Posted by Ali Miller, Product Specialist Team

Managing multiple client accounts can be, and often is, very time consuming. We've just made some changes to the My Client Center (MCC) dashboard that will hopefully make your job a little easier. Here's a quick summary of what you can now find in your MCC:

• Client statistics visible on MCC dashboard: See performance information such as clicks, impressions, and CTR without clicking into individual client accounts.
• Tabbed design: Looking for CTR and impression data for your client accounts? Look on the new Performance tab. Need to see how much budget your client has spent? Check out the new Budget tab.
• Custom date range: Set variable date ranges to see statistics for any period of time.

Lastly, you'll also see your reporting statistics update every few hours rather than once per day. With this new information you can keep closer tabs on your clients, or possibly start a daily CTR competition in your office.

Posted by Laura Hood, Creative Team

If you use AdWords Editor, you may have already attended one of our introductory webinars on its basic uses. Our AdWords Editor team is now offering an advanced training for users who have experience with the application. We hope you can attend, so please register here to join us on Tuesday, June 10th from 10:30 to 11:30am PDT.

Posted by Maris Gersh, Creative Team

For those of you who work with clients in the finance industry we've got a new resource called the Financial Services Industry Knowledge Center.

If you've never heard of our Industry Knowledge Centers (or IKCs, for brevity's sake) they're sites dedicated to particular industries with AdWords tips, success stories, news feeds, and Google product solutions. You can view them all here.

Inside the Financial Services IKC, you'll find three new success stories featuring Garden State Life Insurance, IFA (auto insurance), and Bankrate.com (consumer financial information) and how they use various Google AdWords features to acquire new customers.

The site also dedicates several sections to our tried and true Tips for Success. We'll walk you through best practices to help you and your clients: Start off on the right foot, Target the right audience, and Get more bang for your buck.

Here's a peek at a tip we included for writing effective ad text:

• Highlight free offers such as free rate quotes, free trades, free credit reports, or free market research

• Intercapitalize the Display URL (AdWordsExample.com rather than adwordsexample.com)

• Include a specific call-to-action like "Get A Free Quote Today"
  

Posted by Alice Lin, Danh Ly, and Thu Nguyen, Optimization Specialists

As Optimization Specialists, we spend a good deal of our time helping advertisers improve the performance of their campaigns. We wanted to share some of the tips and guidelines we rely on regularly. We'll focus this series on the content network. Here are some tips to get you off to a strong start:

• Create separate campaigns for search and content. By doing so, you'll be able to:
• Organize and optimize your ads and keywords for different audiences.
• Set different budgets for search and content, depending on your marketing goals.
• Use general keywords for your content ad groups to help create your themes, without affecting your search performance.
  
  
• Focus, focus, focus.
• Create tightly-themed ad groups for each of the products or services your client offers.
• Use about 15-30 keywords per ad group.
  
  
• Turn a negative into a positive.
• Use negative keywords. The more negative keywords you have, the less likely your ad will appear on a site that contains that topic, thereby helping you target your ads more accurately.
• The Keyword Tool can help give you ideas for negative keywords.
  
  
• Adjust your ads.
• Write ad text that speaks to a user browsing a website. Highlight any special offers or low prices to catch users' attention.
• Use call-to-action phrases that help guide users to know what to do on your clients' site. Phrases like "Learn More", "Call Now" or "Download Free Whitepaper".
• Link your ad to customized landing pages that match the information in your ad text.
• Avoid keyword insertion. Because no one particular keyword is used to trigger your ads on the content network, keyword insertion is better used within search campaigns.
  

Posted by Christina Hill, Events Team

Back in April, we posted about the Google Marketer's Playbook sessions at ad:tech San Francisco. If you couldn't make it to the event, not to worry, we've captured the sessions on video and posted the series to our Google Business Channel on YouTube.

The seven-video series includes:

• Introduction to AdWords
• Managing your AdWords account
• Optimization strategies 1
• Optimization strategies 2
• Measuring & tracking: Google Analytics
• Increase your advertising reach: Traditional media
• Online video advertising

Feel free to share the videos with other members of your agency as educational materials. We don't have a blooper reel, however, so you'll have to get your laughs elsewhere on YouTube.

Posted by Tyler Johansson, Agency Team

You may have heard about the recent launch of Google TV ads to all US-based advertisers. If you're already purchasing television advertising for your clients, you can compare all the benefits and features of the AdWords system on the Google TV Ads site.

For your clients who have never advertised offline, television advertising can offer a new way to acquire customers, drive additional sales, and boost traffic to online campaigns. Recent research from Thinkbox and the UK Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has found that many people go online while watching TV. Here are some research highlights:

• The likelihood of buying or using a product increases by more than 50% when TV and online advertising are used together.¹
  
  
• Positive brand perception increases by 47% when both forms of advertising are used in unison, versus either medium in isolation.¹

Use Google TV Ads in concert with your clients' online campaigns to captivate viewers and Internet users when they're most engaged.

[1] Thinkbox and IAB Study: May 2008

Posted by Ashley Kibler, Creative Team

We've just launched the inaugural edition of the Google AdWords Travel Industry Newsletter, designed for advertisers selling travel services and products.

If you have clients in the travel industry, take a look inside for ideas on how to take advantage of this growing market, which is forecasted to increase 5.2 percent, to $778.2 billion, in 2008.¹ You'll find details on how to gain more insight with Google Analytics, using Google's content network to get in front of customers while they're researching their next vacation, and for organizing your client's account, like those below.


If you'd like to receive this newsletter in the future, let us know at travel-newsletter@google.com.

[1] Travel Industry Association, "Modest Growth in Travel Projected in 2008, According to Travel Association Forecast," October 27, 2007

Posted by Kelley Collacchi, Agency Team

To help with your more detailed Google Analytics questions, our Analytics team has put together a new troubleshooting resource for various tracking questions, located on the Analytics Custom Tracking site. Ever wondered how to set a User Defined Variable or how to use your own campaign tracking variables within Analytics? You can find those answers as well as information and tools to troubleshoot code installation and customization scenarios. We’ll be updating the document periodically with more questions and solutions, so be sure to bookmark it.

Posted by Katherine Allan, Agency Team

If you're advertising on Google's search or content networks, your ads may be appearing on parked domains. Parked domains are sites using AdSense for Domains, which allows domain registrars to show relevant ads, rather than empty space, on parked pages. But which parked domains did your ads appear on?

We recently added a new level of detail to Placement Performance reports to answer this question. Placement Performance reports give site-by-site performance metrics for the sites where your ads appeared within Google’s content network. Now, rather than seeing one consolidated entry for all parked domains in your reports, you'll see separate rows displaying performance statistics for individual parked domains. Select the 'Special Category' column when creating a report to identify whether a site where your ads appeared is a parked domain.

Showing ads on parked domain sites can be very effective. For example, Garden State Life Insurance receives 60 percent of their sales on the content network from parked domains:

"Ads that appear on parked domain pages produce very qualified traffic, and that traffic converts on our website in a similar manner to our search network traffic."

-Michael Musselman, Garden State Life Insurance

Download and read their full story here. And, if you find that certain parked domains aren't converting well for you, you can either exclude them individually, or exclude the parked domains category as a whole.

To learn more about Placement Performance reports, check out a one-page guide or the Help Center. To find your car, well, that's a different story.

Posted by Cathy Bishop, Creative Team

From text to gadget ads, AdWords gives you lots of ways to grab attention for your client's business. To help you figure out the best format for your message, we've created a one-page online ad formats guide. Download the PDF to find examples of the various ad types, when to use them, reporting metrics, accepted ad sizes, and more.

For example, if you want to tap into the growing audience of YouTube viewers try creating an in-video ad. Or, reach potential customers in a specific area with local business ads. Use the ad formats guide to play matchmaker and set your client's message up with the best medium.