Car insurance Channel

Ever wonder what time of day your ads are searched and clicked on the most (or the least)? Is it early in the morning, during regular business hours, or late at night? To answer this question (and any others you may have on hourly performance), we recently introduced hourly reporting for Account Performance and Campaign Performance reports.

Hourly reporting allows you to see impression, click, cost, CTR, and average CPC data for your entire account or specific campaigns on an hourly basis – on either specific calendar dates or across a designated time period (such as Last Week or Last Month). Use hourly data to gather information on customer behavior or to help you determine the best times of day to run your ads using our ad scheduling feature.

For more information on hourly reporting, please visit the Report Center section of the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Judy, Inside AdWords crew

This just in, straight from our tech team:

On Saturday, July 29th, the AdWords system will be unavailable from approximately 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. PDT due to system maintenance. While you won't be able to log into your account during this time, your campaigns will continue to run as usual. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Posted by Sarah, Inside AdWords crew

After going over account structure, how ads are targeted, and how to navigate the AdWords interface in previous AdWords 101 posts, we figured it's time to talk about creating campaigns.

Today, we'll cover keyword-targeted campaigns, one of the two types of AdWords campaigns available to you. To get started, click the "keyword-targeted" link next to Create a new campaign" on your Campaign Summary page. Now you're ready to create your campaign - let's run you through the basics and some tips:

1) Choose a name for your campaign and its first Ad Group. Be sure to choose something descriptive as the title; "Summer Shoe Promotion 2006" is a lot easier to locate and identify in a list of campaigns than "Campaign #1." Similarly, Ad Groups named "Women's Flip-flops" and "Men's Sandals" will be a lot easier to understand and remember when you look at the list of different Ad Groups within your Summer Shoe Promotion campaign. You'll then be asked to choose the target language(s), as well as location targeting options.

2) Enter your preferences for location targeting, be it countries and territories, regions and cities, or a customized selection. Remember to think about where your potential customers are located, and more specifically, where your potential customers for the product or service you are trying to sell within this campaign are located. For example, let's say your company has stores across the country; but this campaign is dedicated to a promotion available only in your California stores, then you should target your campaign to users located in the state of California, and not the entire country.

3) After you've specified your targeting preferences, you will be asked to create your ad. If you are someone who experiences writer's block, have no fear. All you have to do is take a minute and brainstorm about the following:

• What product or service are you offering?
  Perhaps your store carries an imported brand of Spanish espadrilles, or a line of specialized orthopedic footwear. Be specific and tell your customers exactly what you have to offer, preferably in the first line of your ad.
  
  
• What is different about your product or service that makes it better than your competitors'? Do you have a special offer?
  If you’re running a sale, tell your customers that your shoes are 50% off, or that you offer free shipping on all orders over $100. (Make sure these special offers are reflected on your site.)
  
  
• What is your "call to action", or the action that you want searchers who see your ad to perform?
  If you want searchers who see your ad to browse your product selection, then say that. Or if you want them to sign up on your mailing list to receive a coupon, mention that in your ad text.

Tip: In our experience, ads that are specific about a product or service, that mention differentiating factors, and have a strong call to action tend to perform better than ads that are overly generic. Also take note of the character limits for each line: 25 characters for the first line, 35 characters for the second and third lines of text, and 35 characters for your display URL. (You may also want to check out our previous post which explains the difference between a display URL and a destination URL.) Once you complete your ad, the AdWords system will review it to make sure it complies with our editorial policies.

4) Choose your keywords. The same principle of being specific and targeted applies to your keyword selection as well. For more details on how to create a good keyword list, review our post on this very topic.

5) The last step in creating your campaign is setting your daily budget and Max CPC. Determine the maximum amount you are willing to spend on your campaign each day, and specify the maximum cost-per-click. After you submit these amounts, you can review all of the details of your campaign and make additional edits if necessary. Finally, click "Save" and watch your campaign go live!

Posted by Vivian, Inside AdWords crew

Over the past few months, we've provided answers to your invalid click questions. Now, Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety, is back to provide details on a new related feature.

Today, we’re announcing the launch of a new AdWords feature enabling advertisers to have a much more detailed picture of invalid click activity in their account. The metrics of “invalid clicks” and “invalid clicks rate” will show virtually all the invalid clicks affecting an account.



These clicks are filtered in real-time by our systems before advertisers are charged for them. The resulting data will of course differ from one advertiser to the next. In addition, a much smaller number of invalid clicks may also be credited to advertisers’ accounts after-the-fact, as the result of a publisher being terminated from the AdSense program for invalid click activity. These will appear as account-level credits.

One of the most controversial issues related to the topic of click fraud has been estimating how big the problem is. Estimates from third-parties (usually from consultants who have a financial incentive to make the problem seem very large) have been both inconsistent and greatly exaggerated due to their methodologies. Advertisers have always been able to compare their log data with their AdWords charges to calculate an estimate of the number of invalid clicks in their own account. This new tool will make estimating invalid click activity much easier.

Remember, when we determine that clicks are invalid, you aren’t charged for them, and they don’t affect your other campaign statistics. You may include the invalid clicks and invalid click rate columns in yearly, quarterly, monthly, and daily reports. More information about the new reporting can be found here.

Update: Changed to reflect the fact that monthly, but not weekly, reports are available at this time.

Posted by Sarah, Inside AdWords crew

Earlier this year we posted about backup credit cards. For those who haven’t taken advantage of this new billing feature, a backup credit card ensures continuous delivery of your ads, even if your primary credit card gets declined. (Note that if both credit cards are declined, your ads may stop running and you’ll need to log into your account and edit your billing information.)

Additionally, in response to customer requests, we’re now showing the last four digits of the credit card used to process a payment on the Billing Summary page. This makes it much easier for you to distinguish which credit card (e.g. primary or secondary) was used.

Posted by Judy, Inside AdWords crew

If you're a member of our Inside AdWords mailing list, over the last 18 hours you may have received a series of unrelated emails via the list. We wanted to let you know that our tech team has now resolved the issue and you should not receive any additional unrelated emails.

We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience and can assure you that this should not happen again. We remain dedicated to sharing the latest product information, news and tips about AdWords with you, and we hope that you'll continue to visit us at http://adwords.blogspot.com or through our mailing list.

Posted by Vivian & Sarah, Inside AdWords crew

Since our video ads announcement and the subsequent feature release, we've received a lot of requests for video ad creation tips and best practices. So, over the next few weeks, Bismarck from the Video Ads team is taking to the street to talk to the people who are creating and finding success with video ads. This week, he caught up with Todd Tracey, one of our first video ad customers, and the Senior VP at TurnHere Incorporated (a company specializing in video production), to get a few tips. Here's what he had to say:

Bismarck: Why is video such a compelling advertising medium?

Todd: With video, you tug at people's emotions and this provides for a higher recall rate than a static image or a text ad.

Bismarck: Can video work online?

Todd: The Internet gives everybody a voice. Small advertisers are able to get the same level of engagement and reach that the large companies, such as Nike, have been getting on broadcast TV for decades, and, at a fraction of the cost. With regard to cost per individual user reached, there is nothing out there that performs better.

Bismarck: Are video ads for everyone?

Todd: Videos are as integral to a company's presence as is their website.

Bismarck: Now for the best practices. What should advertisers look for when creating a starter image?

Todd: Consider the goal of the starter image - it is to entice the user to hit play, so you want to make sure that the starter image grabs the user's attention, but remains relevant to the actual video ad. Use bold, vibrant colors and try to limit text to a minimum.




Bismarck: What kind of content should be included in the video ad?

Todd: Again, make sure to keep the user's attention. Try to tell a story - and stay clear of the product-based infomercial. Use people - owners, customers and the like to tell their story with the product.

Bismarck: How about animation? Does it work?

Todd: We use animation when we're trying to explain a complex idea, but whenever possible, we try to use real people.

Bismarck: Is there an ideal length for an ad?

Todd: Most ads will be watched for less than 30 seconds, so make sure that even if you make your ad longer than 30 seconds, that you front-load your important messages. Movie trailers or short films are obviously watched longer, but even they start to see a drop off at around 90 seconds.

Bismarck: Anything else you would like to share with our advertisers?

Todd: One more thing - avoid using scripts unless you're hiring actors to help you shoot the ad. You want your users or potential customers to believe you and scripting comes off as phony in many instances.

Bismarck: Thank you for your time.

Todd: My pleasure.

We hope you've found this helpful. If you have any video ad tips of your own that you'd like to share, please let us know.

Posted by Sarah, Inside AdWords crew

This week, we released category site selection for the site tool. This allows you to browse sites by category, making it easier for you to find and include sites that are relevant to your products or services. For example, if I want to advertise my soccer camp, I would first select the 'Browse Categories' button in the site tool. Then I can select 'Sports' and drilldown to the topic 'Soccer' in order to view sites that may interest me. It's a great new way to help you browse for sites that fit your needs, and we hope you'll check it out.

Posted by Sarah, Inside AdWords crew

In this fast-paced world, you're really on top of things if you can remember your best friend's birthday and where you parked your car this morning at work. Therefore, having just passed the midway mark of a very active year, it seems like a good time to review the new AdWords products and features that have been introduced in the past six months. Here are the ones we've mentioned on the Inside AdWords blog, organized into categories based on the feature's purpose:

Account Management Tools:
Advanced account search
Account time zones
Tabbed Ad Groups
Ad scheduling

Billing enhancements:
Backup credit cards
'Retry card' billing feature

New ad formats:
Local business ads
Click-to-play video ads

Targeting options:
Demographic site selection

We've gotten great feedback on many of the new features, especially click-to-play video ads, but we're always looking for more. In particular, we'd love to hear from you regarding your experiences using any of our new features and any suggestions for improvements.

If one of the features listed above happened to slip past you, take a look now since it's never too late to learn something new about AdWords.

Posted by Judy, Inside AdWords crew

Yesterday, we sat down with Andrew C., a product marketing manager, who gave us a heads-up regarding an upcoming AdWords 'landing page quality' change. This change to the algorithm will affect a small number of advertisers -- while having a positive impact on the quality of ads that our users see. Here's a little background, and a look at what's coming up:

As you may recall, we began incorporating advertiser landing page quality into the Quality Score back in December 2005. Following that change, advertisers who are not providing useful landing pages to our users will have lower Quality Scores that in turn result in higher minimum bid requirements for their keywords. We realize that some minimum bids may be too high to be cost-effective -- indeed, these high minimum bids are our way of motivating advertisers to either improve their landing pages or to simply stop using AdWords for those pages, while still giving some control over which keywords to advertise on. Although it is counter-intuitive to some who hear it, we'd rather show one less ad than to show an ad which leads to a poor user experience -- since long-term user trust in AdWords is of overarching importance.

From time-to-time, we improve our algorithms for evaluating landing page quality (often based on feedback from our end-users), and next week we're launching another such improvement. Thus, over the coming days a small number of advertisers who are providing a low quality user experience on their landing pages will see increases in their minimum bids. It is important to note, however, that the vast majority of advertisers will not be affected at all by this change, as they link to quality landing pages.

If you do see an increase in minimum bids and you feel that your landing page is providing a great user experience, please contact AdWords support and we'll take a look. Also, for useful guidelines which will help to define what users look for in a high quality site, we hope you'll take a look at the landing page and site quality guidelines, from the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Blake, Inside AdWords crew

Having spent countless hours working with the AdWords program and our advertisers, the Inside AdWords crew is pretty familiar with the questions that come up again and again. And we've found it both fun and instructive to answer a few of the more popular ones here in the blog.

One question that's often on advertisers' must-ask list is why their site does not begin to appear in Google's free search results once they have started advertising with AdWords. By way of illustration, here's a recent question (slightly edited, and excerpted from a longer post) from the AdWords Help group:

We are the only "widget" company in Santa Barbara County. When someone does a search using for example "widgets Santa Barbara" our sponsored link shows up at the top of the list. This is how it should be and it means that AdWords is working properly. However, why is it that our site does not show up in the free results?

It's important to know that Google's advertising programs are entirely independent of the unpaid search results. So being an AdWords advertiser (or AdSense publisher) doesn't affect the inclusion or ranking of your site in the Google search index. Put another way, being an advertiser will neither help nor harm one's inclusion or ranking.

That said, an excellent place to get answers to your search-related questions is the Webmaster Help Center -- where you'll find links to lots of information on topics such as webmaster guidelines and your site in the Google index.

Also, don't forget to take another look at recent Inside AdWords posts regarding Google Sitemaps, another useful tool that may assist you in getting your site listed.

Update: changed Help Center links

Posted by Blake, Inside AdWords crew