We’re living in an always-connected culture -- in fact, the average American spends a full 2 months of their waking year online (emarketer, 2011). That’s time spent at work, on the go with mobile phones, and on the couch with tablets. With this wide array of screens, how do you reach your audience, and your performance goals -- at scale and with efficiency? The Google Display Network has the reach and technology to help get your message to the right customer, at the right time, all across the web -- no matter the device or channel. But putting together an optimized performance campaign to reach this fragmented audience can be a real challenge -- so we decided to bring you your very own toolkit --  The Google Display Network Playbook for Performance Marketers.

Over the next few months we’ll highlight specific sections of the playbook. You’ll get more familiar with all the different steps of display that make it excellent for performance -- including targeting, creative, bidding, measurement, and optimization.

We’ll turn our spotlight first on learning more about how display works with your performance goals, with topics such as:

In this always connected, yet fragmented, world, the Google Display Network spans across devices (desktop, mobile and tablet) and channels (social and video) to connect you to your potential customers, wherever they are.

Increasing the holistic value of your campaigns with display

Search and display campaigns complement and reinforce each other. What’s more, tools like remarketing help you re-engage with users that have already shown interest by visiting your site.

Download the playbook today, and stay tuned for even more ways that the Google Display Network can help you drive results in your performance campaigns.

Posted by Mary Shirley, Product Marketing Manager, Google Display Network

Sitelinks give users a choice of destinations on your website that they can visit directly from your text ads. Hopefully you’ve already been using sitelinks to improve your campaign performance. Maybe you’re now preparing your campaigns to be eligible for enhanced sitelinks, which offer an even bigger boost.

Our existing policy has required each sitelink in a campaign to link to a different landing page. That means a user would have a meaningfully different experience on the landing page from each sitelink. Recently, though, we've noticed an increase in the number of sitelinks created with the same landing page URLs or identical content. So starting today, we are beginning more proactive enforcement of our policy.

How it will work
We’ll initially focus on new sitelinks and any sitelinks that you change. As your ads are being served, our systems will verify that your sitelinks meet the policy standards. Sitelinks that don’t meet the standards will be restricted from appearing.

Impact on format and performance
To increase the chances of having more sitelinks shown with your ads, we recommend loading 6-10 unique sitelinks into your campaigns. Having fewer eligible sitelinks could keep your ad from showing in larger 2-line and 3-line formats, where more eligible sitelinks are required. Remember, larger formats are more visible and have higher average clickthrough rates (CTR). And if you don’t have enough eligible sitelinks in your campaign, then your ads may not display sitelinks at all.

Future enforcement with existing sitelinks
We realize that manually checking and fixing duplicates among your existing sitelinks and landing pages might take some time. So we’re delaying proactive enforcement with existing sitelinks for a few months. But don’t wait until the last minute. And remember, any sitelink that you add or change will be subject to proactive enforcement right away.

Getting started
We suggest doing a basic sweep, starting with campaigns that show sitelinks most often. These are probably your campaigns with branded keywords, like the name of your business and its best-known products and services. Here’s how you can work through this using the AdWords interface.

1. Log into the AdWords interface and click on the “Ad Extensions” tab.
2. Select “Sitelinks Extensions” from the View drop-down menu.
3. Sort your sitelink extensions by impressions or clicks by clicking on the column header.
4. Click on each sitelink in the top campaign and follow it through to its landing page (there’s no charge for these clicks).
5. Fix any duplicates you find by hovering over the extension area and clicking the pencil icon (see image below).

You can then work your way down through each campaign in your account. If you want to be completely thorough, you’ll need cross-check the landing pages on your Ads and Keywords tab with those of your sitelinks for each campaign.

For more details or help with sitelinks, please visit the AdWords Help Center or contact AdWords customer support.

Posted by Mark Martel, Google Ads Team

Our AdWords engineering team is conducting planned system maintenance today starting around 10:00 am Pacific Daylight Time (17:00 GMT). We expect to conclude around 8:00 pm Pacific Daylight Time tonight (03:00 Sunday GMT).

Your ad campaigns will continue to run as usual during this time. But you won't be able to log into the AdWords interface, access or make changes to your account through the AdWords API, or sync changes using the AdWords Editor. Also, any automated rules or scripts scheduled during this time will not run. Additionally, automated rules scheduled to run daily will not run for the entire 24 hour period from 8 am on September 22 to 8 am on September 23 Pacific Daylight Time.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

We’ll update this blog post when maintenance is complete.

Update (4:59 pm PDT / 23:59 GMT): Maintenance was completed early and all systems should be back to normal. Thanks again for your patience.

Posted by Mark Martel, Google Ads Team

SMX East kicks off in early October, and we hope to see you there. Stop by Learn with Google’s in-conference event on Wednesday, October 3; we'll have speakers across Google Search, the Google Display Network, and DoubleClick Search, with question and answer sessions following each presentation. Come hear how Google can help make the web work for you!

Day 2, Wednesday, October 3

• Evolving Paid Search (10:45am - 11:45am): In our opening session, Head of Search Ads Marketing Mark Martel will be sharing Google’s perspective on the direction of paid search, and what search marketers will need to be doing in the coming years to stay on the cutting edge and capture the greatest share of opportunity.
• Richer Tools for Targeting: Search and Display (1:30pm – 2:30pm): Elliot Nix, Head of Media Solutions, Technology, will share how remarketing can help you extend beyond your normal search, and help refine your messaging plus boost relevance for customers and potential customers – wherever they’re browsing – to see even higher returns.
• DoubleClick Search: The power of platform for the next step in search marketing management (3:30pm – 4:30pm): Sr. Product Manager Anthony Chavez will dive deep into how DoubleClick Search helps marketers and agencies running some of the world's largest search campaigns more efficiently and effectively with DoubleClick Search’s campaign management, reporting, and optimization tools.
• Winning the moments that matter with local, social and mobile strategies (5:00pm – 6:00pm): Close the day with heavy snacks, drinks, and a presentation with Tim Reis, Head of Mobile & Social Solutions, who will cover how you can reach users in the moments that matter with effective social, mobile and local solutions from Google AdWords.

Also, you can hear from other Google speakers throughout the event:

Day 1, Tuesday, October 2

• How To Play In The Exploding Mobile Ads Universe, 3:30pm - 4:45pm
  Google speaker: Tim Reis, Head of mobile and social solutions, Google

Day 2, Wednesday, October 3

• Getting Ahead With Google+, 10:45am - 12pmGoogle speaker: Kari Clark, Product Marketing Manager, Google+, Google

• Pagination & Canonicalization For The Pros, 3:30pm - 4:45pm
  Google speaker: Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google Inc. (@maileohye)

The full SMX East agenda can be found here.

Still haven’t registered? Enter discount code googleEast12 (case sensitive) and save 10%. Expo passes are free and get you into the Learn with Google in-conference event.

See you in New York!

As we announced in June, AdWords Editor versions 9.5.1 and 9.7.1 will no longer be supported after October 28, 2012. If you continue using version 9.5.1 or 9.7.1 after this date, you'll encounter errors downloading accounts, posting changes to campaign settings, or checking changes. To avoid these issues, please upgrade to the latest version (9.8.1) at your earliest convenience.

You can upgrade to version 9.8.1 through the auto-update prompt that appears when you run AdWords Editor. To preserve unposted changes and comments, select the "Backup then Upgrade" option in the prompt. You can also download the latest version from the AdWords Editor website.

For a complete list of version-specific changes, please see our release notes. To see which version you're using, go to the Help menu > About AdWords Editor (Windows) or the AdWords Editor menu > About AdWords Editor (Mac).

Posted by Andy Lutz, Inside AdWords crew

At Google, we're amazed by how the ad industry is using the digital canvas to bring brands and ideas to life. Whether it’s enticing viewers with video, evoking a smile with a mobile phone, or reconfiguring the typical ‘test drive,’ when digital advertising works, it can not only be informative, but emotional and dazzling. That’s why we've created a space where everyone can see this great work, talk about it, and roll around in it like a big happy dog.


Today, we’re launching the Creative Sandbox gallery. It’s a crowdsourced collection of global campaigns that push the boundaries of creativity and technology from across digital platforms -- a place to flash your brilliance, spark new digital ideas, inspire and be inspired. We're asking the creators to share a little detail on how they made the magic happen and the tools they used to do it, exposing us all to new ideas and new ways to improve our own work.

As with any sandbox, looking and playing are required. Vote to push your favorite projects to the top. Tell other creators what you admire. And if you've done something amazing lately, send it in. We'd all love to see it.

Jump in. Explore. And play.
www.creativesandbox.com

Posted by Justin Joy, Agency Marketing Manager

In the past 10 years the number and variety of new technologies in display advertising have more than doubled, effectively creating new - and better - ways to buy display across the web. With this influx of new display targeting technologies available to advertisers (contextual, remarketing, demographics, interest categories to name a few), our clients often wonder which targeting method performs better: audience or contextual advertising? We've said in the past that the combination of audience and contextual buying work better together, and now we have some new insight into how advertisers are thinking about these tools.

We worked with Forrester Consulting and surveyed 150 interactive marketers to evaluate their perceptions on the effectiveness of combining audience & contextual targeting with respect to display buying. The findings from the new whitepaper, Display Media Buyers Value Audience in Context, will be presented today (10AMPT/1PMET) during a special joint Learn with Google webinar featuring Forrester’s Joanna O’Connell and Google’s Woojin Kim. Register here!

Key findings from the research include:

• 50% of respondents use a full range of targeting types including: Remarketing, Demographic, Behavioral and Contextual
• Contextual and behavioral targeting dominate: Used by the vast majority - 82% in the case of contextual, 71% in the case for behavioral
• 94% of marketers combine contextual & audience buying for higher performance and greater accuracy
• Audience targeting has become the norm in display buying: The majority of marketers se bullish on audience targeting, and few see it as overhyped.
• Most marketers plan on maintaining increasing spend on combined audience & contextual targeting.

Interested in learning more? Download the whitepaper on Think Insights with Google and tune in to the webinar today!

Posted by Katie Hamilton, Product Marketing Manager Google Display Network

Shared budgets is a new feature that lets you establish a single daily budget that’s shared by multiple campaigns in an AdWords account. Shared budgets can make it easier to match your AdWords spending with how your business allocates marketing budget. And they can save you time and improve your AdWords results. Let’s see how with an example.

How Shared Budgets Work
Say you’re an outdoor furniture seller with a single line of products. You’re currently running three campaigns:

1. A desktop search campaign
2. A mobile search campaign
3. A remarketing campaign to reach people who have visited your site but didn’t convert

Your overall marketing plan allows you to spend $100 per day across your three campaigns. Without shared budgets, you’d next have to decide how to allocate the $100 daily AdWords budget across each of your three campaigns. Say you set a $60 daily budget for your desktop campaign, a $20 daily budget for your mobile campaign, and $20 to your remarketing campaign.

On most days, each campaign hits its daily budget and you’re satisfied with the ROI of each campaign. But on some days, your desktop search campaign sees fewer impressions and clicks than other days. So you only spend $90. On these days, your overall campaign results could be stronger if you were able to put an additional $10 into your mobile search campaign or remarketing campaign.

Using shared budgets allows automatic adjustments across campaigns, so you don’t have to constantly monitor and change individual campaign budgets throughout the day.

Creating a shared budget
It’s simple. Log into the AdWords interface, then click Shared library, and select Budgets. Then follow the steps to Create a new shared budget (see image below).


Reporting
The “Shared library” is also where you can review aggregate performance metrics for multiple campaigns with a shared budget.

Learn more
For more on shared budgets, please visit the AdWords Help Center or the AdWords Community to ask questions or share tips.

Posted by Vidya Iyer, Ads Engineering

Join us for a webinar on Tuesday, September 18th at 11am PT, in partnership with Hootsuite, to learn how we can make better decisions based on performance metrics of social networks using Google Analytics social reports. Register today, it’s open to everyone!

Adam Singer, the Product Marketing Manager for Google Analytics, will go beyond the current social metrics of followers, +1’s, likes and others, to discuss the true impact your social media is making on your brand’s bottom line. Many of the current metrics available allow us to measure the reach of our message, but not necessarily the ROI. Learn how to connect visits to your social pages all the way through to a sale or conversion on your website.

You’ll also learn how social media can impact the rest of your digital presence. For example, when you verify your Google+ Page, recommendations from your customers and fans may be more likely to appear in search results on Google. This can raise the social awareness of your business and increase its relevance. For paid marketing campaigns, social can actually help you improve clickthrough rate performance. 77% of US consumers trust recommendations from their social media connections, more than any other media source, meaning that +1s may have a positive effect on purchase decisions. On average, search ads with annotations have a 5-10% uplift in clickthrough rate. Some of our advertisers have seen even higher uplifts, H&M achieved 22% uplift and Cadbury achieved 17% uplift in clickthrough rates on their search ads.


Start measuring the value you’re creating through your social media campaigns!

Posted by Andy Lutz, Inside AdWords crew

Sources: Google Research 2012; Google internal data

Originally posted on the Google Commerce blog

In May, we announced Google Shopping, a new way for people to find and research products, and discover where to buy those products online or nearby. Google Shopping helps people turn their shopping intentions into actions quickly and easily, and then connect directly with merchants to make purchases.  

Progress, improvements and easier onboarding  
We've been pleased by the rapid adoption of Google Shopping in the retail community; tens of thousands of merchants, including many marketplaces, have come on board and are participating in Google Shopping via the new model, based on Product Listing Ads (PLAs). Overall, this represents inventory from over one hundred thousand sellers.  

As the transition to the new model continues, we’ve made changes that will make it easier for merchants to participate in and get more out of Google Shopping. We outlined several of these last month and are pleased to share several more: 
 

• Google Trusted Stores annotations are appearing on product pages within Google Shopping, providing participating merchants with greater ability to attract new customers and helping shoppers to make more informed shopping decisions.
• For merchants that are not familiar with Adwords, we have created a simplified sign-up flow in Merchant Center to make participation easier.
• AdWords Editor updates are reducing the amount of time it takes to optimize a PLA campaign -- from hours to minutes, in many cases.
• Campaign Tracking URL templates have decreased the number of steps required to set up tracking in AdWords and are making the process easier for merchants.
   

Google Trusted Stores annotations are now appearing on Google Shopping

Of course, it’s not too late for merchants to get on board and optimize their campaigns prior to the upcoming holiday shopping season. We’ve recorded a series of Hangouts on Air to help small and mid-sized businesses transition to Google Shopping, and have made some Google Shopping best practices available here.  

Some Google Shopping Superstars, and the Three C’s  
We’ve seen some early success stories from a variety of retailers, demonstrating how Google Shopping has helped them to connect with consumers, drive clicks to their websites and improve conversion rates. Highlights from some mid-sized merchants are listed below; you can find the full text of all these success stories following each description.
 

• Adorama, one of America’s largest photo retailers and mail-order suppliers, saw their click-through rate (CTR) jump by 176 percent and their conversion rate rise by 100 percent in June 2012, as compared to a year earlier; a similar year-over increase also occurred in July 2012. The full success story can be found here.
• Campmor, a recreational equipment retailer, saw sales increase 10x between January 1 and the present, using PLAs and Google Shopping. The full success story can be found here.
• Empire Covers, an online retailer offering protective covering for cars, trucks, boats, RVs, and motorcycles, along with accessories for pet travel and outdoor living, saw their cost-per-acquisition (CPA) decline by 36 percent between April and August 2012. Additionally, CPCs dropped by 11 percent from July to August 2012. The full success story text can be found here, and a video with more details here.
• Plow & Hearth, a leading retailer of products for the home, hearth, yard, and garden that includes all of its products for all of its brands in PLAs on Google Shopping, saw a number of dramatic results: unique site visits increased by 129 percent, pages per visit increased by 6.3 percent and average visit duration increased by 14.7 percent, while their bounce rate dropped by 9.8 percent. The full success story can be found here.
• ToolKing.com, an Internet Retailer 500 company offering tools, hardware, home-improvement items, outdoor goods, and more across multiple e-commerce channels, lists all its products in Google Shopping via PLAs. Since signing up for PLAs, ToolKing.com’s traffic and conversion rates have risen by more than 50 percent, average order value is up by nearly 15 percent and the sale of thousands of items it once considered “dead” have been reinvigorated. The full success story text can be found here and you can watch a video with more details here.
• TravelSmith Outfitters, an outfitting resource for savvy travelers, used the expertise of Mercent to implement PLAs. Since then, product sales originating from PLAs and Google Shopping have increased by 200 percent. They have also increased consumer traffic by approximately 10 percent and have seen orders go up by 35 percent, with more than a 26 percent increase in sales conversions. The full success story can be found here.

 
There’s more to come!  
We look forward to sharing more with you over the coming months -- from new merchant tools that provide more control and flexibility, to new features that will make holiday shopping easier and more fun for consumers. We’re also in the process of planning our 2013 roll-out of Google Shopping in Europe, Asia and Latin America. We’ll have more to share in the next few weeks, so stay tuned.

Posted by Sameer Samat, Vice President of Product Management, Google Shopping

In February, we announced enhanced sitelinks on desktop search ads. We display enhanced sitelinks by combining multiple sitelinks and closely related search ads into a larger nested format.


Early testing showed that enhanced sitelinks could make ads that appear above the organic search results even more useful. And they could lead to significantly higher clickthrough rates for an advertiser than regular 2-line and 3-line sitelinks.

Over the last several months, we’ve continued to improve the ad systems for creating enhanced sitelinks and determining when they’re most useful. Now, we’ve begun to roll them out in all countries where AdWords is available.

Preparing your campaigns
You can follow these tips to prepare your campaign to show enhanced sitelinks.

1. Enhanced sitelinks can only show when your ad is above the organic search results. If a "top vs. other" report shows that your ads have few impressions in a top ad position, you can try increasing your Quality Score, increasing your max CPC bid, or a combination of the two.
2. Add 6-10 sitelinks, each with a unique landing page.
3. Have multiple active ads in your account with the same landing page URLs as your sitelinks. One ad to match each unique sitelink is the bare minimum.

Like other forms of sitelinks, enhanced sitelinks are generated automatically so they might vary in appearance. And you might not see them show 100% of the time even when you’re eligible.

Reporting and optimizing
Click costs and reporting work the same with enhanced sitelinks as with other forms of sitelinks. If you decide to optimize your account around enhanced sitelinks, we suggest that you always evaluate your changes against multiple performance metrics (e.g., volume and cost effectiveness), not just whether CTR is increasing.

Learn more and share
For more details about sitelinks, please visit the AdWords Help Center. If you’re feeling social, you can ask questions and share tips at the AdWords Community.

Posted by Pramod Adiddam, Senior AdWords Engineer

We’ve recently been writing about our efforts to stop unwanted ads.  The overwhelming majority of our advertisers never serve an ad that violates our policies and terms.  But occasionally we see violations, and on very rare occasions, our systems wrongly detect an ad as being in violation of policy.  I wanted to explain why this happens and what you can do if it happens to you.

Fighting bad ads

Ads help fund businesses across the web, and enable people everywhere to enjoy their favorite services and content, often for free.  Yet, bad online advertising practices — like spammy emails, deceptive or misleading ads, and worse — quickly ruin users’ experiences online and discourage people from using the web.  As a result, we all have a vested interest in fighting these bad ads with serious firepower.  Last year, of the billions of ads submitted to Google we disabled more than 130 million, and reduced the percentage of bad ads by more than 50% compared with the year before.  These are big numbers, but we’re doing what’s necessary to deliver a safe, trustworthy experience that meets our highest standards.

Catching good actors

Occasionally, efforts to stomp out bad ads can result in our systems catching good ads and advertisers in our net.  This happens because our defense technologies often look for patterns in what the bad guys do.  Similar to the way your credit card company may disapprove a transaction that seems suspicious, if the actions of a good advertiser resemble one of these bad patterns, we’ll likely take action. So, our systems are inevitably over-protective. Last year, of the advertisers against whom we took action, 97% had violated our policies and terms and conditions, and 3% were identified incorrectly. We’re constantly working to improve the accuracy of this effort.

Notifying advertisers

While we believe that being overly cautious is the right approach to keep users and partners safe, we know this can be a pain for some good advertisers who inadvertently get caught in the net.  Here’s what happens when we believe we’ve identified you as a bad actor and how you can help us straighten things out if we’re wrong.

1. We notify you: If we believe we’ve detected a violation of our policies, we either disapprove your ad, disallow your site from advertising in AdWords, or suspend your AdWords accounts. When we take an action, we will send you an email and send a notification to your account that will provide you customized information about the particular violation(s) we’ve detected, and will include links to AdWords Help Center articles about disapproved ads, suspended sites, or suspended accounts respectively.
   
   
2. You can respond directly: If you think we’ve got it wrong, you can resubmit the ad for review. If you believe your site or account has been penalized inadvertently, or you disagree with our assessment, you can appeal via this form.  The best responses refer to the relevant part of the AdWords Policy Center and provide as much context in your appeal as you can. We respond as fast as we can - it typically takes us five business days to resolve appeals - each one is reviewed manually by a person in our support teams.

With our screening technology running 24/7, there are no days off in the fight against bad online advertising practices.  While we do mistakenly catch good advertisers from time to time, and we know this is inconvenient to good advertisers, please also know that we work to rectify mistakes quickly, and that our overall goal is to help businesses grow by creating a useful, trustworthy advertising system that keeps users safe and gives them confidence in the ads they see.

Posted by Rahul Pangam, Ads Quality Operations and David W. Baker, Ads Engineering

On Saturday, September 22, some AdWords systems will be unavailable from approximately 10:00 am to 8:00 pm Pacific Time (17:00 Saturday to 03:00 Sunday GMT) due to system maintenance.

During this time, your campaigns will continue to run as usual, but you won’t be able to sign into your account or make changes. Please also keep in mind that any automated rules scheduled during this time will not run. Daily rules (rules set up to run at a given time every day) will not run from 8:00 am Pacific Time on September 22nd to 8:00 am Pacific Time on September 23rd. If you’re an AdWords Editor user, you’ll be able to make edits offline but won’t be able to upload or download recent changes.

We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your patience as our engineers work to keep AdWords running smoothly.

Posted by Mark Martel, Google Ads Team

With more than one million apps currently in the Google Play and iTunes Stores, we know that those of you advertising apps are looking for ways to drive valuable installs at scale while helping your apps stand out from the crowd. We recently launched several app promotion features designed to help those of you who have created an app promotion campaign in AdWords, or are considering creating an app promotion campaign, maximize your return on investment.

CPA Bidding with Conversion Optimizer
You are constantly looking for ways to easily optimize your campaigns and attract the right customers at the right cost. Google’s Conversion Optimizer helps increase conversions across our search and display networks while decreasing cost per acquisition. Conversion Optimizer analyzes historical conversion data and adjusts bids on an ongoing basis to help you maximize your ROI. We're now extending the power of this automated bidding feature to app advertisers to help you drive efficient app installs at scale.


Ad Formats
For advertisers looking to promote your apps to app users, capturing the attention of potential users and driving them to download your app is key. Many advertisers use our text ads to drive people to an Android or iOS app, and we've now optimized text ads for Android or iOS apps to include more information about what users are getting, what they have to pay for it, and how others feel about the app.


With AdWords, app advertisements are automatically updated with the latest information like reviews and ratings. You simply create a text ad that points to your app download page, and AdWords supplies the graphics and formatting. We’ve found that when app advertisers provide users with this kind of important information about their apps, many have seen their cost per conversion decrease by about 25%.

If you’d like to learn more about Google’s app promotion features and see a live demonstration of how to implement and optimize these tools in your AdWords account, tune into our webinar on September 12th at 10am PST. Register today by visiting this link: http://goo.gl/B49ma.

Posted by Chrix Finne, Product Manager, Mobile Ads

Last week we hosted an SMB Hangout on Air with Google ads executives and advertisers. For those of you who missed it, or would like to take advantage of the tips and ideas shared, here's a recap of what we covered:

• Three tips for success: Francoise Brougher, VP of Global SMB Sales & Operations, shared that success with AdWords comes from having properly established goals, a well defined audience and highly relevant ads. 
• Recent improvements to AdWords product: Paul Feng, Director of Google AdWords Product Management, talked about the new campaign creation flow, the Display Network tab and the ease of creating mobile-specific campaigns. 
• Setting up strategy and saving time managing AdWords: Kim Clinkunbroomer, AdWords Certified Partner, got some tips from Paul on ways to save time in managing account with the use of AdWords Express and automated rules in AdWords. 
• Video ads and Remarketing: Tom Sands, AdWords Certified Partner, received advice from Francoise on getting the most out of video ads, and learned from Paul how with the new Remarketing Tag, clients can deploy a single tag once across their whole site and build remarketing lists based on visitors segments. 

 If you missed this Hangout on Air - don’t worry - you can watch the recording now on the Google Business YouTube channel!

Posted by Agata Krzysztofik, Google Ads Team

Marketers have long looked to get a better understanding of the audience make-up of different print and broadcast media to help them better tailor their message and deliver more relevant ads to consumers. This audience insight is equally important in digital advertising, which is why, more than a year ago, we introduced a beta enabling you to show ads based on certain demographic categories, like age and gender.

Since 2011, we’ve been hard at work making this available to more advertisers.  Marketers have been getting great results. For example, Blue Nile used demographics in a campaign to reach potential engagement ring buyers and saw a click through rate of 10x higher than the U.S. national average for online display campaigns.

Today, we’re happy to share that this feature is now widely available within AdWords for campaigns targeting 39 countries; if available in your region, it will start to appear in the Display Network Tab as Age and Gender targeting.

Demographic categories complement other AdWords targeting features, such as interest categories, remarketing and keyword contextual targeting. The ultimate goal is to help you better refine your marketing message and reach the right audience with the right ad. For example, if you sell yoga gear and know that your core audience tends to be women between the ages of 25 and 34, you can set your campaign to show mostly to that audience, rather than showing your ads to people less likely to be interested in the product.

Our goal is to help you better connect with your audience, meaning more effective marketing campaigns for you. This is an important part of our efforts to make our ads better for users, which helps to fund content across the web. To get started using demographics in your campaigns, visit our help center.

Posted by Jon Krafcik, Product Manager

In June we announced the limited release of AdWords scripts, a new AdWords tool that enables you to make changes to an AdWords account, such as updating keywords and ad copy or outputting account statistics, by writing simple JavaScript programs. Today we’re pleased to announce that AdWords scripts is available to all advertisers globally. In addition, we’re launching several frequently requested features that enable advertisers to:

• Run more complex scripts - We extended the length of script executions from 5 minutes to 30 minutes, allowing you to make more complex changes. In addition, we’ve expanded the entity limit to 100K. 
• Use real-time data to manage campaigns - We’re adding support for Ad Parameters, which allow you to update numeric values in ads without having to delete and re-enter ad copy or wait for policy checks. Here’s a tutorial showing the use of US Geological Survey data to insert dynamic ad text. 
• Automate scripts with scheduling - You can now schedule scripts to run a single time, daily, weekly, or monthly.

To help you get started with AdWords scripts, we’re hosting two training events next week.

• On Tuesday, September 11th at 11:30am PST / 2:30am EST, we’ll be hosting a Hangout on Air through Google Developers Live, targeted to advertisers with more advanced coding skills. Questions asked via Moderator will be answered at the end of the presentation. 

• On Thursday, September 13th at 10amPST / 1pmEST, we’ll be hosting a Learn with Google webinar targeted to advertisers with basic JavaScript experience. During this webinar, we will provide an overview of what can be accomplished with Scripts, walk through ways to customize pre-set Scripts, and show you how to write Scripts from scratch. Click here to register.

Additional resources, including a getting started guide and tutorials, are available at https://developers.google.com/adwords/scripts/. You can also join the AdWords Scripts Forum to get help or share advice on AdWords scripts.  

Posted by Katie Miller, Google Ads Team

Over the last few months, we’ve hosted a number of Learn with Google webinars that help you go bigger, faster with AdWords technology that does the heavy lifting so that you can increase efficiency and reach new customers. In March we walked through best practices for efficiently building, optimizing and managing large campaigns using AdWords Editor and Automated Rules. Then in July we shared an overview of four account management tools -- AdWords Editor, automated rules, AdWords scripts and DoubleClick Search -- to help you navigate your choices and make the best decision for your business.

After each of these webinars, you shared that you’d like a deeper dive on how to make the most of these tools, including a walkthrough of new and little known features, as well as advanced applications. We heard you loud and clear, and are pleased to bring you two webinars focused on in-depth best practices for using AdWords Editor and AdWords scripts to manage your accounts automatically and at scale.

Managing AdWords Accounts at Scale - Go Bigger, Faster with AdWords Editor
Wed, Sept 5, 10am PDT / 1pm EDT (TODAY!)
This webinar is intended for current AdWords Editor users who are looking for a product refresher, as well as tips for making the most of new features released in version 9.8.1.

Managing AdWords Accounts at Scale - Go Bigger, Faster with AdWords Scripts
Thurs, Sept 13, 10am PDT / 1pm EDT
This webinar will be on AdWords scripts, a new tool which allows you to make changes to an AdWords account by writing simple JavaScript programs. We'll provide an overview of what can be accomplished with scripts, walk through ways to customize pre-set scripts, and show you how to write scripts from scratch. It is intended for AdWords users who have some basic programming experience and are excited to take advantage of this new tool.

Register for these, and other Learn with Google webinars, here.

Posted by Katie Miller, Google Ads Team

Nearly two years ago we introduced seller rating extensions. In addition to helping users identify highly recommended advertisers, seller rating extensions often provide a CTR lift to sellers who consistently deliver a positive online experience.

Today, we’re announcing a change to help keep ratings fresh and relevant. Previously, we would show seller rating extensions only for advertisers that have at least 30 lifetime reviews and a 4-star average. Moving forward, we will only show seller rating extensions for advertisers that have at least 30 reviews over the last 12 months and a 4-star average.

Since customer opinions about a business can evolve over time, this change will help make seller rating extensions more useful and relevant for searchers. It should also benefit businesses that satisfy customers and garner positive reviews on an ongoing basis.

For more information about seller rating extensions, please visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Liza Ma, AdWords Product Manager