Google Offers Guidebook for AdWords Updates

Google AdWords has added a handy paid search how-to guide to its Learn tab to help users who are feeling overwhelmed by the company’s constant stream of AdWords updates.

The helpful new tool, called the Google Best Practices series, is located in the Help section of AdWords. The series offers actionable advice on how to best use AdWords products for successful paid search and will act as the company’s official AdWords guidebook. Google Best Practices encompasses all areas of paid search, from optimizing keywords to measuring analytics.

Additionally, Google has added a timeline tool to make new features and changes more accessible. The timeline lists all AdWords updates chronologically. Since AdWords updated more than 200 times last year, a time-ordered list will help users stay abreast of changes without spending time searching for applicable updates. The timeline will offer brief descriptions of each new product, features, and updates along with links for more information.

3 Ways to Measure More Conversions Using Estimated Total Conversions

In October, Google announced Estimated Total Conversions as a first step to providing you with a more holistic view of the conversions driven by AdWords. It is available to all advertisers who use AdWords conversion tracking. Estimated Total Conversions includes conversions you see today, such as online sales, as well as new conversion types like cross-device conversions and calls.

These insights are particularly important to understand because consumers are now constantly connected, using multiple devices throughout the day. In the next few weeks, this will be even more pronounced as people shop for holiday gifts. A recent holiday study shows that 84% of consumers who are likely to use a mobile or tablet device while shopping this holiday season, will start shopping on one device and finish on another.

Google making it easier for advertisers to understand these consumer behaviors with new insights that are part of Estimated Total Conversions, a new column in AdWords.

Estimated Total Conversions includes cross-device conversions, which are also shown in a separate column to highlight their importance.

3 ways to use Estimated Total Conversions to improve business results

1. Take another look at your desktop/tablet bid. Once you see more conversions that can be attributed to AdWords, your total ROI from AdWords will change. Re-calculate your desktop/tablet cost-per-acquisition (CPA) based on these cross-device conversions. If your CPA has improved using this measure, you might want to look for opportunities where you may be able to increase position and volume by increasing your bids.

2. Capture the full value of mobile.  Many experienced search marketers are already using this data to make business decisions, by starting a test on campaigns that previously did not show on mobile.  Within a few weeks of showing ads on mobile devices, these advertisers started to see conversions they could not before -- those that started on a mobile phone and ended on another device. These insights led to important business decisions like adjusting mobile bids or shifting budget to reflect the new ROI of their keywords.

Amber Yeray, Digital Marketing Manager at EXPRESS, a national fashion retailer, has been working with her agency partner, RKG, to understand the new insights offered by Estimated Total Conversions.

“Cross-device conversions have shown that total estimated conversions are up 7%, with a 17% lift from mobile-initiated conversions. EXPRESS and search marketing agency partner, RKG, are now able to increase mobile bids for areas of the account that show the most impact from mobile -- driving more volume while remaining efficient.”

3. Spend only the most profitable dollar. The total value of your AdWords investment might change once you’re able to see more conversions. Whether it’s AdWords, other digital channels or offline media, think about investing your dollar into the most profitable channel possible.

Estimated Total Conversions provides new insights that may help you optimize bids and budgets to improve performance. Amit Shah, Vice President of Online, Mobile & Social at 1-800-Flowers, used the new insights that he gained to make more informed budget allocation decisions.

“After measuring cross-device conversions that began on a mobile device, we saw a 4% increase in total conversions measured in AdWords. With the full view offered by Estimated Total Conversions, we can correctly understand attribution across channels and make better decisions on achieving marginal spend optimization.”

These are just a few of the tips that we will continue to share as we hear feedback from you

Understanding Impact with Earned Actions in AdWords for video

For many video advertisers, the benefit of TrueView only begins with the first view. Just as an Honest Trailers link pinged to a friend can lead to several other video views, we see this viewership pattern with paid ad views as well – the initial view can catalyze a long chain of engagement with a brand.

Since these earned views are a major benefit of advertising on YouTube and the Google Display Network, we’re bringing new capabilities to AdWords for video to help you better measure viewer actions following your video ads. Formerly known as Follow-on Actions, these new reporting columns will show your Earned views, Earned view rate, Earned subscribers, Earned playlist additions, Earned likes and Earned shares, with additional columns rolling out over the next few weeks. So if you're an advertiser, you can see how many people stayed on your channel to watch more videos, subscribed to your channel, added your video to a playlist, or shared your video with a friend after watching a TrueView ad.

From looking at the last six months, we’ve seen over 6,000 campaigns generate at least one earned view as a result of every two paid views. And we know the YouTube audience isn’t shy about sharing brand content: 3 in 4 YouTube users agree “If there is a brand I love, I tend to tell everyone about it.” (Source: YouTube Insights Oct 2013)

Check out this video to see how Earned Action reporting helps you better understand the impact of your video advertising:


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  Google have also simplified the Account Linking flow to make it easier to join an AdWords for video account with a YouTube channel and see the effect of TrueView advertising on growing your audience, through Earned subscribers and Earned shares.

Introducing the new Opportunities tab: find more ways to improve your AdWords performance

Adwords launched the Opportunities tab in 2009 as your personal AdWords assistant, surfacing insights to help you improve your performance in AdWords. Today they are announcing the new Opportunities tab. They have added several new opportunity types and made each easier to understand. Now the Opportunities tab is even better at answering the question, “What else can I do to improve my performance in AdWords?”

The new Opportunities tab

New high-impact opportunities

  They have added several new opportunity types for more ways to improve your performance.

• Convert more customers in your best locations: If your conversion rate differs across locations, you might see opportunities to increase your location bid adjustment where your conversion rate is high, or decrease your location bid adjustments where your conversion rate is low. 
• Get more out of your existing budget: If you’re maxing out your budget, you might see opportunities to lower your bids to capture more clicks.
• Be there more often than competitors: If your ads are being seen less frequently than other advertisers competing for the same traffic, you might see opportunities to be seen more frequently with bids to show more often than advertisers like you.
• Show ads that are more relevant: If we spot an ad group with keywords related to lots of different themes, it's harder for you to show a highly relevant ad, so you might see opportunities to create new ad groups from existing keywords.
• Reach more customers on closely related searches: If you're missing clicks on searches that are very similar to your existing keywords, you might see opportunities to broaden your keyword match types.
• Be seen on the first page: If your ads are showing below the first page when users search on high-quality keywords, you might see opportunities to raise your bids to show ads on the first page. 

Pick your best opportunities

A totally new design makes it easier to decide which opportunities to implement. For each opportunity, you'll see a short summary under "What you can do” and the possible impact under “What you might get each week.” The opportunities you’ll see are tailored to your account and selected based on their possible impact to your performance.

More opportunities are just around the corner

Check the Opportunities tab often. Whether you optimize your campaign once a day or once a month, it's constantly working in the background to spot opportunities for you to improve. And Adwords be adding even more opportunity types over time.

Improving Ad Rank to show more relevant ad extensions and formats

When people use Google to research and buy things, they're interested in the most relevant and useful results. Ad extensions help by providing more information to potential customers and additional ways for them to respond. For example, they can call your business number, see your business location on a map, or choose an even more relevant landing page that you're promoting with sitelinks. Ad extensions typically improve clickthrough rate and overall campaign performance because they make ads more useful.

Today, Google announced improvements in the AdWords auction that let us more consistently show more relevant ad extensions and formats.

Ad Rank improvements

 Google system for ordering ads on search results pages uses a calculation called Ad Rank. Previously, Ad Rank was calculated using max CPC bid and your Quality Score. With this update, Ad Rank will also take into account a third component: the expected impact from your ad extensions and formats. In addition, Google have increased the importance of Ad Rank in determining whether your ad is eligible to be displayed with extensions and formats.

Here are some more details and implications of these changes:

• Ad extensions and formats can now influence the position of your ad on the search results page. If two competing ads have the same bid and quality, then the ad with the more positive expected impact from extensions will generally appear in a higher position than the other.
• When estimating the expected impact of extensions and ad formats, we consider such factors as the relevance, clickthrough rates, and the prominence of the extensions or formats on the search results page.
• Because Ad Rank is now more important in determining whether your ad is shown with extensions and formats, you might need to increase your Quality Score, bid, or both for extensions and formats to appear. 
• In each auction, we'll generally show your highest performing and most useful combination of extensions and formats among those eligible. So there's no need to try to guess which extensions will help improve your clickthrough rate the most. 
• You may see lower or higher average CPCs in your account. You may see lower CPCs if your extensions and formats are highly relevant, and we expect a large positive performance impact relative to other competitors in the auction. In other cases, you may see higher CPCs because of an improvement in ad position or increased competition from other ads with a high expected impact from formats.
• For now, this update only affects search ads appearing on Google Search.

Recommendations for using extensions

Extensions make your ads more useful and can improve your campaign performance. So you should add extensions that make sense for your business type and campaign goals. With these improvements to AdRank, Google systems will do even more to automatically serve extensions in the contexts when they're most beneficial.

For example, consider someone downtown searching on a mobile phone for "auto repair." In this example, the user might be most likely to respond to your ad when they can click to call a phone number or tap a link to get directions to visit in person. So Google may show a combination of call and location extensions with your mobile search ad.

Now imagine if someone were searching for "auto repair" on a laptop computer in the suburbs. Say your ad earned the 3rd ad position above the organic results in this auction. Google might show your seller rating and sitelinks because that's the highest performing and most useful combination of extensions that could be shown with your ad in this particular auction and ad position.

Introducing Shopping campaigns: a better way to promote your products on Google

Everyday, people search on Google for the best products from retailers large and small. With Product Listing Ads (PLA) on Google Shopping, people can browse a wide selection of products, finding high-quality imagery and relevant product information like brand and price.

To make it easier for you to connect with these consumers and promote your products on Google, Google introducing Shopping campaigns, a new campaign type for PLAs. Shopping campaigns streamline how you manage and bid on your products, report on your performance, and find opportunities to grow your traffic from Google.

Key benefits

1. Retail-centric way to manage your products

Shopping campaigns allow you to browse your product inventory directly in AdWords and create product groups for the items you want to bid on. For example, if you’re a fashion retailer, you’ll see what types of shoes are in your data feed and how many boots you can promote. You use the product attributes derived from your data feed such as Google product category, product type, brand, condition, item id and custom labels to organize your inventory into product groups. Custom labels are a new, structured way to tag your products in your data feed with attributes that matter to you, such as ‘margin’ to separate your high- and low-margin products. To see all the items you can bid on, the Products tab will show you a full list of your approved products and their product attributes.

2. Advanced reporting to measure product performance

Regardless of how you choose to structure your product groups, Shopping campaigns offer the unprecedented ability to view your performance data by product or product attribute. Since performance metrics are associated with the item and not the product group, you can filter and segment data by your product attributes. This includes Google product category, product type, brand, condition, item id and custom labels. For example, you’ll see which Apparel & Accessories categories drive the most clicks, without having to break out your clothing category into a separate product group.

3. Competitive data to size your opportunity

To help you optimize and scale your PLAs, Shopping campaigns provide insights into your competitive landscape. In the Product Groups tab, you can add benchmark columns to see the estimated average CTR and Max CPC for other advertisers with similar products. The competitive performance data you see is aggregated and averaged, so all performance data is anonymous. Coming soon, you’ll have impression share columns to help you understand the opportunity lost due to insufficient bids and budgets, and a bid simulator will help you estimate the amount of impressions you’ll receive as you adjust your bids.

How to get started

Shopping campaigns are currently available to a limited number of advertisers. It will be rolling out gradually in the US, with full global availability by early next year. API support will come in 2014 as well.

Bing Ads Introduces Performance Comparison Graphs

The Bing Ads UI has long been plagued by obfuscation. Yes, there have been improvements such as the addition of performance trends and change history visualization, but there hasn’t be a way to compare performance data without downloading, formatting  and analyzing reports on your own. Finally, Bing Ads is working on a solution.
Today the company announced it’s working on new performance comparison feature to:

• Compare your current performance to that of a previous period.
• Compare your performance with the MOVING AVERAGE, a reliable performance baseline to measure the success of your campaigns against.
• Compare your performance between weekdays and weekends.
• See performance comparison in the context of change history.

The new feature , now in pilot mode, follows the same layout as the current performance trend with the addition of a “Comparison range” drop down with three options: Previous period, same period last year, moving average.

Both the ability to see performance by Moving average and the shaded Weekend markers are features that are unique to Bing Ads and not seen in Google AdWords.
Moving Average is calculated by averaging the performance metrics across the previous 4 days. All 4 days are of the same day of the week as the original day:

The Moving Average represents the “normal” performance level that can be used as a baseline to measure your daily performance, because it smoothes out the random fluctuations in the comparison trend line, and it also takes care of the “day of the week” factor. It answers advertisers’ frequent question, “how did my campaign do on day x compared with a typical day of the same day of the week?”

The comparative views will be added to the Change History tab as well.
If you’re interested in participating in the pilot, send requests to CHPilot@microsoft.com.

Measure & Optimize for Offline Sales with AdWords Conversion Import

Potential buyers have increasingly turned to the web as the first step in their purchase decisions.  So for years, digital marketers in insurance, auto sales, and other high consideration industries have been using AdWords to build awareness and generate leads. These leads have been handed to sales reps, who then help customers complete the purchase process.

In AdWords, you’ve been able to see which keywords lead to higher or lower lead volumes, and to optimize for a cost per lead goal. But there's been no easy way to measure and optimize in AdWords for events that happen beyond the website, like a customer order taken over the phone by your sales team.

New Conversion Import Feature

The new AdWords conversion import feature can help you measure and optimize for the complete end-to-end purchase process. Now you can upload your offline conversion events into AdWords and see how clicks on your ads led to sales made in the offline world such as over the phone or via a sales rep.

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And since your offline conversion events will be incorporated into your existing AdWords conversion data, tools such as Search Funnels, Automated rules and Flexible bid strategies can leverage that data.

How you might use the conversion import feature

Let’s see how importing conversions can help a small business measure and optimize for the entire customer journey, from online leads to offline sales.

Isabelle designs, builds and sells high-end custom furniture. She uses AdWords to drive prospective customers to her website, where they can submit their contact information and request a sales call. AdWords Conversion Tracking can measure these raw lead submissions, but since most of them won’t result in a sale, she optimizes her campaigns on raw submitted leads; not actual sales.

Now that she’s able to import her offline conversion data (including sale value), Isabelle can better understand which keywords drive the most profitable sales. With a more accurate ROI picture, Isabelle can better manage her bids and budget.

Easily compare your ad performance over time

Which campaigns are down this week? How is my performance this month compared to last month? If you’re like most advertisers, you ask yourself these questions on a regular basis. Over the next few days, we’re rolling out a feature that makes it much easier compare metrics across different time periods by putting the data right in your AdWords tables.

Once “compare dates” is enabled in your date selector, you’ll see a new + button at the top of many columns. Click the + above Clicks, for example, and the Clicks column expands to show you this week’s Clicks, last week’s Clicks, the absolute change and the percent change.

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This new functionality has been added to many reports across AdWords, on most metrics. All of the additional columns are also sortable and filterable, which makes it easy to answer questions like:

Which campaigns saw the largest increase in clicks?
Which ad groups saw conversions drop by more than 20%
Which keywords saw an increase of at least 100 clicks?

You can also use filters on these columns. This makes it easy, for example, to create a saved filter which finds all campaigns that saw a decrease in clicks of 20% or more:

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New top movers report to track how your ad performance has changed

Many of you start each day by asking: What is driving a change in my clicks or cost? What campaigns or ad groups saw the the largest moves? Did any of my recent changes break something?

To help answer these questions, Adwords created the top movers report to show you which campaigns and ad groups have experienced the largest changes in clicks and cost, and highlight changes you made which might have contributed to those moves. Even if your overall account performance metrics appear unchanged, the top movers report will look inside your campaigns to highlight big moves that might have been easily overlooked.

How it works
To view the top movers report, click the Dimensions tab, then View: Top movers. The report compares performance for two consecutive time periods of equal length, and finds the campaigns and ad groups that experienced the largest change between the two periods. You can compare periods of 7, 14, or 28 days, or look at reports generated in the last 90 days.

The report will start by finding up to 10 of the largest moves in clicks or cost and present a summary at the top. If a top mover saw an increase, it goes into the “Top increases” category. If it’s a decrease, it goes into the “top decreases” category. When changes aren’t significant enough to be a top mover, they will roll up into “Other changes.”

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The table below will give details for each top mover. When possible, we offer a “possible cause” for the move, like “bids were increased” or “new keywords were added”.

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Note that “possible causes” only considers changes made to your account. It won’t tell you, for example, if your competitors have raised their bids or introduced new ads.

Top movers is our latest effort to save you time and money by helping you understand changes in performance.  For additional information about using this new report, visit the AdWords Help Center.