Boost Your CTR for the Holidays by Picking Your Best Creative

Testing is a great thing, but it’s also important to know when and how to pick a winner and reap the benefits of your hard work.

Choose strategic moments to remove your worse performing ads and apply the lessons that you’ve learned.  There are times, such as the holiday shopping season when user search interest reaches its peak, when it’s in your best interest to run with your best performing creative.

Testing sacrifices some short term efficiency to ultimately improve your account in the long run.  For that reason, there is an opportunity cost to leaving your tests running longer than they need to.  Take a look at this example:

Ad A and Ad B have minor differences in performance, but Ad A still generates two more leads at a cheaper rate.  Here’s what the account would look like running Ad A all by itself:
Even with the small differences in the example, there is a tangible benefit to reallocating your impressions to the absolute best creative.  Imagine what could happen if all of those impressions in your account (where the differences in CPC, CTR and conversion rate might be much bigger than this example) are going to the best possible creative.

There are a number of different processes that you can follow (depending on your rotation settings) to get your best ads to show for those valuable holiday impressions.

If your campaign is using auto-optimization, we’ll automatically bias impressions toward the ads that are statistically likely to perform better.  While poorly performing ads are already being shown infrequently, it might also be time to cut out the fat.

Starting with your highest volume ad groups, identify the worst performing ads and delete them.  You’ll be able to spot them quickly based on relatively poor performance and low impressions compared to the top performers in their ad group.

If your ads are set to rotate evenly (or indefinitely), start with high volume ad groups where ads have had enough impressions with which you can confidently make a decision.

When manually optimizing, you’ll have to decide which metric is most important to you.  Consider creating your own metrics, such as conversions/thousand impressions or revenue/thousand impressions.

As your tests are concluded, don’t restart them during your heavy season.  Let your top ads shine throughout your peak season, but keep track of ad groups that are no longer testing (via labels) so that you can easily restart your tests once things settle down.

Two things to remember for either of these processes:

1. Make sure to look at your mobile-preferred ads separately from your desktop ads, as these will likely perform differently than their desktop counterparts. 
2. It's possible that certain keywords within an ad group perform best with ads other than the top performer. This might happen in an ad group comprised of disparately themed keywords (check your new-and-improved opportunities tab for places this may be happening in your account). You can see the performance of each ad against each keyword by segmenting your ad report by keyword. One solution might be to separate such keywords into their own ad group, so they can serve against the ad with which they perform the best.

What if your ad tests don’t have enough data?

This happens all the time, particularly with smaller ad groups and campaigns.  You’ll have three options to end these tests:

Directional: Pick the ad that is in the lead at this moment.  It couldn’t pass through any peer-reviewed scientific journals, but you’re still basing your decision on recent performance.

Referential: Look for trends in messaging within your high volume ad groups.  If it’s the same basic test across both ad groups (i.e. one main benefit against another), you can reasonably infer that the ads will perform similarly.  Ensure that whatever significant tests you refer to are similar enough to make sense.  You wouldn’t want your successful messaging about shoes to decide how you’ll sell vacation plans.  Boots, however, could potentially apply the lessons from shoe ads.

Indeterminate: Continue to wait until your tests get more information, possibly enabling auto-optimization for your ads.  Not acting is a defensible decision, but it won’t improve your performance immediately.  Low volume ad groups are almost always going to continue being low volume, so the sooner you get comfortable making decisions with limited information on those ad groups, the sooner you could start to see performance improve.

Whichever route you decide to take, you should still end up with two ads in each of your ad groups - one for desktop and one for mobile-preferred.

If you’re merely pausing your ads (since you don’t have enough traffic yet), make sure that you’re labelling them intelligently and clearly so that tests can be resumed once the time is right.

Ending tests doesn’t mean you’re against testing.  Testing is a great thing that leads to a healthy account and a well-informed, data-driven advertiser.  Ending a test is a little like pushing your car into the red - you do it when you need to, but if you do it all the time you’re going to eventually stall out.

This holiday season, treat your account right by cleaning out your low performing ad copy.  Then, when things slow down and you have a nice, clean account to work with, you can restart your testing with something new from our Creatives That Clicks whitepaper.

Posted by Matt Lawson, Director, Performance Ads Marketing

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Making a List, Checking It Twice: The Essential Paid Search Holiday Checklist

The holiday season is about giving.  And, of course, buying.  You know this, and your holiday paid search plan is almost definitely in place by now - but is there anything that could have slipped through the cracks?  We want to help you get every drop of retail goodness out of the busy weeks ahead, so we put together this checklist to ensure that your plan accounts for everything it should.

Download the Essential Paid Search Holiday Checklist

Does your plan account for all of those little things that may get overlooked?

• Efficient communication with your team
• Driving performance with the right strategies and messaging
• Contingency plans if things don’t go as you imagined they would

Regardless of what your account and account team looks like, it’s never a bad idea to double check that the pieces to your master plan are all in place.

With every day during the holiday season being critically important, decisions can get magnified.  So make the right decisions and amplify your success.  Download the Essential Paid Search Holiday Checklist today.  Your team (and your account) can thank you once things settle down after the Last Day to Ship Before Christmas has come and gone.

Posted by Matt Lawson, Director, Performance Ads Marketing

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Improvements to location targeting for international searches

The world is getting smaller. Today, people use search to shop for products and services from around the corner or across the world. This means that every business can now be a global business.

To help you connect with your customers - wherever they’re located - we’re improving the way location targeting works in AdWords. Starting the week of November 11, 2013, advertisers using either the default or ‘location of interest’ setting will be able to show ads to potential customers by taking into account both the location that people are searching for, as well as the location they are searching from -- even when they are international searches. For example, let’s say you own a hotel, and you are currently targeting Paris with the keyword “Paris hotels.” Previously, only people searching on Google.fr or Google.com from France could see your ad. Starting the week of November 11, your ads will be eligible to show to people searching for “Paris hotels” from anywhere in the world -- for example, someone who lives in New York City who is booking a vacation in Paris.

These improvements help you share your message with more customers who have expressed interest in your business and deliver a better set of results to people who are searching with locations in their intent.

Most advertisers will find that this change improves the reach of their ads with no action needed. In fact, this is currently how targeting works within countries. This update just ensures that searches across countries work in the same way. Your ads will continue to show to your target audience based on the location targeting options that you have set. In some cases you may see a change in impression volume since your ads can now show to people who are searching for your business from places where your ads weren’t previously showing.

These changes offer broader coverage for your ads while keeping your existing location options intact. If you prefer to narrow your location settings, you can still do so using advanced location options by selecting the “People in my targeted location” radio button.  You can also exclude geographic locations to prevent your ads from showing in selected regions.

People are searching in ways that transcend geographical boundaries, and we want to ensure that AdWords reflects this global reality. These location targeting updates make it easier for potential customers to find your business, and easier for you to connect with them – wherever they may be looking.

Posted by Nicholas Boos, Product Manager, AdWords

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New Flexible Bid Strategy and Webinar: Target Return on Ad Spend

In May, we introduced flexible bid strategies as part of our ongoing initiative to improve real-time bid automation in AdWords. Today, we are announcing target return on ad spend (ROAS), a new bid strategy, as part of this broader initiative to provide greater flexibility and control over performance targets and better overall return from your ad spend.  You should see the target ROAS bid strategy rolling out to your account over the coming weeks.

Target ROAS helps you maximize revenue by automatically adjusting your keyword, ad group, and campaign-level bids to meet a custom target return on ad spend. Your target ROAS represents how much revenue you want to earn for each dollar you spend on AdWords. For example, if your goal is to earn $7 for each $1 you spend on AdWords, your target ROAS would be 700%.

Harnessing the same real-time bidding technology behind Target CPA and Enhanced CPC, target ROAS takes into account signals such as location, browser, time of day, operating system and more to adjust your bids based on your ad’s predicted performance.

Grow sales and hit your ROAS goals with ease

To demonstrate the power of target ROAS, we’ll walk you through an example. Let’s say you’re an advertiser whose conversion values vary from product to product. Ideally, you’d love to bid higher on keywords that lead to larger orders, and lower for keywords that lead to smaller ones, however, this would be time consuming and complex to do manually.

You can use target ROAS to help you dynamically select the right bid for each auction. Here’s what you’d do next:

1. Set up conversion values in Conversion Tracking so that AdWords understands the value of orders placed on your site.
2. Choose the ROAS percentage that matches your business goals. You can learn about setting an appropriate target ROAS here.
3. Create a new “Target ROAS” bid strategy in the Shared Library. (see image below)
4. Enter your target ROAS into your newly created flexible bid strategy.
5. Apply the new bid strategy to keywords, ad groups or campaigns.

Once you’ve applied this bid strategy to keywords in your account, AdWords will predict the likelihood that a click will lead to a high-value sale. Based on this likelihood, the system then sets unique bids for each click, taking into account your specified ROAS target. Since this happens automatically and in real time every time your ad is shown, your bids are optimized toward your goals without  having to enter a single manual bid.

Once you begin using target ROAS, you’ll see a rough average of the Max CPC bids Google is setting in Search Network auctions in your Max CPC column. This helps illustrate the auctions’ bids for keywords that are using the bid strategy.

Learn more

To learn more about getting started with target ROAS, visit the AdWords Help Center. You can also tune into the Target ROAS webinar on October 22nd for a live walkthrough on setting up conversion values and using this new strategy. You can sign up for the webinar here.

Posted by Wilfred Yeung, Product Manager, Bidding in AdWords

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AdWords Editor 9.9 is now available

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Mark Martel, Google Ads Team

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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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Impression share reporting changes are here

Impression share (IS) is the number of impressions you received in a campaign or ad group divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive. Today, we are rolling out several improvements and changes for AdWords impression share reporting announced back on October 1st. Here’s a recap of what’s new and some tips on how to use impressions share metrics.

What’s new
Here’s a list of the improvements.

1. Distinct search and display columns. We’re adding new columns to cleanly separate search and display impression share. 
2. “Hour of day” segmentation. Based on your feedback, we’re enabling “Hour of day” segmentation so you can evaluate how your ad coverage varies by the hour. 
3. Filters, charts and rules. You’ll be able to apply filters, see charts, and apply automated rules using IS metrics. 
4. Accuracy. We’re improving the accuracy of how we calculate impression share data. 

As previously mentioned on our blog and social media, along with these changes, historical IS reporting data is now only available going back to October 1, 2012.

Tips on using impression share metrics
Many optimization experts advise a regular review of impression share metrics in well-performing campaigns and ad groups where you want more volume. Use the “Search Impression Share” (or “Display Impression Share” for display campaigns) and look for values below 100%. A lower IS metric means more opportunity for incremental impressions, clicks and conversions.

Once you’ve identified well-performing campaigns or ad groups with good growth potential, you’ll want to determine which changes to make to increase your results. Start by looking at the “Lost IS (budget)” (for either Search or Display). This column tells you what percent of the time your ads didn’t appear because your daily budget was insufficient. To reduce lost impressions due to budget, simply raise your daily budget. In general, you’ll end up acquiring more customers at a similar ROI.

When you’re satisfied with the results you’re seeing by reducing your “Lost IS (budget),” you can then look at your “Lost IS (rank).” This tells you what percent of impressions you missed out on due to an ad rank that was too low. To address this, you can optimize to improve your Quality Score or increase your bids. If you decide to increase your bids to increase ad impressions, closely watch how your other key performance metrics like cost per acquisition, profit, and return on ad spend are affected.

Phasing out old IS columns in February 2013
With the new IS columns now available, we’re planning to phase out the old IS columns in February 2013. Any saved reports using old IS metrics columns will need to be updated to use the new columns. When you try to access a report in the AdWords interface that’s using the old IS columns, you’ll be guided through the necessary steps to replace them with the new IS columns.

More Discussion
We hope these changes and tips help you make better optimization decisions. To exchange ideas about using IS metrics with other advertisers, you can click over to the AdWords Community. We also encourage you to contact AdWords support if you have questions.

Posted by Dan Friedman, AdWords Product Manager

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AdWords Hangouts on Air series - Answering your most frequently asked questions

Wonder what to do when you can’t find your ad? Or how to diagnose the cause of a performance fluctuation?

We’re introducing a new Hangout on Air series on the Google Ads +Page where AdWords specialists from the 866-2-GOOGLE support team will discuss many of the issues you contact us about most frequently.

On November 8 at 11 AM PDT, the AdWords experts will help you identify reasons your ads might not always appear to users. And then on November 15 at 11 AM PDT, we’ll talk about how to discover what causes spikes and dips in your AdWords traffic.

To join the Hangouts, just sign into Google+ and add the Google Ads +Page to your circles. Each week we’ll put up a post soliciting your questions. Then, on Thursday, navigate to your Stream where you’ll be able to view our Hangout live with just one click.

See you there!

Posted by Courtney Pannell & Divya Vishwanath, AdWords support team

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