Car insurance Channel

In the spirit of posting quick but useful tips, here's a question (paraphrased from a post in the AdWords Help community) that we'd like to answer:

The state of California, where my office is located, shows under my ad. Why is that there? I'm not sure I want it there, so how do I get rid of it?

Here is what's happening: When an advertiser has targeted a city or region in their campaign, the name of that city or region will show under their ad to users who are identified by the AdWords system as being located in that area. This tells the user that your product or service is especially relevant to them - and is intended to help you reach more qualified users.

What to do: If you'd prefer that your ad appear without a region name (while still reaching qualified users), you may want to consider running a country- and territory-targeted campaign with region-specific keywords and ad text, rather than a regionally targeted ad. More details may be found right here.

Posted by Blake, Inside AdWords crew

As an AdWords advertiser, we know that you're interested in increasing the amount of traffic to your site. In the past, we've let you know about Sitemaps to make your site more crawler-friendly for our search results. Now, with Google Base, there's another way to make your products or services searchable on Google. Here's Alison from the Google Base team with the details:

Your site may already be included in our crawl index, but we want to ensure that you also know how you can supplement these results with Google Base - you can submit the products or services that you offer directly to Google Base making them eligible to show on Google.com when a user searches on a relevant query.

Google Base allows you to easily submit all types of online and offline information; whether it's a large selection of shoes that you sell online or information about your consulting service, we'll make it easier for people to find it on Google. If your product or service isn't online yet, we can help you put it there -- for free.

For example, let's say you use AdWords to advertise your job search service. With Google Base, you can include specific information about job offers like title, job description, location and salary and we'll display them in relevant search results on Google, helping you to increase awareness about your service. The more details you include about the information you want to share, the greater the likelihood it will be found by those looking for exactly what you have to offer.

If you're ready to submit information to Google Base, there are currently three ways to do so: you can upload individual items manually via a web form, submit multiple items through a bulk upload, or use our just-released API.

No matter how you choose to submit your info, we hope you'll find this to be a worthwhile addition to the targeted traffic you are already getting from your AdWords campaigns.

Posted by Sarah, Inside AdWords crew

As small children wearing book-filled backpacks return to the sidewalks, it's a sure sign that fall is just around the corner. As you enjoy the last few weeks of summer, it's also a good time to look through your active Ad Groups and decide if you need to make any seasonal changes. Below are a few quick tips to make sure your campaigns are seasonally relevant.

Are there items that you only advertise in the summer? If so, there are a number of tools that can help you change these items and replace them with a product for the fall. If you'd like to quickly replace all mentions of 'swimsuit' in your keyword list with 'jacket', the Find and Edit Keywords Tool is for you. To do the same in your ad text, you can take advantage of the Find and Edit Ad Text Tool.

If you'd prefer to keep this Ad Group in place until next summer rolls around, remember that you can simply pause it and resume it again next year. Or, if you know that you'll stop taking orders for your summer cruise on September 15, you can make sure that you stop advertising at the right time by setting an end date for that campaign.

Posted by Sarah, Inside AdWords crew

Here's a quick heads up from our tech team on system maintenance this week:

Starting at 4am PDT tomorrow, August 23, the AdWords video ad upload tool will be down for maintenance for approximately 48 hours. During this time you will not be able to upload or modify click-to-play video ads in your AdWords account. However, if you've already created a video ad, it will continue to run normally during this time.

Then, on Saturday, August 26th, the AdWords system will be temporarily unavailable from approximately 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. PDT due to system maintenance. As with the case mentioned above, though you won't be able to log in or make any changes to your account during this time, your ads will continue to run as normal.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this system maintenance may cause.

Posted by Sarah, Inside AdWords crew

Here's another question (slightly edited for length) sent to us by our colleagues on the AdWords Help forum. Since the question comes up a fair amount, they thought it might help a lot of folks if it we answered it here in the blog:

My campaign was going along just fine, but all of a sudden in the Status column, it says something like "Ended July 31, 2006". Why is that? I didn't do anything, and haven't even made any changes at all for at least a couple of weeks. And even more important, how do I get it running again? I'm losing business, and want to get my ads running again!

This occurs when an advertiser has set an 'end date' for their campaign, and then forgets that they have done so. This happens more often than you might expect, but no worries -- the solution is extremely straightforward. You can get re-started in very short order by following the steps right here.

Tip: When you set an end date for a campaign, you may want to make a note of this on your calendar, perhaps a few days in advance of the actual date. This will remind you to reset the end date to a point in the future, if you wish, before your ads come to a screeching halt.

Posted by Blake, Inside AdWords crew

Do you own a local business? If so, Rob from the Coupons team has news you'll want to hear:

Whether you own a day spa, hardware store, or dry cleaner, there's a good chance that customers in your neighborhood are looking for you on Google. Now you can take advantage of this opportunity by reaching new customers and retaining existing business, at no cost to you.

Through printable coupons on Google Maps, you can offer customers discounts or promotions at the moment they're looking for you. Customers can print out the coupons they find on your business listing page and redeem them at your physical store location.



How do you set-up a coupon? Any local business, including those run by AdWords advertisers, can create and offer coupons for free through the Local Business Center. First, you need to create and update your business listing, as it would appear on Google Maps, to ensure that people know how to reach you by phone, email, or online. Once your listing has been verified, you can login to your Local Business Center account and create, edit, and manage coupons for free.

This is a great way to get your business in front of your customers as they browse Google Maps - if you'd like additional information, take a minute to learn more about adding your business and coupons.

Posted by Sarah, Inside AdWords crew

Here's a quick update from the AdWords Report Center team:

Scheduled reports now begin running (at 1 a.m.) in the local time zone you set for your AdWords account. In addition, for those using an MCC account, scheduled MCC reports begin running (at 5 a.m.) in the local time zone of your MCC account.

Please note that if you did not adjust your account's local time zone, your scheduled reports will continue to run just as they have in the past, in Pacific Time.

Posted by Judy, Inside AdWords crew

A few weeks ago, we introduced Google Checkout on the Inside AdWords blog. Now, Marianna M. from the Checkout team, has news about a related resource:

The new Google Checkout blog for sellers is a way to help you get the most out of Google Checkout. We'll be sharing information on feature enhancements, product updates, Q&A from the customer support team, and useful tips.

For those of you unfamiliar with Google Checkout, it's a new checkout process that makes searching and buying faster and easier. For shoppers, a special Google Checkout shopping cart icon identifies participating merchants and makes it easier to buy from them through a single login--shoppers don't have to re-enter purchasing information every time a purchase is made. For sellers, it helps you sell more online and process $10 in sales for free for every dollar you spend on AdWords advertising.

So, if you're already using Google Checkout, be sure to take a look at the new blog. If you don't have a Checkout account and would like one, you can sign up here.

Posted by Sarah & Vivian, Inside AdWords crew

We've posted before about how you can use local business ads to promote your business on Google Maps. Here's Dominic P. from the Local Business Ads team with an update about a new feature:

You may already know that Local Business Ads allow you to create an enhanced text ad with photos and icons that will give you greater visibility when potential customers search for your business on Google Maps (see screenshot below). In addition, we'll even show a regular text version of your local business ad when users in your area are searching for your business on Google.com.

To enhance local business ads, we've recently introduced the ability to use your own icon as the marker on the Google Map. The icon is 16 pixels by 16 pixels and is similar to a favicon that you see in your favorite web browser. (We've highlighted the custom map marker icons in red in the screenshot below.)

To recap, local business ads are priced the same way as standard keyword-targeted ads -- that is, you only pay when a user clicks on the ad to get to your your webpage from Google Maps, Google.com, or one of our partners on the Google search network. You can use local business ads to promote business locations in the US, Canada or the UK. To get started with local business ads, just follow the steps listed here.

Posted by Vivian, Inside AdWords crew

Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety, returns today with important information regarding third party detection of click fraud:

A rigorous technical analysis by Google engineers has found fundamental flaws in the work of several click fraud consultants – flaws that help explain why widely quoted estimates of the size of the click fraud problem are exaggerated. We would like to share this research so that advertisers can be aware of these problems and so these consultants can use the information to improve their services.

We provide detailed analysis and explanation of this work here. Two key findings are below, which explain the fundamental flaw we have seen in all of the reports we examined – fictitious clicks: events which are reported as fraudulent, but are never recorded or charged as ad clicks by Google:

• Fictitious ad clicks because of mischaracterizing events. This finding may be the most significant flaw responsible for exaggerated click fraud claims. The problem lies in the fact that many click fraud consultants don’t count actual ad clicks. Rather, to determine the number of ad clicks, they use a number of other signals, including counting visits to a particular webpage. As a result, the consultants count page reloads and subsequent visits on an advertiser’s site as multiple clicks on the advertiser’s Google ad. This generates fictitious ad clicks in the consultant’s reports. For example, if a user browses deeper into an advertiser’s site, then hits the back button, this causes a potential reload of the original landing page, which a consultant would record as an additional ad click – even though no Google ad click actually occurred.
  
  
• Fictitious ad clicks due to conflation across advertisers and ad networks. Some consultants “cookie” users and track their activity across their network of client advertisers. One often-used consultant implements the cookie in such a way that clicks on Yahoo ads can be counted as clicks on Google ads, and vice versa.

These kinds of flaws in methodology cause click counts in consultant reports to be artificially inflated. One clear indication that the consultants’ results are flawed: they’re not even getting the total number of clicks correct. We have seen some instances of reports showing 1.5 times the number of clicks in our logs – for example, in one case 1,278 clicks were claimed as being “fraudulent” by the consultant while only 850 actually even appeared as clicks in Google’s logs.

More evidence of the consultants’ defective methodology is revealed when looking at conversion rates. We found clicks identified as “fraudulent” in reports often converted at nearly the same rate (and in some cases better) compared to other clicks. In one case, “fraudulent clicks” converted 5.1% of the time — only a bit less than the advertiser’s overall conversion rate of 5.8%.

Our report provides detailed case studies for three third-party auditing firms – AdWatcher, ClickFacts, and Click Forensics – which represent the vast majority of the last 100 reports advertisers have submitted to us. All of the reports we’ve seen from these consultants exhibit the serious problems we have described above. The pervasiveness of these problems concerns us, especially because advertisers may be hurting their businesses by changing their campaign settings based on erroneous information. We will continue to devote attention to this issue to keep our advertisers well-informed, and perhaps help third-party auditing firms improve their methods so that they can provide value to advertisers.

If you would like to know more about the general issue of invalid clicks and how we manage them, we have posted previously here and here. If you would like to learn more about how to track invalid clicks in your account, you can find information about our Invalid Clicks reporting feature here.

Posted by Blake, Inside AdWords crew

Today we offer a really short and sweet tip, which just may be one of the more important things you can do to be successful with AdWords. It reads just like a cliche, but I'd call it a gem:

From time to time, take off your business owner hat -- and put on your customer hat.

Almost certainly, you are an expert at your business -- so much so that you may have forgotten what it's like to be a less knowledgeable customer for the product or service you offer. This tip proposes that you temporarily forget everything you know about your business and your needs as the business owner, and concentrate instead on what your potential customer needs, wants, and expects. Not to mention what factors might lead them to buy.

You might begin by asking yourself these questions:

• If you were the customer, what would be most important to you as you shop online?
  
• What keywords would you search on to find your product or service?
  
• What ad copy would absolutely capture your attention and motivate you to click your ad?

Next, take a look at your website -- stop for a moment and ask yourself:

• What page on the website offers the most relevant information and makes it easiest for you to purchase the product or service offered? Is this the page that you're using as the landing page of your ad?
  
• Would you trust this website with your credit card number, and rely on the company to deliver, based purely on what you see there?

Here's our challenge to you today: pick an important Ad Group, put on your customer hat, and then evaluate everything you do as an advertiser from that perspective.

You might be surprised by what you'll see. And you may also pick up a new idea or two on how to enhance your advertising success.

Posted by Blake, Inside AdWords crew

Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety, is back with a quick update on invalid clicks:

Those of you following AdWords may have noticed that we've been trying to tell advertisers more and show them more about invalid clicks. We also think there is more the industry as a whole can do to promote transparency on the issue, which is why we're participating in the Industry-wide Click Measurement Working Group. The effort is coordinated by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Media Rating Council (MRC) with a goal of developing "a detailed definition of a 'click' and the standard against which clicks are measured and counted including the identification of invalid clicks and/or fraudulent clicks."

More information about the announcement can be found in the press release from the IAB.

Posted by Sarah, Inside AdWords crew

Are you coming to San Jose next week for the annual Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference? Hosted by Danny Sullivan, this four day conference (from August 7th-10th) will once again feature an agenda packed with presentations, panel discussions, and a trade expo, all of which cover a range of topics that may be of interest to AdWords advertisers. You can also catch Google CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt delivering the keynote on Wednesday, August 9 -- as well as meet up with AdWords specialists who can assist you with personalized account tips.

Thanks to our friends over in Google Analytics, we're happy to offer advertisers a promotional "Priority" code for 20% off when you buy a Conference or Day pass to SES San Jose. The Priority code is 20GOO2 (two-zero-gee-oh-oh-two). To redeem the Priority code and purchase a pass, go here or follow the link below:


If past conferences are anything to go by, this should be a fun and educational event for all - with lots of folks to meet, contacts to make, and tips and tricks to learn and apply. We hope you'll consider it.

Posted by Sarah, Inside AdWords crew