Car insurance Channel

In last week’s installment of our Google Display Network series, we showed how DoubleClick Ad Planner can help you effectively plan your display ad campaigns and reach the right audience. Today we’ll talk about creating compelling display ads and the options available on the Google Display Network (GDN). Let’s look at each category of options you have today:

Great impact through Rich Media and Video. Rich media and video formats engage users at a whole new level, drawing them in and encouraging interactivity in a way not possible with other ad formats.


If you use rich media and video formats to engage your customers, here’s what we offer through our DoubleClick Rich Media and Video solutions:

• Choice of a variety of rich Media formats, based on your campaign objective.
• Access to DoubleClick Studio, a free rich media production and workflow tool.
• Analyze data on more than 100 unique interactions in every creative unit with Audience Interaction Metrics.
• Integration with DoubleClick for Advertisers, a robust ad management, serving, and reporting solution that simplifies trafficking, reporting and billing of your Rich Media campaigns.
• If you’re already working with another rich media vendor, we have many approved vendors we work with.

Build display ads in minutes. Creating display ads can be resource-intensive, and for many marketers, it may not be in the budget. So we introduced Display Ad Builder in 2008, a free tool for creating professional-looking display ads in minutes. Here’s what you can do with Display Ad Builder:

• Create image, video (InVideo, Click-To-Play), Flash and rich media (including expandable) ads using hundreds of fully customizable templates or templates tailored for specific industries.
• Stay true to your brand with your own images, text, videos and logos.
• Automatically convert the ads you design into most standard IAB ad sizes.

Display Ad Builder is also great for testing different messages and creative elements, or to get insights for more complex display campaigns managed by your in-house team or agency.

Stand out by blending in. Text ads are a versatile ad format that are easy to create and edit. They’re especially effective as an extension of your existing search campaigns. Simply opt your search campaign into the GDN and your ads will show to users as they surf relevant web pages via our contextual targeting technology. Text ads also complement display campaigns by engaging users who ignore display ads (i.e. banner blindness). Further, they give your campaign wider reach since not every publisher may accept display ads, or may only accept a limited number of display ad formats and sizes on their site.


Whether your goal is to drive awareness or generate immediate sales, the robust creative toolbox available on the Google Display Network can help. We’ll see you next week when we talk about how you can reach your audience with the targeting technologies available on the GDN.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Marketing Manager, Google Display Network

Earlier this year we launched click-to-call location extensions for search ads appearing on mobile devices with full Internet browsers. Today we’re excited to announce more ways location extensions can be used to connect with local users on the go, whether they’re using their phones to browse the mobile web or engage with their favorite mobile apps.

Many mobile consumers use maps to locate a business and get directions on their phones. With AdWords location extensions, you can now feature your business location and phone number on an expandable map ad that can appear on mobile websites and apps across the Google Display Network. The ad appears as a banner text ad with a business icon that expands to show your business location on a Google map along with your ad creative, click-to-call phone number and option to get directions. Since ads can be served based on the user’s location, a potential customer will see the phone number and map of the store location that’s nearest to them. By providing mobile consumers more options to connect with your business, you can drive more traffic to your store, visits to your website and calls to your business.

In order to help you stay up to date with changes to our AdWords policies, we’ve launched the AdWords Policy Change Log. This new site makes it easier to stay informed about upcoming AdWords policy changes by posting a short summary, including the affected region, for each policy change going into effect.

While the AdWords Policy Change log will have the most comprehensive listing of changes to AdWords policies, if we anticipate that your account will be directly affected by an upcoming policy change, we’ll still email you a service announcement, as necessary, to make sure you’re aware of the change.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

As many of you know, we started the Go Mobile! series of posts on the Inside AdWords blog to give you an easy way to keep up with the world of mobile advertising.

The mobile industry has really evolved since the start of the series: mobile is becoming a core part of many marketing campaigns and publishers are developing mobile-specific content across the web and in applications across mobile operating systems. We’re even more excited about the prospects for driving further innovation in mobile now that AdMob has joined the Google Mobile Ads team.

With this in mind, we created a dedicated blog for those of you specifically interested in mobile advertising and mobile monetization. The Google Mobile Ads Blog is a place where advertisers and publishers can find the latest news, product updates, tips, and account management resources from the Google Mobile Ads team.

Of course we'll continue to post major Google Mobile Ads announcements on the Inside AdWords blog, but be sure to visit the official Google Mobile Ads Blog for all of your mobile-specific updates.

Mobile has come a long way in a short period of time and we can’t wait to see what’s next.

Posted by Anna Khesed, Product Marketing Manager, Google AdMob

The ValueTrack parameter has long allowed you to track the clicks that you get via search and the Google Display Network separately. We know that many of you would like to be able to see the clicks you get from mobile ads separately as well. That’s why we’re pleased to introduce Mobile ValueTrack, a new way for you to do just that.

Mobile ValueTrack works the same way it does for search and content: by automatically adding a tag to your website URL. To use this feature, you just need to add the Mobile ValueTrack parameter: {ifmobile:NewTagName} to the “Destination URL” field when you create a text ad.

There are two ways to take advantage of this feature:

Automatic re-directs to mobile optimized sites
By adding the MobileTrack parameter to your landing page URL, you can automatically redirect people using mobile devices to a mobile-optimized version of your site. In the example below, you can create a mobile site at www.travelingdog.net/mobile and ensure that mobile clicks get re-directed to this site by adding the Mobile ValueTrack parameter, {ifmobile:mobile}. Note that non-Google-ads traffic to your site won’t have the ValueTrack parameter, so it’s still a good idea to send all users to your mobile-optimized site.

click to view full size

Third party tracking tags
Additionally, If you use third party tracking to identify how many of your visitors clicked through to your site from your AdWords ads, you can use Mobile ValueTrack to track clicks coming from mobile devices. Just insert a tag into your destination URL. Let’s say that you’re Travel Dog Company and want to distinguish clicks coming from mobile devices. By adding the Mobile ValueTrack parameter to your landing page URL, www.travelingdog.net?type={ifmobile:hello}, the tag “hello” will be inserted into the destination URL allowing you to see which clicks are coming from mobile devices.

Mobile ValueTrack works for both WAP mobile ads and regular text and image ads on iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers. Keep in mind that any change that you make to your URLs will need to be reviewed and approved before they go live.  You can also get more stats for mobile devices with full browsers by selecting “Segment By: Device” within Campaign Management.

We hope that this feature will allow you to better track your mobile performance and ensure that users get the best experience on mobile.

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

There's lots of misinformation floating around the web about the way AdWords works, and our AdWords support teams get to hear most of it. Since many of the same issues seem to keep popping up again and again, we thought we’d run a blog series to help you separate the myths from the facts. We’ve tried to capture the most persistent of them here, but remember, if you ever have any AdWords questions, you can always pop over to the AdWords Help Center or AdWords Help Forum for an answer.

Myth # 1: Spending money on Google AdWords will influence my website’s ranking in Google's free search results.

Fact: Google AdWords and Google’s free search results are entirely independent of one another. Spending money on AdWords won’t impact your ranking in Google's free search results. Similarly, cancelling your AdWords account won’t lead to your website being banned from Google’s search results. If you’d like to learn more about what does go into ranking your website in Google search results, check out Google Webmaster Central.

Myth # 2: Google AdWords has declined my credit card.

Fact: Google itself doesn’t actually decline credit cards. The decline usually takes place at your bank, your card-issuing institution, or its payment processor.

If your credit card gets declined, your first step should be to check and make sure you’ve filled out the Billing Preferences page correctly. Some common mistakes include:

• Missing or invalid credit card number or security code
• Missing or invalid expiration date
• Missing or invalid billing address and/or telephone number

Once you’ve gotten that squared away, make sure that there aren’t any problems with your card itself. Be on the lookout for issues with your:

• Credit limit
• Maximum amount per debit
• Number of possible debits within a certain period

If any of these are too low for your AdWords account, contact your bank or card-issuing institution. You should also be sure that your card allows for online debits and automatic debits.

Next week we’ll be discussing AdWords clicks and keywords myths, so stay tuned!

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

This Wednesday, July 21st, we'll be hosting a live online course on remarketing. This interactive presentation will be delivered by a Display Network specialist and will take place from 15:00 to 16:00 GMT, including time for Q&A.

During this session we'll take you through the benefits of using remarketing, who it's best for and how to set it up in your account. If you advertise with AdWords and get a large number of visitors to your website, then we encourage you to attend.

If you're interested, be sure to sign up now.

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

After a successful open beta test in the UK and Canada, we're pleased to announce that the broad match modifier is now rolling out globally in most languages*. To recap the original broad match modifier beta launch announcement:

The broad match modifier is a new AdWords targeting feature that lets you create keywords which have greater reach than phrase match and more control than broad match. Adding modified broad match keywords to your campaign can help you get more clicks and conversions at an attractive ROI, especially if you mainly use exact and phrase match keywords today.

To implement the modifier, just put a plus symbol (+) directly in front of one or more words** in a broad match keyword. Each word preceded by a + has to appear in your potential customer's search exactly or as a close variant. Close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings (like “floor” and “flooring”). Synonyms (like “quick” and “fast”) and related searches (like “flowers” and “tulips”) aren't considered close variants.

The graphic below illustrates the relative reach of different keyword match type strategies.

(click for full size image)

Be sure there are no spaces between the + and modified words, but do leave spaces between words. Correct usage: +formal +shoes. Incorrect usage: +formal+shoes.

Here’s what one major UK retail company said about their experience using the feature:

We're always interested in ways to increase our volumes while keeping our CPA down. As a result, we've added broad match modified keywords to several campaigns where previously we only had phrase and exact match keywords. After a few weeks of testing, we're pleased to see these campaigns showed significant increases in conversion and volume, whilst keeping the CPA down. Therefore, we will be looking to scale our use of modified broad match keywords in all our campaigns to take full advantage of these great results.

If you mainly use broad match keywords in your account, you should know that switching your existing broad match keywords to modified broad match will likely lead to a significant decline in your click and conversion volumes and will not directly improve Quality Score. To maintain volume, keep existing broad match keywords active, add new modified broad match keywords, and adjust bids to achieve your target ROI based on the results you see.

You can begin using the feature by logging into your AdWords account, through the AdWords Editor and through the AdWords API. For more details, guidelines on usage, and answers to common questions, check out the original blog post and the AdWords help center.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

*Except Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Arabic and Hebrew languages, which are coming soon. We’ll update this post when the feature becomes available in those languages.

July 19 update: Chinese, Japanese and Thai languages are now supported.
August 17 update: All AdWords languages are now supported, including Hebrew and Arabic.

On June 3rd, we invited you to participate in the launch of our new Billing tab– giving you more control over when and how much you're charged. Today, we're excited to announce the new Billing tab's wider launch. Although some of you already have the new tab in your account, we'll be rolling it out to all advertisers in the coming months. The upgrade doesn't require any action from you -- your billing method and form of payment will stay the same.

The new Billing tab comes with a number of benefits and a few terminology changes. For example, you now have the option to switch between automatic and manual payments.

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

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

In 2009, we launched location extensions, which allows you to "extend" your AdWords campaigns by dynamically attaching your relevant business address to your ads. Today we're introducing a new enhancement to location extensions that lets you show multiple business addresses in a particular area.

For example, if a potential customer is looking for a Toys"R"Us store in their area, the ad can now show them all the nearby locations so they can find the one closest to them.

Including multiple addresses within location extensions helps you by:

• Showing multiple addresses that are relevant to a potential customer's location (up to four at a time);
• Updating results dynamically whenever someone moves the map; and
• Enhancing ads with relevant information about your business to drive in-store traffic.

This feature is available now to primary business owners who have enabled location extensions with Google Places listings. Currently, location extensions with multiple addresses are available in the United States and many other countries/regions - please visit this link to see if this feature is available in your country.

To learn more about location extensions with multiple addresses, including additional information about reporting and filtering, please see the information we’ve put together on the Help Center.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

"Focus on the user and all else will follow." That's always been Google's philosophy. It's also why we'd like to talk to you about how we can best serve you as an advertiser.

On Wednesday, July 14th, 2010, we'll be hosting advertisers at our headquarters in Mountain View, CA to hear about your experiences with AdWords support– including email, chat, and phone.

If you'll be in the San Francisco Bay Area on July 14th and have thoughts on how we can improve our support services, we'd love to have you join one of our focus groups. No visit to Google could be complete without lunch and a tour, so we'll make sure you get both when you come visit.

If you're interested and available, please fill out the form here

Even if you can't make it to Mountain View on July 14th, we'd still like to hear your feedback. If you provide us with your contact details we may reach out to get your feedback by phone or email.

Hope to see you in Mountain View soon!

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew