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Building a brand online is about creating authentic connections with your audience. Since launching AdWords for video last year, we’ve helped more brands capture the power of sight, sound, and motion in a simple and easy way. Today, we’re helping brands further understand the impact of their campaigns by bringing three new measurement features to AdWords for video that make reporting more consistent with other media, more goal-oriented and just plain prettier.

Reach & Frequency Reporting: Speak the same measurement language across media
AdWords for video now displays reach and frequency metrics in your campaign reporting interface. These metrics give you more insight into how many unique viewers have seen your ad and the average number of times they’ve seen it, helping you better measure against other media such as TV. To view these metrics on a campaign, ad or targeting group level, just click on Columns; Customize Columns and look under the Performance section.



Column Sets: Tell us your marketing goals, and we’ll pull the metrics
To help you organize the metrics that matter most to your campaign, we’re introducing the Column Sets feature which groups relevant metrics by marketing objective. So all you need to do is select your advertising goal and we’ll show you useful reporting columns for your account. For example:
  • Want to build brand awareness? Select the Branding objective in the “Columns” drop down to see how broadly your video ad was viewed. We’ll automatically show unique viewers, average view frequency and average impression frequency.
  • Want to optimize for conversions? Select the Website Traffic and Conversions objective to see how your video ads drove viewers to action. We’ll show you website traffic, number of conversions, cost-per-conversion, and your conversion rate from people who viewed your ad.
  • Want to grow your audience? Select the Audience objective to understand how your video ads drove people to watch and engage with more of your content. We’ll show you follow-on subscribers and follow-on views.
  • Want to drive more views? Select the Views objective to understand the follow-on actions viewers take such as when a viewer goes to your channel to watch more videos. We’ll show you follow-on views and unique viewers.


GeoMap: Visualize your views
Where in the world are your views coming from? With the new AdWords for video visualization feature, you can tell with a mere glance. Just select the Campaign tab and click “Map View” to generate a beautiful snapshot that displays view activity on an interactive map. You can even click on regions to drill down to states and provinces globally, and to the DMA-level in the U.S. These geographic insights can help you understand which of your ad messages are resonating with specific markets.



We hope these new features to help you easily compare campaigns across platforms, discover new metrics and derive actionable insights. Head over to AdWords for video to try them out today!

Posted by David Tattersall, YouTube Product Manager, recently watched “Top Gear - Reliant Robin Space Shuttle”
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Throughout the summer, we’ve been sharing 10 simple tips for utilizing Google+ over at Creative Sandbox. We know our agency partners juggle a lot at once, between the RFPs and last-minute campaign launches, traffic reports and research studies -- and we’ve been on the lookout for ways that Google+ can make your day a little easier.

You can check out today’s final post on Google+ -- and we wanted to share the full list here:

Get inspired

  • Follow interesting people -- See what industry experts, colleagues, peers and competitors -- as well as celebrities, photographers and your friends -- are sharing publicly. Check out these suggestions: google.com/+/whotofollow

  • Host focus groups -- Get immediate feedback and insights from consumers via a Hangout. Have a face-to-face conversation online, as if you were in the same room.

  • See how your work gets shared -- See the earned media effects of a campaign by entering a URL or YouTube video into Ripples, which show how posts are shared and reshared on Google+. 

  • Review portfolios -- Can’t visit every job fair? Host a Hangout to give live feedback on advertising and marketing students’ work. Announce ahead of time on your Page.
Make communication easy

  • Meet with clients -- Connect with your clients on a Hangout to review new initiatives, get feedback on creative or even hold a planning meeting. Utilize Screenshare or Google Docs to jointly view proposals.

  • Manage projects -- Trying to keep everyone informed on your most recent project? Keep the team in the loop by creating a Circle just for everyone involved.

  • Communicate with clients -- Organize your contacts by client or even industry in Circles so you can share insights with the most relevant audience.
Build your brand

  • Lead the way -- Host a Hangout On Air featuring influencers in your agency to shine a spotlight on research, share case studies or provide insights on trends.

  • Show and tell -- Have a piece of stellar creative you’ve completed or a great insight you just discovered? Share it on your Page and start a discussion with others who might learn from your experience. 

  • Be seen on search -- Give your stamp of approval to articles, videos and research that you would recommend with the +1 button. Your friends will see your recommendations when they search.
Want more? Download the full booklet and share it with your coworkers -- or even hang it at your desk! And if you have your own tips and tricks for using Google+ as an agency, share them today over at Creative Sandbox with hashtag #g+toptips.

Posted by Becky Bowman, Google+ for Business
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On Thursday, August 4, we held a webinar about how to use today’s powerful targeting technologies to run effective display advertising campaigns for direct response goals. Specifically, we covered:

  • The "targeting toolbox" for direct response campaigns on the Google Display Network
  • Strategies for prioritizing and applying the available targeting options to maximize campaign performance and efficiency
  • Tools, tips and best practices for maximizing ROI

For those of you who missed the webinar, a recording is now available, which you can watch below. You can also download the materials we covered here.


After watching the webinar, share your thoughts and engage with us by following us at @GoogleDisplay. We’d love to hear from you!

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Product Marketing, Google Display
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If you’re as busy as we are it might feel like you work in a bee-hive. Everything buzzing around you all the time--digital, traditional, client demands... The Google Agency Team wants to help you tame a little bit of the buzz by streamlining our agency resources so you can easily stay in the know:

1. Google for Agencies: This gateway site is designed to inspire creativity and give you access to the tools you need to bring your ideas to life, including a redesigned Agency Toolkit, training programs, and case studies organized by audience, ad type, product, and brand.

2. What's New @ Google?
  • Blog: As of this moment(!), this blog, formerly Agency Ads Solutions Blog, is your best source to learn more about webinars, major product updates, and industry information, to name a few topics. Sign up for the RSS feed or email alerts to the right of this post.
  • Newsletter: Join our Google Group to receive bi-weekly agency update emails that include top videos, product updates, and top blog posts. Or contact your Google team to have them send it directly.
  • Flip book: Check out the newest version here. It contains product updates from the previous quarter. Ask your Google representative for a PDF version.
3. @CreativeSandbox: Get informed and stay inspired with a Twitter feed on digital creativity. Check out our Google list to follow other Google Twitter accounts like @YouTube and @adwordsapi.

Please let us know what you think!

Posted by Agency Blog Team
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We recently launched Google for Agencies in the US, a new site to inspire creative ideas and provide access to the programs, tools and resources to bring these ideas to life -- all in a single location.

Here’s a glimpse at what you’ll find on Google for Agencies:
  • Examples of best-in-class campaigns from the past year, showing how the palette of Google media solutions can be used to achieve client goals in innovative ways.
  • One-click access to relevant training programs -- the Google AdWords Certification program, targeted to agencies and advertisers managing $10K or more of spend each quarter, and Google Engage for Agencies, targeted to developers, consultants and small agencies working to bring small businesses online.
  • Links to the agency blog, newsletter and Twitter pages, making it effortless to find and subscribe to updates to keep you ahead of the digital curve.
  • A redesigned Agency Toolkit, showcasing the tools to drive client success, whether you’re planning a strategy, developing creative solutions, implementing targeted plans, or proving performance.
Google for Agencies is part of the re-launch of our advertising site, aimed to improve the user experience, as well as centralized case studies, training and resources by audience, ad type, product or brand. In addition to Google for Agencies, the re-launch includes new advertiser, experienced advertiser and publisher, as well as search, display, video and TV ads.

The site is currently live in the US, and will roll out to other countries in the coming months.

Posted by Katie Miller, Agency Team
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Many of you use contextual targeting on the Google Display Network to reach potential customers as they read web content directly related to your products or services. To date, you've been able to do this by specifying keywords that work together to show your ads on relevant webpages. This week, you'll also be able to specify topics to contextually target your ads to pages in the Google Display Network. With this additional contextual targeting option, you'll be able to select from over 1,750 topics and sub-topics to target your ads, helping you quickly reach a broad audience across the web that's actively engaged with content related to your business.

(click for full-size image)

Using topics versus keywords to target your ads
Using topics to contextually target your ads offers broad targeting and reach, and is a good way to connect with a large audience quickly and easily to generate awareness or drive sales. When using topic targeting our system looks at all the terms on a page to determine the topic of the page, and is less reliant on particular keywords. On the other hand, using keywords to contextually target allows you to target your ads to a more specific set of pages in the Display Network, since you use individual keywords to develop a theme in your ad groups. However, both targeting options can be used together to effectively reach an audience across the Google Display Network. Let's walk through a use-case.

Let's say you're selling digital cameras. Here's how you might use keyword- and topic- based contextual targeting together to achieve different campaign objectives like raising awareness and driving sales.
  1. Create an ad group targeting the sub-topic News & Current Events >> Technology News with a display ad to increase awareness of your cameras among technology enthusiasts.
  2. Then target the sub-topic Photo & Video >> Cameras, using a display or rich media ad format like video to educate people interested in cameras on your products' features and benefits.
  3. Finally, create a separate ad group using keyword-based contextual targeting with keywords focused on a specific brand or camera model. Then run a text or display ad which includes a special offer or discount on your camera to drive purchases among users reading reviews of that Camera brand or model.
This is just one example of how you can use topic- and keyword-based contextual targeting together to build awareness, increase consideration and drive sales. You can also exclude topics and sub-topics to refine your targeting.

As with other targeting options on our Display Network, contextual targeting by topic supports all ad formats, such as text, display, video and rich media as well as all our bidding options, such as cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-thousand impression (CPM), and cost-per-acquisition (CPA). In addition, you still have access to URL-level reporting and other tools such as the Conversion Optimizer.

To find out if this targeting option is right for you, you can read our best practices. Then learn more by watching this video and reading our Help Center articles.

Originally posted on the Inside AdWords Blog.

Posted by Agency Blog Team
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Last week, we launched the Contextual Targeting Tool to help your clients more easily reach customers as they spend time on millions of sites in the Google Display Network.

As you already know, with contextual targeting you can reach potential customers as they read web pages related to your clients’ products or services. Now, with this tool, you can create contextually-targeted campaigns more easily and quickly, while generating more clicks and conversions for your clients’ campaigns.

What does the Contextual Targeting Tool do?
This tool automatically builds keyword lists that can be used to show your clients' ads on relevant web pages in the Google Display Network. Tightly-themed keyword lists are the basis of effective contextual targeting, and with the Contextual Targeting Tool, you no longer have to build them manually. In minutes, you can build dozens, even hundreds, of keyword lists, scaling client's campaign performance while ensuring accurate targeting for their ads. This means they can get more clicks and conversions for campaigns and you can create these campaigns more quickly. Many of you have previously been using the Wonder Wheel tool to do this. The Contextual Targeting Tool now automates this process, and it does it right within clients' AdWords accounts.

How do I use it?
Let’s say your client sells soccer equipment and gear. Normally, you'd have to manually build out separate ad groups for each of your product lines, like soccer gear, soccer balls, soccer cleats, etc. With the Contextual Targeting Tool, simply type each product category into the search box, and the tool will automatically generate tightly-themed keyword lists for you. For example, when you enter soccer gear into the tool, you get more specific ad groups, such as youth soccer gear, discount soccer gear, soccer uniforms, soccer bags, etc.



Along with the new ad groups, the tool provides suggested bids and predicted placements to give you an idea of the types of sites in the Display Network where the ads can appear.

The Contextual Targeting Tool has been available to agencies and advertisers using AdWords Editor. This week, you will be also able to access it from the Opportunities tab in AdWords accounts, although for now you'll still need AdWords Editor to implement the ad groups in clients' accounts (download AdWords Editor). However, this requirement will be lifted and you’ll be able to implement new ad groups directly from AdWords accounts in the coming months.

You can learn more about using the Contextual Targeting Tool by watching this video. We hope this tool will help you more easily and efficiently reach your clients’ goals with their Display Network campaigns.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Marketing Manager, Google Display Network
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We're pleased to share another tips and tools update from our friends at the Inside AdWords Blog. We hope you find it useful for optimizing clients' keywords.

- The Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

We want to thank you for all the feedback you’ve given us on the Keyword Tool. The first thing you told us is that you want more keywords that are better targeted to your account and searches, and we’ve made improvements in this area. We’ve also added features such as better filters, the ability to star keywords, and copy them as text. And we’re not done yet! You can help us understand what’s important to you by continuing to provide us with feedback. Below is a more detailed look at some of our new features.

There are three new ways to filter and refine your keyword list. With our new updates, you can:

  1. Choose specific terms to include or exclude from your keyword list.
  2. Use the ‘More like these’ button to search for terms that are similar to the specific keyword ideas you've selected from the table.
  3. Get only results that include the exact words or phrases (and their close synonyms) you’ve typed in the search box.


Adding stars to keywords
Add stars to keywords that you'd like to save while you're still searching for new keyword ideas. You can review your starred keywords in the "Stars" panel on the left side of the tool.

‘View as text’ button
View your selected keywords in text form, so that you can easily edit them and paste them in a spreadsheet or AdWords Editor.


Your continued feedback is important, so please keep sending us your comments and we'll post about more improvements here.

Posted by Alexandra Kenin, Product Marketing Manager

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[Note: this is cross-posted from the Inside AdWords Blog]

Do you stay awake at night wondering where your bids are? Do you plan your vacations around fluctuations in click volume? Have you taken AdWords for Mobile as your +1 to a family wedding?

Managing an AdWords account to its full potential takes time - time that you could spend managing other important parts of your business. That’s why we’ve developed automated rules, a new feature available to US advertisers that lets you get the benefit of 24-hour account management while leaving you free to focus on other important things.

With automated rules, you’re able to create rules to automate bid, budget, and status changes on a specific part of your account (selected keywords, ad groups, campaigns, and ads) that are triggered at a particular time. For example, automated rules could be created to perform the following tasks:
  • Enable ads promoting a special offer late on a Sunday night when the offer goes live
  • Automatically raise your bid to the first page CPC for all keywords in a campaign that contain the word ‘sale’
  • Generate more traffic on your peak shopping days by automatically increasing your daily budget on Mondays and decreasing it on Wednesdays


Let’s walk through an example of creating a rule within a campaign to increase keyword bids for all keywords with a position worse than 4 so far today. First, we’ll navigate to the Keyword tab of the campaign, click the ‘Automate’ dropdown, and choose “Change Max. CPC bids when...”

In the window that appears, we’ll create our rule to raise bids for all but deleted keywords in the campaign by 10%. We’ll set specific parameters to make sure the rule is only applied when certain criteria are met. In this case, we’ll add a requirement that the average position must be worse than 4 so far today for any bid changes to be made.

Then, we’ll specify that the rule should be performed every day at 12pm using data from the same day. We’ll name our rule and choose to keep track of changes by receiving an email each time the rule runs.

As an important last step, we’ll click ‘Preview results,’ to see a list of changes that would be made if the rule were to run at that moment. When we’re satisfied that everything is in order, we’ll click ‘Save.’

To manage the rules you’ve created and keep track of changes automatically made to the account each day, visit the ‘Control panel and library’ section of your account and click ‘Rules.’

Automated rules will be gradually launched to US advertisers over the coming weeks. If you regularly perform manual tasks in your account, we encourage you to give automated rules a try. Once you’ve done so, we’d love to hear your feedback for how we can make automated rules even better. So let us know how it goes!

For more information on AdWords automated rules, visit Google Ad Innovations.

Posted by Lisa Coffey, Product Marketing Manager

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Editor's Note: This is being cross-posted from the Inside AdWords Blog

One of our key goals is to help you drive better performance with your display advertising campaigns.

As users increasingly spend time across a growing number of sites, however, display advertising is becoming more challenging. Last year alone there were 47 million new web sites created*. Contextual targeting can help by automatically showing your ad to users on web pages related to your products on the millions of sites in the Google Display Network (GDN). But building and managing your campaigns can still be time-consuming. So how do you reach your target audience easily and efficiently while meeting your business goals?

Today, we’re launching two tools -- the Display Campaign Optimizer and the Contextual Targeting Tool -- to help you maximize your performance on the GDN, while saving you valuable time and resources.

Display Campaign Optimizer. This new tool automatically manages targeting and bidding for your Display Network campaigns with the goal of increasing your conversions while meeting your advertising objectives. You simply provide us with your target cost-per-acquisition (CPA), creatives and budget, and the Display Campaign Optimizer goes to work, showing your ads in all the right places, automatically. It monitors your campaign performance and, in real time, adjusts your campaign accordingly. Your campaigns stay optimized, as it “learns” and does more of what’s working and less of what isn’t. For example, Seventh Generation, a company that sells eco-friendly household cleaning, baby care and personal care products, was looking to connect with more “green” consumers across the web and get them to download coupons from their site for use in-store. After implementing the Display Campaign Optimizer, the tool delivered 60% of the coupons downloaded from their site, with a CPA 20% below their target. Further, analysis of our beta testers showed that on average, campaign using Display Campaign Optimizer were likely responsible for almost one-third of the accounts’ total conversion volume with CPAs within 6% of their peer group CPA.**

The Display Campaign Optimizer is now available globally for larger campaigns running on the Google Display Network.




Contextual Targeting Tool. While the Display Campaign Optimizer is an automated solution that does all the heavy lifting on your behalf, the Contextual Targeting Tool helps you more efficiently build your own display campaigns. This tool is ideal for those of you who prefer transparency and control over your campaigns’ targeting and bidding. The Contextual Targeting Tool builds tightly themed keyword lists for your display campaigns, which are used to contextually target your ads. Tightly themed keyword lists are the basis of effective contextual targeting. With this tool, you can build dozens, even hundreds, of ad groups in minutes, quickly scaling your campaign performance while ensuring accurate targeting and control over your campaign.

For example, if you sell yoga gear, normally, you might take the time to build out separate ad groups around each of your product lines, such as yoga mats, yoga clothing, yoga gear, etc. Inputting each product category into the Contextual Targeting Tool will generate even more tightly themed keyword lists. For example, inputting ‘yoga mats’ into the tool generates more specific ad groups, such as designer yoga mats, thick yoga mats, yoga mats with designs, etc. These are all separate ad groups that can help you generate additional traffic and sales, that you wouldn’t necessarily think of creating when manually building out your campaigns.

This week, we’re beginning a phased launch of the Contextual Targeting Tool, and it will become available to more advertisers over the coming weeks and months.

Whether you’re looking for easier ways of building out your display campaigns or looking for a more robust, automated solution that continually optimizes bids and targeting, we think these tools will help you easily and efficiently achieve performance at scale with your display campaigns.

Posted by Woojin Kim, Product Manager and Shaun Seo, Product Manager

* Source: Netcraft Web Server Survey, Dec. 2009
** Source: Internal analysis of active beta testers, in comparison with peer group advertisers. Oct. 2010
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In early August, we announced that the updated Keyword Tool was nearing the end of its beta phase. Today, we wanted to let you know that we’ve fully launched the updated Keyword Tool.

What does that mean for you? It means we’ve combined the best features from two previous keyword tools into one. The previous Keyword Tool and Search-based Keyword Tool are no longer available in AdWords. The updated Keyword Tool is now the only Keyword Tool available in AdWords, so you can now simply call it “The Keyword Tool.”

The Keyword Tool’s benefits include:
  • Flexible search options: Search by any combination of keyword, website/URL, and category (where available) and receive a single set of results.
  • Easy Keyword Refinement: Filter results by word or keyword match type.
  • Negative keywords: Easily add keyword ideas as negatives right from your keyword list. Just click on a keyword and use the drop-down menu to select and save your negative keyword.
  • Advanced options: View statistics for mobile search and use data filters based on local searches, search and ad share, and more.
In addition to these improvements, we’ve also changed how we calculate Global Monthly Searches and Local Monthly Searches. Statistics in these columns are now based on Google.com search traffic only. Previously, they also included traffic from search partners. We've updated these statistics based on advertiser feedback, and hope you find them more helpful for keyword selection.

While we recommend using the Keyword Tool while signed in to AdWords, you can also access the tool without signing in. We hope you like the new streamlined version of the tool and we look forward to bringing you more features soon.

Posted by Alexandra Kenin, Product Marketing Manager
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We're pleased to announce that AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) has begun rolling out globally. Whether you're looking to assess the impact of new keywords, different bids, or a new landing page, ACE lets you run split test experiments that deliver valid impact measurements regardless of changes in demand, competitor movements, or other sales and marketing activity that can complicate traditional before-and-after measurement approaches.

In addition, ACE is now supported in the AdWords API so developers can begin integrating this valuable feature into their AdWords applications. Visit the AdWords API blog for a quick snapshot of what’s available and stay tuned for a deeper dive on ACE for developers coming soon.

For additional information on ACE, check out the complete post on the Inside AdWords Blog and visit the Help Center FAQ. Not seeing it yet in your Campaign tab under settings? Hold tight - users outside the US should see it in a week or so.

Posted by Mark Martel, Product Marketing Manager
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(cross-posted from the Inside AdWords Blog)

Late last year, we announced a beta version of the updated Keyword Tool, which brought you increased functionality and a streamlined way to identify new keywords for your account. Since then, we’ve been working hard to meet our long-term goal to combine all the features you love from both the Keyword Tool and the Search-based Keyword Tool into one comprehensive tool.

We think it’s the right time to begin this final transition since you can now find many of your favorite features from tools in the updated Keyword Tool.

Both of these tools will be available in their current forms through the end of August, after which time their addresses will redirect to the updated Keyword Tool. We’ll post again when the transition is complete and the updated Keyword Tool exits beta (and drops the “updated” from its name).

The updated Keyword Tool has a number of benefits over the older tools:
  • Flexible search options: Search by any combination of keyword, website/URL, and category (where available) and receive a single set of results
  • Easy keyword refinement: Filter results by word or keyword match type
  • Advanced options: View statistics for mobile search and use data filters based on local searches, search and ad share, and more
We also listened to your feedback and added some completely new features:
  • Removing Duplicate Keywords: When you access the Keyword Tool from within an ad group, keywords that are already in that ad group will appear with an “Already in ad group” message next to them
  • Adding Negative keywords: Now, you can easily add keyword ideas as negatives right from your keyword idea list. Just click on a keyword and use the drop down menu to select and save your negative keyword

We’ll continue to improve upon the updated Keyword Tool to make it more useful for you. Give it a try if you haven’t yet to take advantage of its new look and features. If you need to, you can always access the tool without signing in to AdWords. However, for the best results, you should access the tool from within your account. Just click the “Keyword Tool” link from the Opportunities tab. For a full set of directions on accessing and using the tool, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Alexandra Kenin, Product Marketing Manager
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As agencies managing AdWords accounts, you know your clients are not alone in the auction -- any number of advertisers may be using AdWords to offer some of the same goods and services as them. You can monitor their performance and use optimization tools to improve ROI, but you still might not know how they're performing as compared to similar advertisers. We’re aiming to bring more transparency to AdWords with the launch of Analyze competition in the Opportunities tab. For now, this feature is only available to a small number of advertisers using the English language AdWords interface, but we'll expand this to more advertisers in the near future.

‘Analyze competition’ examines an account’s activity over the past two weeks and lists categories that represent the products or services a client is advertising. Categories are based on actual Google.com search terms and are matched up against a client's keywords, ad text, and landing page text. For each category associated with a client's account, you’ll see a bar graph, which shows individual performance compared to the average performance of other advertisers in the same category.

When you hover over the data in the 'Competitive Range' column, you'll be able to see more details such as the exact size of the competitive range, the mean and median performance levels for this range, as well as data on the absolute top and bottom performers.

In the case below, you’ll see that we’ve chosen to evaluate our performance based on how our CTR compares with that of other advertisers. In addition to CTR, you’ll also be able to look at competitive data for impressions, clicks, and average position, and you can segment data by advertiser location.




As with other areas of the Opportunities tab, you’ll be able to export information from ‘Analyze competition’ to a .csv file.

It’s important to remember that data in ‘Analyze competition’ is anonymous, and as part of our commitment to protect your clients' privacy, we don't reveal information about any advertiser's identity.

Now that you know what ‘Analyze competition’ does, here are some tips on how to make the most of this data:
  • Take action. Click the ‘Explore ideas’ button to see customized keyword, bid, and budget ideas for your clients' accounts.
  • Consider clients' advertising goals and focus on the most relevant metrics. It’s not always a bad thing to perform below competitors on a metric that’s not important to clients.
  • If you see that one campaign is performing poorly in comparison to the competition, you can get insight into changes you can make to improve that campaign.
Just like the other areas of the Opportunities tab, we hope that ‘Analyze competition’ will help you uncover new opportunities to improve your clients' AdWords performance. To learn more about this feature, visit the Help Center, or watch this short video.

To read more about and submit feedback on 'Analyze competition,' as well as discover other new developments in AdWords, visit the Ad Innovations page.

Posted by Alexandra Kenin, Product Marketing Manager
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Yesterday, we announced a new tool called AdWords Campaign Experiments, or ACE, that will help you optimize your account by letting you accurately test and measure changes to your keywords, bids, ad groups and placements. We're testing this new tool and inviting U.S. advertisers to participate in the beta.

For more information and to sign up for the ACE beta, please visit the AdWords Campaign Experiments page on Google Ad Innovations.

Posted by Courtney Lischke, Product Marketing Manager
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Over the past year, we've focused on building new solutions on the Google Content Network for campaigns focused on branding. Last year we introduced frequency capping to help you manage how often your Content Network campaigns reach the right people. We then launched an “above the fold” filter to allow you to show ads only in places that appear on potential customers’ screens when the page loads. We also developed innovative tools to measure the impact of brand campaigns.

Today, in response to feedback from many of you who run branding campaigns, we're announcing a new filter that allows you to show your ads only on AdSense sites among the 1000 largest on the web as defined by DoubleClick Ad Planner. This new feature will ensure that your ads reach a large number of users, but only on well-known sites best suited for branding goals.

To activiate the new filter, select ‘non Ad Planner 1000’ within the ‘category filters’ section of your AdWords account. Keep in mind that not all sites in the Ad Planner 1000 are in the Google Content Network and that your ads will only show on those sites that are.

It's important to note that the Ad Planner 1000 does not take performance statistics into account, and that by enabling this filter, you may be excluding many sites that are relevant to your advertised products. Additionally, with this or any of our other brand filters enabled, your campaign will run on fewer sites, so you may need to raise your bids if you’d like to maintain your impression levels. We recommend experimenting to determine which feature or combination of features best meets your goals.

We hope this new feature gives you greater control and assurance over where your ads appear and makes the Google Content Network an even more powerful environment for effective branding campaigns.


Posted by Sean Harvey, Product Manager
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Do you find yourself creating templated ads for clients where only a few variables change, such as a city, price or product? With the Ads Multiplier, templated ads can now be produced much faster.

The Ads Multiplier is a open source Google Apps Script for Google Spreadsheets that populates AdWords creative templates with a list of user-provided inputs. With the Ads Multiplier, just input variables, create the templated ad text and run the script to generate a new tab with your final ad creatives. The script is triggered via menu option: Ads Multiplier --> Generate Output.

See the screenshots below for an example of what the Ads Multiplier script can produce for Awesome Airlines, a hypothetical travel client:

Inputs:






Templates:



Completed Ads:







The best way to access and use the Ads Multiplier is through the sample spreadsheet provided here, which includes the example data for Awesome Airlines. Just click on "Use this template" to download a copy of the template into your Google Docs and run the script. You can edit and add new inputs and reuse the template. We do recommend occasionally coming back and getting the latest template from the link here to ensure you have the latest updates to the tool.

For more information on using the Ads Multiplier, please visit the Ads Multiplier wiki.

Posted by Adam Hersly, Launch Manager, Partner Solutions Organization Global Tools Team
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The mission of DoubleClick Ad Planner, Google's free research and media planning tool formerly named Google Ad Planner, is to provide the deepest, most accurate insight into online audiences possible. This insight helps display advertisers select the best sites for their media plans and drive results for their campaigns.

One of the many data points that DoubleClick Ad Planner provides is site traffic data. In line with Ad Planner's mission, we've improved how we estimate and share this data in order to provide media planners, buyers and researchers with improved data quality and more data visualization options. This builds upon the traffic improvements we made in January of 2009 and is part of our continuous effort to provide trusted insights into online audiences.

This release includes the following two significant improvements:
  • Traffic estimates across a number of metrics are now more accurate (Unique user and reach estimates remain the same)
  • Direct measured traffic is now included for publishers who opt-ed in their Google Analytics data
Upgrading Site Traffic Estimates

To improve the quality of our site traffic estimates, we have upgraded our traffic estimation model. Our model uses a hybrid methodology that combines sample user data, from various Google products and services, with direct measured site-centric data. The model's direct measured signal is pulled from Google Analytics customer accounts that have chosen to opt-in to sharing their data with Ad Planner. This hybrid approach allows us to use direct measured data to train our traffic estimation models and produce the best estimate for any given site. For more information about how we use opt-in Google Analytics data check out our past blog posts on how Google Analytics data is used in Ad Planner and on replacing traffic estimates with direct measured Google Analytics data.

This latest upgrade improves the accuracy of our estimates by over 10%. We look at a large amount of data and metrics to evaluate our estimates and are continuously working on improving them. We believe our model to be among the more accurate sources of traffic estimation in the industry.

Publishers who would like to complement their site listing with direct measured data are welcome to do so by opt-ing in their Google Analytics data in DoubleClick Ad Planner Publisher Center. We invite publishers who are new to Ad Planner to learn more about using Publisher Center to manage their site profile.

Providing Direct Measured Site Traffic Data

In May 2009, we announced Ad Planner Publisher Center, which made it possible for publishers to opt-in their Google Analytics data to Ad Planner. We've now upgraded site profiles in Ad Planner to display this data in the worldwide charts for Daily Unique Visitors on site profile pages. For publishers who opted-in, their direct measured data is displayed as a solid line in their chart. For example, Gamezhero, a website offering free online games, opted-in their Google Analytics data in June. Here's what their worldwide chart for Daily Unique Visitors looks like now:


In the coming months, we plan to bring direct measured site traffic data to country-level profile views in addition to the worldwide profile views that are currently supported.

Understanding the Data in Ad Planner

To offer additional transparency into how Ad Planner generates its data, we've published a new help document about our methodology. The document provides more details behind how Ad Planner generates site traffic data, in addition to other data, such as demographics, ad information, categories and descriptions.

Getting Started

Give DoubleClick Ad Planner a try at www.google.com/adplanner. We think you'll find it to be a powerful research and media planning tool that makes it easy to find audiences and create well-informed media plans.

Posted by Wayne Lin, Product Manager, DoubleClick Ad Planner

[note: this post has been reprinted from the DoubleClick Blog]
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What makes up the ideal creative for your client?

We'll walk you through how you can answer this question using AdWords reporting and the Display Ad Builder, a tool that allows you to quickly and easily customize display ads and to run measurable experiments. Experimentation is not new to advertising, although the theories and ideas that inspired campaigns have evolved over time.

For example, in the early 20th century, the prevailing sentiment in the ad industry was that information made a creative effective. The car ad below sums up the thinking of the time:


National Motor Vehicle, Inc. advertisement (1907) retrieved on 21.1.2010 from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:National-advertisement_1907.jpg

Theories eventually emerged suggesting that consumers weren't always need-oriented, but advertisers were baffled by how to measure seemingly subjective behavior. Mid century a study was released that put data to consumer responses. It showed that three factors - the size of the ad, the size of the illustration and the numbers of colors - together could help explain some of the readership difference between a magazine's ads.

Today, you can find out the the factors that trigger the strongest response by using the data in Ad Performance Reports in AdWords, which provide relevant statistics for ad variations, such as text ads, image ads, video ads, and local business ads, and run experiments with Display Ad Builder. Here are two creatives developed with Display Ad Builder for a hypothetical online travel company:


Ad creatives developed internally using Display Ad Builder: Image 1 & Image 2

When creating the ads, populate the "Ad Name" field in Display Ad Builder with the ad's elements. We'll call the first "day_scene_cta" and the second "night_people_question." Launch the ads on even rotation to ensure a good sample. Then you can construct a chart like the one below from your Ad Performance Report by adding up the clicks and impressions for each ad component:


Sample data set from internal account independent of example creatives.

In this example, the effectiveness measure is clickthrough rate (CTR), but this can be substituted for conversion rate or cost-per-acquisition (CPA). The chart shows the elements of the ad that had the greatest impact on CTR, benchmarked against the performance of the whole ad group.

You can tweak the reporting to show the impact of relationships as well. Do people prefer images of scenery or people at night? With a well-designed ad experiment, you can use basic data-mining principles to find these results. However you choose to experiment, continue to measure your results so you can find the best creative.

Posted by Eddie Higgins, Agency Team
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The New Year festivities have come and gone, and it's now time to return to the daily grind. To add a little color to the January doldroms, we're pleased to share the newly redesigned Google for Advertisers - the central destination for advertisers and their agency partners to understand what it is Google does for advertising.

So what has changed? One big change is the homepage where we now illustrate how Google's tools work together to support the entire value chain of marketing, from insights to creative to media to measurement and optimization. We've been calling these areas of focus the "marketing cycle" and we hope it's a clear and lasting way to help advertisers and agencies make sense of how everything they're working on fits with everything we're working on.

Beyond the new homepage, we added fresh content like our video overview of the Google Content Network and ways to stay up-to-date through twitter, trainings and quick videos. Because we work with partners from around the globe, we're working hard to translate the site into additional languages and create locally-relevant content in other parts of the world. To kick off this effort, we're pleased to introduce our first localized site - Google for Advertisers UK.

To check out the new sites, please visit Google.com/advertisers or Google.co.uk/advertisers. Happy New Year!

Posted by Oliver Deighton, Business Marketing
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