Inside AdWords: April 2012

Making Search Ads work for businesses with mobile apps

Monday, April 30, 2012

Mobile search is a powerful channel for businesses to engage with customers that are searching for them or for their application. Last year, we introduced Custom Search Ads for Mobile Apps. Today we’d like to share several new features that will make it even easier for AdWords advertisers to promote, track and monetize their mobile app. For the first time, businesses can use AdWords mobile search ads as a holistic solution to promote, monetize and track their app downloads.

Promote your app using the new Mobile App Extension

All AdWords advertisers will receive the option to use a new Mobile App extension; a new way to promote their mobile apps. Not all mobile users searching for a business may know that the business has an app. The Mobile App extension allows advertisers to append a mobile app download link to their search ads. With this extension, advertisers can promote their mobile app to users who may simply be searching for their brand, product or service.

The mobile app extension gives advertisers a new distribution channel for their mobile apps and users a new discovery medium. Beta participants saw a 6% lift in CTR for campaigns using Mobile App extensions, compared to control campaigns.

The new Mobile App Extension found in the “Ad Extensions” tab. Use its new ‘app picker’ function to easily find your company’s app in Google Play Store or iTunes App Store

GrubHub, a web and mobile service that connects diners to restaurants and simplifies online ordering for delivery and pick up, was an early beta tester of the Mobile App extension. In addition to pointing mobile customers searching for food delivery services to their mobile website, they used the mobile app extension to add an additional link to their app download page. Abby Hunt from the GrubHub team explains the importance of reaching customers on mobile: “GrubHub is dedicated to feeding our diners anytime, anywhere - this is why it is important for us to reach our diners on their mobile devices. Hungry people are checking their mobile devices on the way home from work or walking to class, and where they are."

GrubHub was an early tester of the Mobile App extension, allowing hungry customers searching for their business the option of accessing information on their mobile site or app via an ad.

Enriching click-to-download ads with more useful app information
Advertisers running campaigns solely focused on promoting and driving downloads of their app will benefit from recent changes that add more useful information to their mobile app icons next to the text ad. We’ve now incorporated richer information about your mobile app right in the ad unit itself. When a user searches and your click-to-download ad appears, they’ll be able to see image previews, a description of your app, and when applicable, pricing and rating information.

All this new information in the click-to-download ad is automatically drawn from the Google Play Store and iTunes App Store. We hope that customers will benefit from recent changes that make click-to-download ads more engaging and for users searching on Google.

Quicken Loans Inc., the nation’s largest online home lender and a top five retail lender uses click-to-download ads to promote their Mortgage Calculator App. They’ve seen a rapid increase in the number of customer searching for them on mobile. Greg Broda, Paid Search Partner Manager at Quicken Loans explains: "When it came time to promote the new Quicken Loans Mortgage Calculator app, the decision to utilize Google’s mobile click-to-download ad platform was a no-brainer. The placement has allowed us to share the app with a very targeted and engaged group of users."

Quicken Loans runs click-to-download ads, now complete with app previews and pricing information, that point users to their app download page.

Track Android app downloads through AdWords
Businesses will now be able to this page.

Monetizing your mobile app with Custom Search Ads for Mobile Apps

We’ve now brought Custom Search Ads to tablet apps via the recent launch of a new AdMob SDK. Tablet and mobile app users will receive ads relevant to what they're searching for inside an app, and businesses running mobile apps will have a new tool to monetize their content and services.

Mobile apps represent a significant opportunity for businesses to reach their customers, and mobile search is an important channel to reach these customers. We’re looking forward to bringing new products in the coming year that will help businesses grow by promoting, tracking, and monetizing their mobile apps with Google.

Posted by Anurag Agrawal, Product Manager, Mobile Search Ads

New Changes to Ad Rotation

Monday, April 30, 2012

please visit this article in our AdWords Help Center

Webinar: Driving Online Conversions with Remarketing

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Join the UK Google Online Media Specialist team for a live "Driving Online Conversions with Remarketing" webinar on Tuesday May 1st at 3:00 PM GMT (10:00 AM EST / 7:00 AM PST).

97% of website visitors do not convert the first time they visit. Remarketing can help you re-engage with your potential customers and bring them back to your website to buy your products. Join our live webinar to see how you can use remarketing to increase your online conversions by helping close the deal with customers who were not ready to make a purchase the first time around.

Key areas that will be covered include:

What remarketing is and how it works
Reasons to use remarketing
A step-by-step set-up guide
Campaign optimization tips

This webinar will be presented by a Google Online Media Specialist and will include Q&A. The session is suitable for advertisers who are already running campaigns on the GDN, as well as those who have not yet used the GDN.

Register now!

Post Posted by Allison Sommer, Inside AdWords crew

Making campaign planning and build-out faster and more accurate

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Improvements to the Keyword Tool

See keyword ideas grouped by themes: With the updated Keyword Tool, you can easily view suggestions for new ad group themes and quickly choose to add ad groups directly to your account.

Seamless Traffic Estimator integration: Easily view Traffic Estimator data for the keywords you select in the Keyword Tool to make better campaign strategy decisions.

Click to view larger image

Improvements to Traffic Estimator

Graph your performance estimates:

We’ve introduced a graph to the Traffic Estimator to make it easier to gauge traffic and bid estimates and develop an effective bidding strategy.

Structure your keywords into ad groups: You can now create draft ad groups within the Traffic Estimator and easily view traffic and bid estimates for each of your draft ad groups.

Add campaigns to your account: When you’re satisfied with your campaign structure, you can add the draft campaign directly to your account.

Click to view larger image

you’ll have to log in to AdWords to use Traffic Estimatorthis articlePosted by Deepti Bhatnagar, AdWords Product Manager

Increasing transparency in Quality Score

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Quality Score in AdWordslanding page experience

ad rankPosted Jen Huang, AdWords Product Manager

Slice and dice your data using AdWords labels

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

We are excited to announce the launch of account labels. Starting this week, you can organize your account’s keywords, ads, ad groups and campaigns into custom groupings so you can quickly and easily filter and report on the data that is of most interest to you. To see the opportunities that labels enable, let’s meet Bob.

Bob is an online retailer who sells apparel and accessories for men and women. He has campaigns for shoes, clothes and bags for each of his three major markets (New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania) and within the campaigns has separate ad groups for generic and brand keywords. This structure (ex: New York - Shoes - Generic and Massachusetts - Shoes - Generic) means that he has the same ads and keywords spread across different parts of his account. Before today, Bob could not easily sort his account or run a report to see how well sneakers are selling across geographies.

Enter labels.

Now Bob can create the label “sneakers” and apply it to all sneaker-related keywords across his account. He can then filter by this label on the Keywords tab to only see sneaker keywords, or he can run a keyword labels report to aggregate performance by label. These reports allow him to then compare --for example-- how sneakers perform against all other shoes, or other labeled groups.

Labels can be used to organize your campaign elements in any way you choose. Report on brand keyword performance versus all other non-branded keyword performance. Measure how ads that mention “free trial” perform versus ads that mention “free demo”. Or simply label your favorite keywords so you can quickly review them every morning.

Labels will begin rolling out this week to all AdWords accounts. For more information, please visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Jon Diorio, Senior Product Manager, AdWords

Helping all businesses play big on YouTube

Monday, April 23, 2012

With a global audience of more than 800 million monthly visitors to YouTube, every day can feel like you’re advertising in the Super Bowl, and Google AdWords for video, you only pay when someone chooses to watch your ad and you can create and manage video campaigns from the same platform as your search and display ads. You can create an account and start promoting your first video in less than 5 minutes. With AdWords for video you can:

Find the right audience: AdWords for video provides a range of options to reach the right audience. For example, you can promote your video by keyword to appear in YouTube search results, or you can choose to show your ad against content your customers are most interested in - such as sports or music. Connect with your audience on YouTube and the Google Display Network, which includes millions of websites. AdWords for video links to your YouTube account so you can easily start a video campaign with your existing videos.
Measure the effectiveness of your spend: On average, we’ve found that YouTube video ads drive a 20 percent increase in traffic to your website and a 5 percent increase in searches for your business (Google Campaign Insights, 2011). With AdWords for video you can find out how viewers are engaging with your brand during and after they watch your ad. You can see how many viewers watched your entire video, visited your website, stayed on your channel to watch another video, or subscribed to your channel, after viewing your ad.
Only pay for engaged views: With YouTube Advertiser Playbook. The Playbook covers everything from creating interesting content to promoting your video with ads. If you need help making a video, our

Hear more from TRX fitness, a company that has built its business with YouTube
If you have a video you want to promote, YouTube for Marketers page on Google+ to stay up-to-date on our latest video marketing innovations.
Baljeet Singh, Group Product Manager, YouTube

Advanced sign-in security to protect your AdWords account

Thursday, April 19, 2012

security blog serieshttp://www.staysafeonline.org/
Posted by Andy Lutz, Inside AdWords crew

New matching behavior for phrase and exact match keywords

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Focusing on user intent
Benefits for many advertisers, control for allcampaign settingsKeyword matching options AdWords Help CenterPosted by Jen Huang, AdWords Product Manager

Introducing the AdWords Community Top Contributors Program

Thursday, April 12, 2012

You may have noticed that some members of our AdWords Community are true AdWords experts. Not only do they participate actively in discussions, but they're eager to help other members, which provides a huge benefit to the community. That's why we've created the AdWords Top Contributors Program to reward them for their efforts.

Members who qualify for the program receive the title of Top Contributor in the Community, which helps show the world that they’re truly AdWords experts. Other perks include:

A profile on our Kim Clinkunbroomer
Top Contributors.

Posted by Lauren Barbato, Inside AdWords crew

Get Local with AdWords

Thursday, April 05, 2012

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

Ad with location insertion in the text and display URL
“We’ve had advanced location targeting in March 2011, we provided you with more control over how you geographically target your ads. Based on advertiser feedback, we’re implementing four additional enhancements that will make location targeting options clearer and more powerful. Read more about these enhancements in the share your story here and we might reach out to you to participate in our upcoming blog posts.
Posted by Richard Holden, Product Management Director

More clarity and control with location targeting improvements

Thursday, April 05, 2012

When we launched

help center. If you use AdWords Editor, details on how these changes will impact you can be found in the AdWords Editor help center.
Posted by Smita Hashim, Group Product Manager Local Ads

Display Campaign Optimizer Available to All

Thursday, April 05, 2012

Recently we announced the most significant enhancement to our contextual engine ever: the ability to optimize Google Display Network campaigns down to the keyword level using launched in 2010 as a limited beta, and since has become one of our most popular automation tools for large advertisers managing high volume campaigns. In addition to fully automating your targeting and bidding, it uses a variety of signals like context, demographics and interest categories to find additional conversions across our vast AdSense publisher network - all at your desired CPA.

Get inspired with Think Quarterly’s creativity issue

Wednesday, April 04, 2012

What does creativity look like in a digital context? What does it mean for your business, your campaigns, and your customers? This issue of Google’s Think Quarterly explores these fundamental questions and more -- a must read for digital marketers!

(Editor's note, April 4, 2:58pm: the below post is cross-posted from the The Curious Case of Creativity,” Google VP of Global Marketing Lorraine Twohill sees creativity through an engineer’s eyes as a way to solve problems, big and small. Interviews with the founders of two award-winning global agencies, Lean Communications” looks at how technology is forcing the traditional creative process to get faster, smarter, and more efficient.

We also explore how the web is inspiring entirely new forms of creativity, like YouTube remixes, 3D models, data art and infographics, that are reshaping how we see the world. (And if you want to see how the web shapes your brand in particular, try our new +Think With Google.

Posted by Allison Mooney, Think Quarterly Editor

Building Display Creatives for Your Audience

Wednesday, April 04, 2012

If you’re

display ad sizes available.
We’d love your feedback. Let us know if this was helpful or how it can be improved at better-ads@google.com.
Posted by Katie Miller, Inside AdWords crew

Better results, (still) early adoption: Marketing attribution in a complex digital landscape

Tuesday, April 03, 2012

Originally
Last click attribution dominates; agencies are leading the way in experimentation
Most digital marketers run multiple campaigns, each with different strategies and objectives. For instance, display campaigns that are designed to generate awareness will have a different impact on sales than paid search campaigns designed to bring in buyers. Yet most marketers today still use attribution models that do not account for these differences in strategy. Although only 14% of respondents consider “last click” attribution to be “very effective,” it remains common; most likely because marketers haven't yet found or mastered the right attribution tools. Digital marketing agencies have done more with sophisticated attribution methods and technologies:

Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics. And check out our this form -- and we’ll invite five of you to join the Hangout live to ask your questions.

We look forward to seeing you at the Hangout on Friday!

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager, Conversion and Attribution

Google Ads - now on Google+

Monday, April 02, 2012

When we Click to view page
Here’s a quick peek at what you can expect from the Google Ads page on Google+:

Stay ahead of the curve with the latest launches and updates for Google's advertising solutions, including search, display, mobile, social, YouTube and Google Analytics
Receive how-to information, best practices, and recommendations
Learn about upcoming trainings and events
Attend Hangouts with product experts

Add Google Ads to your circles here. We look forward to connecting with you on Google+.
Posted by: Christina Park and Katie Miller, Ads Product Marketing

Introducing Click-to-Teleport Ad Extensions

Sunday, April 01, 2012

Exactly one year ago we rolled out
You’ll additionally be able to tailor Click-to-Teleport extensions to your business goals by choosing to either:

Optimize for closest location: Least disorienting for visitors, and helps you maintain a local feeling.
Optimize for conversions: Teleports visitors to locations where your customers are most likely to convert.
Rotate evenly: Teleports visitor to a random business location and helpful for avoiding overcrowded business locations.

Please be aware that while Click-to-Teleport is in beta, there is no “teleport back home” option for users. You are responsible for providing return transportation or calling a taxi for any teleport customer. At this time, Click-to-Teleport extensions are available in all countries and languages on Earth but are not compatible with our The Fly.

Inside AdWords

We've moved!

Making Search Ads work for businesses with mobile apps

New Changes to Ad Rotation

Webinar: Driving Online Conversions with Remarketing

Making campaign planning and build-out faster and more accurate

Increasing transparency in Quality Score

Slice and dice your data using AdWords labels

Helping all businesses play big on YouTube

Advanced sign-in security to protect your AdWords account

New matching behavior for phrase and exact match keywords

Introducing the AdWords Community Top Contributors Program

Get Local with AdWords

More clarity and control with location targeting improvements

Display Campaign Optimizer Available to All

Get inspired with Think Quarterly’s creativity issue

Building Display Creatives for Your Audience

Better results, (still) early adoption: Marketing attribution in a complex digital landscape

Google Ads - now on Google+

Introducing Click-to-Teleport Ad Extensions

Google Best Practices

Best Practices Newsletter

Achieve Your Marketing Goals

Labels

Archive

Feed

More from Adwords

Company-wide

Products

Developers