New Changes to Ad Rotation

New Changes to Ad Rotation:

AdWords currently offers three ad rotation settings: optimize for clicks, optimize for conversions, and rotate evenly. Using the “rotate” setting for ad rotation is helpful for testing new creatives, but when run indefinitely can inhibit advertiser performance and deliver less relevant ads to our users.



Starting next week, the “rotate” setting for ad rotation will change.  Instead of rotating creatives for an indefinite period of time, this setting will only rotate for a period of 30 days.  After that, the setting will then optimize to show the ads expected to generate the most clicks.  Every time a creative is enabled or edited, the ads in that ad group will rotate more evenly for a new period of 30 days.



This change will be rolling out next week. At that time, ad groups with creatives that haven’t been added or modified in the past thirty days will see this new ad rotation behavior. Otherwise, this change will begin 30 days after your last creative was enabled or edited.



This change will enable us to provide users with the most relevant ad experience and should help advertisers improve the performance of their AdWords accounts. For more information on this change, please visit this article in our AdWords Help Center.



Posted by Karen Yao, Senior Product Manager

Webinar: Driving Online Conversions with Remarketing

Webinar: Driving Online Conversions with Remarketing:

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

Making campaign planning and build-out faster and more accurate: We've been listening closely to your suggestions on how to reduce the guesswork involved with building new campaigns. To help improve the campaign building process, we’re rolling out improvements to the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator.



Improvements to the Keyword Tool

To help improve campaign management, we’ve made improvements to the Keyword Tool including:

• 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

We’ve updated the Traffic Estimator to help advertisers build a more effective bidding and budgeting strategy. Changes to the Traffic Estimator include:

• 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

We’re also improving the quality and accuracy of the traffic estimates by using performance history to better gauge traffic estimates. This means that going forward you’ll have to log in to AdWords to use Traffic Estimator.



You’ll find the updated Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator in the AdWords interface over the next couple of weeks. To learn more about the updates to the Keyword Tool, you can visit this article in our Help Center and this article to learn more about the Traffic Estimator.



Posted by Deepti Bhatnagar, AdWords Product Manager

Increasing transparency in Quality Score

Increasing transparency in Quality Score: Today, we’re introducing more details about your Quality Score in AdWords.



Using the status hover for a keyword in the Keywords tab, you’ll see the traditional 1-10 numeric score and new ratings for each main factor in Quality Score. The new ratings have a relative scale so you’ll understand whether your performance expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience is average, above average, or below average compared to other advertisers.








We’ve heard from advertisers that having more insight on Quality Score can help you better focus efforts to improve performance. Improving ads quality is great for users, too.



One final note: This launch gives you information you can use to improve your Quality Score, but it doesn’t change how Quality Score or ad rank are calculated.



Posted Jen Huang, AdWords Product Manager

Slice and dice your data using AdWords labels

Slice and dice your data using AdWords labels: 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

Helping all businesses play big on YouTube:

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 one video can launch a business. Many have had success growing their business on YouTube, by creating videos that demonstrate their products, share customers testimonials, or simply showcase how their business works.

Take TRX, for example. When former Navy Seal Randy Hetrick wanted to expand TRX as a business, he knew he needed to use video to show potential customers how the TRX suspension training system worked and demonstrate its effectiveness. After using YouTube Analytics to hone their optimal video length and broadening their reach with TrueView video ads, they saw a 5X increase in traffic, 2X increase in conversions, and most importantly, a 2X increase in revenue.

To help even more businesses play big with video, today we’re introducing a number of new products, resources, and tools:

Google AdWords for video now available to all. Similar to search advertising - where you pay for clicks and set budgets with bids - we created a new model for video advertising. With 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 TrueView video ads you only pay when viewers choose to watch your ad so you aren’t charged when viewers skip your ad if they aren’t interested or have already seen your video. This means your ad budget is focused on viewers interested in your video. By displaying a call-to-action overlay on your video you can talk about a sale or specific offer to your viewers, share more information about your business, or drive traffic to your website.

$50 million in free advertising. We’re giving away $50 million in free Google AdWords advertising to help more than 500,000 businesses get into video. If you are new to AdWords, you can receive a $75 credit when you sign up. To put that into context, with $75 your video campaign can reach more than 1,500 of your most valuable customers on YouTube for one month. Request your free credit here.

Advertiser Playbook and support. To share best practices and tips on how video can be a core part of your business toolkit, we created a 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 My Business Story is a free tool you can use to create your first video. AdWords advertisers can also call our free phone support line, 866-2-GOOGLE, to get started with AdWords for video.

YouTube Ambassador program. To recognize business owners that are already using YouTube to grow their business, we’re naming 9 businesses from across the country to our first ever YouTube Ambassador program. These businesses have seen outstanding success in reaching new customers, building a brand, and engaging their fans with video. Hear their stories and learn more about the YouTube Ambassador program on the Official Google Blog.

Hear more from TRX fitness, a company that has built its business with YouTube

If you have a video you want to promote, get started with AdWords for video. And, join our YouTube for Marketers page on Google+ to stay up-to-date on our latest video marketing innovations.

Taking Automated Rules to the next level: Now in My Client Center

Taking Automated Rules to the next level: Now in My Client Center:

We’ve added My Client Center support, so you can now run Automated Rules across multiple client accounts, to help you manage many accounts more quickly, easily and efficiently. To get started, simply click the “Automate” drop-down menu on the Performance or Budget tab:



This AdWords Help Center article walks you through how to set up Automated Rules in My Client Center. As you may notice, the steps are mostly the same as for individual accounts, except that we’ve added sections for account and currency selection:

As always, remember to click the Preview results button to verify that you've set the rule up correctly. Previewing displays the time you’ve chosen for the rule to run in groups according to your clients’ timezones, and allows you to get a glimpse of the changes that the rule will make to the first account you’ve selected.

To see popular types of rules created by advertisers, please see this AdWords Help Center article. To learn more about Automated Rules, please visit Ad Innovations.



Posted by Andrew Truong, Product Marketing Manager