Car insurance Channel

"Are my ads showing? If they aren't, why not?"

Whether you have ten keywords or ten thousand, making sure your ads are showing is a top priority. Now you can get detailed diagnostic information for multiple keywords at once by using a new keyword diagnosis option on the Keywords tab.

To get started, open the "More actions" menu on your Keywords tab (at the account, campaign, or ad group level) and select "Diagnose keywords."


On the keyword diagnosis menu, you have all the options available in the standalone Ads Diagnostic Tool. For example, if you're interested in seeing whether or not your ad is showing in a particular location, you can use the Location drop-down to narrow the scope of your diagnosis.


After clicking "Run test," you'll see the real-time results appear in the Status column next to each keyword. If all is well, you see "Ad showing." If not, you'll see a brief summary of the problem (for example, "Low bid or quality score"):



To get more details on a keyword's status, hover over any speech bubble icon. In the above example, viewing details for the keyword "meeting icebreakers" displays more information on the Quality Score issues that are preventing the ad from showing. To focus on one issue at a time, try creating filters for Keyword Status.

The next time your keywords need a check-up, try using keyword diagnosis -- it even makes house calls!

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

At approximately 1:40pm Pacific Time today, we encountered an issue that prevented ads from being shown on Google.com and Search Partner sites.  Our engineering team has diagnosed the issue and is working hard to restore service. As of now, most of the service has been restored.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and will update you with more details as soon as we've fully resolved the issue.

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

UPDATE 4:41pm PDT: We have fully resolved this issue. Again, we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Our engineers are working to ensure that this type of issue doesn't occur again.

When you optimize your AdWords account, you probably start with a primary goal in mind. Some advertisers focus on increasing traffic, while others care more about keeping costs down or monitoring return on investment.

The keyword, bid, and budget ideas you currently see in the Opportunities tab aim to provide you with a balance between increasing traffic and managing costs. Starting today, however, and rolling out globally over the next few weeks, you’ll be able to choose from three common advertiser goals to match your overall optimization objectives. The three new options are as follows:

• Maintain or Decrease Cost - Identify ideas that might help you maintain or decrease your current spend.
• Increase Traffic - Identify ideas that can help you get more traffic at varying cost levels.
• Balance Cost and Traffic - Review a mix of ideas that are aimed at either increasing traffic or decreasing costs.

After you choose a goal for your account, the ideas you see in the Opportunities tab will be customized to match your selection. The Opportunities tab remembers your choice of goal unless you change it, which you can do at any time.

We hope this will help provide you with even better ideas to optimize your account and we look forward to offering even more advertising goals in the future.

To learn more about the Opportunities tab, visit the AdWords Help Center or view our video playlist on YouTube.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

A couple of weeks ago, we announced the Conversion Champion Challenge, a contest to help you get your ROI in shape for the summer using free AdWords conversion products. It’s not too late to enter and compete to win the grand prize – an AdWords voucher and a trip to Google!

Whether you’re just getting started or actively working to get your conversion rate in shape, here are some best practices for getting the most out of two key conversion products: Conversion Optimizer and Search Funnel reports.


Tips for using Conversion Optimizer

• Save time by letting Conversion Optimizer manage your bids to reach your ROI goals (On average, campaigns that use Conversion Optimizer experience a 21% increase in conversions and a 14% decrease in cost-per-conversion )*.
• Choose to bid using the metric that you’re most comfortable with: Target Cost per Acquisition (CPA) or Max CPA.
• Set different CPA bids for each ad group if conversions in one are more valuable to you than they are in another.
• Let Conversion Optimizer run for a couple weeks to give it a chance to acclimate to your campaign’s performance.
• Test Conversion Optimizer on a single campaign if you’re not ready to make large scale changes to your account. If you ever choose to turn it off, you’ll be able to return to the Max CPC bids that you’d previously set.
• Learn more and check out success stories from advertisers who’ve used Conversion Optimizer.

Tips for using Search Funnel Reports

• Run Search Funnel Reports within your AdWords account to figure out which ads and keywords potential customers clicked on leading up to a conversion.
• Identify keywords that are driving conversions and ensure that you’re bidding competitively on them.
• Identify the keywords you're paying for but aren't leading to conversions and decrease your bids on them accordingly.
• Use the Time Lag and Path Length reports to understand how long (time and number of searches) it takes before conversions typically happen on your site. This can help you determine how long to run your campaigns.
• Learn more about Search Funnel Reports.

We can’t wait to hear about your experiences, so let us know how it goes by entering the Conversion Champion Challenge.

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

*This analysis compares the performance of Conversion Optimizer campaigns over the course of a year with a control set of campaigns and represents the average impact of Conversion Optimizer. The actual impact will vary from campaign to campaign.

Over the last year, we’ve introduced a number of new advertising features to help merchants provide potential customers with the most relevant information when they’re searching on Google.com. For example, last year we introduced product extensions, which allows you to include the pictures and prices of the products you sell, right below your ads.

Starting today we’re introducing a new feature, called seller rating extensions, that makes it easier for people to identify highly-rated merchants when they’re searching on Google.com. Seller rating extensions does this by attaching your merchant star rating from Google Product Search to your AdWords ads. These star ratings, aggregated from review sites all around the web, allow people to find merchants that are highly recommended by online shoppers like them.


If your online store is rated in Google Product Search, you have 4 or more stars, and you have at least 30 reviews, you’ll automatically get seller ratings with your ads. What’s more, you’ll only be charged if someone clicks on the headline of your ad - clicks on the review link are free.

At this time, seller rating extensions will show to English-language users searching on Google.com. Please note that because we’ll be rolling out seller rating extensions over the next 24 hours, you may not see it immediately, even if your ads meet the qualifications above.

To learn more about seller rating extensions, including how to manage when they appear with your ads, you can read the FAQ in the AdWords help center.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

Back in November we launched Ad Sitelinks to help you get even better results from your top performing ads. Since then, we’ve seen advertisers experience huge gains with Ad Sitelinks, boosting their clickthrough rates on average by more than 30%. Today, we’re introducing a new one-line format that allows you to get the benefits of Ad Sitelinks for even more of your campaigns, including your more generic, unbranded campaigns.

What’s more, we’re also enabling the option to set up Ad Sitelinks for any campaign. This means that you don’t have to wait for your campaigns to pre-qualify before you can set up Ad Sitelinks.


When a user’s query matches a keyword in your Ad Sitelinks-enabled campaign, Google will automatically determine if your ad qualifies to show Ad Sitelinks and whether to show the two-line or the one-line format based on the quality of that ad. Ads that currently qualify for the two-line format will not be affected by the addition of the new one-line format.

You should keep in mind that Ad Sitelinks is a campaign-level extension, so the links you create should be relevant to any ad in that campaign.

You’ll find the option to set up Ad Sitelinks in your Campaign Settings tab. It will appear as "Show additional links to my site" under the "Ad extensions" section.

To learn more about Ad Sitelinks, read our FAQ in the Help Center.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

The rapid pace of change in the advertising space can be dizzying. From new ad formats to new ad systems, from startups to mergers, the marketing industry is running at a million miles an hour, and it’s often daunting to keep up with it all. We know that staying informed takes a lot of effort, and it’s critical to make good decisions about how you spend your time and resources.

That’s why we put together Google Ad News. Powered by Google News, Ad News is a simple but powerful way for anyone in the advertising industry to track current news coverage on relevant subjects such as display, search, mobile and even traditional media - all in one place. Subscribe to news feeds in the categories you care about most, or search to find coverage on topics related to your business, such as your niche industry or brand.

We invite you to check it out and share it with your colleagues. Hopefully, you’ll find lots of relevant news that’ll help you spend less time scouring the web and more time building your business.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

Over the past year, we’ve been focused on investing in display advertising, and we’ve seen great momentum from the increasing number of you running display campaigns with Google. We’ve rolled out new features and targeting options and more precise measurement tools. To provide more places for you to run display ads, we’ve added more publisher sites (through Google AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange) to our ad network of over one million sites. Meanwhile, many of you have continued to run ads on YouTube and our own properties. In an effort to make our display media offerings clearer to advertisers like you and agencies, we’re creating a new umbrella name for all these properties, the Google Display Network. 

The Google Display Network will comprise all of the sites (apart from search sites), where you can buy ads through Google, including YouTube, Google properties such as Google Finance, Gmail, Google Maps, Blogger as well as over one million Web, video, gaming, and mobile display partners (our display partners include all of our AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange partner sites that allow text and/or display ads). The Google Display Network offers all ad formats -  text, image, rich media, and video ads - enabling you to unleash your creativity and engage potential customers across the Web. 

You can run ads on the Google Display Network the same way you always have. Either place bids through AdWords or make reservations on YouTube and Google Finance with the help of a Google account team.

In the upcoming weeks, you’ll see a change in the AdWords interface reflecting this new term, and you’ll see Google Display Network where you might have seen Google Content Network mentioned. We’ve also launched a new website showcasing the sites and benefits available to you on the Google Display Network. 

We’re working hard to offer the best display advertising solutions and we look forward to introducing new features on the Google Display Network that help you reach your advertising goals. 

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management

Last month at Google I/O, we previewed a new mobile advertising format, click-to-call for apps and mobile website content. We wanted to follow-up and let you know that this feature is now fully live and available to everyone who advertises with AdWords.  Expanding our popular click-to-call functionality on mobile search ads to now include mobile content and apps helps increase the reach of your ads across the mobile web and provides mobile publishers and app developers with even more ways to make money and grow their businesses. 


With click-to-call, potential customers can connect with your business via a phone call when they use their favorite mobile apps or when they browse the web from their mobile devices.  Ads will appear as animated banner or text ads with a call button on mobile devices with full Internet browsers.  To use this new format, you need to enable phone extensions and run your ads on both the Google Content Network and mobile devices with full Internet browsers.







Click-to-call for mobile content and apps is one of many ad formats that you can use to help achieve your mobile marketing goals. It’s a great option for you and also helps drive great results for mobile publishers and app developers.


Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Senior Product Manager, Google Mobile Ads

If you're a fan of the Placement Performance report in AdWords, you should take a look at the Placements report in Google Analytics. The Placements report lets you analyze the visits your site received from ads on the Google Content Network, and it offers more insight and information than the AdWords PPR. You can see the number of visits, the number of conversions, and engagement metrics like bounce rate and time on site.

If you’ve ever wondered how day of the week or time of day affected your ads, you’ll find the Day Parts reports very helpful. With the report, you can see the visits from your ads broken down by hour of day or day of the week. By graphing visits and transactions, you can uncover the times of day when you see more conversions. You can then use ad scheduling to increase your bids during those times.

(click to view full size image)

In order to use the new reports, you need to link your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts with destination URL auto-tagging turned on. If you haven’t already done this, you can set it up by clicking on the Reporting tab, then Google Analytics. You’ll find the new reports in the Traffic Sources section of your reports.

You can learn more about the reports and see a video of them in action on the Google Ad Innovations page.

Posted by Emily Williams, Inside AdWords crew

Posted by Emily Williams, Inside AdWords crew

On Saturday, June 12th, the AdWords system will be unavailable from approximately 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. PDT due to our regularly scheduled system maintenance. While you won't be able to log into your accounts during this time, your campaigns will continue to run as usual.

AdWords system maintenance typically occurs on the second Saturday of each month during the above times. We'll continue to update you here as we always have, but you may want to take note of our intended dates and times to help you plan for any scheduled downtimes further down the road.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

Now that summer is here, people are thinking about how to get in shape as quickly as they can. Well, your conversion rate wants a beach bod too, and with a little work and some tools in your AdWords account, you can whip it into top form. It’s critical that your marketing efforts and website are in peak condition to attract valuable visitors and convert them into customers. Getting started is the hardest part, so to give you a push in the right direction, we’re launching the Conversion Champion Challenge.

The contest is simple:

1. Track conversions on your site using one of Google’s free measurement products:

• AdWords Conversion Tracking
• Google Analytics (make sure to import your Analytics goals into AdWords)

2. Analyze and try to boost your performance using AdWords Search Funnels and/or Conversion Optimizer.
3. Show us the results and tell us your story here!

We’ll select the advertiser with the most interesting, innovative and unique case study for:

We're excited to announce AdWords Campaign Experiments, or ACE: a tool that will help you optimize your account by letting you accurately test and measure changes to your keywords, bids, ad groups and placements. As part of our ongoing effort to improve your AdWords experience, we're testing this new tool and inviting U.S. advertisers to participate in the beta.

In the past, the most common way to measure how changes to your account affected your campaign performance was to measure how the campaign performed before and after you implemented your changes. However, this type of analysis can often be complicated by events that occur during the test period, including holidays, weekends, or changes to end user or advertiser behavior.

ACE allows you to perform faster, more accurate tests by executing your experimental campaign alongside your original campaign. By performing this type of simultaneous split test, we can tell you precisely if your campaign changes produce statistically significant results.

Different ways of using ACE
Use ACE to experiment with any combination of bid, keyword, ad group or placement changes. You can test and measure a variety of scenarios including:

• The incremental impact of adding new keywords to your campaign or changing keyword and ad group-level bids
• The value of restructuring your Content campaigns to use more tightly themed ad groups
• The change in volume by using different keyword match types
• The value of using an ad group default bid versus keyword-level bids
• And much more!

Sign up to test the AdWords Campaign Experiments tool
We invite all U.S. advertisers with English as their language preference to participate in the beta of this feature. We may not be able to offer the beta test to all advertisers who apply, so thanks in advance for your patience as we continue to work on the tool. If you'd like to try the ACE beta, please fill out this form.

Learn more
For more information, please watch the video below and visit the Help Center for how-to-videos and additional FAQs.



Posted by Courtney Lischke, Product Marketing Manager

With the recent launch of Search Funnels, we wanted to have a webinar showing off these new reports and offering you a refresher on AdWords Conversion Tracking and Conversion Optimizer. We'll give overviews of these features, showing how they work and how they can help you, and do a deep dive into the Search Funnels reports.

At the webinar, you’ll learn:

• How tracking conversions can take you beyond clickthrough rate and help you focus your spend on the ads and keywords that drive sales and leads
• How the data in Search Funnels can take you a step further and tell you which ads and keywords are assisting your conversions
• How Conversion Optimizer can use your conversion tracking data and cost-per-acquisition goals to help you focus your spend on the clicks most likely to convert

We’ll hold the webinar next week, on Thursday, June 10th at 9am PDT / 11am CDT / 12pm EDT. Register here if you’d like to attend, and please submit or vote on questions related to Conversion Tracking, Conversion Optimizer or Search Funnels that you'd like answered during the webinar by Wednesday, June 9.

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

As part of our ongoing effort to improve our advertising program, we're testing an updated AdWords billing interface that's designed to make the payment process easier and more flexible.

We’ve just started the testing process with a small group of U.S. advertisers, and we’re inviting eligible advertisers to participate so we can incorporate your feedback into the changes we’re working on. Although your billing method and form of payment won't change, you’ll have access to some snazzy new features. If you already have the new Billing tab, your Billing Summary page will look like this:


If you don't have the updated Billing tab yet, we're giving you the opportunity to upgrade early. Here’s what you can expect from your updated Billing tab:

• Get more control. Choose to initiate a payment on your account at any time and use any form of payment available with your country and currency settings.
• Make payments directly from your billing summary page. You can do this by clicking the "Make a payment" button.
• Add multiple forms of payments and switch between them. Add as many forms of payment as you want to your account and switch between using them at any time.
• Use different business and billing addresses. Your business address doesn't have to match your billing address. Plus, each form of payment can have a different billing address.
• Get additional support. You will have access to improved help content in the new Billing tab and help center.

In addition, the below changes in terminology will be reflected in your upgraded Billing tab. Keep in mind that despite the name changes, these billing methods will function the same as they did previously.

• Postpay is now called "automatic payments." We'll automatically charge you only after your ads accrue costs.
• Prepay is now called "manual payments." You can make payments to your account whenever and in whatever amount you like. Your ad costs draw from those funds.
• Direct debit is now called "bank account." Your funds will be debited from your bank account.

For more information on the new Billing tab, please visit the FAQ in the AdWords Help Center.

If you're interested in upgrading your Billing tab to the new system, please complete this form. Currently, only U.S. advertisers are eligible, but we’ll gradually increase the number of advertisers testing this updated Billing interface in the coming months and make it available to international testers. For eligible accounts, we’ll upgrade your Billing tab and send you an email confirmation to let you know that you can start using the new tab right away. However, we’re not able to guarantee that all interested advertisers will have their accounts upgraded at this time. Also, please note that if your account is upgraded to the new Billing tab, you won't be able to switch back to the previous billing interface.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew