As we announced on the Inside AdWords blog, we’re celebrating AdWords’ 10th birthday this month by asking our advertisers to submit stories of how online advertising has played a role in their businesses -- and then sharing their submissions with the world via a global map of the stories.
Think you can create something special by telling some of your best client stories? Let your clients know that you can help them capture the story of how you’ve partnered to reach their goals with AdWords (of course, you can also submit the story of your own agency business). When you’ve produced the videos, you can submit them on our birthday website.
We can’t wait to see your work -- and share it with the world!
Posted by Kelly Blackford, Agency Training Team This is a cross post from the Agency Ad Solutions Blog
As agencies, you face the unique challenges of mastering the suite of Google media solutions and account management tasks across many accounts. Knowing that you often have questions specific to managing multiple client accounts at scale, we've created an Agency Help Centre to provide you with easy access to answers for your most common questions, as well as useful resources to help you strategically manage your businesses.
We also know that many different sites exist that offer support to agencies for account management, product adoption, media planning, and identifying best-in-class examples. To make life a little easier, we've added links to the Agency Help Centre for the most frequently used resources -- including Google Ad Innovations, the Agency Toolkit and the Google AdWords Certification Program -- so that you only need to go one place to find everything you need.
To date, the Agency Help Centre is available for the US and UK. Over the course of Q4'2010, we'll be localising this resource across multiple languages, as well as continuing to incorporate new agency-centric resources into the site.
Posted by Kelly Blackford, Agency Training Team This is a cross post from the Agency Ad Solutions Blog
The Ad Preview tool lets you view your ads as they would appear on a Google search results page without accruing extra impressions for your ad. You can filter your test search by Google domain, language, and location to understand exactly how your ad appears to different users.
In addition to showing a preview, we will also tell you why your ad may not be showing in certain scenarios. By integrating this information directly into the Ad Preview tool, we hope to save you time and several extra steps. Previously you had to visit the Ads Diagnostic tool separately in the "Opportunities" tab of your AdWords account to understand why your ads may not be showing for a particular keyword.
Click on the "new version" link in the current tool to check it out, and stay tuned for increased availability of this tool in the coming weeks!
I love to discover new places, from sandwich shops in my neighborhood to great museums around the globe. When I start looking for something in a new area, like a barbecue restaurant in Sydney, I usually do quite a few searches. I might search for a list of restaurants and then search for details about each place, like which one has the best atmosphere and menu options.
Today we’re introducing Place Search, a new kind of local search result that organises the world’s information around places. We’ve clustered search results around specific locations so you can more easily make comparisons and decide where to go. Say you’re looking for that great barbecue restaurant. With Place Search here’s what you’ll get:
The new results are marked with red pins, and each one is a unique restaurant with relevant information and reviews from across the web. The information is now grouped conveniently to make it easier to digest and compare.
Place Search results will begin appearing automatically on Google when we predict you’re looking for local information. In addition, you’ll find a new link for “Places” in the left-hand panel of the search results page so you can switch to these results whenever you want. For example, when I’m in Melbourne, I love to go out for sushi, but a search for [sushi] doesn’t automatically show me Place Search results. If I click “Places” I get the new view:
We’ve made results like this possible by developing technology to better understand places. With Place Search, we’re dynamically connecting hundreds of millions of websites with more than 50 million real-world locations. We automatically identify when sites are talking about physical places and cluster links even when they don’t provide addresses and use different names.
One of the great things about our approach is that it makes it easier to find a comprehensive view of each place. In our new layout you’ll find many more relevant links on a single results page—often 30 or 40. Instead of doing eight or 10 searches, often you’ll get to the sites you’re looking for with just one search. In our testing, Place Search saves people an average of two seconds on searches for local information.
Place Search is rolling out now and will be available globally in more than 40 languages in the next few days. During the roll-out process you can use this special link to preview the new results. Our goal is to help you feel like a local everywhere you go!
Posted by Kelly Blackford, Agency Training Team This is a cross post from the Official Google Blog
The Bid Simulator tool gives you insight into the advertising results you could get if you used a different maximum CPC bid for your keywords. For example, suppose you have a maximum CPC bid of $1.00 for your keyword, and you wonder what results you'd get with a bid of $1.50 or $0.75. The Bid Simulator shows the clicks, cost, and impressions you would have seen with these other bids over the last seven days. Using insights from this tool, you can make informed decisions about raising and lowering your bids.
We recently launched a new Bid Simulator feature: the ability to view bid simulations across keywords in an ad group at once. With this launch, we hope to give you a faster and easier way of making bidding decisions across keywords in an ad group.
The ad group level bid simulator provides simulations for two types of changes: 1. Applying a single bid to all the keywords in an ad group 2. Updating the ad group default bid (this only impacts those keywords that do not have their own keyword-level CPC bid and use the ad group default bid)
If, like many agencies and advertisers, you manage your bids at the keyword-level, it may be worth taking a look at ad group level bid simulations. You may find, in some cases, that you could have achieved better results with a single ad group default max CPC bid.
Let’s take a closer look at an ad group in which this is the case:
The highlighted row shows that over the last seven days, the ad group received 339 clicks, costing a total of $182.37. Beneath this row, you can see simulations for the potential clicks, cost, and impressions that the ad group could have received had the keywords all used a single max CPC bid.
In this case, if all keywords in the ad group had used a max CPC bid of $0.53, the ad group could have received an additional 49 clicks (for a total of 398) for about the same cost ($182). Thus, if clicks from all keywords in the ad group are equally valuable to your client, it would make sense to set a single bid of $0.53 for all the keywords.
If a few keywords in an ad group are especially profitable for your client, you should manage them separately by assigning keyword-level max CPC bids. In this case, the bid simulator will display simulations for the remaining keywords in the ad group that use the ad group default bid. If you select a new ad group default bid, this bid will apply to all keywords in the ad group for which you haven’t specified a keyword-level max CPC.
For more details on the Bid Simulator, watch the video below or visit the AdWords Help Centre.
One of our goals is to help you get better performance from your display advertising campaigns. Users are increasingly spending time online across a growing number of sites -- last year alone there were 47 million new web sites created. Contextual targeting can help you reach users on these new sites by automatically showing your ad on web pages related to your products on the millions of sites in the Google Display Network. Still, building and managing these campaigns can be time-consuming. That's why we are introducing new tools to help you reach the right audience and meet your business goals.
Display Campaign Optimiser. This tool automatically manages targeting and bidding for your Display Network campaigns with the goal of increasing your conversions while meeting your advertising objectives. It is now available globally for larger campaigns running on the Google Display Network.
Contextual Targeting Tool. The Contextual Targeting Tool helps you more efficiently build your own display campaigns. The Contextual Targeting Tool builds tightly themed keyword lists for your display campaigns, which are used to contextually target your ads. We've begun a phased launch for this tool, and will become available to more advertisers over the coming weeks and months.
Whether you’re looking for an easier way to build your display campaigns or for an automated solution that continually optimises bids and targeting, you can use these tools to achieve performance at scale with your display campaigns.
Today we began the launch of Google Instant in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and India. Google Instant is an innovative new Google interface that predicts the user’s query as they type and instantly shows updated results. This new interface applies to both search results and related ads.
Google Instant is an important step in helping users find information quickly and easily -- people can see their search results the instant they type words into the search box. It’s an interactive search experience that helps users build queries that return results more closely tailored to their needs.
It’s possible that you might notice changes in the number of impressions your clients’ ads receive depending on how users search with this new feature. With Google Instant, we expect increased user engagement with our search services, including ads.
We’re launching Google Instant in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and India for users with modern browsers gradually over the next few weeks, so you may not see it immediately.
If you would like more information about Google Instant, please take a look at the video below, or visit the AdWords Help Centre.
