"Are my ads showing? If not, then why?"

Whether you have ten keywords or ten thousand, making sure your ads are showing is a top priority. Now you can get detailed diagnostic information for multiple keywords at once by using a new keyword diagnosis option on the Keywords tab.

To get started, open the "More actions" menu on your Keywords tab (at the account, campaign, or ad group level) and select "Diagnose keywords."



On the keyword diagnosis menu, you have all the options available in the standalone Ads Diagnostic Tool. For example, if you're interested in seeing whether or not your ad is showing in a particular location, you can use the Location drop-down to narrow the scope of your diagnosis.



After clicking "Run test," you'll see the real-time results appear in the Status column next to each keyword. If all is well, you see "Ad showing." If not, you'll see a brief summary of the problem (for example, "Low bid or quality score"):



To get more details on a keyword's status, hover over any speech bubble icon. In the above example, viewing details for the keyword "meeting icebreakers" displays more information on the Quality Score issues that are preventing the ad from showing. To focus on one issue at a time, try creating filters for Keyword Status.

The next time your keywords need a check-up, try using keyword diagnosis -- it even makes house calls!

Posted by Kate Conroy, AdWords Product Specialist

When you optimise your AdWords account, you probably have a goal in mind. Some advertisers focus on increasing traffic, while others care more about keeping costs down or monitoring return on investment.

The keyword, bid, and budget ideas you currently see in the Opportunities tab aim to provide you with a balance between increasing traffic and managing costs. Rolling out globally over the next few weeks, you’ll be able to choose from three common advertiser goals to match your overall optimisation objectives. The three new options are as follows:

* Maintain or Decrease Cost - Identify ideas that might help you maintain or decrease your current spend.
* Increase Traffic - Identify ideas that can help you get more traffic at varying cost levels.
* Balance Cost and Traffic - Review a mix of ideas that are aimed at either increasing traffic or decreasing costs.



After you choose a goal for your account, the ideas you see in the Opportunities tab will be customised to match your selection. The Opportunities tab remembers your choice of goal unless you change it, which you can do at any time.

We hope this will help provide you with even better ideas to optimise your account, and we look forward to expanding to even more advertising goals in the future.

To learn more about the Opportunities tab, visit the AdWords Help Center or view our video playlist on YouTube.

Posted by Kate Conroy, AdWords Product Specialist
This is a cross post from the Inside AdWords Blog

As agencies managing AdWords accounts, you know your clients are not alone in the auction -- any number of advertisers may be using AdWords to offer some of the same goods and services as them. You can monitor their performance and use optimisation tools to improve ROI, but you still might not know how they're performing as compared to similar advertisers. We’re aiming to bring more transparency to AdWords with the launch of Analyze competition in the Opportunities tab. For now, this feature is only available to a small number of advertisers using the English language AdWords interface, but we'll expand this to more advertisers in the near future.

‘Analyze competition’ examines an account’s activity over the past two weeks and lists categories that represent the products or services a client is advertising. Categories are based on actual Google.com search terms and are matched up against a client's keywords, ad text, and landing page text. For each category associated with a client's account, you’ll see a bar graph, which shows individual performance compared to the average performance of other advertisers in the same category.

When you hover over the data in the 'Competitive Range' column, you'll be able to see more details such as the exact size of the competitive range, the mean and median performance levels for this range, as well as data on the absolute top and bottom performers.

In the case below, you’ll see that we’ve chosen to evaluate our performance based on how our CTR compares with that of other advertisers. In addition to CTR, you’ll also be able to look at competitive data for impressions, clicks, and average position, and you can segment data by advertiser location.



As with other areas of the Opportunities tab, you’ll be able to export information from ‘Analyze competition’ to a .csv file.

It’s important to remember that data in ‘Analyze competition’ is anonymous, and as part of our commitment to protect your clients' privacy, we don't reveal information about any advertiser's identity.

Now that you know what ‘Analyze competition’ does, here are some tips on how to make the most of this data:

* Take action. Click the ‘Explore ideas’ button to see customised keyword, bid, and budget ideas for your clients' accounts.
* Consider clients' advertising goals and focus on the most relevant metrics. It’s not always a bad thing to perform below competitors on a metric that’s not important to clients.
* If you see that one campaign is performing poorly in comparison to the competition, you can get insight into changes you can make to improve that campaign.

Just like the other areas of the Opportunities tab, we hope that ‘Analyze competition’ will help you uncover new opportunities to improve your clients' AdWords performance. To learn more about this feature, visit the Help Center, or watch this short video.



To read more about and submit feedback on 'Analyze competition,' as well as discover other new developments in AdWords, visit the Ad Innovations page.

Posted by Kelly Blackford, Agency Training Team
This is a cross post from the Inside AdWords Blog