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Last week, we posted about recent improvements we've made to the display ad builder. Now we'd like to share some best practices for using the tool. Hopefully these tips will help you get off to a running start with your new display campaigns:

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Inside AdWords crew

We recently announced the launch of AdWords display ad builder, and now we've made it more widely available and easier to use. Display ad builder is a tool that lets you create and customize display ads, allowing you to easily expand your AdWords campaigns beyond text advertising. We've had an overwhelmingly positive response from our advertisers so far, so we're happy to announce that the tool is now available to advertisers in the UK, Ireland, and a number of other countries.

In addition, based on your feedback, we made improvements to the display ad builder to enable greater customization and make building display ads even easier:

Image picker: You can now choose from previously uploaded images when creating your ads.

Real-time editing: See what your text and other customization edits look like, automatically -- without having to click the 'update preview' button.

Quicker way of seeing available ad sizes: You can see which sizes your ad can run in for each ad template without having to complete the ad creation process. You can also preview how your customization choices affect each size.

Additional templates: Choose from even more templates for customizing your ads.

We think these improvements will help you more easily and efficiently create engaging display ads. As always, we welcome your suggestions on how we can improve the display ad builder.

Next week, we'll post best practices to help you build effective ads with the display ad builder. In the meantime, you can view our tutorial video or visit the display ad builder site to learn more.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Inside AdWords crew

We've just asked a small group of US advertisers to start testing an updated web interface for AdWords. (If you're in the test pool, you'll see an alert when you sign in to your account.)

We're testing changes to the ways that AdWords advertisers see and manage the data in their accounts. These changes should make it easier to tackle common tasks, like navigating between campaigns and editing keywords across several ad groups. We hope the updates will give advertisers clearer insights into their ad campaigns and simpler ways to act on those insights.

To answer a common question: The updates we're testing won't affect how ads run. Bidding, ranking, Quality Score, and the other key AdWords performance fundamentals are not changing with these updates.

We've started advertiser testing very early, while we're still working on changes to the updated interface, so that we can make adjustments based on comments from our testers. That's one reason why this test group is pretty small. We'll gradually increase the number of advertisers testing the updated interface (and make it available to international testers) in the coming months. We'll be sharing more details about key features along the way.

In the meantime, if you'd like to be considered for the test, please submit your AdWords account information on our beta sign-up page and we'll contact you when we're ready to add you as a tester.

Posted by Amanda Kelly, Inside AdWords crew

The Seminars for Success program continues to grow and we're happy to announce a new addition to the program: Website Optimizer Seminars for Success.

For those not familiar with Seminars for Success, they are full day, in-person seminars providing hands-on training on Google products. Seminars are currently offered for AdWords, Analytics, and now Website Optimizer. Seminars for Success are led by industry experts using a curriculum designed in conjunction with Google.

The first Website Optimizer Seminars will be held in the following cities:
December 4 - Alexandria, VA
December 10 - Seattle, WA
January 23 - Las Vegas, NV
February 11 - San Jose, CA

Sign up for Seminars at least 7 days in advance and we'll even throw in a $50 AdWords credit (View the terms and conditions of advertising credits). We'll be adding more Website Optimizer Seminars in the near future, so if you want to hear when seminars are happening near you, you can fill out this contact form.

For more information about Seminars for Success, including registration details, course outlines, and past attendees' comments, please visit www.google.com/awseminars.

Posted by Vivian Leung, Inside AdWords crew

Did you know that 20% of the queries Google receives each day are ones we haven’t seen in at least 90 days, if at all? With that kind of unpredictable search behavior, it's extremely difficult to create a keyword list that covers all relevant queries using only exact match.

Broad match is a great way to capitalize on those unexpected, but relevant queries. When you include a keyword as a broad match, your corresponding ad is not only eligible to appear alongside queries with that exact spelling, but it can also capture keyword expansions that include synonyms, singular/plural forms, relevant variants of your keywords, and phrases containing your keywords.

Matching your ads against all these relevant query variations can have a big impact on the success of your online search campaigns. In fact, broad match currently accounts for over 1/3 of all clicks and conversions for advertisers, worldwide.

To make the most of broad match, you can run search query reports to monitor your expansions. If you discover a query that's performing exceptionally well, consider adding it to your ad group as a broad match keyword and setting an appropriate bid. Conversely, if you see that one of your keywords has been matched to a search query that doesn't fit with your campaign, include that search query as a negative keyword in the appropriate campaign or ad group.

We recently improved the search query report to provide more granular detail on which queries are triggering ads for your broad match keywords. This means less of your traffic may be reported under the "other unique queries" heading.

We also recommend trying the Conversion Optimizer, a bidding feature that uses your conversion tracking data to get you more conversions at a lower cost. Conversion Optimizer helps you by automatically finding the clicks from broad match terms that convert the best.

With so much traffic on Google each day, finding the queries that are most relevant for your business can be a challenge. With broad matches accounting for 1/3 of all clicks and conversions, using broad match keywords can help you capture relevant clicks and conversions that you never knew existed.

For more information, check out our frequently asked questions on broad match in the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Amanda Kelly, Inside AdWords crew

Since we launched Google Ad Planner a few months ago, you've suggested more ways we could help improve your media planning process. First, we're excited to announce that Ad Planner is now accessible to anyone with a Google account. Second, we've released a number of new features that we built based on your direct input.

Today, we have been experiencing delays in the reporting of your AdWords account statistics. This delay is temporary and does not affect the serving of your ads as per your campaign settings. 

We have been working hard to get this fixed, and at this time, click and cost statistics have been updated and show the correct numbers. Correct impression counts will follow soon. As a result of these reporting delays, your clickthrough rate (CTR) may show a higher than actual number until the impression counts are also updated. This delay in reporting is unrelated to the ads quality improvements that we wrote about on Monday. We regret any inconvenience that this may cause you and appreciate your patience as we work toward a resolution.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Inside AdWords crew

We're pleased to let you know that the improvements to Ads Quality that we announced last week have recently launched. As we explained last week, these improvements better evaluate the precise quality of your ads and improve the way we determine which ads show in the yellow region above the search results.

We also wanted to emphasize that AdWords has always accounted for the influence of ad position on CTR and removed it from the Quality Score. This specific improvement updates this system to make it fresher and more accurate.

Again, while we don't believe that any immediate changes are needed on your part, we encourage you as always to watch your key metrics and to make adjustments as appropriate.

Posted by Amanda Kelly, Inside AdWords crew