With the new year just around the corner, it's a good idea to tidy up your clients' accounts for success in 2009. Locating keywords and campaigns that have a high bounce rate, meaning users left after visiting just one page of the site, is a good first step when optimizing AdWords accounts to be more successful.

But time is of the essence, so check out this quick video tip on how to use Google Analytics reports to identify poor performing keywords and campaigns in your clients' AdWords accounts. For more details on Google Analytics reporting, visit the Analytics Help Center. Happy New Year!

We're back with the fourth fact in our series to help clear the air about Quality Score and help you run more effective campaigns for your clients. Today's fact is:

A few bad days of test performance will not ruin your Quality Scores. In order to optimize your clients' accounts, we encourage you to run targeted tests on your bids, creatives, and keywords. These small tests are a useful way to measure the impact of changes before applying them more widely. You should carefully track the performance of your experiments. If you find that the changes you've made don't perform well after a few days, you can revise your experiment or delete those changes and the short term impact on your Quality Score will soon be outweighed by the positive performance you have accrued in the rest of your client's account.

We'll bring you our next fact in the new year. Wishing you Happy Holidays until then!

Posted by Dan Friedman, Product Marketing Manager

It's update time again! We've released version 7.0 of AdWords Editor for Windows and Mac, and have included some sought-after metrics. This release of AdWords Editor includes data for first page bid estimates and keyword Quality Score. Version 7.0 also offers optional usage tracking to send anonymous statistics to Google and help us improve AdWords Editor. You can learn more about these and other new features in the release notes.

As always, we want to remind you to save comments and unposted changes by backing up your work before you upgrade. Then, after you've installed the new version, you can download your account and import the backup file.

Posted by Kerrie Lenhart, Product Specialist

Everyone gets hungry, but how do you get people to be passionate about granola bars? We'll explore how Nature Valley's "Where's Yours?" campaign did just that with a good question and a lot of creativity. In this campaign, travel enthusiasts were invited to submit a video describing their own "Nature Valley" for a chance to win one of three trips to exotic locations, making the campaign's YouTube channel one of the most subscribed-to sponsors in YouTube history.

In this webinar, John Williams of General Mills will provide a campaign overview, Shane Robbins of MRM Worldwide will recap campaign strategy, and Angela Reynar of Google will highlight the ad effectiveness research, which measured brand lift, online behavior, and offline sales.

If you haven't yet, check out the "Where's Yours?" site and YouTube Channel, and view the campaign-starting video below.

Register here to join us for the webinar on Thursday, December 18th at 12pm EST. You'll need the event password googleCPG to register, and you'll then receive an email with further details and dial-in information for the webinar.



Posted by Katie Wasilenko, Agency Team

Welcome to the third fact in our series on Quality Score. We've been posting specifics about Quality Score to set the record straight on some of the common questions we receive. Today's fact is:Google does not keep track of your landing page Quality Score history. We've heard some concern from advertisers who think their current Quality Score is being lowered by previous landing pages' Quality Scores. However, Google only uses the most recent check of your landing page to determine its relevance and quality.

If you're interested in warming your hands by the glow of your computer, we've got some great educational material for you to cozy up to. Whether you're interested in tapping into social media, managing financial services clients, or just looking to learn more about opportunities for online advertisers, join us for our upcoming webinars:

Intro to Social Media
December 10, 2008, 2PM EST
Register here
This webinar gives an overview of social networks and dispels the myths that they're only a venue for teens. Learn who's on social networks, why they're visiting, and all the opportunities for advertisers, including OpenSocial, targeting capabilities, ad formats, global and mobile opportunities, and reporting metrics.

Shopping for Investment Services
December 11, 2008, 2PM EST
Register here
Compete, Inc. and Google will share the findings from a joint study that analyzed the research behavior of investors, specifically how these investors used search to research their decisions. In this webinar, we'll answer the following questions:

• To what extent is the economy driving interest in this category?
• How are economic conditions changing the way investors research and shop for investment accounts?
• What online and offline resources do consumers use in their research and shopping process?
• What is the role of search in the research process?

Posted by Cathy Bishop, Creative Team

We've recently launched a new AdWords Help Forum with a range of improvements. Designed to help facilitate a vibrant AdWords community, the forum is a great place to meet other savvy AdWords users or develop relationships with new advertisers looking for help.  Our very own Google experts also frequently answer questions.  Here are just a few of the new features you can expect to see when you visit the forum:

We recently began our series on Quality Score to help dispel any myths or misconceptions about this factor in your account. For the second installment of our series, we bring you this fact:As always, feel free to send us your questions or comments at agencyblog-feedback@google.com.

Posted by: Dan Friedman, Product Marketing Manager