Introducing the new Opportunities tab: find more ways to improve your AdWords performance

We launched the Opportunities tab in 2009 as your personal AdWords assistant, surfacing insights to help you improve your performance in AdWords. Today we’re announcing the new Opportunities tab. We've added several new opportunity types and made each easier to understand. Now the Opportunities tab is even better at answering the question, “What else can I do to improve my performance in AdWords?”

The new Opportunities tab

New high-impact opportunities

We've added several new opportunity types for more ways to improve your performance.

• Convert more customers in your best locations: If your conversion rate differs across locations, you might see opportunities to increase your location bid adjustment where your conversion rate is high, or decrease your location bid adjustments where your conversion rate is low. 
• Get more out of your existing budget: If you’re maxing out your budget, you might see opportunities to lower your bids to capture more clicks.
• Be there more often than competitors: If your ads are being seen less frequently than other advertisers competing for the same traffic, you might see opportunities to be seen more frequently with bids to show more often than advertisers like you.
• Show ads that are more relevant: If we spot an ad group with keywords related to lots of different themes, it's harder for you to show a highly relevant ad, so you might see opportunities to create new ad groups from existing keywords.
• Reach more customers on closely related searches: If you're missing clicks on searches that are very similar to your existing keywords, you might see opportunities to broaden your keyword match types.
• Be seen on the first page: If your ads are showing below the first page when users search on high-quality keywords, you might see opportunities to raise your bids to show ads on the first page. 

Pick your best opportunities

A totally new design makes it easier to decide which opportunities to implement. For each opportunity, you'll see a short summary under "What you can do” and the possible impact under “What you might get each week.” The opportunities you’ll see are tailored to your account and selected based on their possible impact to your performance.

More opportunities are just around the corner

Check the Opportunities tab often. Whether you optimize your campaign once a day or once a month, it's constantly working in the background to spot opportunities for you to improve. And we’ll be adding even more opportunity types over time.

To learn more about the Opportunities tab, please visit our AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Deepti Bhatnagar, Product Manager, AdWords

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Making large-scale changes faster and easier in AdWords

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

Posted by Prashant Baheti, AdWords Product Manager

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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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Diagnose ads faster with new status insights icon

This week we're introducing a status insights icon in the Ads tab that provides visibility into the approval status and potential policy limitations for each individual ad creative. The new icon will be particularly valuable if you’re advertising products or services that are restricted by our advertising policies to show only in specific countries or with certain keywords.

To use the new status icon, simply hover over the speech bubble in the Status column of the Ads tab next to the ad of interest:


We’ll tell you if the individual ad is showing for the default keyword and location displayed in the hover. If you would like to re-diagnose the ad with with a different targeted location or keyword, you can edit the parameters from right within the hover:


This new icon complements the existing ad diagnosis tools, which include the status hover on the Keywords tab, a batch option to diagnose many keywords at once, and the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool.

Posted by Katie Miller, Inside AdWords crew

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Upgrade to AdWords Editor 9.7.1 for more efficient campaign management

AdWords Editor version 9.7.1 is now available for Windows and Mac. This new version includes performance improvements and several new options for editing and targeting your campaigns. A few highlights:

• Faster downloading for large accounts, and faster cut, copy, and paste (including drag-and-drop).
• A new tool for changing the capitalization of selected text in one step.
• More AdWords settings available within AdWords Editor, including advanced location settings, user interest category targeting, and Wifi traffic targeting.

For a complete list of changes and instructions, visit our release notes.

If you're already using AdWords Editor, you'll be prompted to upgrade automatically. If you're not already using AdWords Editor, you can visit our website and click "Download AdWords Editor." To learn more about AdWords Editor, visit our Help Center.

Posted by Katie Miller, 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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AdWords Editor Version 9.0 released today

Today we’re releasing AdWords Editor Version 9.0, with a number of new features designed to help you make changes across accounts more efficiently and manage new ad features, such as Ad Sitelinks and high-end mobile targeting, at scale. We’ve highlighted key changes below. More details are available in the AdWords Editor Version 9.0 release notes.

AdWords Editor Version 9.0 highlights:

Scalably manage Ad Sitelinks
Version 9.0 provides full support for Ad Sitelinks, including downloading and uploading to your account, making edits, checking changes, and importing and exporting.

Improved Add/Update Multiple and Import CSV tools
When entering new data using the Add/Update Multiple tool, you can now enter your data with the columns in any order, assign the appropriate headers to each column, select the option to remember the order of your columns for your next import, and approve or cancel the changes in the account in one click. In addition, Import CSV now includes the option to Paste Text as well as to import From File.

Set high-end mobile targeting options
AdWords Editor now supports the ability to set campaigns to target high-end mobile devices (including Android, iPhone, iPad, and Palm) and carriers in Campaign Settings.

Better manage multiple accounts and MCCs
To help you better manage multiple accounts, AdWords Editor now offers sort and search for accounts, select and remove multiple accounts, and a new dropdown menu above the Account tree in AdWords Editor that displays recently accessed accounts, so you can quickly switch to any one of them.

In addition, when adding an MCC account to the Add New AdWords Account dialog, you can search within the list of available child accounts, display extra columns, and move up to a different level in the MCC account hierarchy.

More easily find and make bulk changes to negative keywords, placements, or audiences
To more easily locate and manage negative keywords, placements, or audiences in your account, we’ve changed the way we display Negatives in AdWords Editor. The Negatives tab has been removed, and you can instead toggle between displaying negative or positive keywords, placements, or audiences by clicking the Positives or Negatives switch on each item’s respective tab.

The Select Duplicates button is now available for negative keywords when in the Duplicate keywords view mode.

The next time you log into your AdWords Editor account, you'll be prompted to upgrade. You may also download Version 9.0 from the AdWords Editor website. After you install the new version of AdWords Editor, your accounts will need to be downloaded again. To preserve your comments and unposted changes, select the Backup then Upgrade option in the automatic upgrade prompt and save the backup file to your computer. Then, re-download your account and import the backup file to AdWords Editor.

For more information, check out the release notes and visit the AdWords Editor Help Center.



Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

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An AdWords take on Search Stories

During last year’s Super Bowl, we did something unprecedented for Google--we aired our first Super Bowl commercial. Our television commercial, Parisian Love, is what we now call a “search story,” since it tells a user’s story through the eyes of the Google.com search box.

Since the first airing of Parisian Love, many new search stories have been created. While each story is unique, they all highlight the ways in which users are searching, whether it’s on Google.com, Google Maps, or mobile--and whether users are clicking on a search result or an ad.

We believe that ads are information and can be a vital part of the search process. As AdWords advertisers, we know you feel that way too, and we wanted to share with you three of our favorite search stories. These stories are all very different, but they all feature ads! As you watch the videos, can you spot them all?

Healthy Habits
A woman takes up healthier habits.
click for full size image

Love at First Bite

A sweet ending to missed connections in the big city.

click for full size image

It's Greek to Me

A hesitant traveler discovers he's born to cruise.

click for full size image

For the full video playlist, watch here.

Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

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