Car insurance Channel: July 2011

Live AdWords webinars every Tuesday and Wednesday at 3pm BST

8:00 AM

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Making local online advertising easy with Google AdWords Express

AdWords Express 12:33 PM

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Upcoming Webinar: Display targeting strategies for direct response

Display Network 9:20 AM

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Now all US and Canada advertisers can get more phone calls and detailed call reporting

Reporting and Analytics 8:00 AM

Call Metrics, a simple way to get more phone calls and detailed call reports with AdWords, is now available to all advertisers in the US and Canada. Availability was limited since the introduction in November 2010, so thanks for holding.

Call Metrics works by assigning and placing a toll-free forwarding number next to your ad text on Google search pages. When a user sees your ad and calls the number, AdWords registers the call and forwards it to your business. So far, we’ve connected over 5 million calls for thousands of businesses. And calls generated from ads using Call Metrics last six minutes, on average.

(click for full-size image)

Vijay Malavia, Associate Search Director at interactive agency Razorfish, manages search campaign strategy and results on behalf of his client ADT, the largest US electronic security service provider. With its broad mix of services and customer profiles, ADT considers both the web and phone to be important customer acquisition channels. Vijay describes the benefits of Call Metrics he’s seen for ADT:

"Since we’ve started using Call Metrics, we've seen average daily call volume in the ADT call center increase. Quality of inbound calls has been solid -- duration and conversion metrics are consistent with other sources. In addition to providing convenience and getting more calls, having integrated reporting has made it much easier to project the total value ADT is getting from both calls and clicks from AdWords. And that's helped us make better optimization and budget decisions."

We’re also announcing a few other changes with this launch:

1. More detailed reporting. In March we enhanced Call Metrics reporting to show the time, duration, and caller area code for each call. Based on advertiser feedback, we’re now making reporting available at the ad group and campaign level for manually-dialed calls (subject to minimum volume). And you’ll still be able to segment reports to compare how many calls were received from mobile clicks-to-call and how many were manually dialed after the ad was shown on a desktop, notebook, or tablet computer.

2. New pricing for certain calls. A $1 USD (or equivalent in CAD) charge applies to manually dialed calls completed to your Google forwarding numbers. These calls occur when a potential customer on a desktop, notebook or tablet computer sees your ad and dials the number shown.

Pricing for mobile clicks-to-call remains unchanged, whether you use Call Metrics or not. They continue to be charged as regular mobile search ad clicks.

3. Call Extensions replace Phone Extensions. To reduce possible ambiguity, we’ve renamed Phone Extensions to Call Extensions.

In a future release, we plan to incorporate calls into Ad Rank calculations, which determine an ad’s position and cost per click. At that time, you’ll be able to influence your ad position by specifying a bid per call greater than $1.00 USD. This will parallel the way that clickthrough rate (CTR) and max CPC bids can influence Ad Rank today.

To get started with Call Metrics, sign into AdWords and click on the Ad Extensions tab. Select Call Extensions in the shaded View drop down box. Select your country, then enter the business phone number where you’d like to receive calls for this campaign. Finally, select the check box for Call metrics.

(click for full-size image)

You’ll find many more details and answers to frequently asked questions in the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, AdWords Product Manager

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Non-ASCII characters now supported in display and destination URLs

Destination URL 9:46 AM

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Introducing phone support for AdWords advertisers in Europe

8:51 AM

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‘Top vs. Side’ Ad Performance Segmentation

3:00 PM

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Google Display Network: Announcing changes to campaign settings

12:00 PM

This week we're making a minor change to the way Google Display Network campaign settings work. This change will affect campaigns that meet these criteria:

Are opted in to the Google Display Network
Are targeting only keywords in at least one ad group
Have the campaign setting "Relevant pages only on placements, audiences, and topics I manage"

Background

When you set up a Google Display Network campaign, you have two options to choose from:

(1) Relevant pages across the entire network
(2) Relevant pages only on placements, audiences, and topics I manage

With option (1), Google automatically places your ad on relevant webpages based on the keywords in your campaign. With option (2), you have greater control over where your ad appears: your ads show on relevant webpages only within specified placements, audiences, or topics.

Currently, if you choose option (2) and only add keywords, your ads aren't eligible to appear. As a result, you receive zero impressions in those ad groups on the Google Display Network.

For example, say that you're selling tennis shoes and using the keywords "sports shoes," "tennis shoes," and "sneakers”. If you're only opted into the Display Network and you've selected "Relevant pages only on placements, audiences, and topics I manage" as your setting, your ads will only appear on specified placements, audiences, or topics. Because you aren’t using any topics, placements, or audiences, your ads won't appear on the Google Display Network.

What's changing?

With the upcoming change, ads with this type of setting conflict will start appearing on relevant pages across the entire Google Network based on your keywords. In the previous example, ads would show on pages about "sports shoes," "tennis shoes," and "sneakers" on the Google Display Network.

If you add a placement, audience, or topic, your ad will continue to appear only on relevant pages within that placement, audience, or topic.

Important: No changes are needed to existing ad groups, as those that meet these criteria will be prevented from appearing on relevant pages across the entire network.

To make these campaign settings clearer, we are also renaming the settings.

We're changing these two options to:

(1) Show ads on pages that match the broadest targeting method
(2) Show ads only on pages that match all selected targeting methods

Before	After
“Relevant pages across the entire network”	“Show ads on pages that match the broadest targeting method”
“Relevant pages only on placements, audiences, and topics I manage”	“Show ads only on pages that match all selected targeting methods”

For more information on how to use our campaign settings and targeting methods to control where your ads appear, visit the help center.

Posted by Andrew Truong, Inside AdWords crew

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New: Tablet targeting options now available

Campaign Targeting 9:00 AM

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The Zero Moment of Truth: A New Marketing Strategy

9:15 AM

Once upon a time, marketers believed that shoppers made up their mind about a product in about the time it takes to read this sentence.

The three to seven seconds a shopper considered a product on a store shelf was believed to be a critical moment—what P&G termed the “First Moment of Truth” or FMOT ("eff-mot"). This was the moment when all the advertising a consumer had seen for a brand would either pay off with a purchase or not.

Since then, FMOT has become one of those terms, like “tipping point” and “purple cow,” that changes the way marketers think. FMOT is one of three widely accepted “moments of truth” for a product—the other two being when the consumer sees an ad for the product (the stimulus) and when she uses it for the first time (the experience).

These concepts still hold true today and may be even more relevant given the continued emergence of strong store brands. But thanks to the web, we’re seeing the rise of an additional class of critical brand interactions: the Zero Moment of Truth or ZMOT ("zee-mot"), which occurs after the consumer sees an ad for a product, but before a purchase is made in store. More precisely, it's the moment when a shopper goes online to research a product and decides whether to make a purchase.

We're seeing growth in everything from queries for reviews and coupon redemption to mobile usage, strongly indicating that this phenomenon is real. But what we wondered is, what does this phenomenon mean for marketers? To find out, we spent a lot of time talking to industry experts and leading marketers and conducting primary market research to learn as much as we could about ZMOT.

Now, we’re excited to drive industry discussions and pass our findings on to marketers in a new free ebook, Winning the Zero Moment of Truth.

In it, we explore:

- Typical ZMOT moments that happen every day

- Why marketers should consider ZMOT as important as “the ad” and “the shelf”

- Seven steps to winning at ZMOT, including exercises to identify relevant moments for your brand

If you’re interested in learning more about the consumer behavior that’s changing the way marketers think about branding and online commerce, I invite you to download Google’s free marketing strategy ebook Winning the Zero Moment of Truth. And I encourage you to join the conversation (and check out the enhanced video version of the book) at www.zeromomentoftruth.com (#zmot). I hope that you enjoy our work and that it helps you navigate your own moments of truth.

Posted by Jim Lecinski, Author and Chief ZMOT Evangelist, Google

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Car insurance Channel

Live AdWords webinars every Tuesday and Wednesday at 3pm BST

Making local online advertising easy with Google AdWords Express

Upcoming Webinar: Display targeting strategies for direct response

Now all US and Canada advertisers can get more phone calls and detailed call reporting

Non-ASCII characters now supported in display and destination URLs

Introducing phone support for AdWords advertisers in Europe

‘Top vs. Side’ Ad Performance Segmentation

Google Display Network: Announcing changes to campaign settings

New: Tablet targeting options now available

The Zero Moment of Truth: A New Marketing Strategy

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