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Location extensions with multiple addresses available on mobile devices

Published on 09/03/2010 at 05:45 PM
Cross-posted from the Google Mobile Ads Blog

Do you have several business locations in one city? For example, are you a national retailer of consumer electronics who wants to increase foot traffic to your Los Angeles area stores?

Every day, consumers are using their high-end mobile devices to find directions to local businesses, making mobile an ideal way to reach this audience. We’re excited to streamline this experience by announcing a new enhancement to the location extensions ad format: location extensions with multiple addresses. This new feature will ensure that your customers connect with the right location of your business at the right time.

Now available on Google Maps for Mobile (GMM) versions 4.4 and above on Android devices, location extensions with multiple addresses allow consumers to find the most relevant location of your business on a Google mobile map.

Featuring your business location alongside your mobile ad is a powerful method to drive foot traffic and in-store sales. For instance, if a potential customer is looking for a wireless communications store like Sprint, an ad within GMM can display all Sprint locations near them. This not only delivers a relevant search experience, but also enables customers to visit the closest and most convenient Sprint store location.

click for full size image

Here’s how location extensions with multiple addresses work:
  1. Based on a user’s search and location signals, AdWords can display a clickable banner with the option to show all locations for a particular business in Google Maps for Mobile.

  2. When the “Show all” banner is clicked, the map displays just the locations of your business as indicated by your business icon. Using your business logo as the icon is a great opportunity to build awareness and loyalty for your brand.

  3. Clicking on a specific business location leads the user to a page with more details about the business -- including ad text, business address with directions and the ability to call or visit the website.

  4. After the search is completed, the business icon and location are automatically saved as a GMM Layer and will continue to appear on the map in subsequent search results until turned off by the user.
To take advantage of this enhancement, you must be a primary business owner and have enabled location extensions within your Google Places account. Additionally, your campaigns must target the iPhone and other high-end mobile devices with full mobile browsers. You will only be charged when users click on the website URL or the phone icon displayed on the details page of a particular business location.

Location extensions with multiple addresses launched for desktop earlier this summer and we’ve worked hard to bring it to mobile. For now, this feature is only available on Android devices, but we hope to expand to other platforms in the near future.

Location extensions ad formats can show in the United States as well as a number of other countries. To learn more about location extensions with multiple addresses, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Google Mobile Ads Product Manager
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AdWords Editor 8.0.1 for Windows and Mac

Published on 09/03/2010 at 03:55 AM
In order to make it easier for you to manage your account and take advantage of location extensions, we’re releasing a new version of AdWords Editor, 8.0.1, for Windows and Mac.

AdWords Editor 8.0.1 now supports location extensions, our new and improved way to run local ads. To support this change, we've transitioned the local business ads in your AdWords account to ads that are compatible with location extensions, added the Extensions tab in the AdWords Editor interface, and removed the Local Business Ads tab. This new Extensions tab should help make it easy for you to create and manage your location extensions. Learn more.

To help you focus on just what you need when you’re managing your AdWords account, AdWords Editor 8.0.1 also introduces collapsible and expandable panels, progress bars for tasks that can take some time, improved adding of My Client Center accounts, simplified exception requests, and more helpful error messages.

To learn more about all of the new features in version 8.0.1, such as support for campaigns using target CPA and enhanced CPC bidding options, read the release notes.

If you're already using AdWords Editor, you'll be prompted to upgrade automatically, as soon as it's available for you. After you install the new version, you’ll need to download your account again. To preserve your comments and unposted changes, select the 'Backup then Upgrade' option in the automatic upgrade prompt, then import the backup file after downloading the account. We’re launching version 8.0.1 to all users over the course of the next few weeks, so don’t worry if you don’t get it right away.

If you’re not using AdWords Editor, you can visit our website to download it. Find more information and answers to your AdWords Editor questions in our Help Center.

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Richard Petty Driving Experience puts Conversion Optimizer in High Gear, winning the Conversion Champion Challenge

Published on 09/02/2010 at 05:56 PM
Back in June, we announced the Conversion Champion Challenge, a contest to help motivate you to get your conversion rates in shape for summer. Many of you embraced the challenge - with increased profits to show for it! However, one advertiser stood out among the rest as the true Conversion Champion. We’re delighted to invite Elliott Antal from Richard Petty Driving Experience, to the Google Headquarters in Mountain View, CA, to spend a day with the Google Conversion team. Elliott told us a bit about his journey to the finish line:

“The Conversion Champion Challenge was the perfect opportunity [for Richard Petty Driving Experience] to try some new tools in regards to our paid search marketing.

Richard Petty Driving Experience is the world's largest provider of NASCAR ride and drive entertainment and the exclusive stock car experience at premiere tracks such as Daytona International Speedway, Las Vegas Motor Speedway, and Walt Disney World Speedway. A conversion for Richard Petty Driving Experience is a completed e-commerce transaction. Customers have the opportunity to purchase a ride, drive, or merchandise through www.DrivePetty.com.

On June 11, we activated the Conversion Optimizer for our primary search campaign. In the time after the activation we have seen our conversion rate increase by 10% and cost-per-acquisition drop 2%. We’ve also seen our clicks double, with average cost-per-click decreasing by 30%. Conversions are coming in at a healthy pace while maximizing the reach of our budget. Conversion Optimizer has most certainly made a positive impact on our account and performance is continuing to improve over time.”

Well done, Elliott! We look forward to meeting you in person and exploring more ways to boost your ROI.

To learn more the Conversion Optimizer, an automatic bidding tool for increasing your ROI, visit the Conversion Optimizer site.


Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew
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Identify new opportunities in your AdWords account with the Opportunities tab

Published on 09/01/2010 at 05:04 PM
We’ve just added a new course to the AdWords Online Classroom about the Opportunities tab in your AdWords account.

In case you’re not familiar with the Opportunities tab, it’s designed to help you discover ways to potentially improve your campaign's effectiveness by providing keywords, keyword bids, and budget ideas. These ideas are specifically catered for your account based on your campaign's past performance and may help increase your AdWords return on investment.

Our newly added course will help you learn to use the Opportunities tab to its full potential. You’ll also hear stories from other advertisers who have used the Opportunities tab to extend their advertising reach and improve their account performance.

Click on the country flag most appropriate to you to watch this course now:

(US) (UK) (AU)

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Get design tips to boost the impact of your display ad

Published on 08/31/2010 at 11:34 PM

While the right text and placement of your display ad are always crucial, you should also make sure that your ad is well designed. But how exactly can you ensure that your ad stands out on a web page, looks professional and is consistent with your overall brand message?

On Thursday, September 2nd, we’ll be holding a short one-off live course on effective display ad design. The session will give you a set of practical design tips including key insights on using color, font and images. The focus will be on the Display Ad Builder tool, although the tips are applicable to display design in general. The course is suitable for anyone interested in display advertising.

The course will be held on Thursday, September 2nd at: 3pm - 4pm BST / GMT+1 (London), 10am-11am EDT (New York), 7am-8am PDT (San Francisco).

Sign up here to attend.

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Upcoming Free Webinar: Increase ROI with Enhanced CPC

Published on 08/31/2010 at 09:58 PM
A couple weeks ago, we announced the launch of Enhanced CPC, a new automatic bidding feature designed to increase your conversions and return on investment in your Max CPC campaigns.

We’d like to invite you to a free webinar hosted by members of the product development team to learn more about Enhanced CPC. Specifically, we’ll discuss:
  • How Enhanced CPC works and benefits your campaign performance
  • How Enhanced CPC complements your current bidding strategy, including 3rd party bid management solutions
  • Key differences between Enhanced CPC and Conversion Optimizer and how to select the best bidding option for your campaign
Register here for the webinar to be held on September 8 at 9:30am PST / 11:30am CST / 12:30pm EST.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew
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More advertiser control on YouTube

Published on 08/30/2010 at 06:25 PM










Similarly, you might run a keyword-targeted campaign on bakery-related keywords and exclude whole channels that you don’t feel suit your audience. So if FoodNetworkTV has videos centered mostly around cooking meat dishes, you have the controls to prevent ads from showing on that channel and specific videos.






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Analyze Competition live in all English language accounts

Published on 08/27/2010 at 06:58 PM
In June we announced the Analyze Competition feature in the Opportunities tab. At first, this feature was only available to a small number of advertisers using the English language AdWords interface, but now this feature is available to all English language accounts.

Analyze Competition helps you understand how your AdWords performance compares to that of other advertisers competing on similar keyword categories. Using the data in Analyze Competition, we hope you can make more informed decisions about which types of optimization changes are right for your account.

In addition to the feature’s core functionality, you can now also see the Google search terms that triggered your ad for each of the most specific sub-categories in your account. Click a category name to see more specific sub-categories. When the category name is no longer a link, you’ll know you’re at the most specific sub-category -- this is where you’ll see a "See search terms" link. Seeing the search terms that triggered your ad can serve as inspiration for new keyword ideas or help you understand if your keywords have been miscategorized by our system. If you see that the search terms listed for a given category are not related to the keywords in your ad groups, you may consider making keywords more specific or adding new negative keywords.

We hope to bring even more features to Analyze Competition in the future. To learn more about Analyze Competition, visit the Help Center, or watch this short video. You can also visit our page on the Ad Innovations site, which is the destination site for the newest, most innovative developments in AdWords.
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Update your Google Advertising Professionals Qualification to the Google Certification Program by October 31

Published on 08/25/2010 at 06:26 PM
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AdWords myths: understanding the AdWords auction

Published on 08/25/2010 at 01:00 PM

Over the past few weeks, we’ve covered a few common areas of confusion related to AdWords, including billing and spending, and keywords. This week, we’d like to wrap up this blog series by offering some helpful info on the AdWords auction.

If you have questions about how the AdWords auction works, a great place to start is with this introductory video from Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist.

(click to watch on YouTube)

One of the most important factors in deciding your ad’s position within the auction is its Quality Score. To learn more about how Quality Score is defined, and how to improve it, you can visit the Search Ads Quality Getting Started Guide.

Finally, remember that if you’d like to understand how bidding can affect your ad's performance in the auction, you can use the bid simulator. It will provide you with click, cost, and impression data estimating how your ad could have performed over the last seven days had you used a different bid.

These resources should give you more insight into how the AdWords auction works.

This concludes our AdWords Myths series. We hope it’s helped clarify a few things you may have been wondering about AdWords.

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew
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New course to help you improve your bids

Published on 08/24/2010 at 01:36 AM
We recently added a new course to the AdWords Online Classroom designed to help you set and improve your AdWords bids so you get the most for your money.

In this course, we'll show you how to calculate your value per click (the most you can pay for a click in order to still make a profit) and how to experiment with different cost-per-click (CPC) bids to find the most profitable bids for your business.

While this course is most suited to AdWords advertisers who're already measuring their ROI, we encourage anyone interested in learning more about AdWords bidding strategy to view it.

Click on the country flag most appropriate to you to watch this course now:

(US) (UK) (AU)

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew
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AdWords system maintenance on August 21st

Published on 08/19/2010 at 11:34 PM
On Saturday, August 21st, the AdWords system will be unavailable from approximately 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. PDT due to our regularly scheduled system maintenance. While you won't be able to log into your account during this time, your campaigns will continue to run as usual.

AdWords system maintenance typically occurs on the second Saturday of each month during the above times. We'll continue to update you here as we always have, but you may want to take note of our intended dates and times to help you plan for any scheduled downtimes further down the road.

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew
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Introducing the AdWords Small Business Corner, a new forum discussion category for SMBs

Published on 08/19/2010 at 01:00 PM
We’ve heard from many of you that you’d like to be able to easily share tips for developing a successful AdWords strategy with others like you. To help you do that, we’ve created a new category in the AdWords Help Forum: the Small Business Corner. The Small Business Corner is designed to give those of you who are running your own AdWords accounts the opportunity to share best practices in discussions with your peers so that you can make sure your AdWords account is doing all it can to support your business goals.

This new category is not about troubleshooting specific account issues, but rather about sharing and learning from the experiences of others. To give you a preview of the kinds of topics that we hope to discuss, here are a few conversation starters that we had in mind:
  • Choosing the right tools to measure results
  • How to write great ads
  • Finding the right frequency to sign in to AdWords
Of course, this category is about your interests and needs, so we hope you’ll suggest the small business-related topics that you’d like to cover. For any other topics, please consider the other existing forum categories available to you.

Getting started
To join the conversation now, just visit the Small Business Corner. If you’re new to the AdWords Help Forum, you may want to create a Google Profile (while signed in to your AdWords account), introducing yourself and your business before jumping in. In the meantime, you can check out the introductory discussion thread here.

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew
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New Tutorial: Exporting Google Display Network Placements from Ad Planner into AdWords

Published on 08/17/2010 at 08:21 PM
DoubleClick Ad Planner helps you research and identify the web sites most likely to attract your audience. With Ad Planner, you can select sites, add them to your media plan and easily export them directly into your AdWords account as a new campaign, or add them to an existing campaign or ad group.

Many of you requested this feature because you wanted an easy way to plan and buy Google Display Network (GDN) campaigns using Ad Planner.

Exporting to AdWords is easy and this online tutorial will show you how to take advantage of it. In this video, you’ll learn more about:
  • Creating a media plan and finding GDN placements
  • Exporting your plan to AdWords
  • Setting up a new campaign or adding to existing campaign in AdWords

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew
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New My Client Center features: search across accounts and labels

Published on 08/17/2010 at 04:00 PM
If you use My Client Center (MCC), over the last few weeks you might have noticed that we've added some new features to your MCC interface. We've introduced search across accounts, labels, and simplified dashboard buttons.
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