Car insurance Channel: March 2010

Google Ad Innovations: where ads are going next

In the past year, Google's advertising tools have moved in some exciting directions. We've introduced more data-driven and efficient campaign management with the new AdWords interface, easier account optimization with the Opportunities tab, and new ad formats like Ad Sitelinks and Product Extensions that provide more context and value to those who see them, to name a few.

But where is advertising with Google headed next? Which new tools, formats and features will make it possible for you to communicate with your customers in more meaningful, creative ways?

We've started a new project, Google Ad Innovations, to answer that very question. Google Ad Innovations is a website where you can explore Google's latest advertising technologies, watch short video demos, and try out select new tools.

The technologies we'll highlight on Google Ad Innovations are at various stages of development, from early tests to fully released features. Here are a few of the new releases you'll find on Ad Innovations right now:

Remarketing -- a way to show your ads to users who’ve previously visited your website as they browse sites across the Google Content Network
AdWords Search Funnels -- a set of reports that help you understand the Google.com search ad click and impression behavior leading up to a conversion
Location Extensions with Multiple Addresses -- an ad format that displays a list of nearby store locations when your customers are performing local searches
Click-to-Call Extensions -- an ad format that lets mobile phone users call you directly from your ads
Analytics Intelligence -- a Google Analytics feature that automatically identifies significant changes in your site traffic

There's a lot to see on Ad Innovations, but we want it to be more than a show and tell site. Every Ad Innovations page will have a feedback link, so if you see a feature that can be improved or think we've hit on a valuable new idea, let us know! The comments and suggestions you leave while using Google Ad Innovations will go directly to the Google team working on the feature.

If you want to stay on the cutting edge of Google advertising products, visit Google Ad Innovations. We’ll regularly add new tools and features to the site, and would love to hear your thoughts.

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

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AdWords for mobile: check in quickly, anywhere

Announcements 9:00 AM

Did your smartphone suddenly start blinking and buzzing like crazy? No need to worry– it’s probably just getting excited about AdWords for mobile, our new mobile interface for Android, iPhone, and Palm Pre devices.

We’ve heard that your smartphone and AdWords account have been pining for each other. Over the past few months, many of you have let us know how much you’d like to have fast and easy mobile access to AdWords, which is why we’re now testing a streamlined mobile experience. AdWords for mobile gives you easy access to your key alerts and statistics, enabling you to make quick changes even when you’re out and about.

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AdWords for mobile works best when you customize your experience. Before using the mobile website, you should log in from your desktop computer and choose the parts of your account that you want to monitor closely. Set up custom alerts for key account events (like when your campaign reaches 90% of your daily budget, or when your traffic drops substantially compared to the previous week), and saved filters to flag your most important keywords and campaigns. You’ll then see these filters and alerts on your AdWords for mobile home screen.

We built AdWords for mobile to help you quickly access the essentials in your account, so we’ve focused on letting you view and make basic edits to campaigns and keywords through the mobile application. If you need access to the other parts of your account, like ads or campaign settings, you can switch to the desktop version of AdWords through a link at the bottom of the screen.

Today, AdWords for mobile will be used as the default mobile interface for a small percentage of English language advertisers, and we look forward to enabling the feature for additional advertisers and languages in the coming weeks. However, if you’d like to try AdWords for mobile immediately, simply direct your Android, iPhone, or Palm Pre to http://adwords.google.com/dashboard/Dashboard

Hope you (and your lovestruck smartphone) enjoy having easy access to AdWords wherever you go!

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

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New best practices to find more customers on the Google Content Network

Content Network 11:10 AM

Our previous post in the Content Network Optimization University series covered the basics of setting up and launching a good campaign on the Content Network.

Today, we'll cover more advanced optimization strategies. We've compiled these by observing best practices from the most successful advertisers on the network. Whether you're new to the Content Network or have been using it for a while, you can get better results from your campaigns by employing some of these strategies.

Build effective campaigns

Taking time up front to set up your campaign correctly goes a long way in getting higher quality traffic to your site. Let’s recap the top strategies:

Separate Search and Content Network campaigns: Setting up a separate campaign just for the Content Network will give you more control over daily budgets, ad groups, keywords and bids. Watch this demo on campaign setup.
Create many, tightly themed ad groups: AdWords can target your ads more precisely if you build multiple ad groups, each with a small tightly-themed set of 5 to 20 keywords. Watch this demo on ad group setup and this demo on keyword selection.
Copy your best performing text ads from Search campaigns: For initial setup, it's best to use the text ads with the highest click-through rates from your search campaigns. Watch this demo on ad text best practices.
Setup the same starting CPC bid as your Search campaigns: We recommend starting with the same maximum CPC bid as your Search campaign ad groups. Once AdWords has collected enough data, our smart pricing technology will automatically optimize your bids on the Content Network to give you more profitable clicks. Watch this demo on bidding tactics.
Set up AdWords Conversion Tracking on your website: Install Conversion Tracking on your website to measure the sales and leads (conversions) you get from each ad group and placement. Watch this demo to learn how conversion tracking works on the Content Network.

Optimize for better results

It's important to monitor your campaign’s performance and consistently optimize individual elements. Before making significant changes (e.g. changing bids, excluding high volume sites, pausing ad groups), wait until enough click or conversion data has accrued. We recommend having at least 5 conversions or 100 clicks per site.

Exclude poor-performing sites: Get more qualified traffic and boost conversions by excluding sites that perform poorly for your campaign, based on the number of clicks, the average CPC and the number of conversions.
Focus your keywords and exclude less relevant keywords: Add more keywords that describe your product and ad group theme in greater detail. Also, add negative keywords to refine your targeting and prevent impressions on irrelevant sites. Watch this demo on refining your campaigns.
Adjust your bids to manage your costs: Change your bids for ad groups or individual sites based on conversion rate, average CPC and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) to meet your performance goals. You should bid higher for better performing sites to get more traffic, and lower for poorly performing sites.
Use Conversion Optimizer to manage your CPA: Google Conversion Optimizer is a free tool that automatically manages bids at the site level to reach a maximum CPA bid, which is the amount you're willing to pay for a conversion (such as a purchase or sign-up). Watch this video on how to use Conversion Optimizer.

Expand your campaign for more traffic

To get additional traffic and boost sales from your campaign, we recommend creating a keyword expansion strategy for the Content Network.

Use the Wonder Wheel tool for ad group ideas: You can use Wonder Wheel on Google Search to brainstorm new ad group themes and keyword ideas. When you search for any topic on Google.com, Wonder Wheel will generate up to eight related topics for you to consider.
Create new ad groups to reach additional parts of the network: Each topic in Wonder Wheel represents a possible ad group theme for your campaign. Simply click on any of the topics to see other searches and themes related to it. Any closely related topics that are less relevant to your product are great candidates for your negative keyword list. Watch this demo to learn how to use this strategy.
Expand your keyword list to get more traffic: Once you have finalized your ad group themes, use the AdWords Keyword Tool to get keyword ideas. Enter ad group theme descriptions or keywords under the 'Descriptive words or phrases' tab. Select the 5 to 10 most frequently searched keywords and save them to your ad group This will help to ensure that your list stays highly relevant to your ad group theme.

You can find all the latest videos and updates on our YouTube channel. We hope these tips help you get even better results from your Content network campaigns!

Posted by Katrina Kurnit, Inside AdWords crew

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Improve your account structure to improve your results

Optimization 11:18 AM

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Now available: Reach the right audience through remarketing

Display Ads 5:45 AM

Imagine you’re a travel company, and you’re trying to excite users during the holiday season about deals to tropical Caribbean destinations. Users may come to your website, browse the offers and think about booking a trip, but decide that the deal is still not cheap enough. Then, they continue to browse the web. If you later decide to offer discounted deals to the Carribean, how do you reach these users who have already expressed interest in travelling there?

To help you do this, this week we're rolling out a new feature called remarketing. Any AdWords advertiser can use remarketing to reach users as they’re browsing the web on sites within the Google Content Network. Remarketing is a simple way to connect with users, based on their past interactions with your website.

We opened a trial of remarketing last March as part of our interest-based advertising beta. We’ve received a tremendous response from the hundreds of advertisers who’ve been using it in recent months, across all industries - including automotive, retail, local and finance. We’ve seen that remarketing has worked well for many different kinds of advertisers - whether they’re looking to boost brand awareness, or drive clicks and sales, and whether they use display or text ads. For example, if you’re a search advertiser, you can use remarketing to create an integrated campaign strategy. After driving traffic to your site with search ads, you can then remarket to those users who reach your site by showing them tailored ads on sites throughout the Google Content Network.

You can easily set up and create a remarketing campaign through the new “Audiences” tab in AdWords. A remarketing campaign allows you to take advantage of the same features and reports you can use today in AdWords - it’s just a new way to reach the best audience for your ad.

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Here’s an example of how it works. Let’s say you’re a basketball team with tickets that you want to sell. You can put a piece of code on the tickets page of your website, which will let you later show relevant ticket ads (such as last minute discounts) to everyone who has visited that page, as they subsequently browse sites in the Google Content Network. In addition to your own site, you can also remarket to users who visited your YouTube brand channel or clicked your YouTube homepage ad.

You can also run a number of remarketing campaigns at the same time. For example, you could offer discount game tickets to users who’ve previously visited your tickets page, advertise VIP hospitality packages to users who clicked on your “How to get to the arena” page, and advertise a sale on team merchandise to users who previously visited your YouTube brand channel.

Remarketing is a great way for businesses to reach users who are likely to be highly receptive to their ads and special offers. It helps advertisers and websites get higher returns. For example, Intercontinental Hotels Group has used remarketing to reach potential customers who have visited one of their hotel websites:

Ad by InterContinental Hotels Group using remarketing to offer incentive to users

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It also means more relevant and useful ads for users, and more opportunities for your customers to receive special offers and discounts that may be of interest to them. As we announced when we launched our beta of interest based advertising, we want to put users in control of the ads they see, so anyone can opt-out of remarketing by using the Ads Preferences Manager. Our remarketing product complies with industry standards developed by self-regulatory groups such as the NAI and IAB and IAB UK.

To get started with a remarketing campaign, check out the information we’ve put together.

Posted by Aitan Weinberg, Product Manager

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New Reports: AdWords Search Funnels

Announcements 1:23 PM

In order to help you make more informed decisions about your AdWords keywords, ad groups, and campaigns, we're excited to release a new set of reports for your AdWords account: AdWords Search Funnels (beta). Currently, conversions in AdWords are attributed to the last ad someone clicks before making a conversion, masking the fact that many customers perform multiple searches before finally converting. AdWords Search Funnels help you see the full picture by giving you insight into the ads your customers interact with during their shopping process.

What are AdWords Search Funnels?

AdWords Search Funnels are a set of reports describing the ad click and impression behavior on Google.com that leads up to a conversion. In addition to a Top Conversions report, Search Funnels consist of 7 reports including Assisted Conversions, First and Last Click Analysis, Time Lag, and Path Length. For an overview of these new reports, check out this video:

Why are these useful?

"Search Funnel enables us to create a better experience for our customers by helping us understand how they search for our products," said Beth Hirschhorn, Chief Marketing Officer from MetLife, the largest life insurance company based in the United States. "It is an important tool to help de-code consumer shopping habits and thought processes, which we can relate back to our online as well as offline advertising."

By showing which ads your customers clicked on before ultimately converting, Search Funnels give a more complete picture of the value of your keywords, ad groups and campaigns. Let's look at a hypothetical example.

An online vacation service called Flyaway Vacations is running AdWords campaigns for vacation packages in Hawaii. Their ads link to a site where visitors can book any or all parts of a package that includes flights, a hotel, car rental, and surf lessons. Suppose that on March 10 someone searched for "hawaii vacation" and clicked on an ad for Flyaway's Hawaii package. A click was registered in their AdWords account. Then, two days later, the same person searched for "flights to hawaii" and saw another ad for Flyaway, but didn't click. An impression was registered in Flyaway's AdWords account. Finally, three days later, the same person searched one more time, this time for "flyaway hawaii." This time they clicked the ad, visited the site, and purchased the Hawaii vacation package.

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Instead of showing only a purchase conversion for the "flyaway hawaii" keyword, Search Funnels will show an assist click for the keyword "hawaii vacation" and an assist impression for the keyword "flights to hawaii". Testing the value of assist clicks and impressions is important for evaluating and understanding the true value of all of your keywords.

Search Funnels not only help you understand the keywords seen by converters, they also show you those that weren't seen. For example, in the Flyaway campaign, it's possible that another keyword, such as "hawaii surf lessons," didn't contribute any assist clicks or impressions, or last click conversions, indicating that this may be a keyword that's providing little conversion value. Assist information is an additional data point you can use when making strategic budgeting decisions, from the campaign level down to the keyword level.

Search Funnels also show the "Path Length," or average number of clicks and impressions prior to conversion, which can help you understand and target repeat visitors. Additionally they show "Time Lag," or the amount of time it takes a customer to convert after seeing or clicking on your ads for the first time, which can help you determine lead time for seasonal campaigns. These breakdowns can help you understand your customers' behavior and create strategies around that information.

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Over the next few weeks, the Search Funnels beta will be rolled out gradually to all accounts in the 'Conversions' section under the 'Reporting' tab. To activate them, you must either have AdWords Conversion Tracking running or import goals or transactions into AdWords from Google Analytics. Keep in mind that Search Funnels are only available in your AdWords account (not in Google Analytics), and will only show data for keywords that show up in at least one conversion path. Search Funnel data is currently limited to search ads showing on Google.com, for ad impressions and clicks within 30 days of the conversion.

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

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Go Mobile! Series: Reach local customers

Go Mobile Series 6:17 PM

About one in three mobile search queries are made by people who are looking for something in their local area. This means that local businesses have the opportunity to reach mobile users when they’re nearby and looking to take immediate action. Here are a few tips to help you reach these potential customers.

1) Control how your business appears in organic search results

Since more people search for businesses online than anywhere else, it's important to make sure your business listing can be easily found on Google.com and Google Maps. Creating a business listing in the Local Business Center helps ensure potential customers find you, and allows you to maintain full control over how your listing appears.

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If your business already appears as a search result, you can use the Local Business Center to claim your listing and enter additional information like photos, hours of operation, website, and more.

2) Reach more potential customers near you

Whenever you create a campaign in your Google AdWords account, you can use location targeting to show your ads only to people close to your business. You can target potential customers within a given city, region or metro area. You can also define a radius around a certain point or set your own borders for more precise reach. Location targeting can help you improve the ROI on your ad campaigns by focusing on people who are nearby and therefore more likely to take action.

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3) Drive local action with location extensions

A location extension is an optional additional line of ad text that shows your nearest business address to potential customers based on their location or search terms. People can click on the address to see a map of the area around your location. When the ad appears on mobile devices with full internet browsers, potential customers can also see a click-to-call phone number to connect directly with that business location by phone.

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You can easily set up location extensions with the business information in your Local Business Center account or by manually entering the information in your AdWords account. While your ad will appear to users in any geographic location you chose to target, only people whose location signals indicate that they're close to one of your businesses will see your location extension.

4) Put it all together

How do geo-targeting and location extensions come together when ads appear on mobile devices? Let’s say you own a flower shop with several locations in the area. John is a potential customer who wants to pick up flowers on his way to a housewarming party. John can use his mobile phone to search for ‘flower shop.’ Since he’s close to one of your stores, your ad appears with a location extension showing the closest business address and phone number. John clicks on the business address to see a map and get driving directions. He then clicks on your phone number to call and make sure that you’re open for business and have ready-made bouquets in stock. Thanks to you, geo-targeting, and location extensions, John can quickly pick up a beautiful bouquet of lilies and make a great impression at the party!

Mobile users are often looking to take action immediately, whether it’s driving to a store or calling ahead to make sure that store has what they’re looking for. Try out these features to enable your customers to easily engage with your business.

Posted by Katrina Kurnit, Inside AdWords crew

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Opening up YouTube to new display advertisers

Display Ads 9:20 AM

One of our goals is to democratize access to display advertising and make it accessible and open -- like search advertising -- so new advertisers can participate easily. We launched Display Ad Builder in 2008 to help you easily set up and run display ad campaigns.

Display Ad Builder is a self-service tool within AdWords that helps you choose from dozens of professionally designed templates to run ads across the 1 million sites that make up the Google Content Network -- including YouTube -- in a matter of minutes. Over 20,000 advertisers have used Display Ad Builder to create display ads quickly and simply, and over 80% them had never run a display ad campaign before.

Since we launched Display Ad Builder, we’ve added more templates and fonts to help you design display ads quickly. Today, we're announcing a new feature in Display Ad Builder that lets you use simple templates to create InVideo and companion ads on YouTube.

An InVideo ad is an animated flash overlay that appears at the bottom part of a video that a user is watching. It’s been one of the most effective ad formats on YouTube. With people watching over 1 billion videos a day on the site, overlays are an easy way to get your ad directly in front of a huge audience.

Building overlays has always been difficult for small advertisers, who often don’t have access to the resources needed to create these animated ads. That’s where Display Ad Builder in AdWords comes in.

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Now, any advertiser can use Display Ad Builder to turn their image ads into overlays and run a campaign on YouTube in minutes. Depending on the type of campaign an advertiser wants to run, overlays can be bought on a CPC (Cost Per Click) or CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) basis, and can be matched to YouTube videos based on numerous criteria, or even on a video by video level.

With this new format, Display Ad Builder will enable more advertisers to run display advertising campaigns on YouTube. For example, if you’re a small business that sells beauty products, you can quickly use a template in Display Ad Builder in AdWords to create an overlay ad and then run it on popular fashion and beauty videos.

If you're interested in creating your own InVideo ad, or any other type of display ad, click here to get started.

Posted by Emily Williams, Inside AdWords crew

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Go Mobile! Series: A case study in optimizing mobile campaigns

Case studies 3:19 PM

More and more people are accessing the internet on their mobile devices. Take advantage of this trend by making sure that your ad campaigns are opted in to show on mobile devices with full internet browsers. If you’d like to take things to the next level, create separate mobile-focused campaigns so that you can optimize your keywords, ad text and landing pages for people using mobile devices.

To help you understand what mobile optimization looks like, we thought we'd share the approach that Razorfish, a global digital advertising agency, took for one of their retail clients:

The Razorfish team started by duplicating the existing desktop campaigns and switching the settings to target mobile devices with full internet browsers.
Since their client had a well-known brand name, they focused on branded keyword terms with enough traffic to help them learn quickly about what was working best for their campaigns.
To measure performance, they tracked several conversion metrics including whether a mobile user looked up the brick and mortar store location or downloaded a coupon from the website. Right away, they saw a 7.5% lower cost per conversion on mobile devices, encouraging them to test ways to optimize their mobile campaigns.
Razorfish tested whether variations in the campaign’s landing page would affect conversion rates. The team hypothesized that mobile users might be looking to take a specific action, and by starting the user’s experience closer to that action, the client would see better results. As it turned out, for this client, they saw much higher conversion rates when the user was directed to a landing page that showed nearby store locations.
Finally, they tested variations in the ad text. Four versions of ad text were tested, including the original copy used in desktop campaigns. Each of the three new versions provided over 9.3% lift in conversion rate over the strongest performing copy in their desktop campaigns.

We hope you can learn from Razorfish's success and apply some of these strategies to your own mobile campaigns.

To learn more about the approach Razorfish took to optimize their client’s mobile ad campaigns, or read about other case studies, check out our Mobile Ads Success Stories.

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

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New tool for brand advertisers on the Google Content Network

Announcements 8:54 AM

Two types of advertisers run campaigns across the Google Content Network. The first group, direct response advertisers, measures the success of their campaigns by looking for clicks, traffic to their sites, and sales. In contrast, brand advertisers typically use display ads to raise awareness and purchase consideration for a product or service a person might buy down the road. Other advertisers are looking to achieve a combination of these goals.

On the Google Content Network, we've been focused on building new capabilities that make it a great place for brand advertising of all kinds. For example, last year we introduced frequency capping to enable advertisers to manage how often their campaign reaches the right users. We've also developed new innovative tools to measure the impact of brand campaigns. Today, in response to feedback from brand advertisers, we're announcing a new feature that allows these advertisers to reach their advertising goals more easily.

This feature, which filters out "below the fold" inventory, enables brand advertisers to be more selective about where ads appear. The new filter gives you the ability to show ads only in places that appear on the user's screen when the page loads, without requiring them to scroll down. Learn more in the Help Center.

With a host of different web browsers, monitor sizes, and screen resolutions, it’s hard for advertisers to predict where an ad will land, since the same placement may appear differently on each user's screen. To simplify the process for you, Google has implemented a statistically driven solution to determine which ads are above and below the fold. The statistically driven model only considers ads "above the fold" if they are completely on-screen when the browser window loads.

Our goal with this release is to give brand advertisers greater control over where their ads appear, and make the Google Content Network an even more powerful, controlled environment for running high performing brand campaigns.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

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