Car insurance Channel

Beta testing for the new AdWords interface has been expanded to an even larger number of advertisers. The new interface is now available to most active AdWords accounts in these languages:

• English
• Spanish
• French
• German
• Italian
• Dutch
• Hebrew
  
• Simplified Chinese
• Japanese
• Brazilian Portuguese

We'll be adding more AdWords languages in the future.

If your account has been added to the beta test, you'll be directed to the new interface the next time you log in. The previous interface will still be available if you need it: during the beta you can switch back and forth using the "New Interface (Beta)" and "Previous Interface" links in the top corner of your account, next to your email address.

Have questions while using the new interface? The new interface microsite has videos and a how-to guide that will help you with the changes. For example:

Using Analytics to improve overall website ROI

This series has shown you how to use Analytics to identify low and high performing keywords, find your highest revenue keywords, and weed out low performing keywords. Now that you're familiar with Analytics, you might want to explore some of the other ways it can help you improve your website's ROI. Here are some suggestions for getting started:

• Use Analytics to create an optimization plan to improve the conversion rate on your site
• Track your email marketing campaigns with Analytics
• Expand your keyword lists using Analytics with Insights for Search and the Search Based Keyword Tool
• Follow the 9 steps to becoming an Analytics Emperor
  
• Hire a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant to handle all your tracking for you
  

You can also find regular updates on how to improve your Analytics skills on the Google Analytics blog and Youtube Channel.

That's it for this series. Happy tracking.
Posted by Amanda Kelly, Inside AdWords crew

The success of your business both online and offline is very important to us, which is why today we'd like to share a message from David Fischer, our VP of Global Online Sales and Operations:

It's no secret that small businesses play a key role in Google's success as a company and drive the economy as a whole. AdWords, AdSense, Apps – you name it – have all grown because small businesses use them. Because of that, increasing their bottom line is very important to us.

In Washington, D.C. and state capitols across the country, we often witness policy debates, legislative initiatives, and regulatory changes that significantly affect the small business constituency – the same constituency that has helped make Google what it is today. But the recent economic downturn has turned entrepreneurship into an uphill battle. So we asked ourselves a simple question: What can we do to help broaden the collective voice of small business both on Capitol Hill and in the states? We want to know about the issues that are important to our small business partners so that we can better invest in their goals and objectives and ultimately, their success.

Today we're launching a new initiative called the Small Business Network. It's designed to promote business-friendly policies at the federal and state levels. We plan to tackle a number of important technology policy issues - the first two of which are increasing broadband access and preserving an open Internet. And we also want to have a dialogue with small business owners about other issues that affect their online business.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, signed into law by President Obama in February, sets aside $7 billion to increase access to high-speed Internet or broadband for the 20 million Americans who live in underserved areas. By expanding broadband access and preserving an open platform, small businesses in America have the ability to reach all consumers at an affordable cost and compete with their counterparts anywhere in the world. We hope that the Small Business Network will encourage lawmakers to grant those funds to the right providers and create broadband access for all small businesses across the country.

If you are a small business owner who is interested in learning more this initiative, visit Google's Small Business Network site to find out how you can be a part of it.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Inside AdWords crew

You may use your AdWords campaigns to drive people to your site or to drive sales online, but did you know that paid search can also be a powerful brand-building tool?

In a recent study, Google and the OTX research firm explored how search can impact branding across five travel product categories: Air Travel, Car Rental, Cruise, Hotel and Online Travel Agency.

Join us on Thursday, April 30th at 1:00pm EST to learn how paid search can:

• Lift key metrics for your brand
• Increase traffic to your site

You can register here to attend.

Posted by Amanda Kelly, Inside AdWords crew

Let's take a look at some of the cool things you can do with filters. First, no matter what tab you're in, you'll find filters under Filter and views.

(click to view larger image)

Setting up a filter is the same whether you're working with ad groups, keywords, or placement; though, the criteria you can filter by does depend on what you're trying to filter. For example, you can filter keywords by match type, but you can't filter ad groups by match type.

(click to view larger image)

To set up a filter, just specify the criteria you want. You can add additional rules to make your filter more specific. For example, you can set filters for clickthrough rate (CTR) and average position at the same time to see keywords with a high CTR appearing on the second page of search results. If you want to re-use the same filter repeatedly, you can save it by checking the Save Filter box.

Let's say we'd like to find high performing keywords across our account. Rather than hunting down all the keywords from ad group to ad group, we can just filter for high performance. Let's look for keywords with a CTR greater than 2% and conversion rate of at least 5%.

(click to view larger image)

Then, after we've filtered the list, we can make changes to our high performing keywords directly in the results table instead of having to click through to each ad group one by one.

Another place you might find filters very handy is in the Ads tab, which displays all your ads across your account, campaign, or ad group. Here's a way you could use filters to get better insight into your campaigns:

The Google Store has campaigns with two types of landing pages: product pages for a specific product like this t-shirt, and category pages for entire groups like all wearables. We'd like to know which type of page generates more sales. Since the URLs for our product pages are formatted differently than the URLs for our category pages, we can create a filter to show only ads that have category landing pages by filtering for destination URLs that start with http://www.googlestore.com/category.asp?

(click to view larger image)

With this filter, it's easy to see performance across all ads that drive traffic to our category pages. We can compare this to the performance we see on product pages. For the Google Store, we found that the category pages generate more sales than the product pages-- information that will help us improve our campaigns.

With filters on the Ads tab, you can also quickly identify ads with a specific approval status. This is a quick way to identify all pending or disapproved ads across your account.

(click to view larger image)

As you can see, filters have a lot of possible uses. We encourage you to try looking at your campaigns in different ways. You might be surprised at what you find. Happy filtering.

Posted by Austin Rachlin, Inside AdWords crew

At the end of last year, we announced the launch of the new Search-based Keyword Tool. This tool examines the content of your website and matches it against actual Google search queries, providing you with a list of highly relevant, actively-searched keywords. Since the launch, we've gotten lots of positive feedback from our advertisers, so we're happy to announce that the tool is now available in Australia, Canada, China, Japan, and New Zealand. Additionally, on the Settings page, you are now able to select the currency for which you'd like to see suggested bids.

We've also added new features to enable greater customization and help you get even more targeted results:

• Language/Country-specific results: Narrow your results by adjusting your country/territory and language settings. For example, you can use this if you only want to have the tool match your website against searches from Canada or Australia.
• Ad/Search Share filters: Filter by Ad Share and Search Share, in addition to the other advanced filtering options. These filters help you customize your results to focus on queries where you're not showing up in the natural search-results.

If you haven't tried the tool yet, getting started is easy:

1. Go to http://www.google.com/sktool.
2. Sign in to your AdWords account.
3. Enter the URL of your website.
4. Use the Language or Country/territory settings to get results specific to your selection, or keep the default settings to show global data.
5. Click Find keywords.

As always, we welcome your suggestions on how we can improve the Search-based Keyword Tool. We'll be expanding to additional languages and more countries in the near future, so stay tuned.

For more information on the tool, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

Back in December we launched mobile ads for iPhone and Android devices. Unlike standard mobile ads, which show on WAP devices and require you to create mobile-specific text and image ads, the mobile ads for iPhone and Android phones allow you to show your regular text and image ads on these devices.

If you’ve been thinking about getting into mobile advertising, but don’t know where to start, check out this video to get a quick overview of the benefits and differences between the two ad formats:


You can also check out this post on the Google Mobile Blog which goes into more detail about the differences between the two types of ads.

Posted by Amanda Kelly, Inside AdWords crew

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Inside AdWords crew

Posted by Austin Rachlin, Inside AdWords crew

Last week we talked about how Google Analytics can provide you with rich data about your advertising, and this week the Google Analytics Team would like to share some more specifics about how to analyze your campaigns.

Linking your accounts

Linking your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts gives you more information about your advertising because you can see how visitors from different campaigns and keywords interact with your website. If you've already linked your accounts, skip to the next section to see how you can view AdWords reports in Analytics.

You can link your Analytics and AdWords accounts by clicking the "Analytics" tab in AdWords. If you don't have a Analytics account already, you'll be asked to create one. Once you link your accounts the data from your AdWords campaigns will automatically appear inside Google Analytics (assuming that you've already installed the tracking code). You can check out this video to learn more about linking your accounts.

You'll also need to install the tracking code on every page on your website if you haven't already. Here are some resources to help you get the code installed correctly:

• Google Analytics Blog: Tracking Code Tutorial
• Help Center Article
  

Once installed, your profile overview page will show that everything is good to go by displaying a status icon that looks like a green check mark. If you have a Google Analytics account, but don't know where to find your tracking code, check out this article for instructions.

Finding your ROI

The Google Analytics AdWords Campaigns report (in the Traffic Sources section) let's you drill down and find out where visitors from each of your campaigns are going and what actions they are taking on your site. After going to the Traffic Sources section, click one of the campaigns listed in this report to view the ad groups within the campaign. Within the AdWords Ad Groups report, click one of the ad groups to see the AdWords Keywords report, where you can find lists of your keywords that brought traffic to your site.



Finally, click the Clicks tab to see ROI metrics for the keywords. With the ROI information for each of your keywords you can then make more informed decisions about where to target your advertising dollars or how to change your website to better capture these visitors. We'll talk about how to find low and high performers in the next couple weeks.

Tracking your revenue

Don't skip this part just because you don't sell online. If your goals don't have values, you won't be able to measure the return on your investment, so let's explore how you can set up your goals and track your return.

If you have an e-commerce site, your return comes from your e-commerce revenue. But, even if you don't have an e-commerce site, you can probably come up with intelligent values for your goals. For example, if you know that 1 out of every 100 PDF downloads results in a $500 sale, you can assign a value of $5 to that PDF download ($500/100 downloads).

If you have an ecommerce site, you can check out this help center article to learn more about tracking your return, and if you don't sell online, read this one.

That's it for this post. Next time we'll start diving into using Analytics to analyze and improve your AdWords campaign performance.

Posted by Amanda Kelly, Inside AdWords crew

We're happy to announce the winners of our display ad builder contest, where we challenged advertisers to use their creativity and innovation to create compelling new display ad builder ads. The top five entries stood out for their choices of template, ad copy, use of images, and overall creativity.

First place: Wilshire Grand Hotel in Los Angeles, whose display ads have helped them significantly increase online reservations.


Second place: ResortQuest.com, whose ads received a low cost per conversion compared to other ads in the ad group.


Third place: TripRes.com, who used text-only display ad builder ads to achieve a lower cost per conversion compared to text ads in the same ad group.


Honorable Mentions: Printglobe.com, a promotional products company, and the tea company, Teavana.

Congratulations to the winners and thank you to everyone who participated!

We also invite you to learn more about display ad builder, and how you can build your own great ads that will reach your customers in new ways. Or, if you use Twitter, you can follow @GoogleAdBuilder to ask questions and get the latest display ad builder updates.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Inside AdWords crew

Google Finance is now accepting image-based ads for the first time, and we're launching several new financial display ad templates that you can use specifically for Google Finance or any other placement on the Google Content Network. Of course, you can use any of our more than 80 templates on Google Finance, but we've also created several new financial services templates with pre-designed elements for your specific needs. As with many of our display ad templates, you can customize any of the text and colors, and specific templates also allow you to upload your own images. Here are screenshots of a couple of the new templates that you can use - they're available in multiple sizes:

The system maintenance we were planning and informed you of for Saturday, April 11th has been canceled. As a result, the AdWords system will be available on this day, and you should be able to sign in and access your accounts as normal. We apologize for any confusion.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Inside AdWords crew

For a short period of time, we experienced a technical issue that prevented AdWords advertisers from accessing their accounts. During this time, your ads continued to show according to your campaign settings, and your campaign statistics were updated as usual.

We've now resolved the issue, and you can once again log into your AdWords account to view your campaigns and make changes. However, as a result you may notice a slight delay in campaign statistics for the next few hours. We apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused.

Posted by Amanda Kelly, Inside AdWords crew

We're currently experiencing a technical issue with a part of our ad system. AdWords ad serving has not been affected. Your ads will continue to show as per your campaign settings, and your AdWords statistics will continue to update normally. However, you will be unable to access your AdWords account to view your campaigns or make changes at this time.

We're working on a solution and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you. Please check our known issues page for updates.

Posted by Christian Yee, Inside AdWords crew

Posted by Amanda Kelly, Inside AdWords crew

On Saturday, April 11th, 2009, the AdWords system will be unavailable from approximately 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. PST due to system maintenance. While you won't be able to sign in to your accounts during this time, your campaigns will continue to run as usual. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Inside AdWords crew

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Inside AdWords crew

In our survey last month you told us you were interested in hearing more about how Google Analytics can help you improve your AdWords results. Today, we're going to kick off a four-part series on precisely this subject.

For those of you unfamiliar with Google Analytics, it's a free tool that lets you see how visitors interact with your site. While AdWords helps you drive traffic to your site, Google Analytics helps you find out what happens to these visitors after they get to your site. For example, if your ad for shoes directs visitors to a page with all the brands of shoes you offer, here are some things Analytics can show you:

• Which types of shoes do visitors view most often? For example, do people prefer sandals or sneakers?
• In which order do visitors view pages? For example, do people view more expensive shoes, but then buy cheaper ones?
• Which pages are the last ones people see before leaving the site? For example, do people get confused on the sign-up page and leave?
• Do people actually complete a goal on your site? For example, how many visitors buy or sign-up?

All this information can help you make better decisions about your website and your AdWords advertising. For example, if your ad directs people to a page that Analytics says has a high bounce rate (where many people leave the site after viewing the page) you can change your destination URL to point to another page. In that way, you can get more value out of your website traffic.

Over the next few weeks we'll explore specific ways that you can use Analytics to maximize your AdWords investment:

Part 2 - Linking your Analytics and AdWords accounts & tracking your revenue
Part 3 - Identifying keywords that lose you money & calculating your ROI
Part 4 - Finding keywords and ad positions that drive revenue

But if you're in a hurry to get started, you can watch the Google Analytics in 60 Seconds series to learn how to effectively use Google Analytics:

Google Analytics in 60 Seconds: Find the Best Keywords
Google Analytics in 60 Seconds: Location Targeting
Google Analytics in 60 Seconds: Find Poor Performing Campaigns and Keywords
Google Analytics in 60 Seconds: Placement Targeting
Google Analytics in 60 Seconds: Identifying High Spenders
Google Analytics in 60 Seconds: Conversion Funnels
Google Analytics in 60 Seconds: Tracking Ecommerce with Google Analytics

And if you'd like to learn more about Google Analytics, including case studies and in-depth looks at its features, you can visit the Google Analytics site.

Posted by Amanda Kelly, Inside AdWords crew

To help you better maximize your AdWords investment this quarter, and to give you a preview of what you can learn at the Seminars for Success, we've just posted two videos by AdWords seminar leader Anastasia Holdren. The two videos are Explaining Quality Score and Advertising in a Down Economy, which you can also view below:

You can learn more about all the seminars we offer on the course description page of our website. And for those of you interested in attending future seminars, in the coming months we'll be offering Seminars for Success in the following cities:

AdWords
April 6-7: Austin, TX - AdWords 101: Beginner and AdWords 201: Intermediate
May 4-5: Tampa, FL - AdWords 101: Beginner and AdWords 201: Intermediate
May 20-21: Philadelphia, PA - AdWords 301: Advanced Account Optimization and AdWords 302: Advanced Conversion Optimization
June 4-5: Chicago, IL - AdWords 301: Advanced Account Optimization and AdWords 302: Advanced Conversion Optimization
June 15-16: San Diego, CA - AdWords 101: Beginner and AdWords 201: Intermediate
June 24-25: Boston, MA - AdWords 301: Advanced Account Optimization and AdWords 302: Advanced Conversion Optimization

Analytics
April 15-16: Orange County, CA - Analytics: Introduction and Analytics: Advanced
April 21-22: Honolulu, HI - Analytics: Introduction and Analytics: Advanced
April 27-28: Boston, MA - Analytics: Introduction and Analytics: Advanced
June 10-11: Miami, FL - Analytics: Introduction and Analytics: Advanced

Website Optimizer
April 17: Orange County, CA - Website Optimizer
April 23: Honolulu, HI - Website Optimizer

If you sign up for seminars at least seven days in advance, we'll even throw in a $50 AdWords credit (terms and conditions).

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

Posted by Amanda Kelly, Inside AdWords crew