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It's hard to believe, but the beginning of the holiday season is right around the corner, and you don't want to get caught without ads for your spooky ghost candles or turkey basters. So, we're encouraging you to plan ahead. Yes, it's early, but now's the time to come up with a schedule for your seasonal advertisements and to start putting it into place.

As part of the process of creating a new campaign, you can set the campaign start date for a time in the future. It's located in the 'Set pricing' section, right under your daily budget setting. Setting your start date ensures that if your shipment of pilgrim plates doesn't arrive until October 15, you can start your campaign on that date.

As we mentioned in our blog way back in July, you can also set a specific end date for each of your campaigns on the Edit Campaign Settings page. This allows you to stop your ads for spooky ghost candles from running at midnight on the day of your choice, without your having to remember to do it. If your campaigns work out so well this year that you'd like to implement them again next year, you can easily resume your campaign when you're ready, and then simply set a new end date in the future.

Posted by Sarah, Inside AdWords Crew

Seven years ago, Google first opened its door in Menlo Park, California. The door came with a remote control -- because it was a garage door. Thanks to all of our users, we don’t have to work in a garage anymore.

To celebrate our birthday, here’s our gift to you: 7 AdWords tips -- tried, tested, and true:

1) Identify your goals
Decide what you want to achieve so that you can build effective campaigns for your business. For example, a party supply store might decide to drive sales of their birthday candles.

2) Build a relevant, targeted keyword list
Choose specific keywords, like ‘dripless birthday candles,’ rather than broad ones such as 'candles.'

3) Use the right keyword matching
Take advantage of our various matching options to choose the ones that make sense for you. Use negative keywords like ‘wholesale’ to filter out unwanted party store traffic.

4) Organize your campaign
Create separate Ad Groups based on theme. Put all of your party hat keywords in one Ad Group and all of your birthday candles keywords in another.

5) Write clear, compelling ad text
Write separate ads with targeted text for each product line. Emphasize unique aspects of your product or service and include a strong call-to-action such as “Check out our wide selection” or “Buy party supplies today.”

6) Choose useful destination pages
Send users to landing pages that relate directly to your ad text to help turn prospects into customers. Make it easy for someone looking for purple crepe streamers to find them.

7) Track results frequently and modify your campaign
Assess your stats; measure your successes. Use Google’s tools to help you.

Posted by Arielle & Vivian, Inside AdWords crew

We’ve received a few emails recently from Inside AdWords subscribers requesting to be unsubscribed from our mailing list because they were receiving too many emails from us. While we have and will continue to honor your requests, we wanted to tell you a little bit more about how our mailing list is set up, and how you can change your subscription options to suit your own preferences.

Our mailing list is powered by Google Groups. By entering your email address into the subscription box on the right side of our blog, you become a member of the “Inside AdWords” Group on Google Groups. While the mailing list functionality eliminates the need to sign up for the Groups services itself (we wanted to make it simple and straightforward for you to join our mailing list), you can sign up for Google Groups in order to harness the power of everything Groups has to offer, such as the ability to change your email preferences or subscription options for a particular Group.

To sign up (it takes less than a minute), go to http://groups.google.com/ and click the “Join” link. You’ll then be asked to create a Google Account. In order to manage your mailing list preferences, use the same email address that you used to sign up for Inside AdWords. You’ll then receive a verification email at your email address, and once it’s verified, you’ll be automatically logged into Google Groups. You’ll see that “Inside AdWords” is already listed in your list of Groups. Click on that link, and you’ll see the “Unsubscribe or change membership” link at the top (see screenshot below). You can then choose if you want to receive full text emails, digest emails, abridged emails, or no emails at all.

Of course, you can now join the various Groups available out there – including one of our favorites, AdWords Help (as mentioned in our recent post).

Posted by Vivian, Inside AdWords crew

We’ve written about using data to automatically show your better performing ads more often and using Urchin to make data driven decisions about your site itself. Now, for a little bit about metrics that can show which of your keywords are actually driving sales:

Although clickthrough rate (CTR) is a great measure of the relevancy of your keywords (a keyword with a high CTR indicates that users searching for that word are interested enough in your ad to want to visit your site), it doesn’t tell you what happens after the user gets to your site. That's where tracking your conversions comes in. Using Google's free conversion tracking, you can see which clicks lead to purchases and thus more intelligently decide which of your keywords are worth investing in. So how does it work?

After placing a snippet of code on your site’s confirmation page (usually the “Thank you for your order” page that users see after they purchase something), when a user clicks on your ad, a cookie is placed on their computer. If, when they visit your site, they end up on this confirmation page, the cookie is recognized and a conversion is reported. In your account, you’ll be able to view conversion data all the way down to the keyword level or run custom reports to view additional conversion statistics.

With the more advanced conversion tracking, you can not only learn which keywords are generating sales but also understand the revenue generated by each of your keywords. If you're spending more on clicks for the word “granny smith apples” than you are selling as a result of that spend, you’ll want to consider refining that keyword or adjusting your maximum CPC accordingly. Similarly, if you find that “mail order apples” is bringing in more revenue than it’s costing you in clicks, you might want to consider expanding your keyword list with similar words (“mail order fujis,” “mail order granny smiths”) or possibly increasing your bid on that keyword. By spending less on poorly converting keywords and increasing your spend on high conversion ones, you’ll optimize your overall ROI.

And if this all sounds a bit complicated, check out the conversion tracking setup guide (.pdf) or ask your webmaster to help you add the snippet of code to your site to get you started.

Posted by Arielle, Inside AdWords crew

In the spring, we launched the Site Exclusion tool to give you more control to determine where your ads will show on the content network. This tool allows you to prevent your ads from showing on specific sites in the content network in the same way that you can add negative keywords to stop your ads from showing for specific keyword searches.

Recently, we increased the number of sites that you can exclude using this tool to 500. This gives you the ability to further tailor your AdWords account to the needs of your business. Remember, excluding a site in the content network will prevent you from showing on all of the pages that fall under that site's domain. We suggest that you review these sites carefully before you decide to exclude them. After all, the content network allows you to reach a targeted audience across a broad range of sites, and we wouldn't want you to miss any customers!

Posted by Sarah, Inside AdWords crew

This just in, straight from our tech team:

On Friday, September 23rd, the AdWords system will be unavailable from approximately 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. PDT [?] due to system maintenance. While you won't be able to log into your accounts during this short downtime, your campaigns will continue to run as usual. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Posted by Arielle, Inside AdWords crew

From time to time, we love to get a group of advertisers together and ask them to talk about their experiences with AdWords. It's a great way for us to learn, right from the source, what's working with our program and what could use some improvement.

One thing we've noticed during these forums is that when you get a bunch of advertisers together, they often begin to bond -- and they just naturally start helping each other. It's a real pleasure to see advertisers begin to swap tips and tricks and to share their hard-won knowledge in order to help each other advertise more successfully with AdWords. I think more than a few of our advertisers are natural born teachers.

Just thinking about this puts a smile on my face. And, if you find yourself feeling the same way, then I've got good news for you!

Recently, the AdWords team built an online forum in which AdWords advertisers may search or browse for answers, ask questions, and assist others with AdWords -- 24/7. It is our fondest hope that a strong and vibrant community of AdWords advertisers will grow there and enjoy each other's company while sharing their knowledge and skill.

This new forum, called AdWords Help, may be found on Google Groups. And if the idea of helping others -- while also learning from them -- excites you at all, you're cordially invited to join. We've quietly grown to just over 125 members now, and we thought it was time to mention AdWords Help to a wider audience. You'll be getting in right at the start of something good, should you decide to join us.

We hope that you'll stop by and take a look. Maybe during your visit, you'll even decide to ask a question. Or exercise your inner-teacher, and answer one or two. ;)

Have fun!

Posted by Blake, Inside AdWords crew

To give you the chance to review and activate previously disabled keywords after the launch of our new keyword evaluation system, disabled keywords have remained in your account for the past several weeks. Next week, they'll be deleted.

So, what should you do? You don't have to make any changes to prepare for this --- your previously disabled keywords will show up as deleted in your account, and you can still choose to re-enable them. However, if you'd like to keep a list of your previously disabled keywords on hand, you can create and save a custom keyword report.

Posted by Sarah, Inside AdWords crew

Want to test out different ads, but not sure how to compare their performance? Here’s a tip from Emel M., an AdWords specialist:

First, create two or more ads within the same Ad Group. Try out different headlines or highlight different offers—the sky’s the limit. Our automatic ad optimization will then show ads with a higher clickthrough rate (CTR) more frequently. The served percentage number, located under your other ad statistics in each Ad Group, will show you how often each ad is being shown. You can then refine the text of ads which are being shown less often, or delete them from the Ad Group entirely. To make sure you have this feature enabled, follow the instructions here.

Posted by Arielle & Vivian, Inside AdWords crew

Some of the emails that we receive from Inside AdWords readers contain straightforward questions that have short and sweet answers. I’ve gone through some of these to pull out the “quickies” that may of interest to the rest of our readers.

“Is there an API that I can use to somehow add and delete my ads dynamically as I need to rather than continually having to do it manually?” – Clint W.

Absolutely. The AdWords API is available for all of our advertisers who want to manage their campaigns programmatically. You can read more about it in our earlier post, or go straight to the AdWords API home page to sign up.

“Is there an easy way to change all the URL's in my ads at once for any given campaign? I have 1-5 ads running for any given campaign and find that I have to update each ad URL individually. How can I do this more quickly?” – Paula B.

Yes, ma’am. The Find/Edit Ad Text tool on the Tools page will allow you to make bulk changes to any portion of your ad texts, including the display or destination URLs. You can read more about the details here.

“It would be nice to search for campaigns by URL. For example, I want to see all ads that have tracking code 'x', or all ads that don't have tracking code 'x' in the URL.” – Brandon H.

Well, we can help you do one of the two things that you mentioned. The handy dandy search box in the upper right corner of your AdWords account allows you to search within your campaigns. For example, if your tracking code is “X834s-11”, simply type that into the search box and it will locate all the relevant campaigns, Ad Groups, keywords, and ads that contain that term. As for searching for ads that don’t contain a certain term, that’s a good suggestion that I’ll pass on to the product team. :-)

Whether you have a quick question or a lengthy problem, send them to us and we’ll try our best to share the answers with all of our readers.

Posted by Vivian, Inside AdWords crew

Ever tried to remember the date you changed that keyword's max CPC, created that new campaign, or started to target ads to Canada? Now you can find out.

The My Change History tool, a new feature you'll find located on the Tools page of your AdWords account, allows you to see a log of the changes you've made to your account over the past three months. Some advertisers who helped us test this tool used it to understand what account modifications led to a bump in their sales. Other advertisers, whose accounts are managed by multiple people with different logins (an MCC login and the account login), used the tool to see who made certain changes.

Have another cool use for the tool? Let us know! Who knows, your idea might very well appear in lights right here on Inside AdWords.

Posted by Arielle, Inside AdWords crew

We knew this blogging thing was going to be huge, and sure enough, when our AdSense friends found out about Inside AdWords they decided to create their own AdSense counterpart, Inside AdSense.

So if you're also an AdSense publisher, or you're interested in staying up to date on the information the Inside AdSense team is sharing with our publishers, we hope you'll take a look.

Posted by Arielle, Inside AdWords crew

Many newer advertisers wonder how they should structure their account to maximize success. Often unaware of the powerful options that AdWords offers to create a range of very targeted ads, new advertisers sometimes just create a single ad to promote all of the products or services they offer. Here's an example of an "all-purpose" ad:

Joe Smith's Footwear
All kinds of footwear on sale
Specials for the whole family!
www.example.com

This tends to provide moderate results at best. By creating separate (and very focused) ads for each product or service, though, advertisers generally enjoy much better results. So, Joe might break up his product offerings into more targeted ads like this:

Women's Leather Sandals
Super comfy sandals for summer
Find a huge variety at Joe Smith's
www. example.com

Men's Clogs
Enjoy the comfort of clogs
Now on sale at Joe Smith's!
www.example.com

Kid's Tennis Shoe Sale
Just in time for back to school!
The styles they want at Joe Smith's
www.example.com

Baby Booties Sale
Shoes & booties for the little one
Great fall colors at Joe Smith's!
www.example.com

While creating multiple Ad Groups with targeted keywords relevant to each is a bit more time consuming, the improved results are more than worth it. It's also quite simple to do once you have an understanding of how an AdWords account is structured.

Yep, you guessed it. We've finally gotten to this week's hidden gem, entitled "How is an AdWords account structured?" It'll give you the basics you need to build an account structured for success, complete with targeted Ad Groups like Joe's.

Posted by Blake, Inside AdWords crew