Check out your new image ads from the AdWords Display Ad Builder

Check out your new image ads from the AdWords Display Ad Builder:

Image and video ads on the Google Display Network can have a strong impact on the success of your online marketing campaigns. These ads convey your messages in more engaging and memorable ways, enticing viewers to buy what you’re selling.

The Display Ad Builder tool within AdWords already lets you easily create image and video ads for free and gives you the flexibility to customize these ads to suit your needs. Check out these image ads for examples of what you can create:

But today we’re announcing a new feature that essentially builds your image ads for you.

The Display Ad Builder now automatically creates suggested image ads, using the existing text ads in your campaign.

• Click on the suggested ad that you like best.
• If necessary, customize any fonts, text, or colors that need tweaking.
• Then incorporate the ad into one of your ad groups. It’s that simple.

Check out your suggested ads now>>

You don’t even have to be in the Display Ad Builder tool to use this new feature.

• If you’re in one of your ad groups, you can select an existing text ad and under “More Actions,” choose “Generate Display Ad.”
• AdWords will create an image ad based on the text ad you selected.

If you want to create your ad from scratch, you can always choose from hundreds of template designs.

• Add your text and customize the fonts, colors, and background.
• Choose images from the AdWords stock gallery, from your computer, or straight off your website.
• Review the ad in all formats to make sure it looks right, then add it to your campaign.

For more information about Display Ad Builder, visit the Display Network website.

Posted by Lauren Barbato, Inside AdWords crew

AdWords and AdSense statistics temporarily delayed

AdWords and AdSense statistics temporarily delayed:

As some of you may have noticed, since approximately 2pm PST this Monday, March 5th, there's been a delay for statistics reported in AdWords and AdSense. While the reports are delayed, whether you are an AdWords advertiser or an AdSense publisher, your ads are serving as usual, with no disruptions.

This is a result of a temporary technical issue with our "statistics pipeline" (this is the system that translates the raw data into meaningful and actionable metrics for you). Our engineers are working hard to resolve the issue, and should have all your stats updated, current and complete by early Tuesday morning (PST).

We appreciate your patience. We'll update this post with any additional information and status reports.

Update, March 6, 2012: As of approximately 2 am PST this morning, most AdWords and AdSense stats are back to normal in your accounts. A few daily reports, including the search query report, geo reports, and domain and url reports will not be fully restored until approximately midnight PST today. Thank you for your continuing patience!

Update, March 7, 2012: We’re happy to report all stats and reports in your AdWords and AdSense accounts are completely restored, and back to normal. Thanks!

Posted by Katie Miller, Inside AdWords crew

Opportunities for sitelinks

Opportunities for sitelinks: A fast, simple way to increase your AdWords performance is adding sitelinks to your campaigns. If your campaign is eligible to show sitelinks but it doesn’t have them them up yet, it’s probably missing a good opportunity. To help out, we're adding sitelinks to the AdWords Opportunities tab

Now, when we detect that your campaign is performing well enough to show ad sitelinks, but does not yet have them set up, we’ll show you that idea in the Opportunities tab. You'll also get a personalized estimate of the impact on clicks and cost if sitelinks were implemented, based on your last week’s campaign stats.

Here are two tips to keep in mind when you're setting up ad sitelinks:

1. Our systems automatically determine which sitelinks perform best and show them more frequently. So adding more than the minimum number of suggested sitelinks can boost your performance.
2. Sitelinks can appear with any of the ads in your campaign. So choose website destinations and sitelink text that make sense across all of your ads.

To learn more about the Opportunities tab, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Mark Martel, AdWords Product Marketing

Webinar tomorrow: Making Mobile-friendly Websites

Webinar tomorrow: Making Mobile-friendly Websites: Mobile searches have grown 400% in the last two years, but many businesses today still don't have mobile optimized sites. A mobile optimized site will allow users to have a great experience on your site while browsing on their mobile devices. Whether your customers are contacting you or making a purchase, this session will walk you through the ten best practices for building a better mobile site so you can get more customers while they are using mobile devices. This webinar will be hosted by one of our in-house Mobile Websites specialists who will also be on hand to answer questions after the webinar.

The session will take place on Tuesday, March 13, at 3pm GMT. Register Now!

Posted by Lauren Barbato, Inside AdWords crew

Announcing AdWords campaign limits increase

Announcing AdWords campaign limits increase:

Last year we increased the limits for all advertisers to 500 campaigns and 3 million keywords per AdWords account. Today, in response to feedback from many of our advertisers, we are pleased to announce yet another AdWords campaign limit increase.

It is now possible to have 10,000 campaigns (includes active and paused campaigns) per account. With this change, it is now possible to easily manage and monitor more campaigns in a single place.

AdWords Editor, the AdWords API, and all other AdWords services are compatible with the new limits.

A full list of all account limits, including creative and ad extension limits, is available in the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Katie Miller, Inside AdWords crew

Basics of organic SEO

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the marketing technique used to drive traffic to websites. The art of SEO relies mostly on keywords; what kinds, where to place them and how they are used. While you can simply use keyword frequency and repeat phrases or search words throughout your content to attract visitors, good SEO goes far beyond such simplistic methods. Organic SEO leads to a natural selection of your site by search engines, without having to pay for placement.

Relevance
Search engines use complex algorithms to rank web pages by relevance. Sites listed by a search engine such as Google are chosen based on their merits, with more relevant sites ranked higher than less relevant ones. You can increase the relevance of your content using organic SEO to give your webpage a higher search ranking result.

Keywords
Keywords are the foundation on which organic SEO is built. Using the right keywords is the basic tenet of SEO. Relevant and competitive keywords are more likely to bring you more traffic. By using the proper keyword frequency, high keyword density and placing keywords in prominent areas such as the title, metatag and the start of sentences, you can increase traffic to your site.

Content
Organic SEO relies on good content to work effectively. Some sites simply list keywords to gain page ranking, but good content offers readers quality, well written articles with keywords used naturally within the work. Organic SEO is often so subtle that website visitors do not notice repeating keywords.

Optimization
Smaller SEO tricks include optimizing your page for keywords such as using keyword within picture titles, having good page navigation tools such as a sitemap or a search function, and using bold text blocks. Having a sitemap helps crawlers and search engines index your pages faster, leading to a better page rank.

Backlinks
Backlinks from other sites are considered good organic SEO because it adds to your site’s search page rank. The more backlinks your site obtains from other relevant and related websites, the higher your page will rank on search engine results. However, be wary of too many backlinks - search engines only rank websites with links to other sources that contain relevant content.

Grouping pages by theme
If you group the pages on your site by related themes, you will increase your relevancy to search engines. By grouping related pages together in larger collections, bots and spiders can index your site faster and this can lead to a higher page rank on search engine results.

Google Instant: Affects Google Adwords and SEO?

Google Instant Search is finally here, now Google reaches to its results very fast, it reaches faster than you can decide what you are looking for and you will see lot of buzz on forums, blogs and social sites as well. But unfortunately Google is facing lot of angry buzzing as people get hold of this new setup. Google AdWords and SEO both are affected by this new set up. Let us see how…

SEO
How SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is affected by Google Instant? Well, the fact is that new search feature has not changed the results at all. Third place position for a keyword will be the same, and will not change because of the instant search. But this set up could affect the way how many people search. People will have to adapt this fine tuning style of search, people will bypass your site when they search for something more accurate. But good SEO’s will maintain the same techniques which got them the positions for keywords, but over the time they will adapt to how their pages and titles have to be to make them more attractive for the modern searcher. This will lead to greater importance for long tail key phrases when people pinpoint their search to a more brief level.

AdWords
Many advertisers start to worry at this area, the good news is that the instant search is not going to directly affect you CTR, and the bad news is that it could indirectly affect it. This new method of search could have the impact on how often the users come across your ads which means that your impressions could increase radically.