Flexible reach allows you to select any combination of multiple targeting selections at the ad group level, plus the control to combine different methods for targeting and bidding at the ad group level. It also provides transparency into how your targeting selections are affecting the reach and impression volume of your campaigns.

How will this affect my campaigns today?
The Flexible reach campaign setting will appear as an optional setting in AdWords accounts in June and will eventually replace the Broad and Specific reach options later this year.

Once you’ve selected this option in an existing campaign, you can’t revert back to Broad or Specific reach and any new ad group will have Flexible reach by default. Your current targeting and bidding selections will remain the same, but you’ll now have the control to select how to target and bid on an individual ad group basis.

Learn More!
To find out more about how to take advantage of Flexible reach, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Subha Subramanian, Product Manager, Flexible Reach

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New In-Ads Notice Label and Icon for the Google Display Network in Europe

Last year in the U.S., we launched the AdChoices Icon on the Google Display Network. AdChoices is an industry standard "i" icon that expands to “AdChoices” when users move their cursor over the icon. Giving users clear notice about the ads they see is a high priority for Google and for many in the online advertising industry at large. Users who click this label are taken to a page where they can learn more about online advertising and the ads they see.

We’re now rolling out the AdChoices feature across Europe, supporting industry-wide efforts to provide more information to consumers. We'll soon start to change our “Ads By Google” in-ads notice icon to a new icon that expands to an "AdChoices" label. These notifications were developed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB Europe)-led Self-Regulatory Program for Online Behavioral Advertising to proactively give users notice and choice about the ads they see. With the adoption of a common icon users will see on ads across the web, we hope to show our support for the industry-wide initiative and to increase users' understanding about their choices.

Over the next few weeks, we'll start showing the new icon and label on most ad formats across the majority of European-language sites. Over time, we’ll expand the notice to ensure that all European-language publisher sites in the Google Display Network come within the Self-Regulatory Framework. This will be the single largest rollout of the "AdChoices" label to date, and we're encouraged that others in the industry are also adopting the label.

Users who click on the "AdChoices" label will be taken to a page where they can learn more about online advertising and the ads they are shown. This page will also link to the Ads Preferences Manager, where users can control the types of interest-based ads they see on the Google Display Network. We think this rollout will help users better understand the ads they're seeing, and we look forward to seeing widespread adoption of this label throughout the industry.

Posted by Jason Bigler, Product Management Director

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Customize account management with AdWords scripts

We know that you're always looking for more efficient ways to manage your AdWords accounts. We also hear that many of you would love to use your own external data to make decisions in your accounts. Today, we're excited to announce the limited release of scripts in AdWords. With scripts, you can make changes to an AdWords account by writing simple JavaScript programs.

With scripts, you can:

• Use external inventory data to either change bids or pause/unpause keywords. 
• Output account statistics to a spreadsheet from which you can create reports and visualizations. 
• Use stats trends over several weeks to change keyword or ad group bids.

Scripts run in the Google Apps Script infrastructure, and we're enabling Apps Script integration with three services: you can use Google Spreadsheets and Url Fetcher to integrate with external data, as well as email results of a script execution from the script itself.

To get started with scripts, visit the Campaigns tab, and select “Automation” then “Scripts” from the left toolbar:

To make the most of scripts, we recommend that whoever is writing them has a basic understanding of JavaScript.

In the coming weeks we plan to enable this feature for everyone. In the interim, we are accepting applications for access. Applicants will be whitelisted in batches as we ramp up usage in the system. In order to apply, you will need an AdWords customer ID (not a My Client Center ID). Please refer to our developers site for more instructions and best practices for using scripts.

Posted By: Prashant Baheti, AdWords Product Manager

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Connecting shoppers and great stores online

Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog

Online shopping is great for many reasons, but most of all it’s a convenient and fast way to turn your intent to buy that new pair of running shoes, for example, into an actual purchase. But shoppers tell us they’re often nervous about buying from online stores they don’t know. We created the free Google Trusted Stores program to help solve this problem. When shoppers see the Google Trusted Store badge, they know in a snap they’re shopping with a reputable retailer and they can feel confident making an informed purchase.

We’ve been testing the program since last fall with about 50 online merchants and more than 10 million orders. It’s working even better than we hoped, generating positive feedback from shoppers and increasing sales for merchants. Starting today, Google Trusted Stores is open to all U.S. merchants who want to apply.

Helping shoppers choose stores they can trust
When shopping online, you may come across the Google Trusted Store badge. Hover over it and you’ll see a “report card” which shows “grades” for that merchant’s shipping and service, including more precise metrics about what the grades mean.

The Google Trusted Store badge and report card

This badge is only awarded to online stores that deliver a great overall experience, so even if you haven’t shopped with this merchant before, you can easily tell if they are trustworthy, ship quickly and reliably, and offer exceptional customer service. If there’s a problem with your purchase, we’re here to help. When you buy from a Google Trusted Store, you can opt in to get up to $1,000 lifetime purchase protection per shopper. And our dedicated customer service team is there to work with you and the merchant to assist in resolving the issue.

Helping merchants demonstrate their excellence and earn new business
Google Trusted Stores helps online stores attract new customers, increase sales and differentiate themselves by showing off their excellent service via the badge on their websites. Soon the badge will also appear on Google.com ads and in Google Shopping results.

Google Trusted Store badge on AdWords

Over the last nine months of the pilot, our tests show that participating in this program can help merchants big and small. For example, Wayfair, the largest online-only retailer of home goods and one of the top 50 largest online retailers as ranked by Internet Retailer, increased sales* on its site by 2.3 percent with Google Trusted Stores. And Beau-coup, a specialty online favors and gifts retailer, saw an 8.6 percent increase*. Take a look at our merchant success stories to learn more about how Google Trusted Stores has had a positive impact on website conversion rates and average order sizes for online retailers.

Google Trusted Stores is entirely free, both for shoppers and for online stores. We’re still testing the most helpful ways to display Trusted Stores information to shoppers, so you may see different versions, or none at all, while we conduct experiments. If you’re a merchant and would like to participate in the Google Trusted Stores program, please apply.

Posted by Tom Fallows, Group Product Manager, Google Shopping

*Increased sales percentages are based on a combination of uplift in conversion and average order size.

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A Preview of AdWords’ New Look

Over the years, we’ve listened to your feedback and added lots of innovations across search, display, mobile, video, social, local, and measurement to help you get great results with AdWords. We also want your experience setting up and managing campaigns to be easier and more enjoyable. So, over the last several months, as part of our aim to deliver a simpler, more beautiful experience across all Google products, we’ve been working on a redesign for the AdWords interface. We are looking for feedback as we put the final touches on this visual refresh. Have a look at the preview and let us know what you think. You’ll find a feedback button on each page.

A more beautiful AdWords
This refresh aims to get the interface out of the way, so that the important things – such as your data – stand out. We integrated the latest client side technologies to make the AdWords interface more visually appealing and scalable.

Click the image above for a preview of AdWords’ new look

A simpler AdWords
The design changes are also aimed at making campaign creation simpler. One example is the introduction of campaign types, which will determine the campaign settings that you see.

For example, if you're creating a Search Network campaign to place ads on Google search and search partners, you'll have the option of selecting a campaign type: either Standard, All features, or Product Listing Ads. If you select the Standard campaign type, you'd see only the most relevant settings to Search Network only campaigns, making you experience simpler and more efficient.

New Campaign Types

Whether you spend an hour a month or a few hours a day in AdWords, we hope you’ll find these changes intuitive and pleasant. Stay tuned for more details as we launch this new design soon.  We welcome your feedback.

Posted by Greg Rosenberg and the AdWords User Experience Team

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Update to the recent ad rotation change

Last month we announced that we would be changing how creative rotation works in AdWords. Specifically, we changed the even rotation setting to rotate evenly for a period of 30 days, after which AdWords would optimize to show your higher performing creatives more frequently.

In the past month, we've heard a number of concerns from you about this change. Thank you for all of the feedback -- we've been listening carefully to determine the right course of action. The concerns have focused on (1) the lack of an opt-out for this change and (2) the potential that the 30 day even rotation window might be shorter than your testing window for new ads. You also inquired about why we made the change.

First, we’d like to share a little more about why we updated how creative rotation works. With the modified Rotate evenly setting, our tests indicate that we will provide you with more valuable traffic in an automated, efficient manner. We've found that, on average, optimized creative rotation results in an increase in click-through rate and an increase in total conversion volume for advertisers. Here’s an example describing the benefit (note: data is intended for illustrative purposes only):

Advertisement A has a 3% CTR, while Advertisement B has a 1% CTR. Under the original Rotate evenly setting, the ads would show roughly evenly, resulting in an average CTR of around 2%. Under the new setting, Advertisement A will show more frequently after the even rotation window has passed, bringing the average CTR closer to 3%, or a 50% increase in clicks. Our systems will also continue to run Advertisement B for a low fraction of traffic to continue to test how well it performs.

Also, in response to your feedback, we're planning to make two changes to the setting. First, we'll expand the even rotation period from 30 days to 90 days to give you a longer window for testing new ads. Second, if you still wish to have your ads rotate evenly indefinitely, we're going to offer an opt-out of this change. You can opt-out by filling in your information on this form or by contacting your account representative. Both of these changes will go into effect on June 11, 2012.

If we see a large amount of demand for the opt-out over the next few weeks, we'll also offer the opt-out in the AdWords interface directly.

We're confident that the changes we've made to ad rotation enable us to show higher quality ads to our users and better performing ads for our advertisers. However, we also realize that it is important to provide you with the freedom and time to decide what works best for you and that's why we're announcing these changes today. Please continue to share your feedback so that we can build solutions to meet your advertising needs.

Posted by: Nick Fox, VP, Product Management

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Announcement: Custom alerts will sunset on June 30, 2012

When we first created custom alerts, we wanted to provide advertisers with a way to be notified when certain behaviors or changes occurred in their AdWords account. Over time, we observed that most advertisers wanted to take action when such triggers occurred within their accounts. Many of these actions can now be done by creating automated rules - a tool within AdWords that enables you to schedule automatic changes to specific parts of your account based on the criteria that you specify.

Based on automated rules adoption, we have decided to sunset custom alerts. Starting June 15, we will disable creation of new alerts and by the end of June, we will stop triggering existing alerts. This means that on June 30, you will not see custom alerts in your AdWords account. If you selected email as your notification method, this means you will no longer receive alert emails.

We are actively working to bring you an email-only option in automated rules so you can be notified when a rule requirements are met without taking any action. In the meantime, check out some of the common ways you can use automated rules to save you time in managing your account.

Posted by Prashant Baheti, AdWords Product Manager

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New Changes to Ad Rotation

AdWords currently offers three ad rotation settings: optimize for clicks, optimize for conversions, and rotate evenly. Using the “rotate” setting for ad rotation is helpful for testing new creatives, but when run indefinitely can inhibit advertiser performance and deliver less relevant ads to our users.

Starting next week, the “rotate” setting for ad rotation will change.  Instead of rotating creatives for an indefinite period of time, this setting will only rotate for a period of 30 days.  After that, the setting will then optimize to show the ads expected to generate the most clicks.  Every time a creative is enabled or edited, the ads in that ad group will rotate more evenly for a new period of 30 days.

This change will be rolling out next week. At that time, ad groups with creatives that haven’t been added or modified in the past thirty days will see this new ad rotation behavior. Otherwise, this change will begin 30 days after your last creative was enabled or edited.

This change will enable us to provide users with the most relevant ad experience and should help advertisers improve the performance of their AdWords accounts. For more information on this change, please visit this article in our AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Karen Yao, Senior Product Manager

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Advanced sign-in security to protect your AdWords account

Has anyone you know lost control of their online accounts? Cases like the "Mugged in London" scam demonstrate why it's important to take steps to help secure your activities online. If you reuse the same password on multiple sites and one of those sites gets hacked, or your password was stolen through a phishing scam, it can be used to access some of your most closely-held information.

We continually strive to develop solutions to prevent security breaches like these. So last year, we developed an advanced opt-in security feature for Google Accounts called 2-step verification. This feature makes your Google Account (and thereby also your AdWords account) significantly more secure by helping to verify that you're the real owner of your account. It does this by requiring two independent factors for authentication, much like you might see on your banking website: your password, plus a code obtained using your phone.

To make your AdWords account more secure, you can apply this 2-step verification to your Google account. While this is an extra step, it's one that significantly improves the security of your AdWords account because it requires the powerful combination of both something you know—your username and password—and something that only you should have—your phone.

Learn more about 2-step verification and get started at our Help Center. And for more about staying safe online, see our ongoing security blog series or visit http://www.staysafeonline.org/. Be safe!

Posted by Andy Lutz, Inside AdWords crew

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New matching behavior for phrase and exact match keywords

Consider these three exact and phrase match keywords in AdWords.
 [waterproof sunblock]     "bollard cover"     [single serving coffee maker]

 Now have a look at these two rows of search queries.
1. waterproof sunblock     buy bollard cover     single serving coffee maker
2. waterpoof sunblock      buy bollard covers    single serve coffee maker

Today, only the search queries in the upper row (1) are considered a match and allowed to trigger an ad that can appear in the results. The close variants in the bottom row (2) are not considered a match by AdWords, despite the similarity in user intent.

This will change soon. Starting in mid-May, phrase and exact match keywords will match close variants, including misspellings, singular/plural forms, stemmings, accents and abbreviations. Based on our research and testing, we believe these changes will be broadly beneficial for users and advertisers.

Focusing on user intent 
People aren’t perfect spellers or typists. At least 7% of search queries contain a misspelling, and the longer the query, the higher the rate.

Even with perfect spelling, two people searching for the same thing often use slightly different variations, such as “kid scooters” and “kid’s scooter” or “bamboo floor” and “bamboo flooring.”

Google’s organic search systems detect and compensate for misspellings and close variants.

We know users are happier when they get search results that reflect their intent and help them achieve their desired action, even if it’s not a precise match for what they’ve typed. So we’re extending this behavior to ads.

Benefits for many advertisers, control for all
Our early experiments looked at the impact on advertisers getting a third or more of their clicks from phrase or exact match. On average, the new matching behavior increased AdWords search clicks by 3%, with comparable CPCs. Keep in mind that results may vary by advertiser.

We’ve been testing this new improvement with advertisers, and participants have seen positive results. “Previously we spent a lot of time making sure to include hundreds of versions of brand misspellings and to include plural forms of all our keywords,” said Dana Freund, Senior SEM Manager at GameDuell. “With the improvements to exact and phrase match we don’t have to worry about these keywords anymore. We get more relevant impressions for a smaller number of keywords, and it’s been a significant time saver for us.”

If you don’t want the potential for more clicks and prefer to maintain the current matching behavior in your campaign, you’ll still have that option. In the coming weeks, we’ll begin rolling out controls which will allow you to adjust your keyword matching options. Once they’re live, log in to AdWords and select the campaign settings tab. Under “Advanced settings” select Keyword matching options:

Again, these controls will begin rolling out in the coming weeks to all AdWords accounts. But, to be clear, the new matching behavior won’t actually start until mid-May.

For more details on keyword matching behavior, reporting changes, and other frequently asked questions, please visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Jen Huang, AdWords Product Manager

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Get Local with AdWords

Get organized this spring with new location features in AdWords and share your stories

Over the past 30 years, California Closet Company has grown from the brainchild of a college student organizing his dorm room closet to a successful business with more than 77 franchise locations. To reach customers across the U.S. and internationally, the company centered their digital marketing strategy on creating locally relevant campaigns.

It’s no surprise that local campaigns are a focus for many businesses--from finding directions to looking up a phone number, more people are going online to find local information. In fact, more than 20% of searches on Google are related to location, and people often act quickly on local searches. Research shows that using smartphones, 88% of people who search for local information take action within a day.

To help you organize your local ad campaigns this spring, we’re introducing three new features in AdWords to help you create ads that are more relevant to local customers.

Target customers by zip code

If you customize your direct mail, outdoor ads, or newspaper ads at a postal code level, you now can easily do the same in AdWords in the US. We are introducing the ability to target more than 30,000 US ZIP Codes with your AdWords campaigns.

You will be able to add up to 1,000 postal codes at a time to your search ad campaigns with AdWords Location Targeting. Plus, you can get feedback on the performance of your local campaigns by viewing campaign performance statistics at the postal code level.

"Location targeting within AdWords helped us double lead volume and cut the cost to acquire new customers in half,” said Lois Erbay, Director of Marketing, California Closet Company. “We plan on building on that success by using ZIP Code targeting to create even more locally relevant campaigns for our customers.”

More locally relevant ads in less time

To help you easily create a custom ad title, text, display URL, and/or destination URL for all of your locations at scale, we’ve developed location insertion for location extensions. You’ll no longer need to create multiple ads for multiple locations--this new feature automatically inserts the city, phone number, or zip code of your local business into your ad text.

For example, if your ad text says: “Find a {lb.city:Local} Store or Shop Online,” a user viewing your ad in Chicago would see: “Find a Chicago Store or Shop Online.” This new feature cuts out all the work to building out ad text featuring local information for all your locations.

Ad with location insertion in the text and display URL

“We’ve had amazing success manually customizing our creative with local information for our top markets, which shows us that customers want locally-relevant results when it comes to a service like storage,” said Chris Laczi, Advertising Director, Uncle Bob's Self Storage. “That’s why we’re very excited about location insertion. It will simplify the task of creating locally customized ads for our 400+ locations, and we expect it will greatly enhance conversion rate of our ads.”

You must have location extensions set up and running in order to enable location insertion. Location insertion will work even if your location extensions don’t show because of other extensions. We detect location based on where your customer is physically located or by the geographic locations she may have shown interest in.

Find out more about location insertion and location extensions.

Better clarity and control

When we launched advanced location targeting in March 2011, we provided you with more control over how you geographically target your ads. Based on advertiser feedback, we’re implementing four additional enhancements that will make location targeting options clearer and more powerful. Read more about these enhancements in the Help Center and in this blog post.

There is significant opportunity for businesses to reach local customers online and win moments that matter by delivering the right ad in the right context. Stay tuned for more information on how ZIP Code targeting can help you grow your business.

We want to hear from you about your success in getting local with AdWords--share your story here and we might reach out to you to participate in our upcoming blog posts.

Posted by Richard Holden, Product Management Director

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More clarity and control with location targeting improvements

When we launched advanced location targeting in March 2011, we provided you with more control over how you geographically target your ads. Based on advertiser feedback, we’re implementing four additional enhancements that will make location targeting options clearer and more powerful. Here’s an overview of what’s changing.

Location targeting is now easier to understand.

First, we’ve reworded the options to help make them clearer. Here is what the options for advanced location targeting used to look like:

Here is what we’re unveiling today:

Show ads to people in a physical location, without exception.

Previously, if you had selected “Target using physical location,” your ad would show to people in your targeted location as long as they were not searching for something related to a different location. Now, when you select “People in my targeted location,” your ad shows to people in your targeted location, without exception.

Let’s say you are an airline using physical location targeting to reach customers in Atlanta, GA looking to fly to Hawaii. You have the keyword “flights to hawaii” in your ad group. Previously, your ad wouldn’t appear for any prospective customers in Atlanta that were searching for “flights to hawaii” because the search term indicated that they were interested in Hawaii. With the new setting “People in my targeted location,” the airline can now reach the customers in Atlanta searching for “flights to hawaii.”

This enhancement has been beneficial in increasing VEGAS.com’s ability to target offers to users based on where they are located at the time of the search. “As a leading destination travel site, our goal is to send the right message to a user as they plan their travel well ahead of time from their home market. Advanced Location Targeting has given us that ability,” said Dan Hippler, Vice-President of Marketing, Vegas.com.

Greater control over location targeting on the Display Network

Previously, the only location targeting signal applicable to ads on the Google Display Network was the likely physical location of the user. Now, both the location extracted from the content of the page and the likely physical location can be used, making advanced location targeting applicable for the Display Network for the first time. The default setting is to show to people “in” or “viewing pages about” your targeted location, but you can edit this option at any time.

Let’s say a customer in Atlanta is planning a trip to Hawaii and she’s looking at websites about fun things to do in Hawaii. A coffee plantation tour service from Hawaii would like to show ads about its offers to such a user. Similarly, an airline would like to advertise flight services to this user. The new targeting enhancements give the tour service and airline such capabilities, as both an ad targeted to Hawaii for a coffee plantation tour and an ad targeted to Atlanta for flights from Atlanta may now both show on the same page.

There are several situations in which we will not use location to target an ad. For example, a user reading about news in Hawaii may not be interested in “Hawaii tours”. For this reason, we currently only consider the location signal on a limited set of pages when we believe it may be useful. You can gain insight into the sites on which your ads are showing on the placement report, and into the locations on the geographic report.

Note that all campaigns targeting the Display Network will automatically be opted into the default option, which is to reach people in, searching for, or viewing pages about your targeted location. If you wish to exclude campaign traffic from people viewing pages about your location, you can choose “People in my targeted location” in advanced location options.

More easily avoid getting impressions for excluded areas

We have also changed the advanced location exclusion methods. Previously, the less restrictive option, “Exclude by physical location only,” was the default. Based on feedback from advertisers, we have re-worded the exclusion options and made the more restrictive option, “People in, searching for, or viewing pages about my excluded location,” the default. This way you avoid getting impressions for excluded areas regardless of whether your customers are located or interested in those areas.

What it looked like before:

What we’re launching today:

For example, now by default excluding Chicago means your ad won’t show for customers in Chicago or those outside Chicago who included “Chicago” in their searches.

This change will only impact newly created campaigns and will not affect existing campaigns.

Remember, advanced location targeting may limit the exposure of your ads, so it isn’t suited for all advertising goals.

To find out more about advanced location targeting or to change your settings, visit our help center. If you use AdWords Editor, details on how these changes will impact you can be found in the AdWords Editor help center.

Posted by Smita Hashim, Group Product Manager Local Ads

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Display Campaign Optimizer Available to All

Recently we announced the most significant enhancement to our contextual engine ever: the ability to optimize Google Display Network campaigns down to the keyword level using Next-Gen Keyword Contextual Targeting. These new controls will help advertisers fine-tune their campaign performance on a completely new level - like upgrading from a standard engine to a 6-speed manual gear-shift race car. For advertisers that prefer to put their campaigns on cruise-control and let Google technology do the heavy lifting, our suite of automatic optimization tools maximize the performance of your Google Display Network campaigns while saving you valuable time and resources. From adjusting bids with Conversion Optimizer and Enhanced CPC, to automatically finding optimal placements around the network with Display Campaign Optimizer - these features help advertisers achieve their ROI goals, with a fraction of the effort.

Display's Self-Driving Car - Display Campaign Optimizer

The Display Campaign Optimizer was launched in 2010 as a limited beta, and since has become one of our most popular automation tools for large advertisers managing high volume campaigns. In addition to fully automating your targeting and bidding, it uses a variety of signals like context, demographics and interest categories to find additional conversions across our vast AdSense publisher network - all at your desired CPA.

Watch how it works

As we highlighted last fall, advertisers have had great success using Display Campaign Optimizer. Recently it helped Dale Carnegie Training expand their online reach to more than 85 countries in the world without a lot of hands-on effort. After implementing the Display Campaign Optimizer on two campaigns, they increased conversions by 308% and 101% in only six months while maintaining a steady cost-per-lead.

Dale Carnagie Wins Friends and Influences Buyers with Display Campaign Optimizer

Now Open to All

With greater adoption and a significantly improved engine, we’re excited to announce that Display Campaign Optimizer is exiting “beta” and available to all advertisers through AdWords. Previously only large advertisers with very high conversion volumes (150/month) could take advantage of this powerful tool. The new and improved Display Campaign Optimizer now has the same low conversion requirement (15/month) as Conversion Optimizer. This means you can simply opt-into DCO on any campaign running on Conversion Optimizer and take advantage of the added benefit of more conversions!

Get Started!

Starting today you can easily set-up Display Campaign Optimizer campaigns in AdWords. For more information on how to set up your Display Campaign Optimizer campaigns, review our step-by - step guide on our AdWords Help Center.

Posted by David Mitby, Product Manager Display Campaign Optimizer, and Abhinay Sharma Sr Engineering Manager

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