Car insurance Channel

As ads become more interactive, you might want to know how they'll impact your business's key metrics like clicks, click-through-rates and, most importantly, conversions.

To help answer this question, we’ve added a new report to your AdWords account that allows you to measure the performance of each click type you’re using. You can think of a click type as how your customers interact with your ads. Did they click on the headline, a sitelink, or some other aspect of your ad?

You can access the new click type report in the Campaign, Ad groups or Keywords tabs. Select “Segment” then “Click type.”


With this added data, you’ll now have the ability to compare performance of each click type side by side. If certain click types perform well for your business, you may want to consider expanding them to other campaigns. Comparing click types by campaign, ad group or keyword will also highlight areas that need work.

Given the success we’ve seen searchers and businesses have with more interactive features in ads, you can expect to see more of these types of features in the future. With the new click type report in AdWords you can measure the impact of these new features and continue to get the most out of your ads.

Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

Google Apps recently launched an improvement that made dozens of Google services available to Google Apps users for the first time. As part of this launch, Google AdWords is now available to our Google Apps users with their Apps accounts.

Google Apps is Google’s suite of cloud-based messaging and collaboration apps used by over 30 million users in small businesses, large enterprises, educational institutions, government agencies, and non-profit organizations around the world. If your organization hasn’t gone Google yet you can learn more about how to lower IT costs and improve productivity and collaboration with Google Apps.

For those current AdWords users who have a Google Apps account, we're currently in the process of wrapping up some necessary infrastructure work to ensure that the transition for those users will be a seamless process. For new users without data to transition, if your administrator has enabled this service you can begin using AdWords with your existing Apps account at adwords.google.com today.

For more details, read the complete post on the Google Enterprise blog and follow all the updates on other newly available services for Google Apps users.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

This Wednesday December 1st, we’ll be hosting a live course on media planning in the AdWords Online Classroom. The course will highlight the best practices of media planning and break down the planning process into 5 simple stages. We'll also give an overview of a number of Google tools that you can use to achieve high ROI, relevance and reach for your Google Display Network campaigns.

The course will be delivered by an Online Media Specialist and will last for approximately 1 hour, including time for Q&A. It will take place on Wednesday December 1st, 2010 3pm - 4pm BST / GMT+1 (London), 10am-11am EDT (New York), 7am-8am PDT (San Francisco).

Make sure to sign up now if you're interested!

Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

Earlier this year we introduced the Ad extensions tab to help you manage and track your campaign extensions in AdWords. Now, in addition to showing statistics for your campaign extensions, the Ad extensions tab lets you share extensions between campaigns.

Shared extensions allow you to use the same extensions information across multiple campaigns, saving you the time and effort of manually recreating extensions one at a time per campaign. For example, if you’ve set up Ad Sitelinks in one of your campaigns, you may want to use the same settings for a new campaign. Rather than copying each link and pasting it over one at a time to the new campaign, now you can share your Ad Sitelinks settings from your existing campaign to the new one.

What’s more, if you need to change part of your extension later (for example, to change the URL for one of the Ad Sitelinks), you only need to change the extension once and all campaigns sharing that extension will be automatically updated.

Any extension you add is automatically available for sharing between campaigns. To add a shared extension to a campaign, visit the Ad extensions tab for the destination campaign. Then, select the extension type from the drop down box, and click 'New extension.'



You’ll see the option to choose one of your existing extensions from another campaign, or to create a new extension. Choose the extensions you’d like to use, click save, and you’re done.



To learn more about shared extensions, please visit the AdWords help center.

Posted by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew

Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog:

When we here in the U.S. think of Thanksgiving, many of us think of our favorite foods: perhaps a fresh-from-the-oven pumpkin pie, a sweet glazed ham or a succulent turkey. But thanks to Charlie Hohorst III of Lafayette, La., tens of thousands of Americans dream instead of a turkey... stuffed with a duck... stuffed with a chicken.

For the past 15 years, Hohorst has run food shopping site Cajun Grocer, which specializes in more than 1,000 different authentic Louisianan foodstuffs and delicacies. The “turducken”—a Cajun dish consisting of a de-boned turkey filled with duck, chicken and stuffing—is “the bread and butter” of his business, says Hohorst. He can attest to their growing popularity as he ships an ever-increasing number of turduckens to cities all over the country, from Los Angeles to Boston.

Cajun Grocer’s business has grown hand-in-hand with the use of Google AdWords. Before starting AdWords campaigns in 2002, sales were fueled primarily by word of mouth, and reaching the right audience at an affordable price was a challenge. “With a specialty product like a turducken,” says Hohorst, “who do you target and how do you target them?” Using AdWords, Cajun Grocer can show off their products alongside relevant searches on Google and measure every penny spent on advertising.

Cajun Grocer's ad for "turducken" searches, using AdWords Product Extensions. click for full size image

The process of hand-crafting all eight types of turducken for the Thanksgiving rush starts in April and continues through packing and last-minute shipping as late as November 23.

Aside from their role in spreading the culinary influence of his native Louisiana, what Hohorst really loves about turduckens is that, much like the Thanksgiving holiday itself, they give people a reason to come together. “They’re a gathering item. Many people have heard of them, and when someone they know has one, it can bring in 10 or even 20 people.”

Posted by Jim Prosser, Communications Manager

Cross-posted from the Google Small Business Blog:

When Uday Challu noticed a growing dissatisfaction with avenues for technical support, he was inspired to create a better way for people to get help with their tech troubles. So in 2007 he founded iYogi.com, India’s first direct-to-consumer remote technical support company. Founded on a belief in good karma, iYogi aims to mitigate frustrations with technical products and services by delivering a high-quality customer service experience.



iYogi provides round-the-clock, 24-hour service on a wide variety of technical products and issues, in Australia, Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. Uday uses Google AdWords to reach these international customers.

Uday says he saw search and, in particular, AdWords as a way to reach customers in need of technical support. He says, “iYogi services are currently available in multiple geographies and advertising with AdWords seemed like the most obvious way to reach customers who were turning to the Internet to find and fix their problems.”

With the intent of starting small and building to scale, Uday targeted his first campaigns to the U.S. only. Using location and language targeting, iYogi launched a U.S.-only campaign with general keywords related to customer support, and honed his campaign over time. “We gathered lots of intelligence from the Search Query Report, which helped us identify other keywords people in the U.S. were searching for,” says iYogi Vice President of Online Marketing K.R. Sreejith. “We also tested new ad texts and customized these ad texts to highlight popular keywords.”

Then, using lessons from his experiences in targeting the U.S., Uday expanded into the Canadian market. He found his experience in the U.S. helpful for the Canadian campaign, but didn’t see similarly high volume. After examining the global competitive landscape, he decided to expand to Australia and the U.K.

“We quickly learned that ads in the U.K., for example, had to be different than ads in the U.S.,” says Sreejith. “Using the Search Query Report, we noticed that the popularity of certain keywords was different in the U.K. and that there are differences in the spelling of these terms. We also learned from our sales teams that U.K. customers spend more time on the phone than do U.S. customers. So, we edited our ad texts and landing pages to reflect these different keywords and values.”

Today, iYogi is one of the fastest growing remote tech support providers in the world. As Uday continues to expand his business internationally, he’ll continue to use insights gained from his ad campaigns and to provide the rest of the world with similarly karmic technical support experiences!

Posted by Anand Devsharma, Team Manager, India

On Wednesday November 24th we’re hosting a free, live, online course about Goals in Google Analytics. Goals help you measure conversions or successful actions on your website, such as visits to a 'thank you' page after a customer makes a purchase on your site.

In this live course you’ll learn how to set up Goals and how they can benefit you. We'll clarify the difference between conversions in AdWords and Goals in Analytics, as well as discuss the reports the Goals section offers. After completing the course you'll know how to use Analytics Goals to measure the effectiveness of your AdWords traffic, then make more informed business decisions as a result.

This interactive course will be delivered by two Analytics Specialists and will last approximately 1 hour, including time for Q&A. It will take place on Wednesday, November 24 from 3-4PM GMT (7-8AM PST) and is suitable for anyone who’d like to learn more about Analytics Goals.

If you're interested make sure you sign up now!

Posted by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew

Cross-posted from the Google Small Business Blog:

At Google we’ve always believed that the Internet is an engine of economic growth, but until now no one has ever quantified who, how, why, where and what was behind this growth. So we asked The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a well-respected adviser on business strategy, to conduct an analysis of the impact of the Internet on the UK economy.

And we were surprised by the results:

• In 2009, the Internet contributed £100 billion to the UK economy. That represents 7.2% of GDP.
• The UK is the number one country in the world for e-commerce and is a net exporter of e-commerce goods and services, exporting £2.80 for every £1 imported.
• The Internet economy is expected to grow by 10% per year.

[The Connected Kingdom video]

BCG researched the impact that being online has had on overall businesses sales, and the results were again startling. In recent years, businesses that embraced the Internet have seen four times the growth in sales than businesses that haven’t.

[UK tights small business success story]

Understanding the importance of the Internet on the UK economy was useful, but BCG wanted to dig deeper and compare how the UK ranks against other countries. So they devised what they’ve called an “e-intensity index” which looks at three main factors: the ease of access to the Internet, the amount spent on the Internet, and the level of engagement people have with the Internet. Whilst the UK led on the amount of money spent online, the overall leader was Denmark, with the UK in 6th, and Germany, USA, and France in 9th, 11th and14th place, respectively.

To view a full version of the report, get involved in the debate and have your say in what the UK government should do to help grow the UK Internet economy, we encourage you to visit www.connectedkingdom.co.uk.

Posted by Richard Keelty, Product Marketing Manager, Google UK

As part of our Google Images redesign this July, we introduced Image Search Ads, which include a thumbnail alongside your ad text. We learned that on Google Images, image-based ads provided great results for our advertisers. They are also a highly useful format for users because they show commercial content directly related to the user's query.

Today we're expanding the image ad formats available on Google Images by testing rich media leaderboard units that appear above Google Images search results and invite you to try new products and services. With the introduction of this display ad format on Google Images, you now have a great opportunity to reach users with engaging ads, whether your goal is to build brand awareness, or to drive clicks and conversions.


Advertising on Google Images allows you to reach hundreds of millions of users around the world who use the site to find relevant photos and images every week. Today display ads on Google Images are available on a small fraction of queries in the US and UK only. Over time, we hope to make display ads on Google Images available on more queries globally.

Display ads on Google Images work the same as they would on other sites in the Google Display Network. They're triggered by the content on the page - in this case, that’s defined by the category of the search term that the user enters. If, for example, you target your ad to appear on Google Images on travel-related content, your ad may appear on Google Images if a user searches for related terms like [travel], [vacation], [beach] or [summer holiday].

It’s easy to start running display ads on Google Images. Just use the AdWords placement targeting tool to target Google Images like any other site on the Google Display Network, and choose the type of content you want to advertise alongside. You can upload your own leaderboard format ad or create one using Display Ad Builder. Pricing can be either CPM or CPC, depending on your goals. If you want more information about the advertising options on Google Images, visit the Help Center.

We’re invested in making display advertising work better for both users and advertisers. We look forward to introducing new, innovative placements and formats on the Google Display Network to help you reach your advertising goals.


Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

If you're interested in creating a stronger online branding presence or drawing high-volume traffic to your site, YouTube can help you accomplish both by giving you access to the world's largest online video-streaming and sharing community. YouTube can further enhance your current online advertising campaigns with millions of ad impressions and video ad streaming opportunities, so that you create the high-profile online presence that your website needs.

There are now a number of ways in which you can raise your profile as an advertiser using YouTube. During this course you'll learn about the different methods of targeting YouTube, and how to make the most out of any existing presence you may already have on this platform.

This is a live course presented by a YouTube Specialist and is appropriate for all advertisers interested in growing their presence on YouTube. It will take place tomorrow, Wednesday, November 17, 2010 3pm - 4pm BST / GMT+1 (London), 10am-11am EDT (New York), 7am-8am PDT (San Francisco).

If you’re interested, make sure to sign up now!

Posted by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew

Event Date: November 16, 2010 at 02:00 PM East/12:00PM Central/11AM Pacific. Register today.

As a dentist, Dr. Bob Wagstaff knew he had a better way to cure bad breath than most other solutions in the market. So he founded Orabrush to sell a tongue brush to help consumers more easily clean their tongues of the germs that cause bad breath. When Dr. Bob first tried promoting his new invention, many forms of traditional advertising failed him. A $50,000 infomercial went nowhere. Then, Jeffrey Harmon suggested a marketing campaign built around a YouTube video. That first video cost $500 and has since earned the company over 13 million views, setting Orabrush on the path as an innovator in online video marketing.

Join this live Webcast with AdAge to hear from Jeffrey Harmon and Abe Neiderhauser, the team that has helped earn Orabrush more than $1,000,000 in sales through YouTube, AdWords and online marketing.

Posted by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew

It probably comes as no surprise that we are huge fans of AdWords. It is such an effective marketing tool for our advertisers that it's no wonder that we'd use it ourselves. In fact, Google uses AdWords for many of the same reasons that our advertisers do - it's a great way to reach users and raise awareness about a product or feature. Type “Chrome” into the search box on Google, and you’ll see an ad with links and a demonstration video.


House ads are a common industry practice. Newspapers show ads in their pages with information on how to subscribe. Television stations show ads to promote different programs that are on the same channel or other channels owned by the same parent company. And search engines commonly use ads to inform and educate users about services they provide.

As we’ve always said, we’ve been using house ads for several years to promote a variety of products. We've run search marketing campaigns on Google for search products such as iGoogle, Google Maps, and mobile products as well as for specific issues in order to provide information to our users. We’ve run ads related to disasters to help users find resources and learn more about disaster relief (for example, in the aftermath of the earthquake in Chile, Google showed an ad with links to Google’s crisis response website for queries such as “Chile earthquake”).



How do these house ads work?

• These advertising campaigns are subject to internal marketing budgets, so we are strategic and careful in our implementation of our advertising campaigns.
• We only allow ads from Google that comply with the same ads policies that apply to any other advertiser. In fact, Google's ads are not guaranteed to appear in any given spot.
• Indeed, as any other advertiser experiences, only directly relevant and quality ads will show, as the auction is dynamic [see Quality Scores and Ad Auctions].
• It is the quality scores and the bids of all advertisers entering a specific auction which may determine the cost-per-click, and Google may well be one of these advertisers.
• For AdSense ads, all AdSense publishers and syndication partners get paid exactly the same way whether the advertiser is Google or another business.

We manage our advertising campaigns according to the same principles that any other advertiser would. We look closely at our budgets, managing our spend against CPC and CPA (cost-per-acquisition). Like more than a million other businesses, we believe in the value of online marketing to connect with web users.

Posted by Lorraine Twohill, Vice President, Global Marketing

On Saturday, November 13, 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 account 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 Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew

One year ago today we launched the initial beta of Product Listing Ads. With Product Listing Ads, we wanted to introduce a basic ad format that makes it easy for you to promote your entire product inventory while still providing potential customers with high-quality, relevant results. Over the last year we’ve been impressed with the results. In fact, during the beta, advertisers listed hundreds of millions of products and we found that people are twice as likely to click on a Product Listing Ad as they are to click on a standard text ad in the same location.

Today we're announcing that Product Listing Ads is coming out of beta. Starting today, and rolling out completely over the next week, all U.S. advertisers can start using Product Listing Ads.

Product Listing Ads, along with Product Extensions, is part of AdWords Product Ads. With Product Ads, users can see the exact products you offer before they even reach your site, which leads to more clicks, higher quality leads, and higher ROI for your search ads.



Like Product Extensions, which lets you add the pictures and prices of relevant products to your keyword-targeted text ads, Product Listing Ads makes it easy to show the most relevant products from your Google Merchant Center account to potential customers searching on Google.com.

However, unlike Product Extensions, Product Listing Ads don’t require any keywords or ad text. Product Listing Ads are automatically triggered whenever someone’s search matches an item in your Merchant Center account, making it easy to show relevant ads for your entire product inventory.

To learn more about Product Ads and see how to get started with Product Extensions and Listings, you can visit our help center or watch the video below.




Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Scott Imbrie, CEO and Co-Founder of Original Skateboards. His passion is longboarding, a popular form of skateboarding that blends elements of surfing and snowboarding. Scott started Original in 2002 with his brother, Brad. The brothers began selling longboards shortly after Scott's 20th birthday, when Brad was just 17. Original distributes its products in most surf, skate, and snowboard shops on the East Coast of the United States and in many other areas around the world.

My brother Brad and I started Original in 2002. We both loved board sports and saw longboarding as our ideal next adventure. At the time, it was almost entirely unknown. We wanted to build longboards and trucks that would allow descents of the steepest paved roads in the world. We also wanted to travel to those locations to prove it could be done. YouTube and Google AdWords have helped us to achieve those goals.

Since March 2005, we have been using Google AdWords for online search advertising. In conjunction with positive organic rankings, search placement (even on terms where our organic rankings are top 5) has helped us ensure brand presence for our primary keywords; it has also established us as a leading brand in our industry. Building on this strong search marketing foundation, we expanded our AdWords efforts to the Google Display Network. The Display Network consistently contributes additional conversions and expands market awareness of our brand.

In our experience, Display Network site visitors interact more often with our Brand Channel. Despite having an immediate conversion rate lower than search based visitors, they are more likely to share their experience socially. By providing these more active customers sharable content, such as YouTube videos, we make the most of our Display Network clicks.

That being said, YouTube is much more than a simple way to allow our customers to share our videos. YouTube helps us find customers globally through video. We now have more than 105,000 YouTube subscribers, and our business has grown by a factor of 10 since we aired the first video.

For more information on how Google AdWords and YouTube have helped us grow a successful small business based on global reach, strong branding, and consistent sales conversions, head on over to the YouTube Blog.

Posted  by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew

Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer, Search Funnels, and AdWords Conversion Tracking - these are some of our favorite tools for measuring and optimizing conversions on websites. These tools help you maximize your return on investment whether your site exists to share information, generate leads, or make sales.

We recently started the Japan and Asia-Pacific (JAPAC) Conversion Room and Blog. Over the last two years we've seen a tremendous uptake of Google’s conversion products in this region, celebrated many success stories with users, and witnessed the development of local expertise. The JAPAC Conversion Room aims to inspire JAPAC (and global) online marketers to maximize conversions through sharing success stories and expert tips from this region.

If you're drawn to digital marketing, optimizing for conversions, and have an interest in the Japan and Asia-Pacific region, then head on over to the site and subscribe to get all of the latest articles.


Post Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

What if you found out that your AdWords campaigns were bringing you more customers than you realized?

Zac Stafford, Senior Search Strategist at Nina Hale Search Marketing in Minneapolis, MN, recently discovered that this was true for his client, modern furniture retailer Room & Board. Stafford saw some encouraging results as an early beta tester of AdWords call metrics, a new feature that automatically includes a unique phone number in your ads to measure the calls that you receive from AdWords.

“By cross-checking our call metrics reports with our sales records, we saw that half the people who called the toll free number in our ad purchased online but the other half purchased in a store. Before using call metrics, we determined our ROI just by looking at the online sales numbers. Now we have proof that online search ad campaigns drive in-store purchases.”

Today we're announcing that AdWords call metrics is available for more advertisers, making it easier than ever to measure the phone calls that AdWords generates for your business. Using the technology behind Google Voice, call metrics assigns your campaign a unique phone number which is automatically inserted into your ad on both desktop and high-end mobile devices, where the number is clickable.

When a user calls the number in your ad, the call is automatically routed to your business, and AdWords notes that this call took place. Then, when you look at your AdWords reports, you’ll see the number of calls generated by each campaign, call duration, and in the near future, caller area code. You'll still only pay for clicks on your ads, but we intend to charge for call metrics in the future.

Once you know where your calls are coming from, you can refine your marketing strategy to make sure you’re getting the most out of your ads. For example, you could test different ad text variations to see which results in the most calls or reallocate budget to campaigns that truly bring you the highest ROI.

Currently, call metrics is only available to a limited number of US advertisers. We plan to make the feature available to more advertisers in the coming months. To find out if call metrics is available in your account and to learn more about the feature, visit Google Ad Innovations.


Additionally, if you want to see call metrics in action, watch the video above.


Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Senior Product Manager, AdWords

On Wednesday, November 3rd we’ll be hosting a live online course about how you can start using mobile advertising to reach more customers.

Did you know that there are now 4 billion mobile phone owners globally? Half of all new internet connections come from mobile devices, and by 2014 it's projected that there will be more mobile internet users than desktop internet users.*

In this course we'll take you through the changing landscape of mobile advertising. We'll also show you how to identify if users use mobile devices to find your services and how to set up Mobile Search and Display Campaigns.

This course is for those of you interested in learning more about mobile advertising and how to easily set up your AdWords account to target more users on mobile devices. The interactive course will be delivered by an Online Media Specialist and will take approximately 1 hour including time for Q&A. It will take place on Wednesday 3rd November from 3pm - 4pm BST / GMT+1 (London), 10am-11am EST (New York), 7am-8am PST (San Francisco).

If you're interested in this course, sign up now!

*Morgan Stanley report, 'Internet Trends' published on April 12, 2010.

Posted by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew