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

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

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

Key benefits

1. Retail-centric way to manage your products

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

2. Advanced reporting to measure product performance

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

3. Competitive data to size your opportunity

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

How to get started

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

You can learn more about Shopping campaigns at some upcoming events. Join us at our Learn With Google webinar for Shopping campaigns on November 20, 2013, and find us at Search Engine Strategies in Chicago on November 6, 2013.

We've built Shopping campaigns with retailers in mind, and if you'd like to be an early adopter to share your feedback, you can express your interest here. We'd love to hear from you!

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

Customize your AdWords conversion window to more accurately measure your performance

A consumer’s journey to purchase isn’t always immediate. People may search on a number of keywords, over several days and across different channels before making a purchase. Sometimes decisions span a few days, but more significant decisions, like buying a car or booking vacation travel, can take longer.

To help you have a more complete and accurate view of your customers' path to purchase as you optimize and evaluate your ROI, we recently launched cross-account conversion tracking and the ability to import conversions in AdWords.

Today, we're also adding the capability to customize your conversion counting window from 7 to 90 days after a click. Previously, AdWords only counted conversions occurring within 30 days after a click.

Benefits of customizing your conversion window:

• Capture more high-consideration conversions. Many advertisers sell products that customers want to research thoroughly before making a purchase -- for example, a new insurance policy or an expensive laptop. Sometimes, conversions for these products may take longer than 30 days to occur. You can now ensure you measure more of these conversions and get a more complete picture of the value of your advertising.

• Measure longer term value of your customers. Some businesses have a goal to drive repeat purchases from recent customers. For these businesses, extending the conversion window means you can now measure more of these repeat purchases and gain insight into the longer term value your advertising drives.

• Discover more upper funnel keywords. By increasing the length of the conversion window, you can discover keywords that play a role much earlier in the conversion funnel, especially if the shopping cycle is long for your customers.

Customizing your conversion window

You can edit your conversion window in the ‘Conversions’ tab under Tools and Analysis (see image below):

Click image to enlarge

When you click to edit your conversion window, you'll see a link to the Search Funnels time lag report. When you view this report, you’ll see the average and a distribution of the length of time it takes your customers to complete a conversion after clicking on keywords in your account. You can use this to help you decide how long of a window to set.

For more information on how to customize your conversion window, check out this help center article.

Posted by Vishal Goenka, Product Manager, Conversions in AdWords

Dashboards, Advanced Segments, And Custom Reports For Your Business Needs

A version of this post originally appeared on the Google Analytics Blog.

We’ve heard you loud and clear that getting started on Google Analytics can be challenging. It’s such a robust tool with a variety of reports, filters, and customizations that for a new user it can be overwhelming to figure out where to look first for the data and insights that will enable you to make better decisions. For more advanced users it can be time consuming to build out different variations of reports and dashboards to get the clearest snapshot of your performance. That is why we’ve created the Google Analytics Solution Gallery.

The Google Analytics Solution Gallery hosts the top Dashboards, Advanced Segments and Custom Reports which you can quickly and easily import into your own account to see how your website is performing on key metrics. It helps you to filter through the noise to see the metrics that matter for your type of business: Ecommerce, Brand, Content Publishers. If you're not familiar with Dashboards, Advanced Segments and Custom Reports, check out these links to our help center for detailed descriptions on how they work and the insights they can help provide.

Examples

Here are a few examples of the solutions that can be downloaded into your Google Analytics account to see how the analysis works with your data.

Note: You should already have an Analytics account with data to have these solutions be effective for you.

• AdWords (Google CPC) Performance - Use this segment to analyze the performance of AdWords traffic. You can also create segments to compare your CPC traffic from other sources and compare performance between them.
• 6+ Keywords - Learn which long-tail keywords with more than six words your visitors are using to find your site. Then refine your pay-per-click ads and SEO to drive more qualified visitors to your site.
• Paid vs. Organic Search Performance - Do you know the behavioral differences between users who click on your paid ads and those who click on your organic search results? Use this report to understand the different ways they interact with your site and how to improve performance based on these findings.

How do I add these to my account?

We’ve designed it so it’s easy to get started. Simply go to the Google Analytics Solution Gallery, pick from the drop drown menu the solutions that will be most helpful for your business. Select from Publisher, Ecommerce, Social, Mobile, Brand, etc.. . Hit “Download” for the solution you want to see in your account. If you are not already logged into Google Analytics we’ll ask you to sign in. Then you’ll be asked if you want to accept this solution into your account and what Web Profile do you want to apply it to. After you select that it will be in your account and your own data will populate the report.

We’re planning on expanding on this list of top solutions throughout the year so be sure to check back and see what we’ve added. A big thank you to Justin Cutroni & Avinash Kaushik for supplying many of the solutions currently available.

Ian Myszenski, Product Marketing Manager, Google Analytics Team 

Google Tag Manager: Video and Q&A

Have you ever struggled with implementing new marketing and measurement tools on your website? For many people, deploying data collection “tags” (like conversion tracking, remarketing, audience reporting and analytics) can take weeks or months. Worse, the tag implementation is often incorrect, meaning you’re missing out on valuable information about your site and its users.

It doesn’t need to be difficult. We recently held a webinar to introduce users to Google Tag Manager, a free tool that helps marketers and IT departments manage their marketing and measurement tags quickly and easily. Watch the video here to learn more about:

• Overall benefits and features of using Google Tag Manager
• A quick demonstration of how to deploy a new tracking tag
• Tips for getting your company started with Google Tag Manager

In addition to this webinar, we’ll be hosting a technical webinar in January to help new users through the nuts and bolts of installing Google Tag Manager (with lots of concrete examples). Stay tuned -- we’ll share registration information in a future blog post, or you can check back on the Learn with Google webinar site.

Read on for responses to some of the top questions we received during the webinar.

Questions and Answers

Where can I find out more about the core concepts described in the webinar?
To learn more about the Google Tag Manager management interface, please visit our Help Center -- you may want to start with our Before you Begin article. There you can find more information about key concepts like Tags, Rules, and Macros. For developers interested in how to implement Google Tag Manager, please visit our developer documentation. Or if you’d like help with implementation, you can contact one of our Partners. You can also ask questions (and find responses to questions from others) on the Google Tag Manager product forum.

What happens to historical data if we move to Google Tag Manager?
All of your historical data should be preserved when you move to Google Tag Manager. Google Tag Manager only changes the way that tags are deployed and managed on your site, it does not change the way data is collected.

How would you migrate a tag?
Follow these steps to migrate tags -- whether it’s a single tag or all the tags on your site. If you’re just getting started, take a look at our Before you Begin article.

• Create a Google Tag Manager Account and a Container associated with that account.
• Install that Container code snippet on every page of your website (so that it appears immediately after the opening <body> tag). The container should be empty.
• Map your site - thinking about what data you want to collect, what events you want to track, and which tags you want to use to track that data. You should think about where your current tags are implemented, but now is a great time to rethink your overall data collection goals and start fresh.
• (Optional) If you would like to make use of the Data Layer functionality, create a data layer on the pages where you wish to pass information or fire tags
• Create Tags, Rules and Macros within the Google Tag Manager interface according to the map you just created. Make sure to apply the correct Rules to your Tags to make sure they fire in the right place.
• Test the changes you’ve made in Google Tag Manager using debug and preview mode.
• Then push a version of your site live that has removed the hard-coded tags from within the page. At this time, also Publish your changes using the Publishing feature of Google Tag Manager, which pushes the changes live to the site.

For more precise details on these steps, read our developer documents about migration.

Can you add tags to events or buttons?
Definitely! In order to use Google Tag Manager to fire tags on events and buttons, follow these steps (for more detail, read our developer document on event handlers):

• On your page, proactively add the dataLayer.push({ ‘event’: ‘myEventName’}) to the event handlers for all events and buttons you might want to track.
• Create a new rule where “event equals myEventName”.
• Associate this rule with any tag you’d like to fire when the specified event happens.

Can hard-coded tags and tag manager co-exist? Do I have to remove my other tracking tags?
We strongly recommend that you completely migrate all your tags, so you can take advantage of the benefits of managing and updating those tags within Google Tag Manager. However, if a full migration seems too hard, you can use Google Tag Manager in parallel with hard-coded tags. Some of our users use Google Tag Manager to only manage adding new tags.

If you choose to do a partial migration to Google Tag Manager, you need to be very careful to make sure you don’t accidentally start double-counting your tags. If you decided to deploy a tag via Google Tag Manager, make sure that you don’t have a version of the same tag firing on the same page.

Can you build your own custom tag templates? And how do I become a recognized Tag Vendor within Google Tag Manager?
Custom Tag templates within Google Tag Manager allow you to copy/paste any HTML or Image tags directly into Google Tag Manager and fire it based on your predefined rules and macros. To turn it into a template, use the {{macro_name}} syntax to populate the tag code with dynamic values. We will also do a syntax check to ensure that when you copy your 3rd party tag, it will fire as intended.

If you’re interested in having your tag added to the list of predefined templates, apply to become a Tag Vendor within Google Tag Manager by completing this interest form.

How does this work with Google Analytics? How do you do things like track pageview and track event within Google Analytics?
Google Tag Manager is a convenient way to correctly deploy Google Analytics across your site. To use Google Analytics within Google Tag Manager, simply create a Tag with the Google Analytics tag template. You can select the “Track Type” as either a pageview, an event, or a transaction.

Make sure you have some version of the Google Analytics tag firing across all pages on your site. A good way to do this would be to have a basic tag firing on all pages, but blocking on pages where your more customized tags are firing (like the thank you page where you’d be firing a specialized transaction tag type).

Can the Google Tag Manager snippet be placed in <head>? How about in my footer?
The recommended best practice is to have the Google Tag Manager snippet at the top of the <body> to maximize data collection, but some clients may find it easier to implement the Container snippet elsewhere in the in the page, like the footer.

Do not place the Google Tag Manager snippet in <head> (for the IT folks: this is because there is an iframe in the <noscript> case, which can have unpredictable results in some browsers).

No matter where you install the container snippet, you will need to make sure that this snippet of code is on every page of their site. Google Tag Manager will still work if you only deploy it on part of your site, but Google Tag Manager’s rule based system will only work on pages where the snippet is deployed. For more details, read our developer documents.

Does Google Tag Manager replace Doubleclick Floodlight?
No, Google Tag Manager does not replace Floodlight -- they are complementary. Floodlight is a conversion pixel for DoubleClick products (Floodlight tags can now be deployed within Google Tag Manager), and Google Tag Manager is a tag management system or “container tag” for multiple tagging technologies. Floodlight has previously been used by some users as a container tag as well, but moving forward, Google Tag Manager is a way to deploy all tracking technology.

You also have the ability to pass custom floodlight variables through Google Tag Manager into Floodlight, through the Data Layer. For more information, please review the material in the Developers Guide.

We hope this webinar and this blog post will help you as you get started with Google Tag Manager, and we look forward to seeing you at our technical webinar in January. (Registration details coming soon).

Cross posted from the Google Analytics blog, originally posted by Laura Holmes, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager: Webinar, GoPro case study, and product updates

Just over a month ago, we launched Google Tag Manager, a free tool that makes it easy for marketers to add and update website tags—including conversion tracking, site analytics, remarketing and more—with just a few clicks. Since then, we’ve released the product in 35 languages, we’ve added new tagging capabilities for Google Analytics, and we’ve been hard at work building more enhancements.

To help you get the most out of Google Tag Manager, we’ve scheduled a webinar next week with Product Manager Laura Holmes to walk through the tool and go over implementation basics:

Webinar: Getting Started with Google Tag Manager
Date: Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Time: 10am PST / 1pm EST / 6pm GMT
Register: goo.gl/YTulu

We’ve also been hearing great feedback from our users, including GoPro, the world’s leader in wearable and gear-mountable cameras and digital devices. With the growing popularity of GoPro products and accompanying complexity of their digital marketing activities, GoPro found itself with dozens of tags measuring countless engagement activities across its web properties. It was critical to find a way to implement and maintain marketing tags that would scale with the marketing organization. Analytics Pros, a Google Analytics Certified Partner and Google Tag Manager specialist, led a comprehensive migration to Google Tag Manager -- and GoPro stakeholders were delighted with the results:

“Google Tag Manager centralizes our tags into a single location that gives our marketing and analytics teams the flexibility to make tagging updates within minutes without burdening IT.”
- Lee Topar, Director of Online Marketing, GoPro

Download the full case study.

We hope you’ll join us at the webinar next Tuesday the 13th. If you’re not able to attend, we’ll be posting a recording of the webinar about a week afterwards here on the blog and on YouTube, and you can also read more about Google Tag Manager on the website or the help center.

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager

Make better decisions in AdWords with your Google Analytics data

If you’re already using Google Analytics, you know how useful it can be to help you make better decisions and improve your online marketing. Now, we’re making it possible to use your Google Analytics data right in AdWords. After setting up AdWords to import your Google Analytics data, you’ll have access to Bounce Rate, Pages Per Visit, and Average Visit Duration columns directly in the AdWords interface. With more performance data available right where you’re managing your campaigns, you can make better informed decisions and improve your AdWords ROI.

Using your Google Analytics data
With Google Analytics you can find insights that matter, including how visitors arrive at your website, how they use it, and how you can keep them coming back. Here are some ways you can take advantage of the new Google Analytics data available in AdWords to improve your results.

• Attract more engaged users. If highly engaged users are an important goal, sort your ad groups to find the ones that deliver visitors who stay on your site the longest (“Average Visit Duration” or “Pages Per Visit”), and bid more for these.
• Discover opportunities to convert more engaged visitors. You might find certain keywords or ads that have relatively low conversion rates, but great engagement metrics. You could lower your bids by a little and move on. Or you could see this as a great opportunity to convert clearly engaged visitors into buyers. By adjusting your offer, adding an incentive (like a coupon or discount code), or making your call to action more obvious and accessible, you might be able to improve your ROI and your conversion volume. To look for these types of opportunities, create a filter based on conversion rate and sort by Average Visit Duration, Pages per visit, or Bounce Rate.
• Identify ads with badly matched landing pages or inaccurate targeting. Pages with both low conversion rates and low engagement metrics (low Average Visit Duration or High Bounce Rate) could indicate a poor landing page for a particular ad or keyword. It might also suggest inaccurate targeting. To identify and troubleshoot these problems, set up a filter for low conversion rate and low engagement rate and regularly monitor it. Since you’re using Google Analytics, you can easily set up A/B testing on the landing page using a Content Experiment.
  

Success in action
Casamundo, the biggest vacation rental listing service in Europe, has been an early tester of this new feature. They've used Google Analytics since 2008 and over the past 5 years they've grown and refined their AdWords campaigns to over 50 million active keywords across 10 languages. Their analysis shows that converting visitors research vacation rentals over an average of 7.4 visits, so understanding whether their ads and keywords can create strong engagement is vital to their business and how they optimize their AdWords campaigns. Seeing high bounce rates and low average time on site for a keyword means that the offer or destination page might not be a good match for that keyword.

Having easier access to Google Analytics data right in AdWords has helped Torge Kahl, Online Marketing Manager, at Casamundo make better decisions and make optimizations more quickly. According to Torge:

“The combination of using both Google AdWords and Google Analytics has proved to be the perfect set of tools for us to achieve our goals, and we're very happy to see this combination get more integrated and powerful. Using Analytics data right within AdWords has let me better optimize our account and significantly improve the return on our AdWords investment."

More details
Please visit the AdWords Help Center for step-by-step directions on how to connect your Google Analytics profile data to your AdWords account and for more details.

To exchange tips and ask questions of others, please visit the AdWords community. You can always contact AdWords support for help if you need it.

Posted by Dan Friedman, AdWords Product Manager

Slice and dice your data using AdWords labels

We are excited to announce the launch of account labels. Starting this week, you can organize your account’s keywords, ads, ad groups and campaigns into custom groupings so you can quickly and easily filter and report on the data that is of most interest to you. To see the opportunities that labels enable, let’s meet Bob.

Bob is an online retailer who sells apparel and accessories for men and women. He has campaigns for shoes, clothes and bags for each of his three major markets (New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania) and within the campaigns has separate ad groups for generic and brand keywords. This structure (ex: New York - Shoes - Generic and Massachusetts - Shoes - Generic) means that he has the same ads and keywords spread across different parts of his account. Before today, Bob could not easily sort his account or run a report to see how well sneakers are selling across geographies.

Enter labels.

Now Bob can create the label “sneakers” and apply it to all sneaker-related keywords across his account. He can then filter by this label on the Keywords tab to only see sneaker keywords, or he can run a keyword labels report to aggregate performance by label. These reports allow him to then compare --for example-- how sneakers perform against all other shoes, or other labeled groups.

Labels can be used to organize your campaign elements in any way you choose. Report on brand keyword performance versus all other non-branded keyword performance. Measure how ads that mention “free trial” perform versus ads that mention “free demo”. Or simply label your favorite keywords so you can quickly review them every morning.

Labels will begin rolling out this week to all AdWords accounts. For more information, please visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Jon Diorio, Senior Product Manager, AdWords

Measure how customers interact with your ads

New AdWords features such as Product ads, Sitelinks and Click-to-call allow you to create more interactive ads. Product ads and Sitelinks help customers find the most relevant pages on your website and Click-to-call allows customers to call your business directly from the search results.

As ads become more interactive, you might want to know how they'll impact your business's key metrics like clicks, click-through-rates and, most importantly, conversions.

To help answer this question, we’ve added a new report to your AdWords account that allows you to measure the performance of each click type you’re using. You can think of a click type as how your customers interact with your ads. Did they click on the headline, a sitelink, or some other aspect of your ad?

You can access the new click type report in the Campaign, Ad groups or Keywords tabs. Select “Segment” then “Click type.”

click for full size image

With this added data, you’ll now have the ability to compare performance of each click type side by side. If certain click types perform well for your business, you may want to consider expanding them to other campaigns. Comparing click types by campaign, ad group or keyword will also highlight areas that need work.

Given the success we’ve seen searchers and businesses have with more interactive features in ads, you can expect to see more of these types of features in the future. With the new click type report in AdWords you can measure the impact of these new features and continue to get the most out of your ads.

Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

Introducing the Japan and Asia-Pacific Conversion Room

Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer, Search Funnels, and AdWords Conversion Tracking - these are some of our favorite tools for measuring and optimizing conversions on websites. These tools help you maximize your return on investment whether your site exists to share information, generate leads, or make sales.

We recently started the Japan and Asia-Pacific (JAPAC) Conversion Room and Blog. Over the last two years we've seen a tremendous uptake of Google’s conversion products in this region, celebrated many success stories with users, and witnessed the development of local expertise. The JAPAC Conversion Room aims to inspire JAPAC (and global) online marketers to maximize conversions through sharing success stories and expert tips from this region.

If you're drawn to digital marketing, optimizing for conversions, and have an interest in the Japan and Asia-Pacific region, then head on over to the site and subscribe to get all of the latest articles.


Post Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

The Report Center is retiring soon

Back in June we began moving AdWords reports into the Campaigns tab. Since then, we’ve copied over every key AdWords report, letting you quickly download your data from the same pages where you manage your campaigns.

In the next few weeks we’ll finish the transition and retire the Report Center entirely. From then on you’ll schedule and download all of your reports from within AdWords campaign management.

We’ve made the transition to this new style of reporting gradually, collecting feedback from advertisers and making adjustments accordingly.

For example, we heard that you had a hard time finding specific reporting options in your account. To help, we’ve added relevant FAQs to the download menus in the Campaigns tab, enabling you to find the views and metrics you’re interested in more easily.

If you’re currently downloading reports from the Campaigns tab, you’ve already adjusted to the bulk of the changes, and you’ll find that each of your scheduled reports have been copied to the Control Panel & Library. We’ll delete any old versions of scheduled reports from the Reports tab, and stop sending the emails associated with them, by early November. Shortly thereafter, we’ll remove the Report Center entirely.

To prepare for the retirement, you can compare the scheduled reports in the Reports section of your Control Panel & Library to the old versions of your scheduled reports in the Report Center, then make any necessary adjustments to make sure you’re getting the data you want, in the format you want.

If you’re looking for additional resources to guide you through the changes, you can visit the AdWords Help Center for articles on each report. We’ve also published a before and after guide to keyword reporting to give you a step-by-step tutorial to running one of the most popular AdWords reports.

Thanks again for your patience during the transition. If you have any additional feedback on AdWords reporting, please continue to send it our way.

Posted by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew