Bidding Best Practices (Part 3) - Calculating mobile bid adjustments

Today’s post about calculating mobile bid adjustments is the third in a bidding best practices series. The previous post covered improving your results with location bid adjustments.

People are now constantly connected and switching seamlessly between devices. In fact, more than 38% of our daily media interactions occur on mobile¹. This presents advertisers with new opportunities to reach customers anytime, anyplace, on any device. At Google, we want to help you capitalize on these opportunities and develop new strategies for your business to win on mobile.

Mobile bid adjustments in AdWords enhanced campaigns give advertisers the power to optimize bids across devices — all from a single campaign. In today’s post, we’ll help you understand how to calculate a mobile bid adjustment that accounts for the total conversion value your mobile ads drive for your business.

Review your current desktop and mobile performance
Before calculating your mobile bid adjustment, you can run an AdWords report to review your current desktop and mobile performance. While online conversions, app downloads, and calls are easy to track in AdWords, other conversions such as in-store visits may be harder to attribute directly to your ads. For those conversions, you may need to estimate their value. The closer you can estimate the value of these conversions, the more optimized your bid will be on mobile.

Calculate your mobile bid adjustment
The key to optimizing your mobile bid adjustment is to identify the ratio of mobile vs desktop (and tablet) conversion value. This is calculated by dividing your value per click on mobile by your value per click on desktop.

We’ll illustrate this calculation using the table below. Let’s say this data belongs to a national retailer with mobile and desktop websites as well as physical stores. In the past month, this retailer saw 10,000 clicks from her mobile ads and 10,000 clicks from her desktop and tablet ads.  Her mobile ads drove $900 of revenue from phone calls to her stores, $5,000 from online sales and $5,000 from in-store visits for a total of $10,900. During this same month, her desktop and tablet ads drove $100 of revenue from calls, $10,000 from online sales, and $2,000 from in-store visits for a total of $12,100.

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With this information, the retailer calculates the value per click (for mobile and desktop) by dividing the total value (i.e., the total revenue from all conversion types) by the total number of clicks, respectively. In this case, the mobile value per click is $1.09 and the desktop value per click is $1.21.

The retailer’s mobile bid adjustment is the ratio of these two values: she divides the value per click on mobile by the value per click on desktop and then subtracts 1. In this case we have (1.09/1.21) - 1, or a -10% mobile bid adjustment that can be entered into AdWords.

Iterate and test
As with all online marketing techniques, mobile bid adjustments aren’t something you should just “set and forget.” Frequent iteration and testing will help you account for changes in seasonality or business operations.  Due to varying screen sizes on mobile, we also recommend that you keep a close eye on your mobile impression share so that your ads show in the top positions.

Learn more
To learn more about mobile bid adjustments, visit the AdWords Help Center or watch this recording of this hangout on air, “Enhanced Campaigns: Optimizing Mobile Strategy.”

To use mobile bid adjustments, you’ll need to upgrade your campaigns to enhanced campaigns. Starting on July 22, 2013, we will begin automatically upgrading all campaigns.

Next week, we’ll dive deeper into ways you can use tools like conversion optimizer and eCPC to automate your bid settings based on specific business goals like ROI.

Posted by Andy Miller, Head of Mobile Search Solutions

¹http://www.google.com/think/research-studies/the-new-multi-screen-world-study.html

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Bidding Best Practices (Part 2): Improving Results with Location Bid Adjustments

Today’s post about improving results with location bid adjustments is the second in a bidding best practices series. The series began with prioritizing and iterating on your bid adjustments.

Your advertising performance almost always varies by location, no matter what kind of business you run. The good news is that if you optimize your bids for different locations, you can increase your sales and ROI.

Optimizing bids for better performance by location
With enhanced campaigns, it’s now much easier to boost bids in locations where your performance is stronger and reduce bids where performance is weaker. Before enhanced campaigns, you’d have to set up and manage an identical campaign for every location where you wanted unique bids. Since this was hard, the most common approach to location optimization has been to cut out underperforming locations using targeting exclusions. But in the long run, this approach can limit your growth and reduce your business competitiveness. So we recommend using bid adjustments rather than location exclusions.

Calculating location bid adjustments
Start by downloading a location performance report. Here’s how, using the AdWords interface:

1. Set the date range to the past 30 days (longer if your campaign is on the smaller side).
2. Click on the “Location details” button and select “What triggered your ad.”
3. Click the View button and select Region.
4. Click Download.

To maximize orders or leads at a particular CPA or ROI level, a common best practice for setting bid adjustments is to equalize your target metrics across all locations. As a math formula, it looks like this:

Location bid adjustment = 100% * ( ( Campaign goal ÷ Actual performance ) - 1 )

Here’s an example from a campaign with a cost-per-action goal.

Example of calculating your location bid adjustment

Location	Conversions	Cost	CPA	CPA Goal	Location bid adjustment
Florida	100	$800	$8	$10	100% * [(10÷8) - 1] = +25%
New York	120	$1080	$9	$10	100% * [(10÷9) - 1] = +11%
Ohio	70	$1050	$15	$10	100% * [(10÷15) - 1] = -33%
Pennsylvania	85	$850	$10	$10	100% * [(10÷10) - 1] = 0%

You can implement your bid adjustments in the AdWords interface (directions) or using the AdWords Editor (directions).

Businesses with local stores or service areas
Closer customers are often more likely to buy from you and less costly to serve. So if your business has local stores or service areas, you should consider optimizing your bids based on customer proximity. For example, you can easily set one location target for customers within 2 miles of your business locations, and a second target for customers within 20 miles of your business locations (directions). Then use the approach described above to calculate your optimum bid adjustment for your two location extension targets.

Tips and reminders

• Maintain a broad location target to cover your entire potential market. Targeting too narrowly can limit your reach, clicks and conversions.
  
  
• It’s OK to set overlapping location targets with bid adjustments. We’ll only apply the most specific location bid adjustment. For example, say you have a +10% bid adjustment for Canada and a +20% bid adjustment for Montreal. When someone searches in Montreal, your bid will be increased by 20%. And you’ll see distinct performance stats for Montreal and all of Canada except Montreal on the Locations subtab on the campaign Settings main tab.
  
  
• Be careful when you don’t have much data. Otherwise your calculated bid adjustments could end up being too high or too low, and you could end up with worse results instead of better. If you don’t have statistical expertise on hand, we recommend not adjusting bids in locations with fewer than 1000 clicks and 30 conversions, as a general rule of thumb. Lengthening the date range for your reports to the past 90 days or more can help.
  
  
• Periodically check performance and increment your bid adjustments. From time to time, check your performance for each location target on the Locations subtab. Incrementally raise your bid adjustment where your performance is above your goal, and lower your bid adjustment where your performance is below your goal. This will allow you to optimize your bids over time and adjust to changing consumer behavior.
  

Posted by John Sullivan, Global Search Solutions

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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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Modcloth and Inflection Drive Performance with Next-Gen Keyword Contextual Targeting

Advertisers use contextual targeting on the Google Display Network to reach new customers as they browse content related to their products and services. In March we launched Next-Gen Keyword Contextual Targeting, which enabled our display advertisers to manage their contextual campaigns with the same level of precision and granularity as search. In a few short months we’ve been delighted to see how it’s translated into real results for our customers, and today we’d like to shine a light on two specific examples.

Modcloth, an online retailer selling vintage inspired clothing, had been using contextual targeting on the Google Display Network as a way to scale their message across a wide variety of sites. Their challenge was figuring out which keywords were triggering which conversions across their multiple product lines. With keyword level reporting and optimization levers, Theresa Rockovich, Modcloth’s SEM Manager, was excited to finally put her SEM skills to work. “Before the ability to target and bid on keywords, we were barely making these campaigns profitable. Now that we’ve been able to adjust our bids and see which keywords are driving performance, margins are the healthiest they’ve ever been.” In nine weeks, their keyword-level optimizations helped turn three unprofitable contextual campaigns into some of their highest performers. Their jewelry lines saw a 460% increase in click-through-rates and their dresses campaign saw a 700% increase in ROI.

Andrew Wong, Marketing Director at Inflection, similarly took a search-focused approach to managing their contextual campaigns. “We took the shell of our search campaigns and copied them onto the Google Display Network” and created specific page URLs for each product line. After a few weeks of generating traffic, they turned on the Display Campaign Optimizer – the Google Display Network’s auto-optimization tool that automatically manages targeting and bidding – and the results were phenomenal. With the help of DCO, they increased conversions by 480% at a cost-per-action 10% lower than the rest of their display campaigns.

Keyword level targeting is one of the many reasons why our Display Campaign Optimizer  has improved in both accuracy and efficiency the past year. We've seen advertisers are usually able to reach their target cost-per-acquisition (CPA) in about two weeks, versus the two months it often took before these changes. Coupled with new bidding capabilities, such as real-time bidding, MaxCPC and Enhanced CPC, DCO is now available to use on ‘hybrid’ search and display campaigns.

And it gets even better

In addition to keyword targeting, bidding and reporting, today we’re announcing  new keyword status messages to assist advertisers troubleshoot for more effective and consistent keyword matching and delivery. Now you’ll know if a keyword is pointing to a suspended site, has been disapproved, or if it matches too few pages (Few Page Matches). We’ve also added a notification that alerts users with display-only campaigns when a Display Network bid - which overrides keyword bids when ads are shown on the Google Display Network - is in place. We recommend removing the Display Network Bid in display-only campaigns to take advantage of keyword level bidding. Click here to learn how.

Learn More

We look forward to seeing even more success stories as we continue to roll out these new features! To learn more about how to implement these strategies into your display campaigns, download the Google Display Network Guide here!

Posted by Katie Hamilton, Product Marketing Manager Google Display Network

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Make better decisions in AdWords with your Google Analytics data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Dan Friedman, AdWords Product Manager

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Make smarter decisions with the new Auction insights report

A key component of developing a search ads strategy is understanding what other advertisers are doing, and using this intelligence to optimize campaigns for top performance. To empower advertisers to make better informed optimization decisions, we’re launching the Auction insights report.

We currently provide Impression share columns within campaign and ad group reports that show the percentage of impressions received, compared to the estimated number of impressions for which they were eligible. While this report gives valuable insight into missed opportunities in aggregate, it also raises additional questions -- who competes in the same auctions, and can performance data be made available at a more detailed level?

With the Auction insights report, you can compare your performance with other advertisers who compete in the same set of auctions as you do. You can see how often your ads rank higher than other advertisers’ ads on the search results page, and how often your ads appear compared to theirs based on your estimated possible impressions. This information can help you make strategic decisions about bids, budgets, and keyword choices by showing you where you are succeeding and where you may be missing opportunities for improved performance.

The Auction insights report provides data at the keyword-level, and provides five different statistics: impression share, average position, overlap rate, position above rate, and top of page percent:

Note: Mock data only.

Reports can be generated for one keyword at a time, and data is only available for keywords that meet a minimum threshold of activity for the time period specified. If you see this icon () to the left of a keyword in your statistics table on the Keyword tab, you’ll know that the Auction insights report is available for that keyword.



Note: This report provides information on other advertisers that participated in the same auctions as you. This does not indicate that the other advertisers have the same keywords, match types, or other targeting settings as you. The other advertisers’ metrics shown are based only on instances when your ads were also estimated to be eligible to appear. These reports will not reveal the actual keywords, quality, or settings from your campaign, and it will not give you insight into the same information for others.

While this information is already available by performing queries on Google search -- and many already attempt to estimate this data by scanning the ads that appear -- this report will make it easier to access and understand this information. It is available at no additional cost to advertisers whose keywords have a minimum threshold of activity.

This report will be rolling out over the next few days. For more information on the Auction insights report, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Update - Auction insights report icon unavailable

We are removing the Auction insights report icon () from the statistics table on the Keywords tab. The report is still available for keywords which meet the minimum threshold of traffic.

To determine the keywords for which to run the report, we recommend sorting keywords by impressions. If the report is not available for the selected keyword and time frame, no data will be shown on the report page.

We’ll update this blog post as soon as the icon, or an alternative solution, is once again available.

Posted by Bhanu Narasimhan, Group Product Manager, AdWords

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Model bid changes at scale with campaign bid simulator

When we launched bid simulator in 2009, we wanted to make it easy for you to understand the impact of bids on your advertising results. Until now, you’ve been able to access bid simulator at the keyword and ad group level.

To allow you to more easily simulate and apply bid changes at scale, we’re pleased to announce the launch of campaign bid simulator.

To access campaign bid simulator, go to the Opportunities tab and select “campaign bid simulator” from the left navigation tree.

With campaign bid simulator, you can:

• View bid changes in aggregate and model changes even when keywords or ad groups might not have enough data for this on their own. 
• See what might happen if you increased or decreased all your bids by a specific percentage (10%, for example). 
• See whether you may need to increase your campaign budget to ensure it doesn’t become limited by budget at the new bid value. 
• Model what happens if you changed all your bids in the campaign to a single value. 
• Download the bid-simulation data at the account or campaign level. 
• Download an AdWords Editor-compatible file with bid amounts at the simulated level and the ad groups and keywords to which they should be applied. 

Note: this is mock data only and should not be seen as a real or accurate simulation

For more information, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Sheridan Kates, Product Manager, AdWords

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Writing ads that attract customers

With the theme of Valentine's Day on our mind, we're sharing tips on how to spice up your AdWords text ads, courtesy of the AdWords Help Center.

Start by taking a moment to consider what you want to do with your ad. Then use the six guidelines below to create an ad that's accurate, to-the-point, and engaging.

• Highlight what makes your business, product, or offer unique
• Include prices, promotions, and exclusives
• Tell your customers what they can do
• Include at least one of your keywords in your ad text
• Match your ad to your landing page
• Experiment

Here are some examples:

Couples Cooking Class

www.example.com/cook

Sauté your way to her heart!

Register as a couple and save 20%

Hot Air Balloon Ride

www.example.com/balloonride

Love is in the air. Save 30% today.

Soar in the world's largest balloon.

Lovers Laser Tag

www.example.com/lasertag

Like Cupid's Bow, only faster

15% off for couples on Feb 14th.

Read the full article and watch a video on Tips for creating successful text ads in the AdWords Help Center to get additional examples on how to improve your ad.

Now that you've optimized your text ads, consider creating a video ad. Follow the steps mentioned in the Tips for creating effective video ads article.

Posted by the AdWords Help Center Team

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Getting Started with Automated Rules

Earlier this year, we launched Automated Rules, a feature that lets you save time by scheduling automatic changes to your account based on criteria that you specify. Since then, tens of thousands of advertisers have created rules to manage their accounts more effectively and even deploy more advanced strategies.

Whether you're new to Automated Rules or already an expert, we wanted to share with you some of the most popular examples of rules that AdWords users have created. We hope that these examples can help you take better advantage of the feature.

Click here for details on how to set up these types of rules. You'll need to adjust them to meet your business needs and goals. Let us know what you think of these examples, and send us your favorite rules.

Scheduling ads

• Turning on/off special ads for a promotional event
• Turning on/off certain ads on a repeating basis (e.g., every weekend)
• Turning on/off a special ad campaign for a promotional event

Pausing low-performing ads or keywords

• Pausing low-performing keywords based on success metrics (e.g., high cost per conversion)
• Pausing low-performing ads based on success metrics (e.g., low CTR)

Bids and bid scheduling

• Adjusting bids for keywords based on cost per conversion
• Changing bids to reach a desired average position
• Raising bids to ensure ads show on the first page
• Bid scheduling (e.g., a higher bid during certain hours of the day)

Controlling budgets and cost

• Increasing budget for campaigns that convert well (using cost per conversion)
• Budget scheduling (e.g., higher budget on certain days of the week)
• Pausing campaigns that have spent a certain amount partway through the month
• Pausing campaigns that have received a certain number of clicks partway through the day

General examples

• Understanding how to make a rule work on one, several or all campaigns
• Excluding keywords from a rule

To learn more about Automated Rules, please visit Ad Innovations. Happy automating!

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

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5 New AdWords Campaign Experiments Demo Videos

A number of advertisers have told us that they want to try AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE), but they’re not sure what to test. If you’re one of these advertisers, we’ve just created five demo videos that walk you through some example experiments you might want to try.

With our new videos, you can learn how to divide your experiment into control and experiment groups as well as how to run these four experiment types:

• Keyword match types (e.g., How does adding a modified broad match keyword affect my account?)
• Bids (e.g., What happens if I increase my bids by 10%?)
• Ad creatives (e.g., How does new ad text and a new display URL affect my performance?)
• Ad groups (e.g., Does a broader or more tightly themed ad group structure work better for me?)

We hope these videos help inspire you to run experiments in ACE! In case you need a refresher on how to set up your first experiment, watch our step-by-step video guides here.



Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

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Add +1 to help your ads stand out

People make choices about your website many times each day--whenever your pages appear in Google search results. What if the people who love your site could help their friends and other users find your great content right at the moment of decision?

That’s why we introduced the +1 button on Google search in March. +1 annotations show your customers which pages people they trust have found and enjoyed first, making it easier to find content they’re likely to care about.

Since we announced +1, we’ve gotten requests from Google search users and advertisers alike for +1 buttons in more places than just search results. That’s why today we’re making the +1 button available to sites across the web. Sometimes you want to recommend a web page after you’ve visited it. After all, how do you know you want to suggest that great hotel deal in Madrid if you haven’t checked it out yet?

We’ve partnered with a few sites where you'll see +1 buttons over the coming days:

You'll also start to see +1 buttons on other Google properties such as Android Market, Blogger, Product Search and YouTube.

Adding +1 buttons to your pages is a great way to help your ads stand out on Google. By giving your visitors more chances to +1 your pages, your search ads and organic results might appear with +1 annotations more often. This could lead to more--and better qualified--traffic to your site.

click for full size image

To get started, visit the +1 button tool on Google Webmaster Central, where you’ll configure small snippets of JavaScript to add to the pages where you want +1 buttons to appear. You can pick from a few different button sizes and styles, so choose the +1 button that best matches your site’s layout.

When a user clicks +1, that +1 applies to the URL of the page they’re on. There are some easy ways to ensure your +1s apply as often as possible to the pages appearing in Google search results.

To stay current on updates to the +1 button large and small, please subscribe to the Google Publisher Button Announce Group. For advanced tips and tricks, check our Google Code site. For information about how the +1 button affects your search ads, check out the AdWords Help Center.

If your site primarily caters to users outside of the US and Canada, you can install the +1 button code now; the +1 button is already supported in 44 languages. However, keep in mind that +1 annotations currently only appear for English search results on Google.com. We’re working on releasing +1 to other domains in the future.

If you have customers who love your content (and we bet you do), encourage them to spread the word! Add the +1 button to help your ads stand out with a personal recommendation right at the moment of decision, on Google search.


Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

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Live online webinar on ‘Advanced Optimisation for the Google Display Network’

On Wednesday, May 11th, we’ll be holding a live and interactive webinar about optimising AdWords for the Google Display Network.

The Google Display Network, which reaches over 70% of unique Internet users around the world, allows you to reach potential clients beyond search. It also has the advantage of reaching potential customers at different points of the buying cycle.

This live webinar will make recommendations for the optimal structure for your Google Display Network campaigns and provide various optimisation tips and tools—such as advanced bidding options, interest category marketing, AdWords Campaign Experiments, and reporting—that will help you in the optimisation process. We’ll also discuss using Google Analytics and Website Optimiser to improve campaign performance.

The webinar will be presented by AdWords Specialists as part of the AdWords Online Classroom (UK) and will take place on Wednesday, May 11th, 2011,from 3 pm to 4 pm BST, so make sure to sign up now!


Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

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Free online webinar: Finding Your Audience - Targeting Ads By Topic

On Wednesday, April 13th, we’ll be holding a live and interactive webinar to teach you how to target your audience using Topic Targeting in AdWords.

Topic Targeting works by contextually targeting all pages about a specific category on the Google Display Network, so you can reach your target audience while they surf relevant pages.

During this live webinar, we’ll give an overview of the new Topic Targeting tab, explain how Topic Targeting works and show you how to set up your campaign.

This webinar will be presented by AdWords Specialists as part of the AdWords Online Classroom (UK) and will take place on Wednesday, April 13th from 3 pm to 4 pm (BST/GMT+1)*, so make sure to sign up now!

* Due to Daylight Savings (clocks changing) in UK, please check your local time zone for correct equivalent time.


Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

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Put optimization ideas to the test—run AdWords Campaign Experiments in your Opportunities tab

Many of you have used the Opportunities tab to find keyword, bid, and budget ideas for your account. With each optimization idea, we provide estimates for how these ideas may affect your impressions, clicks, and cost. Now you can test these optimization ideas on your own campaigns when you run experiments in the Opportunities tab.

This new feature uses AdWords Campaign Experiments to run experiments on the keyword and bid ideas in your Opportunities tab. Experiments run on 50% of your AdWords traffic for thirty days, during which time you’ll have the chance to compare your original campaign setup with your test setup. You can decide at any time whether you want to apply your experiment settings to 100% of your traffic. If you take no action after thirty days, your experimental changes will be applied to your campaign automatically.

The ability to run experiments in the Opportunities tab has already launched in some English-language accounts and will be available to all English-language accounts over the next few days.

Start an experiment in just a few clicks:

1. Select keyword or bid ideas you want to test.
2. Select the checkbox for "Evaluate this idea for up to 30 days."
3. Click "Apply now."

(click for full-size image)

Keyword experiment setup in the Opportunities tab

Monitor your experiment performance:

When your experiment is running, you’ll be able to monitor your experiment performance from the Ideas page of the Opportunities tab.

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Monitoring experiment performance in the Opportunities tab

You’ll also be able to view performance statistics for individual keywords and bids on the Keywords tab when you segment by "Experiment."

For those of you who have wanted to try ACE but didn’t know what to test, this should help get you started. This is also a great feature for those of you who want to see a positive performance improvement before making changes to all of your traffic.

No matter how your new keywords and bids perform relative to your original setup, you’ll leave your experiment with more knowledge than you had previously, which means every experiment is a good experiment.

Posted by Lisa Shieh, Inside AdWords crew

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AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) now available in AdWords reports

Experiments are only as useful as the results they produce. For those of you who use AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) to run experiments on your keywords, bids, placements, ad groups, ad creatives, and more, you’ll be happy to know that you can now run an AdWords report to evaluate your experiment performance. You can evaluate data in your report or easily export to a spreadsheet (no more cutting and pasting)!

ACE reports are now one of the many reports you can run from the Campaigns tab (or through the API!). When you run a report segmented by “Experiment,” you’ll see a side-by-side comparison of the performance of your experimental campaign changes (“experiment”) versus your original setup (“control”). You’ll also be able to see the level of statistical significance for your experiment performance, which should help you judge if experiment performance was due to chance or an actual difference in performance. You can learn more about evaluating your results and statistical significance here.

Understanding your experiment's performance can help you determine whether you’re ready to accept your changes fully, remove changes or keep running your experiment. Reports also serve as an important record of experiment outcomes as you won’t see your past experiment data after you’ve accepted or removed your changes.

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ACE can provide you with invaluable real-time data on how campaign changes affect your account. Whether you find that you have significant improvements to make or your account is running just fine, every experiment is a good experiment! To learn more about ACE, watch our video series on YouTube or visit the AdWords Help Center.

What are you waiting for? Ready, set, test!


Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

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Live online webinar on ‘Advanced Optimisation for the Google Display Network’

On Wednesday, March 23rd, we’ll be holding a live and interactive webinar about optimising AdWords for the Display Network.

The Google Display Network, which reaches over 70% of unique Internet users around the world, allows you to reach potential clients beyond search. It also has the advantage of reaching potential customers at different points of the buying cycle.

This live webinar will give recommendations on how you can structure your Google Display Network campaigns, as well as provide various optimisation tips and tools such as advanced bidding options, interest category marketing, and reporting that will help you in the optimisation process.

This webinar will be presented by AdWords Specialists as part of the AdWords Online Classroom (UK) and will take place on Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011, from 3 pm to 4 pm GMT, 7 am to 8 am PST, so make sure to sign up now!



Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

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Live tutorial on basic AdWords reporting & analysing your performance

Want to know how to analyse your account performance? On Wednesday 16th March we’ll be delivering a live tutorial as part of the AdWords Online Classroom (UK) that will highlight best practices for generating AdWords reports and analysing the results.

We’ll focus on four key reports including; Keyword Report, See Search Terms Report, Ad Performance and Campaign Performance Reports, which will allow you not only analyse your performance but also highlight opportunities to optimise your account. In addition we’ll also show you how to download, save, schedule and e-mail these reports.

This tutorial will be presented by AdWords Specialists and is appropriate for all advertisers wanting to make their ads as informative as possible. It will take place on Wednesday, March 16th, 2011 3-4pm GMT, 7-8am PST so make sure to sign up now!


Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

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Learn about Quality Score in a live, online tutorial (UK only)

As so many attendees reported finding our last Quality Score tutorial useful, we’ve decided to re-run the live course in the AdWords Online Classroom (UK) on Wednesday 2nd March for anyone who wasn't able to attend. The key to a successful AdWords account is the relevancy of your ads, keywords, and website. Having a better understanding of Quality Score can help you improve your AdWords performance.

This course will clarify what Quality Score is and provide useful tips on improving your Quality Scores so that you can further optimise your account.

The hour-long interactive course will be delivered by two AdWords Specialists as part of the Adwords Online Classroom (UK) and will include time for Q&A. It will take place on Wednesday 2nd March from 3 pm to 4 pm GMT (7 am to 8 am PST).

If you’re interested, make sure to sign up now!

To learn more about Quality Score, you can also visit our Help Center.


Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

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Advertisers save time and uncover new keyword ideas with the Opportunities tab

If you’re a small business, time can often feel like your most valuable and most constrained resource. While you’re doing everything you need to do to keep your business up and running, important tasks like AdWords account optimization can fall to the bottom of your to-do list.

Knowing that time is a key factor for all AdWords advertisers, we created the Opportunities tab to provide you with automated and customized keyword, bid, and budget ideas. Here are two stories of advertisers who used the Opportunities tab to find new keywords quickly and easily.

Fitness Singles
Chris Mattioli founded Fitness Singles, a fitness-focused online dating website in 2003. With Chris’s dedication and some help from AdWords, he has grown his business to over one million global members today.

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Like many small business owners, Chris wanted to improve his AdWords performance, but didn’t have a lot of time to work on his account. When Chris discovered the Opportunities tab, he knew it was a good fit for Fitness Singles, since it allowed him to uncover new keywords quickly and easily.

Chris scans the keyword ideas in the Opportunities tab regularly to find terms related to fitness, online dating, and singles. He’s found many ideas that are similar to the keyword combinations and variations that are in his account, but that he may have accidentally overlooked. He’s also found completely new relevant keywords to include in his campaigns. In one instance, Chris saw terms such as promotion code and coupon among his keyword ideas. From there, he decided to add a number of discount-based keywords to his campaigns. Chris says, “The Opportunities tab can often find new keywords that are relevant our ads and that don't currently exist in our account. It also helps you identify new keyword areas--even when you thought you had it covered.”

resortsandlodges.com
Ryan Bailey, President and Co-Founder of resortsandlodges.com, describes his company as a full-service agency rather than a travel directory. "We have a rapidly growing client base of two thousand-plus and a business model that gives our clients turnkey marketing and advertising support.” While part of a large company, VEMGlobal.com, resortsandlodges.com runs as a small business and keeps its operations small and scrappy.

On the site, you can 'book your spot' to save your travel information, plan your next trip, and more
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Like Fitness Singles, resortsandlodges.com uses the Opportunities tab to find new keyword ideas and save time. Ryan says, “The Opportunities tab provides high-quality keywords--and a lot of ideas we wouldn’t have thought of otherwise, which is the whole point! It’s great that you can easily scan through the ideas and find hidden jewels and then apply those insights for both keyword selection and site optimization.”

Mollie Moore, the company’s interactive marketing manager, also used the Opportunities tab to help with a website redesign project in March 2010. The previous version of resortsandlodges.com had dozens of links at the bottom of the page, and Moore was tasked with de-cluttering and limiting these links to the most important content. Looking at the number of keyword ideas associated with a particular theme as well as the traffic estimates for each keyword idea, the team learned that “the most effective content sections were top destinations, popular resort types, popular trips, and so forth,” says Moore. “We also used ideas from the Opportunities tab to build out our meta titles, descriptions and keywords embedded in the back-end of every page on the site. Using the Opportunities tab, we can reduce guesswork in determining the most effective content."

To learn more about Fitness Singles and resortsandlodges.com and how they use the Opportunities tab, read their full case studies in the AdWords Help Center. You can learn more about the Opportunities tab in the AdWords Help Center or our YouTube video series.


Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

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