Monday, November 30, 2009

[Inside AdWords] 11/30/2009 08:18:00 AM

Black Friday may be behind us, but Cyber Monday, one of the busiest days of the year for online retailers, has just begun. And just as users' searches for Cyber Monday deals and information have increased over time, so have their expectations about the types of information they want from the ads.

Last week, the Official Google Blog provided an overview of some of the new search ad formats we've introduced over the last few months. These new formats are part of our AdWords New Ad Formats Initiative and showcase the ways we've worked to include richer types of information in our ads. This initiative is Google's next chapter in search advertising and over the next year it'll be a major focus for AdWords, so we'd like to give you an idea of what to expect.

The AdWords New Ad Formats Initiative has two themes: ad extensions and new ad models.
  • Ad extensions offer you the ability to enhance your existing text ads with additional relevant information. Some examples of ad extensions include Ad Sitelinks which allow you to provide additional links pointing to specific information on your site and Product Extensions which allow you to show images and prices of relevant products from your Google Merchant Center account. By putting the most salient information directly wiithin the ad, ad extensions are designed to help users more quickly and easily find the products and services they seek on Google.
  • New ad models are formats that offer better solutions to more complicated queries. For example, Comparison Ads enable users to specify the exact product or service they're looking for and compare multiple offers in a single location. New ad models also offer advertisers new pricing models, like cost per action for Product Listing Ads. Our new ad models are designed to make it easier for users to find exactly what they want and for you to reach more users with better information.
The AdWords New Search Ad Formats Initiative is part of our core mission to deliver the right information to the right user at the right time. As more and more users come online searching for products and services, we'll continue to test new ad extensions and new ad models that make it easier for them to find the information they're searching for. We hope you have a successful Cyber Monday and look forward to working with you to make AdWords even better in the new year.



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Posted By Inside AdWords crew to Inside AdWords at 11/30/2009 08:18:00 AM

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Friday, November 27, 2009

[Inside AdSense] Update your tax forms this holiday weekend

We hope you had a great Thanksgiving. Here in the U.S., we on the AdSense Team are spending the Friday after Thanksgiving enjoying holiday shopping, American football, and leftovers.

On this vacation day, we'd like you to remind you that tax season is approaching quickly, so you may wish to take a moment to review your address information and even re-submit your tax information to make sure it reflects your most current tax standing.

If you haven't entered tax information before, you can choose a form directly or follow our handy tax wizard within your account. If you're updating your tax information, feel free to click the 'change your tax information' link.

In addition, now would be the perfect time for our publishers in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to verify their bank accounts for Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) payments. If you're eligible for a payment at the end of December, you have until December 15, 2009 to select your bank account for payment, so we hope you give it a try!



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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 11/27/2009 08:04:00 AM

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Wednesday, November 25, 2009

[Inside AdWords] Product extensions available to all U.S. advertisers

Beginning today, all U.S. advertisers can get started with a new feature of AdWords called product extensions. Like Ad Sitelinks, which we introduced earlier this month, product extensions are a way for you to enrich your existing AdWords ads with more relevant and specific information. Product extensions allow you to use your existing Google Merchant Center account to highlight your products directly in your search ads. When your AdWords text ad appears, and your Google Merchant Center account contains products that are relevant to the searcher's query, product extensions show the images, titles, and prices of your products in a plusbox under your ad.


With product extensions you can show users the products from your site that are most relevant to their current query. You're charged the same cost-per-click (CPC) whether a user clicks on your main text ad or any of the offers within the product extensions plusbox; however, you won't be charged if a user simply expands the plusbox without clicking through to your site. Advertisers who implemented product extensions during our beta found that the additional product information helped improve the performance of their search campaigns. For example, Zeta interactive, who manages advertising for SonyStyle.com, reported seeing over a 10% increase in clickthrough rate (CTR) for their ads with product extensions.

Like Product Listing Ads, which we announced as a limited beta earlier this month, product extensions are part of our effort to make ads more useful and relevant for shopping-related queries by allowing advertisers to include relevant product information directly within the ad. However, unlike Product Listing Ads, which are automatically targeted and priced on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis, product extensions are priced on a cost per click (CPC) basis and will only display when your ad is triggered by one of the keywords in your product extensions enabled campaigns. What's more, product extensions give you the option to prefer which products are displayed when a user's query triggers your ads. For example, you may sell dozens of laptop computers but you want to promote the newest or best selling inventory using product extensions when a user searches for 'laptop computer' on Google.com. By making a simple addition to your Merchant Center account, you can easily control the products that display for certain queries. Of course, you can always use automatic targeting, and let AdWords determine the most relevant products in your account to a user's query.

It's easy to get started with product extensions. First, log in to Google Merchant Center and add your Adwords customer ID to your account. Then, simply visit the campaign settings tab in your AdWords account, find the 'Ad extensions' heading and select the option to "Use product images and information from my Google Merchant Center account." No need to create new campaigns or ad groups, update your keywords or change your ad text. Product extensions are available now to all U.S. advertisers, but remain in a limited beta outside the U.S. Over time, we hope to offer product extensions to all advertisers globally.



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Posted By Inside AdWords crew to Inside AdWords at 11/24/2009 10:27:00 AM

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Tuesday, November 24, 2009

[Inside AdWords] Think2010: Experimentation is worth the risk

When it comes to testing and experimentation, there's always a risk-reward scenario to play out. You could go with what you know and what feels comfortable -- or you could try something new and see how it fares. It could really pay off, but it could also flop. If you're responsible for cooking a big Thanksgiving feast this week, you may feel that lots of experimentation is clearly not worth the risk. When you think about your approach to marketing in 2010 however, testing and experimentation should be key elements.

With digital marketing, testing is a low-cost, fast way to learn. The ability to start, stop, or change your approach is easy and actually applying what you learn -- so you can capture the greatest opportunity -- can happen very quickly.

When you market online, the cycle of launching, measuring, and optimizing happens quickly and continuously. The more nimbly you manage this cycle, the stronger your results will be. Don't be afraid to try and possibly fail -- whether you're testing a new creative message, a new communication platform, a new promotion, or another strategy. The long term benefits of successful testing can quickly and easily outweigh the short term costs.

Brett Keller, CMO of Priceline.com, echoes these thoughts on the value of experimentation.

Here are a few testing ideas to apply in 2010:
  1. Use Website Optimizer to test content (e.g. headline, copy, images) or design alternatives for your landing page. This tool will help you quickly identify and implement the combinations that drive most conversions.
  2. Use YouTube as a focus group. Beyond monitoring views, ratings, and comments, use YouTube Insight to learn what's resonating, and where. Based on what you learn, invest in your 'winning' content by driving traffic via sponsored videos, altering your associated messaging in search campaigns, and ramping up geo-targeting in the areas where your video over-indexes in popularity. You may even consider testing that video as a TV spot (e.g. via Google TV Ads).
  3. If you're not yet using display ads, commit to testing them. Use Display Ad Builder to build display, rich media, and video ads in minutes by incorporating your own text, images, and logo into one of our professionally designed templates. This allows you to test a creative message and learn what is working before investing in a deeper level of creative support.


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Posted By Inside AdWords crew to Inside AdWords at 11/23/2009 04:37:00 PM

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[Inside AdSense] A deeper look at channels: Custom channels (Part II of III)

In the second part of our channels series, we'll focus on custom channels. Boyar Naito will walk you through how to set up custom channels to track the performance of specific ad units. You'll learn about the three pieces of information that are most important to us: ad size, ad location, and page content, and how to analyze this information to figure out what ad formats work best for your website.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWgYKjz6Cjo

You can find more information about custom channels in our Help Center. Catch the last part of this series next week, when we'll cover targetable channels.



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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 11/23/2009 02:42:00 PM

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Thursday, November 19, 2009

[Inside AdWords] Take advantage of advanced reports

For a long time, the Report Center has been the place to go to find detailed data about your campaign performance. Reports with dimensions like geographic performance and time of day can give you new insights through metrics that aren't available on the campaigns tab.

But there can be drawbacks to using the Report Center: customized reports take time to set up and run, and you have to navigate back to the Campaigns tab to take action on any insights you discover.

We're addressing these issues by better integrating advanced performance data into campaign management. Now, instead of running a placement performance report, you can manage your automatic placements on the Networks tab. Rather than run a search query report, you can use the "See search terms" option on the Keywords tab to see which searches are bringing up your ads. And if you prefer to look at your reports in a spreadsheet program, you now have the option to download nearly every table in your account (look under the "More actions..." menu above each table).

You can also use new segmentation functions to slice and dice your data directly within campaign management. Click on the "Filter and views" menu above your statistics, then choose the "Segment by" option to see different the levels of detail available for display.


The segmentation options available to you differ depending on whether you're looking at keywords, ad groups or campaigns. If you're looking at keywords, you can segment by match type. If you're looking at campaigns or ad groups, you can segment by network to quickly compare your performance on Google and search partner sites to your performance on the Content Network.

In addition to these segmentation options, we've recently introduced time-based segmentation for your campaigns, ad groups and keywords. Now you can break out statistics by day, week, month, quarter or year to isolate changes in your performance. For example, if your performance summary graphs show a sharp decrease in clicks, segmenting by day can show you changes in other statistics that might explain why your drop in traffic occurred.

You can also segment by day of the week. This option is helpful if you're looking for help with ad scheduling. Try segmenting your performance for the past few months: if your performance is dramatically different on a given day of the week, you can modify your bids to account for the change in user behavior.

We'll be bringing even more data from the Report Center into the Campaigns tab over the coming months. So next time you're searching for insights you can use to improve your performance, you won't have to look very far.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

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Posted By Inside AdWords crew to Inside AdWords at 11/18/2009 04:34:00 PM

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[Inside AdSense] A deeper look at channels: URL channels (Part I of III)

As many of you know, channels are a great tool for tracking the clicks and impressions on your ad units, as well as figuring out which ad placements, sizes, and colors generate the most revenue. With that in mind, three of our very own Mountain View-based AdSense optimization specialists have created videos showcasing best practices for setting up channels within your AdSense account.

In the first episode, Matthew Carpenter-Arevalo talks about URL channels which can help you track revenue on a specific URL or domain. You'll learn how to set up a channel within your AdSense account, what metrics you can track using channels, and how to use that data to increase your earnings by generating more clicks on your ads.




You can find more information about URL channels in our Help Center. Check back next week, when we'll cover custom channels.



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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 11/18/2009 03:38:00 PM

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Wednesday, November 18, 2009

[Inside AdWords] Think2010: Recap of the Four Winning Moves webinar

Last week, Google's US Managing Director Bonita Stewart hosted the 2nd webinar in the Think2010 series, entitled "Think2010: Four Winning Moves for 2010." She discussed tools and strategies that you can use to differentiate your offerings, increase competitive advantage, and ultimately seize opportunities as the economy recovers. Below are the four key takeaways from the webinar:

1) Use precision - Flexibility yields stealing share: Utilizing precision through search can serve as the world's largest focus group and allow you to understand how consumers want to engage with brands. Tools like Google Analytics and Insights for Search can help you increase this precision.

2) Develop deeper connections - Consumers want to connect: Understand your audience and how they are communicating, then develop marketing campaigns to target your ideal consumers. Utilizing new communication technologies within ad creatives can make your advertising more interactive. Advertising on community centric mediums like YouTube can help to increase brand engagement and ultimately help you develop deeper connections with consumers.

3) Innovate - Marry the art and the science: News and optimism about the economic recovery have increased over the past few months. Business leaders across the globe are thinking forward and seizing the opportunity to throw out old marketing rules and embrace innovation as they gear up for 2010. Large brands like GM and JetBlue, for example, are coming up with new digital strategies to act nimbly and ensure they're prepared for the opportunities the recovery will offer.

4) Be relevant - Consumers don't stop searching: It's important for you to stay engaged and in touch with consumer demands. Keeping a pulse on search trends is a live, real-time way for you to stay up to date on consumer interest and sentiment.

If you missed this webinar and would like to learn more, please visit the Google Business Channel on YouTube to see the recorded version. Also, be sure to stay engaged with the Think2010 series at www.google.com/think2010 where you can view videos, blog posts and future webinars.



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Posted By Inside AdWords crew to Inside AdWords at 11/17/2009 03:13:00 PM

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[Inside AdSense] Google Ad Planner Publisher Center: Take advantage of new wa...

Earlier this year, we introduced the Google Ad Planner Publisher Center to help you showcase your site to advertisers. Now we've enhanced the Publisher Center to give you even more ways to promote and manage your Ad Planner site profile. As a reminder, any publisher can use the Publisher Center, but the user interface is currently only available in English.

Claim your subdomains
You can now claim subdomains, such as myblog.blogspot.com, in Google Ad Planner. Your site's subdomains can also appear in Google Ad Planner to give advertisers a more detailed view of your site for their media planning. Learn how to claim your sites in Google Ad Planner.

Share more Google Analytics metrics
We've expanded the type of Google Analytics data you can share with Google Ad Planner. You can opt-in your page views, unique visitors (cookies), total visits, average visits per visitor, and average time on site, which ensures potential advertisers see the most accurate information for your site. Learn how to share your Google Analytics data.

Delegate site ownership 
Managing your website profile in Ad Planner has just gotten easier. You can now invite additional users to edit and maintain your Google Ad Planner site profile. 

Display an Ad Planner badge
Highlight your Google Ad Planner profile by displaying our new badge on your site. Advertisers who click your badge will be brought directly to your Google Ad Planner site profile, where they'll find your traffic, demographics, and advertising information.

Choose from four Ad Planner badges:



Tell us what you think
We invite you to sign in to Google Ad Planner now to try these new features, then send us your feedback and ideas so we can continue improving Google Ad Planner for you.



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Posted By Inside AdSense Team to Inside AdSense at 11/17/2009 11:13:00 AM

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Saturday, November 14, 2009

AdSense for Feeds

AdSense for Feeds


"Afternoon, Frank." "Hey howdy, George."

Posted: 13 Nov 2009 06:56 AM PST


It's about time these two neighbors got to talking to each other. Most Saturday afternoons you'd find them politely waving as they passed at each other by with their push mowers, tending to their neatly manicured tables, charts, and graphs. It just made sense that the grounds would look that much more complete if they removed a bit of fence between them. And so they've done just that.

If you use either AdSense for feeds or Google FeedBurner to track item clicks and also use Google Analytics, as of today, you will automatically start to see your feed item click analytics show up in Google Analytics with some additional information added to help you understand how distributing your feed with FeedBurner leads to traffic on your site.

Specifically, we will help you classify your links by tagging the Source as "feedburner", the Medium as the channel in which we sent out your feed such as "feed" or "email", and the Content as the actual endpoint application in which the user viewed your feed content such as "Google Reader" or "Yahoo! Mail".  In order to slice your traffic by these endpoints, in the All Traffic Sources view in Google Analytics select the "Ad Content" field in the second column.

In the coming weeks, you will start to see many more distribution endpoints in your reports. The represent ongoing additions to our database of applications that process feeds.




By default, these analytics will show up in the "All Traffic Sources" and "Campaigns" views in Google Analytics. You can filter the results just to only the traffic that comes from Google FeedBurner by filtering on "feedburner" on the All Traffic Sources page or "Feed:" on the campaigns view.  You can also use these sources in the Advanced Segments views.

In this view below, we actually have two separate feeds driving traffic to this blog, and that can  now be tracked easily in one view.





If you have item click tracking enabled, we are now automatically tagging your item URLs with Google Analytics parameters. If you're not using Google Analytics, or for some other reason don't want these parameters in the requests coming to your website, you can turn off Google Analytics tracking on the "Configure Stats" page on the Analyze tab at http://feedburner.google.com.  If you don't have item click tracking enabled, this is also the perfect time to turn it on, which can be done on this same page.





For instance, if you would rather see the detail of where your feeds are read directly, you can add ${distributionEndpoint} as the medium, and then you will get views that look something like this.





Again this will happen automatically except in one specific case:  if you are already tagging your feed item URLs with Google Analtyics tags such as "utm_source" and "utm_medium" - we have disabled this feature and you will have to turn it on manually by selecting "Track clicks as a traffic source in Google Analytics."   Note that if you do this, we will replace any existing "utm_" tags that may be in your permalinks with the values generated from FeedBurner.

In the coming weeks, we will be releasing more features in Google FeedBurner that take advantage of this functionality, so we highly recommend that you register and set up your site with Google Analytics if you haven't done so already.


Posted by Steve Olechowski on behalf of the Google FeedBurner team

Friday, November 13, 2009

[Inside AdWords] Upgrade to AdWords Editor 7.6.1

AdWords Editor version 7.6.1 is now available for Windows and Mac. This new version includes support for ad scheduling, advanced location targeting, YouTube Promoted Video ads, and other features. For a complete list of changes and instructions, visit our release notes.

If you're already using AdWords Editor, you'll be prompted to upgrade automatically. If you're not already using it, you can visit our website to download AdWords Editor. To learn more, take a look at our AdWords Editor Help Center.




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Posted By Inside AdWords crew to Inside AdWords at 11/13/2009 07:57:00 AM

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Google Analytics Blog : New Feature Spotlight: Advanced Filters

jagoan has sent you a link to a blog:

good one

Blog: Google Analytics Blog
Post: New Feature Spotlight: Advanced Filters
Link: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/11/new-feature-spotlight-advanced-filters.html

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