Social features for your website

When you pay for people to click on your ad, you probably want them to spend time on your site and hopefully return to your site. One way to make your advertising dollar go further by keeping visitors on your site is to add social features with Google Friend Connect. Friend Connect is a service that lets you add features such as comments, ratings, and friend invitations from gadgets created by Google and the OpenSocial developer community. Friend Connect also helps you convert visitors into members by letting visitors use their existing Google, Yahoo, AIM or OpenID accounts.

To learn more about how Friend Connect helps you build user communities, watch this video below.

You can implement Friend Connect by simply pasting in a few snippets of code in your site with no programming necessary - a process familiar to those of you acquainted with Google Analytics or AdWords Converison Tracking. We're also constantly making improvements to Friend Connect, such as the social bar feature and the integration with Blogger released last month. You can stay updated on what's going on with Friend Connect and other Google products helping to make the web more social by visiting our Social Web Blog.

Posted by Christian Yee, Inside AdWords crew

A new year, a new traffic model for Ad Planner

If you are looking for more site information to help plan your display advertising campaigns and understand audiences on the web, Google Ad Planner can help. Our goal is to provide you with the most accurate site information for better planning and decision-making, and we're excited to kick off the new year with an improved traffic estimation model as well as several other features.

The new traffic estimation model should help reduce some of the confusion that often surrounds tracking the number of unique visitors to your site. When creating campaigns, many advertisers use media planning tools, including Ad Planner, to look at unique visitors based on estimates of real world users. However, publishers typically rely on web server logs or web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, to measure unique visitors based on cookie counts. Discrepencies arise when these two types of unique visitors are compared. You can learn more about this topic by reading the IAB guidelines on Audience Measurement.

To address the various ways of measuring site traffic, we:

• Added Unique Visitors (cookies), a new cookie-based metric, to help you cross-check and compare metrics, similar to Google Analytics unique visitor metrics.
• Changed Unique Visitors to Unique Visitors (users) so it's clearer that you're reviewing estimated numbers of real world users.
• Placed the Unique Visitors (cookies) and Unique Visitors (users) metrics on a site's profile page so you'll have a more comprehensive view of how a specific site can support your media planning. Learn how to make the most of these two metrics.

In addition, our new model improves our traffic estimates. You'll notice our page view estimates are now more accurate and consistent with web server measurements.

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We've also added country demographics for Australia, Brazil, Japan, and Switzerland, which brings our demographics total to ten countries, with more coming in the future. In select countries we've also added a new demographics category, Children in Household, which can be used to research sites.

You've told us that defining an audience to fit your intended customers can be difficult. In response, we've created Pre-defined Audiences that represent commonly used audiences. Now you can experiment with different criteria without having to choose them manually.

This release represents only a fraction of what we're planning for 2009. Stay tuned for more Google Ad Planner announcements soon.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Inside AdWords crew

(Ad)Word of the Day: Optimization

Seasoned AdWords users know that to have successful campaigns you need to do more than simply set them up and let them run. To get the most out of your campaigns, you should consider optimization, today's (Ad)Word of the Day. 

According to the AdWords Glossary, optimization is the process of modifying your ad campaigns to improve the quality and performance of your AdWords ads. This often involves changing the contents and settings of your campaigns and ad groups and editing your keyword lists and landing pages.

Optimization can be as simple as adding new keywords relevant to your campaign, or can be as involved as adjusting your CPC bids and rewriting your ad text. By optimizing your campaigns to improve your keyword Quality Scores, you can help lower your ad's costs without losing your position on a search results page. 

If you'd like to learn more about optimization, here's a guide from our AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Christian Yee, Inside AdWords crew

Display ad builder best practices

Last week, we posted about recent improvements we've made to the display ad builder. Now we'd like to share some best practices for using the tool. Hopefully these tips will help you get off to a running start with your new display campaigns:

Customize your ads to make them stand out. Here are some ways you can do that:

• Choose the color scheme of your ad, like the background and font color, to align it with your unique product and brand.

• Ensure text and images are a proper fit. Review all available ad sizes for each template to ensure that the text displays properly and images fit the ad slot. Upload images and logos that fit the recommended specifications we display as you create your ad.

• Try out different templates. You can see which one yields the best performance and optimize accordingly. 

• Consider transparent PNG graphics. They can make your ads look more professional by matching the background of both the image and the ad.
  

Consider separating your display ads into their own ad group. This will allow you to:

• Set unique bids for your display ads. For example, you may want to bid more competitively for you display ad, since it has to rank high enough to place above the other ads competing for the same spot.

• Use unique keywords for your display ads, without impacting the performance of your text-only ad groups, especially those running on search as well as the Google content network. 

Double-check your ads to ensure they meet the following criteria:

• Your display URL should be visible. If it's the same color as the ad's background color, it won't be visible to the user.

• Uploaded images should be less than 50KB. Otherwise your ad won't be eligible to run.

Now that you're armed with these tips on creating effective display ads, please try out the display ad builder and let us know how it's working for you. If you want to learn more about the tool, please visit the display ad builder site.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Inside AdWords crew

Display ad builder: Wider availability and improvements

We recently announced the launch of AdWords display ad builder, and now we've made it more widely available and easier to use. Display ad builder is a tool that lets you create and customize display ads, allowing you to easily expand your AdWords campaigns beyond text advertising. We've had an overwhelmingly positive response from our advertisers so far, so we're happy to announce that the tool is now available to advertisers in the UK, Ireland, and a number of other countries.

In addition, based on your feedback, we made improvements to the display ad builder to enable greater customization and make building display ads even easier:

Image picker: You can now choose from previously uploaded images when creating your ads.

Real-time editing: See what your text and other customization edits look like, automatically -- without having to click the 'update preview' button.

Quicker way of seeing available ad sizes: You can see which sizes your ad can run in for each ad template without having to complete the ad creation process. You can also preview how your customization choices affect each size.

Additional templates: Choose from even more templates for customizing your ads.

We think these improvements will help you more easily and efficiently create engaging display ads. As always, we welcome your suggestions on how we can improve the display ad builder.

Next week, we'll post best practices to help you build effective ads with the display ad builder. In the meantime, you can view our tutorial video or visit the display ad builder site to learn more.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Inside AdWords crew

Announcing the Search-based Keyword Tool

Keyword targeting can sometimes feel like a guessing game. Potential customers are performing hundreds of millions of searches on Google, most of which you don't even know about. With so many searches, you have to guess which ones might be relevant for each of your landing pages, and hope you find the right audience for your AdWords campaigns. That's where the Search-based Keyword Tool (beta) comes in. With this new tool you can get a better sense of what your potential customers are searching for and which keywords you should advertise on.

Here's the scoop: you know that the Google search engine starts with searches conducted by users and helps them find relevant pages. But for keyword targeting, what you want is a tool that goes in the opposite direction by starting with your pages and identifying keywords that potential customers are searching on to find your products or services. The Search-based Keyword Tool does exactly this, leveraging search query data relevant to your website's content. In other words, this new tool gives you keywords that are highly relevant to your site but are not part of your AdWords campaigns. This helps you take advantage of missed opportunities.

The tool is also useful if you don't currently advertise on AdWords. For example, a shoe store could discover which footwear styles users are searching for, or a digital camera blog could decide which cameras to review by looking at which camera models attract the most queries.

The Search-based Keyword Tool is now available to all advertisers in the US and UK. We'll be expanding to additional languages and more countries in the near future. We'll also continue to develop the tool based on your feedback. Try it out at http://www.google.com/sktool, and let us know what you think.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Inside AdWords crew

Google Ad Planner: new features, available to everyone

Since we launched Google Ad Planner a few months ago, you've suggested more ways we could help improve your media planning process. First, we're excited to announce that Ad Planner is now accessible to anyone with a Google account. Second, we've released a number of new features that we built based on your direct input.

Define your audience by keywords and geography

In response to your requests for more audience definition options, we've enhanced Google Ad Planner to support search queries and geo-targeting. For example, now you can find video game enthusiasts based on their likeliness to search for keywords such as "video games" or "video game codes." You can also drill-down to specific states or metros (region or cities in geographies outside the US).

Manage your site results

With three new site ranking methods, you can decide how you want your site results ranked and displayed. You can choose between sites most likely to attract your target audience, larger known sites to increase your campaign scale, or a balance between the two. By applying other site filters, you can narrow your search to only sites that accept ads, sites in specific categories like "Video Games," or sites that end with a particular domain suffix like ".edu."

(Click the image for a full-size version)

Analyze your media plan

With Google Ad Planner's new interactive bubble chart, you can compare sites in your media plan by demographics, frequency, traffic, and unique visitors. In the example below, the red bubble shows a site heavily skewed towards females under 35, which is inconsistent with other sites in the media plan. By discovering such outliers, you can easily refine your media plan targeting.

(Click the image for a full-size version)

International demographic data

We've expanded demographic audience data to include France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK. We look forward to continuing to expand the number of countries Ad Planner covers.

Sign in today to see the latest improvements, maybe check out a training video or two, and let us know what you think.

Posted by Amanda Kelly, Inside AdWords crew

Build your own display ads in minutes

Today we released the AdWords display ad builder, which lets you create professional-looking display ads in AdWords without needing to hire a designer or start from scratch. If you've wanted to expand beyond your text ad campaigns, or if you've been looking for an easier way to build display ads, this tool can help.

This new tool lets you create customized display ads with your own text, images, and logo. You can also change colors and backgrounds. The tool can create ads to fit all possible placements across the Google content network, including video and game placements. The display ad builder is available now to all advertisers in the U.S. and Canada.

We've also put together a short video demonstrating how to create your first ad:

And for a more detailed look you can watch a longer tutorial.

To start creating your ads, click Display Ad Builder on the Create an ad page within a new or existing campaign in your AdWords account. If you want to learn more about creating and running display ads, visit the new Display Ads 101 tutorial. As we continue adding new templates and features to the tool, we're want your feedback. Please let us know what would make the display ad builder better for you.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Inside AdWords crew

New ways to look at Search & Content Network statistics

*Please note updated information at the bottom of this post as of 5/17/2013

In our past content network posts, we've discussed how search and content network performance can differ. In particular, clickthrough and conversion rates aren't always comparable between the content network and the search network, since users browsing content commonly approach ads differently than users searching actively for a particular topic. As a result, we use smart pricing to protect advertiser ROI by automatically adjusting the cost of a contextually-targeted content network click based on its effectiveness compared to a search click.

Because search and content network statistics can differ greatly, viewing aggregate statistics for a campaign running on both networks may not give you granular insight into your performance. For example, a high number of impressions and a low clickthrough rate on the search network may be signals that you should optimize, but similar statistics on the content network are unlikely to indicate poor performance.

To provide better insight, we've made a small change to the campaign and ad group summary pages that allows you to easily evaluate search and content network statistics separately. The new "Statistics" drop-down menu lets you change your view to see search and content network statistics in individual rows for each of your campaigns and/or ad groups. You can also filter to see only the statistics for the network you choose. By separating the statistics by network on your summary pages, you can not only see which campaigns or ad groups need your attention, but you can also identify which network you need to optimize for. Optimization strategies for the search network are often different from strategies for the content network.

When comparing your performance on search and content networks, look at your cost/conversion (measurable through AdWords conversion tracking). This metric is very useful since your target cost/conversion is likely to be the same for both networks and can be used as an accurate measurement of your overall ROI.

To learn more about the new display options for your statistics, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Christian Yee, Inside AdWords crew

*UPDATE: In the above post, it reads:

As a result, we use smart pricing to protect advertiser ROI by automatically adjusting the cost of a contextually-targeted content network click based on its effectiveness compared to a search click.

This statement should read:



As a result, we may use smart pricing to protect advertiser ROI by adjusting the cost of certain contextually-targeted content network clicks based on their effectiveness compared to a search click.

Announcing Google Insights for Search

In June, we updated Google Trends with numbers and the ability to download results to a spreadsheet. We received a lot of great feedback from agencies and advertisers on how they're using the new version; from identifying new growth markets to optimizing their Google AdWords campaigns.

We have Elan Dekel and Niv Efron to tell us about a new tool for fans of Google Trends:

Today, we're launching Google Insights for Search, a new product designed with the advertiser in mind. It provides more flexibility and functionality for advertisers and marketers to understand search behavior, and adds some cool new features like a world heat map to graphically display search volume and regional interest.

Like Google Trends, you can just type in a search term to see search volume patterns over time, as well as the top related and rising searches. You’ll also have the ability to compare search volume trends across multiple search terms, categories (commonly referred to as verticals), geographic regions, or specific time ranges.

Let's take the example of entering the term apple. You'll notice that the majority of top related and rising searches are associated with the brand Apple.

(Click the image for a full-size version)

Google Insights for Search allows you to filter this query by the Food & Drink category, resulting in a dramatically different view of search volume trends and related searches of apple, the fruit. You can also use this filter to compare search terms with the category (for example, apple compared to the Food & Drink category).

(Click the image for a full-size version)

This is just an example to get your ideas flowing. If you love Trends, we hope you’ll fall in love all over again with Google Insights for Search.

You can get started at the Google Insights for Search homepage, and, just a note, you'll need to sign into your Google account to see numbers or download results to a spreadsheet. You can also take a look at more examples of how you can use Google Insights for Search. As always, we love to hear your feedback about the tool and the insights you discover.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Inside AdWords crew