Impression share reporting changes coming soon

In early November, AdWords impression share (IS) reporting will get some improvements to give you better insights, including new columns and hour of day segmentation. Along with these improvements, we’re also announcing some changes in the availability of certain historical IS data.

What’s new
Here’s a list of the improvements.

1. Distinct search and display columns. We’re adding new columns to cleanly separate search and display impression share.
2. “Hour of day” segmentation. Based on your feedback, we’re enabling “Hour of day” segmentation so you can evaluate how your ad coverage varies by the hour.
3. Filters, charts and rules. You’ll be able to apply filters, see charts, and create automated rules using IS metrics.
4. Accuracy. We’re improving the accuracy of how we calculate impression share data.

Changes to existing columns and historical IS data
As we launch these improvements, there will also be some changes to the availability of historical IS reporting data. We’ll also be phasing out the existing columns. Below are the key milestones.

Milestone	Existing IS Columns	New IS Columns
Early November 2012	Historical IS data in existing columns will only be available going back to October 1, 2012	New IS columns appear for the first time with historical IS data available going back to October 1, 2012
February 2013	Existing IS columns and data permanently retired	Historical IS data available in new IS columns back to October 1, 2012

Up until February 2013, data will continue updating in the existing IS columns. Once the existing IS columns and data are retired, you’ll only have access to the new IS columns.

Preserving pre-October 2012 historical IS data
If you rely on historical IS data for reporting or decision making, please plan ahead and take action before November.

To preserve an offline copy of your pre-October historical IS data with the existing columns, you must download all desired reports before the start of November 2012. After early November you’ll only have historical IS data for the existing columns going back to October 1, 2012.

We’ll post again around the time of the November milestone. In the meantime, please contact AdWords support if you have questions.

Posted Dan Friedman, AdWords Product Manager

Digital marketing made (much) easier: Introducing Google Tag Manager

(Cross posted from the Analytics Blog)

Over the past few years, we’ve seen massive improvements in digital marketing sophistication and capabilities. Today there’s a rich suite of tools allowing marketers to gain better insights, reach audiences in new ways, and develop improved marketing campaigns so users have better web experiences. Yet many modern marketing tools—like web analytics, conversion tracking, remarketing, and more—depend on adding "tags" to your website.

Website tags help enable today’s sophisticated digital marketing technologies

Tags are tiny bits of website code can help provide useful insights, but they can also cause challenges. Too many tags can make sites slow and clunky; incorrectly applied tags can distort your measurement; and it can be time-consuming for the IT department or webmaster team to add new tags—leading to lost time, lost data, and lost conversions.

We’ve been hard at work to help take the pain out of tagging for everyone. That’s why today, we’re announcing our first release of Google Tag Manager. We’re launching globally in English, and the product will soon be available in many other languages.

Google Tag Manager is a free tool that consolidates your website tags with a single snippet of code and lets you manage everything from a web interface. You can add and update your own tags, with just a few clicks, whenever you want, without bugging the IT folks or rewriting site code. It gives marketers greater flexibility, and lets webmasters focus on other important tasks. Take a quick look at how easy it is to set up an account and manage your tags:

Google Tag Manager is built to handle your tagging needs, and it works with Google and non-Google website tags. We’ve packed in lots of great features, including:

• Asynchronous tag loading—so your tags can fire faster without getting in each other's way, and without slowing down the user-visible part of the page
• Easy-to-use tag templates, so marketers can quickly add tags with our web interface, as well as support for custom tags
• Error-prevention tools like Preview mode (so you can see proposed changes before implementing them), the Debug Console, and Version History to ensure that new tags won’t break your site
• User permissions and multi-account functionality to make it easy for large teams and agencies and clients to work together with appropriate levels of access
• Plus we have exciting plans to add great new features over the next several months

We’re also happy to announce our tag vendor program: If your company provides tag technology and you’d like Google Tag Manager to include a template for your tag, please contact us here to become a tag vendor.

Dozens of companies have already begun using Google Tag Manager and have seen great results. Ameet Arurkar, Director of Search Engine Marketing at QuinStreet, reports:

“Google Tag Manager took one big chunk of time out of the tagging process. What took 2 weeks now takes less than a day—sometimes just hours. We, the campaign managers, now make the call on which tags to use, and we can implement the tags ourselves.”

“Google Tag Manager just makes business sense. Why would we want to manually add hundreds of tags for our pages?”

Setting up Google Tag Manager is quick and easy—you create an account, add one snippet of code to your site, then start managing tags. If you want more help, contact a Google Certified Partner—they’ve been carefully vetted and meet rigorous qualification standards.

Get started today at www.google.com/tagmanager.

Posted by Laura Holmes, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

An easier way to view advertising policies

Understanding AdWords advertising policies is an important part of successfully managing your account and delivering ads that are safe and useful to users. To help you understand how policies affect the delivery of your ads, we recently introduced a status insights icon on the Ads tab. We’re now following up with another feature to help you identify policy issues more quickly: a new Policy Details column.

The Policy Details column allows you to scan and sort policy issues across all of your ads (without hovering individually over each status one by one). You’ll find information like:

• Approval status for each ad
• Disapproval reasons, if applicable
• Specific policies that can limit where your ads show

This information is available for paused ads as well, which can be particularly helpful if you want to know the status of your paused ads or if you need to temporarily pause a campaign while you work out some policy problems.

Here’s what the Policy Details column will look like, alongside some fictional example ads:

To find this new column, navigate to your Ads tab and click the “Columns” button to start customizing your columns. Under the “Attributes” section, click to add “Policy details” and save. You’ll then see the new Policy Details column in your Ads tab. (One note: this new policy column isn’t yet downloadable in your reports, but we’re working on it!)

Posted by Katie Miller, Google Ads Team

Make smarter decisions with the new Auction insights report

A key component of developing a search ads strategy is understanding what other advertisers are doing, and using this intelligence to optimize campaigns for top performance. To empower advertisers to make better informed optimization decisions, we’re launching the Auction insights report.

We currently provide Impression share columns within campaign and ad group reports that show the percentage of impressions received, compared to the estimated number of impressions for which they were eligible. While this report gives valuable insight into missed opportunities in aggregate, it also raises additional questions -- who competes in the same auctions, and can performance data be made available at a more detailed level?

With the Auction insights report, you can compare your performance with other advertisers who compete in the same set of auctions as you do. You can see how often your ads rank higher than other advertisers’ ads on the search results page, and how often your ads appear compared to theirs based on your estimated possible impressions. This information can help you make strategic decisions about bids, budgets, and keyword choices by showing you where you are succeeding and where you may be missing opportunities for improved performance.

The Auction insights report provides data at the keyword-level, and provides five different statistics: impression share, average position, overlap rate, position above rate, and top of page percent:

Note: Mock data only.

Reports can be generated for one keyword at a time, and data is only available for keywords that meet a minimum threshold of activity for the time period specified. If you see this icon () to the left of a keyword in your statistics table on the Keyword tab, you’ll know that the Auction insights report is available for that keyword.



Note: This report provides information on other advertisers that participated in the same auctions as you. This does not indicate that the other advertisers have the same keywords, match types, or other targeting settings as you. The other advertisers’ metrics shown are based only on instances when your ads were also estimated to be eligible to appear. These reports will not reveal the actual keywords, quality, or settings from your campaign, and it will not give you insight into the same information for others.

While this information is already available by performing queries on Google search -- and many already attempt to estimate this data by scanning the ads that appear -- this report will make it easier to access and understand this information. It is available at no additional cost to advertisers whose keywords have a minimum threshold of activity.

This report will be rolling out over the next few days. For more information on the Auction insights report, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Update - Auction insights report icon unavailable

We are removing the Auction insights report icon () from the statistics table on the Keywords tab. The report is still available for keywords which meet the minimum threshold of traffic.

To determine the keywords for which to run the report, we recommend sorting keywords by impressions. If the report is not available for the selected keyword and time frame, no data will be shown on the report page.

We’ll update this blog post as soon as the icon, or an alternative solution, is once again available.

Posted by Bhanu Narasimhan, Group Product Manager, AdWords