Improving Ad Rank to show more relevant ad extensions and formats

When people use Google to research and buy things, they're interested in the most relevant and useful results. Ad extensions help by providing more information to potential customers and additional ways for them to respond. For example, they can call your business number, see your business location on a map, or choose an even more relevant landing page that you're promoting with sitelinks. Ad extensions typically improve clickthrough rate and overall campaign performance because they make ads more useful.

Today, we're announcing improvements in the AdWords auction that let us more consistently show more relevant ad extensions and formats.

Ad Rank improvements

Our system for ordering ads on search results pages uses a calculation called Ad Rank. Previously, Ad Rank was calculated using your max CPC bid and your Quality Score. With this update, Ad Rank will also take into account a third component: the expected impact from your ad extensions and formats. In addition, we've increased the importance of Ad Rank in determining whether your ad is eligible to be displayed with extensions and formats.

Here are some more details and implications of these changes:

• Ad extensions and formats can now influence the position of your ad on the search results page. If two competing ads have the same bid and quality, then the ad with the more positive expected impact from extensions will generally appear in a higher position than the other.
• When estimating the expected impact of extensions and ad formats, we consider such factors as the relevance, clickthrough rates, and the prominence of the extensions or formats on the search results page.
• Because Ad Rank is now more important in determining whether your ad is shown with extensions and formats, you might need to increase your Quality Score, bid, or both for extensions and formats to appear. 
• In each auction, we'll generally show your highest performing and most useful combination of extensions and formats among those eligible. So there's no need to try to guess which extensions will help improve your clickthrough rate the most. 
• You may see lower or higher average CPCs in your account. You may see lower CPCs if your extensions and formats are highly relevant, and we expect a large positive performance impact relative to other competitors in the auction. In other cases, you may see higher CPCs because of an improvement in ad position or increased competition from other ads with a high expected impact from formats.
• For now, this update only affects search ads appearing on Google Search.

We've updated our Help Center articles on topics including ad extensions and how we rank ads to reflect these important changes.

Recommendations for using extensions

Extensions make your ads more useful and can improve your campaign performance. So you should add extensions that make sense for your business type and campaign goals. With these improvements to AdRank, our systems will do even more to automatically serve extensions in the contexts when they're most beneficial.

For example, consider someone downtown searching on a mobile phone for "auto repair." In this example, the user might be most likely to respond to your ad when they can click to call a phone number or tap a link to get directions to visit in person. So we may show a combination of call and location extensions with your mobile search ad.

Now imagine if someone were searching for "auto repair" on a laptop computer in the suburbs. Say your ad earned the 3rd ad position above the organic results in this auction. We might show your seller rating and sitelinks because that's the highest performing and most useful combination of extensions that could be shown with your ad in this particular auction and ad position.

We're always looking for ways to make ads more relevant to a user's intent and context. After months of testing, we're confident that these AdRank changes help achieve that goal by more consistently showing people the most useful combination of extensions and formats.

Posted by Chris Roat, Staff Software Engineer

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

Improvements to location targeting for international searches

The world is getting smaller. Today, people use search to shop for products and services from around the corner or across the world. This means that every business can now be a global business.

To help you connect with your customers - wherever they’re located - we’re improving the way location targeting works in AdWords. Starting the week of November 11, 2013, advertisers using either the default or ‘location of interest’ setting will be able to show ads to potential customers by taking into account both the location that people are searching for, as well as the location they are searching from -- even when they are international searches. For example, let’s say you own a hotel, and you are currently targeting Paris with the keyword “Paris hotels.” Previously, only people searching on Google.fr or Google.com from France could see your ad. Starting the week of November 11, your ads will be eligible to show to people searching for “Paris hotels” from anywhere in the world -- for example, someone who lives in New York City who is booking a vacation in Paris.

These improvements help you share your message with more customers who have expressed interest in your business and deliver a better set of results to people who are searching with locations in their intent.

Most advertisers will find that this change improves the reach of their ads with no action needed. In fact, this is currently how targeting works within countries. This update just ensures that searches across countries work in the same way. Your ads will continue to show to your target audience based on the location targeting options that you have set. In some cases you may see a change in impression volume since your ads can now show to people who are searching for your business from places where your ads weren’t previously showing.

These changes offer broader coverage for your ads while keeping your existing location options intact. If you prefer to narrow your location settings, you can still do so using advanced location options by selecting the “People in my targeted location” radio button.  You can also exclude geographic locations to prevent your ads from showing in selected regions.

People are searching in ways that transcend geographical boundaries, and we want to ensure that AdWords reflects this global reality. These location targeting updates make it easier for potential customers to find your business, and easier for you to connect with them – wherever they may be looking.

Posted by Nicholas Boos, Product Manager, AdWords

Mobile Product Listing Ads Improvements and Success Stories

People are increasingly turning to their mobile devices as shopping assistants at home, in stores, and on the go, and constant connectivity is helping shoppers find the products they want, whenever they want. Google Shopping connects people looking for products with the best places to buy both online and in local stores, and there are big opportunities for retailers to connect with mobile shoppers using mobile Product Listing Ads (PLA), particularly as we head into the holiday retail season.

Expanded Google Shopping results on mobile devices
As part of our efforts to help retailers promote their products to people across devices, we’re updating the look of the mobile PLA unit on Google.com to help shoppers more easily browse and discover products on their mobile device. Users can now swipe to quickly see more products in the mobile PLA unit without having to leave the search results page. The unit will also feature larger product images and product titles. This update gives more retailers the opportunity to appear on the mobile PLA unit, and early tests show that it drives more traffic to retailers.

Retailer success stories with mobile PLAs
Many advertisers have already positioned themselves for success by leveraging mobile PLAs ahead of the holidays. Below are just a couple of examples.

• REVOLVEclothing.com understands that their customers are very mobile-savvy, so they increased their focus on optimizing their mobile PLA campaign. Within a few months, they grew their mobile PLA campaign clicks by 371%, their conversions climbed 537%, and their mobile return on ad spend (ROAS) increased by 77%. Learn more.
  
  
• HalloweenCostumes.com implemented mobile PLAs for their entire product line after seeing major lifts in their online advertising efforts via desktop PLA campaigns. Mobile PLAs are now a major driver of their overall mobile growth, delivering a 31% lift in overall mobile conversions. In addition, they focused heavily on converting new mobile traffic by redesigning their mobile site to increase the speed and overall usability of product pages and navigation. Learn more.
  
  

Show your Product Listing Ads to smartphone shoppers
If your PLA campaigns aren’t already opted into mobile, there’s still time to apply mobile bid adjustments to help you capture valuable real estate on mobile shopping search results with over a month left before Thanksgiving.

If you need help getting started, please join our webinar on Wednesday, October 23 at 10 am Pacific Time to hear tips and best practices for creating and optimizing a mobile PLA campaign.

Posted by Jennifer Liu, Group Product Manager, Google Shopping

Get more out of Google Shopping with Channel Intelligence

With the holidays right around the corner and shoppers already beginning their holiday shopping research online, advertisers are getting poised to reach those customers. Research from Think With Google shows that online sales during Black Friday increased by 26% last year.* By optimizing your Product Listing Ads you can not only increase your overall sales but also aid you in preparing early for a head start on this year’s holiday rush. To help you get ready, we want to share a few holiday optimization tips and insights from Channel Intelligence and also invite you to a webinar on October 15th at 11am PT.

Channel Intelligence is a feed management service acquired by Google in February. Channel Intelligence works with many merchants to deliver high quality product feeds across all major shopping engine services, including Product Listing Ads. Channel Intelligence manages feeds, optimizes bidding and provides data quality monitoring for clients. These services can help with increasing Return on Ad Spend while improving the performance of individual products on shopping engines.

Here are some best practices Channel Intelligence uses to help merchants prepare for a successful holiday with Product Listing Ads:

• Make sure your data quality is accurate. A good data feed is important. Confirm that all of your products are correctly submitted to Google and approved. Review policies for such things as non-family safe items.
• Get ready for traffic across devices. Shoppers will be on-the-go throughout the holidays. Reach where shoppers are by opting into mobile bidding as part of your overall holiday strategy.
• Prepare for Cyber Monday. Shoppers are going to be looking for the best deals on products. If you are planning to have holiday promotions for your products, there’s a separate attribute for promotional text. More details can be found in the feed specifications at the Merchant Center Help Center.

Join Channel Intelligence for a webinar on October 15th at 11am PT

The team at Channel Intelligence will share knowledge and experience with Product Listing Ads to help you prepare for the holidays. The team is giving insight on how merchants can get more from their product campaigns this season. Topics will cover where multichannel retail is heading, how you can improve your ad content, and how to apply best practices to your campaigns.

If you are interested in the webinar, register here.

To learn more about Channel Intelligence services, visit www.channelintelligence.com. If you are new to Product Listing Ads and would like step-by-step instructions on how you can get started, check out our Get Started Guide.

Posted by TT Ramgopal, Head of Channel Intelligence

*Comscore, Inc., 2012 Holiday Season To Date vs. Corresponding Days in 2011, NonTravel (Retail) Spending, November 2012

Google Shopping goes local

With Google Shopping, people can easily research products, compare items, and connect with merchants online to make their purchase. We've been going global to bring a quality online shopping experience to users around the world. But sometimes the most helpful information about a product is whether you can find it at a local store nearby.

Recently, we began rolling out two new local features for Google Shopping. The first is local availability for Product Listing Ads on desktop and smartphones. When someone searches for a product on Google, she may see a Product Listing Ad for a local store. When she clicks on the ad, she’ll arrive at a local storefront where she can browse a large selection of the store’s inventory before she visits in person.

For example, someone searching for a new fragrance may see an ad letting her know it’s available at a nearby store. After clicking the ad, she’ll see product and availability information for that fragrance, along with similar items in stock at the store. She can search other available products, find store hours, and get directions. If she still needs more information, she can call the store or visit the website directly from the local storefront. Below are examples of how these features appear on mobile and desktop devices.

Both local availability for Product Listing Ads and the local storefront are based on a local product feed managed through Google Merchant Center, which allows retailers to provide users with up-to-date, item-level price and availability information for each physical store. Participating retailers pay for clicks on the Product Listing Ad to the local storefront on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. All clicks and interactions on the local storefront are free. Retailers can also see separate local click performance.

These local features help retailers leverage the scale of Google Shopping to market items sold in their physical stores. They’re currently available to a limited set of US retailers, and we look forward to making them more widely available in the coming months. Please fill out this interest form if you are a US merchant and would like to participate in the future.

Paul Bankhead, Senior Product Manager, Google Shopping

New Flexible Bid Strategy and Webinar: Target Return on Ad Spend

In May, we introduced flexible bid strategies as part of our ongoing initiative to improve real-time bid automation in AdWords. Today, we are announcing target return on ad spend (ROAS), a new bid strategy, as part of this broader initiative to provide greater flexibility and control over performance targets and better overall return from your ad spend.  You should see the target ROAS bid strategy rolling out to your account over the coming weeks.

Target ROAS helps you maximize revenue by automatically adjusting your keyword, ad group, and campaign-level bids to meet a custom target return on ad spend. Your target ROAS represents how much revenue you want to earn for each dollar you spend on AdWords. For example, if your goal is to earn $7 for each $1 you spend on AdWords, your target ROAS would be 700%.

Harnessing the same real-time bidding technology behind Target CPA and Enhanced CPC, target ROAS takes into account signals such as location, browser, time of day, operating system and more to adjust your bids based on your ad’s predicted performance.

Grow sales and hit your ROAS goals with ease

To demonstrate the power of target ROAS, we’ll walk you through an example. Let’s say you’re an advertiser whose conversion values vary from product to product. Ideally, you’d love to bid higher on keywords that lead to larger orders, and lower for keywords that lead to smaller ones, however, this would be time consuming and complex to do manually.

You can use target ROAS to help you dynamically select the right bid for each auction. Here’s what you’d do next:

1. Set up conversion values in Conversion Tracking so that AdWords understands the value of orders placed on your site.
2. Choose the ROAS percentage that matches your business goals. You can learn about setting an appropriate target ROAS here.
3. Create a new “Target ROAS” bid strategy in the Shared Library. (see image below)
4. Enter your target ROAS into your newly created flexible bid strategy.
5. Apply the new bid strategy to keywords, ad groups or campaigns.

Once you’ve applied this bid strategy to keywords in your account, AdWords will predict the likelihood that a click will lead to a high-value sale. Based on this likelihood, the system then sets unique bids for each click, taking into account your specified ROAS target. Since this happens automatically and in real time every time your ad is shown, your bids are optimized toward your goals without  having to enter a single manual bid.

Once you begin using target ROAS, you’ll see a rough average of the Max CPC bids Google is setting in Search Network auctions in your Max CPC column. This helps illustrate the auctions’ bids for keywords that are using the bid strategy.

Learn more

To learn more about getting started with target ROAS, visit the AdWords Help Center. You can also tune into the Target ROAS webinar on October 22nd for a live walkthrough on setting up conversion values and using this new strategy. You can sign up for the webinar here.

Posted by Wilfred Yeung, Product Manager, Bidding in AdWords

Estimated Total Conversions: New insights for the multi-screen world

People are constantly connected, using multiple devices throughout the day to shop, communicate and stay entertained.  A September 2013 study of multi-device consumers found that over 90% move sequentially between several screens for everyday activities like booking a hotel or shopping for electronics.

As consumers are increasingly on the go and switching between devices, marketers are telling us they want to see a more complete and accurate picture of how their online advertising drives conversions.  Conversions can come in many forms: visits to stores, phone calls, app downloads, website sales or purchases made after consulting various devices.  Getting better insight into these complex purchase paths can help you optimize your online advertising and allocate budget more effectively.

Introducing Estimated Total Conversions

Today, we are introducing Estimated Total Conversions for search ads on Google.com.  This is an exciting first step to give marketers more insight into how AdWords drives conversions for your business by showing you both the conversions you see today, like online sales, as well as an estimate of conversions that take multiple devices to complete.  Over time, we’ll be adding other conversion types like phone calls and store visits as well as conversions from ads on our search and display network.

Estimated Total Conversions will provide you with a holistic view of all of the conversions driven by your Google search advertising that can be used to make important decisions like how much to bid and how to assign budget across your various marketing channels.  For the last few years, many sophisticated advertisers have been using their own analysis to get to these insights.  Today, we are beginning to bring this level of insight and measurement to all advertisers.

Estimated cross-device conversions

Estimated cross-device conversions is the first new conversion type to launch as part of Estimated Total Conversions. Cross-device conversions start as a click on a search ad on Google.com on one device and end as a conversion on another device (or in a different web browser on the same device).

For example, say someone shops for “blue jeans” on her mobile phone while waiting for the morning train.  She clicks on a mobile ad for ABC Blue Jeans.  When she gets to her office, she goes directly to the ABC website to make a purchase.  This is an example of a cross-device conversion.  We calculate cross-device conversions using a sample of data from users who signed into multiple devices.  Learn more about how this works.

Estimated cross-device conversions will begin rolling out globally to all AdWords advertisers starting today and continuing over the next few weeks. To see these new statistics, you’ll need AdWords conversion tracking and a sufficient volume of conversions on which to base a reliable estimate.

In the last few months, we’ve analyzed data across thousands of AdWords advertisers to learn more about cross-device conversion patterns.

When advertisers in the travel industry use AdWords estimated cross-device conversions, they are able to measure 8% more conversions, on average, than they did before.  In addition, they can now measure 33% more conversions that originated on a mobile phone and later converted on different device.  This helps them attribute all those sales -- from customers who searched for flights and hotels on their mobile phones and then made a purchase from another device -- to the right ad.

Similarly, other verticals, like entertainment and retail are also seeing positive results.  Businesses in these industries are now able to measure 12% and 7% more conversions, respectively, than they could before using Estimated Total Conversions.

Sean Singleton, Marketing Manager at American Apparel noted that, "We always knew our online ad investment was influencing conversions across devices, but we didn't know how to begin estimating these numbers. Once we saw that 5.3% more conversions could be attributed to cross-device conversions in AdWords, we knew we could more accurately calculate the value we were receiving from each ad click.  We also learned that mobile ads are driving 16% more conversions than we thought, so we are now investing more into this channel to gain more sales.”

More results from other verticals can be seen below.

Paving the way for marketers to measure the full value of their online advertising

We are committed to helping you gain insight into the new conversion types that are part of a constantly connected, multi-screen world so that you can make the best advertising decisions possible. In addition to cross-device conversions, both phone calls and store visits will be included as part of Estimated Total Conversions in the coming months. These are important conversions to consider — people make more than 40M calls to businesses each month directly from Google ads and are often looking for physical store locations when they search on Google, particularly on the go.

We look forward to your feedback on estimated cross-device conversions and are working hard to add new features.  Over the coming weeks we’ll dive into the new features with tips and best practices on the Inside AdWords blog and on the new Think Insights page for conversions. We hope you will join us.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy, SVP, Ads and Commerce

Create beautiful, engaging display ads in seconds with Ready Creatives

Building on VP of Product Management Neal Mohan’s presentation to the Mobile Marketing Association about building cross-screen creative in HTML5, and Product Management Director Brad Bender’s keynote speech about advances in creative formats at IAB MIXX yesterday, we’re excited to announce the launch of Ready Creatives – our groundbreaking new solution to make display ad creation easier than ever. Ready Creatives consists of two powerful tools: Ready Image Ads and Ready Ad Gallery.

Display ads today need to captivate consumers with rich creative and dynamic messaging. But creating an engaging, beautiful ad takes time and effort. High quality ad creation – until now – has been a big challenge, putting it out of reach for small to medium businesses. Ready Creatives puts the power back in your hands – and makes it easier than ever before to create beautiful ads that can be consistently displayed across screens.

Instantly build IAB Standard, HTML5 compatible ads with Ready Image Ads

With one single click, take advantage of Ready Image Ads flexibility by simply adding your website URL to automatically construct display ads based on images from your website.  You can customize further by adjusting the text, font, color, images, headlines, URL and more – in a way that best tells your story. Our friendly user-interface and streamlined process enables you to build display ads in minutes, automatically creating IAB standard ads in HTML5 formats using your existing elements from your website or your own uploaded images. And these HTML5 ads can be viewed across mobile devices as well as desktops!

Provide your website URL and Ready Image Ads automatically builds a variety of beautiful ads for you to use in your campaigns

Beautiful ads at your fingertips in Ready Ad Gallery

Ready Creatives doesn’t just quickly cobble together the elements you want included in your ad – it helps you build campaigns that engage customers with stories they love, remember and share. Our Ready Ad Gallery features pre-built templates you can easily customize based on your campaigns goals.

Choose from the following formats and watch your display ad come to life:

• Dynamic Ads – Dynamic Ads deliver tailored creative across the web that combine the layouts, products, messages and offers that your customers are most likely interested in, based on what they viewed on your website.
• Engagement Ads – Engagement Ads captivate consumers with rich creative messages. They fit in standard display units, allowing to scale across the web, and then expand to a larger format after an innovative two-second hover delay. 
• Video Ads – Videos are as effective as TV in building awareness of your business.  Create a quick video ad in seconds that showcases your brand.
• General Purpose Ads – if you need a simple display ad, browse through our hundreds of template options and customize in our easy-to-use editing tool.

Building display ads has never been simpler, and we’re making this capability accessible to all advertisers at no additional cost, and as part of the AdWords campaign workflow. No matter what type of ad you choose, you can be sure you will not only have saved time and money but also have created an ad your customers and prospects are sure to love.

To get started using Ready Creatives today, log into your Adwords account and click on the Ads tab. For more information, visit www.google.com/think/products/ready-creatives.html.

Posted by Ashley Jiang, Product Manager, Google Display Network

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

Measure & Optimize for Offline Sales with AdWords Conversion Import

Potential buyers have increasingly turned to the web as the first step in their purchase decisions.  So for years, digital marketers in insurance, auto sales, and other high consideration industries have been using AdWords to build awareness and generate leads. These leads have been handed to sales reps, who then help customers complete the purchase process.

In AdWords, you’ve been able to see which keywords lead to higher or lower lead volumes, and to optimize for a cost per lead goal. But there's been no easy way to measure and optimize in AdWords for events that happen beyond the website, like a customer order taken over the phone by your sales team.

New Conversion Import Feature

The new AdWords conversion import feature can help you measure and optimize for the complete end-to-end purchase process. Now you can upload your offline conversion events into AdWords and see how clicks on your ads led to sales made in the offline world such as over the phone or via a sales rep.

Click image to enlarge

And since your offline conversion events will be incorporated into your existing AdWords conversion data, tools such as Search Funnels, Automated rules and Flexible bid strategies can leverage that data.

How you might use the conversion import feature

Let’s see how importing conversions can help a small business measure and optimize for the entire customer journey, from online leads to offline sales.

Isabelle designs, builds and sells high-end custom furniture. She uses AdWords to drive prospective customers to her website, where they can submit their contact information and request a sales call. AdWords Conversion Tracking can measure these raw lead submissions, but since most of them won’t result in a sale, she optimizes her campaigns on raw submitted leads; not actual sales.

Now that she’s able to import her offline conversion data (including sale value), Isabelle can better understand which keywords drive the most profitable sales. With a more accurate ROI picture, Isabelle can better manage her bids and budget.

How to get started

For step by step directions to get started, check out this article on how to import your offline conversions.

Several software solution providers, including Marketo, Mongoose Metrics and SugarCRM have also posted guides on integrating with this new feature.  In addition, we have published a guide for integrating with Salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud.

More to come

As we mentioned last week, with the launch of cross-account conversion tracking and Search Funnels, we’re working on tools like the conversion import feature to help you measure your customer’s complex path to purchase.

Our product roadmap has lots of improvements and new features aimed at providing a more complete picture of your customers' journey and more accurate measure of ads effectiveness across devices and across channels. Stay tuned!

Posted by Jon Diorio, Product Management Lead, AdWords Reporting & Insights

Making it easier to discover new features in AdWords

You're busy, and we know it's not always easy to stay on top of every innovation and change in AdWords. To keep you informed about the latest and greatest, we wanted to share how we are making it easier to stay updated on important AdWords improvements and changes with the new look and feel on the Inside AdWords blog.

Product update shortcuts
At the top of this page on the right you will see “Product Updates” written below the search bar. This is your access point for our product and feature announcements going forward.

The first link, Major updates on our blog, is where you will find both in-depth posts on specific releases, as well as posts summarizing all the recent happenings in AdWords on a regular basis. Blog posts related to updates will be tagged with “Updates” to help you find them quickly and easily.

For those of you who want AdWords news in real time, we have added a second link to All updates on Google+, featuring our product and feature changes on the Google Ads Google+ page. Each post will be tagged with #adwords #updates to make them easily identifiable. We encourage you to "follow" this page so updates hit your G+ stream in a timely way.

Blog reader feedback survey
Finally, we would love to get your feedback on our blog to learn more about what you like and expect from it, and what you would like to see us improve. Please complete our short survey to help us provide you with a better experience here on the blog.

Thanks for reading the Inside AdWords blog, and stay tuned for more updates and insights into AdWords.

Posted by Rob Newton, Inside AdWords Crew

Get more insight into the full customer journey with Cross-account Conversion Tracking and Search Funnels

The path to a purchase for today's online shoppers is rarely straightforward. People interact with a variety of ads along the way.  For example, they may search for your product in the morning at home, then do a more specific search when they get to the office later in the day.

For advertisers, this can make measuring conversions complex. It’s important to see a full picture of your customer’s path to purchase to determine which keywords and ads drive the most conversions.

Over the next few months, we'll be rolling out many new features to give you a clearer picture of your conversions, your customer's path to purchase and your return-on-ad spend (ROAS). Up first on our list of new features are Cross-account Conversion Tracking and Cross-account Search Funnels.

Cross-account Conversion Tracking

If you manage multiple AdWords accounts for your business, you know the work that goes into implementing multiple tags, one for each AdWords account, and merging conversion reports from other tools into AdWords. With Cross-account Conversion Tracking, you can now measure conversions across all your accounts with a single tag and a simple setup.

Cross-account Conversion Tracking helps you:

• Tag your site quickly and easily. Create one snippet of code to use across all of your accounts. This makes it easier and faster to tag your site and may also improve site load time. 
• Get more accurate conversion reporting. A single tag ensures that a conversion is only counted once across your accounts. With the cross-account tag, you’ll see assist conversions for all AdWords clicks leading up to a conversion, not just the clicks within one account. This can provide a holistic view of your advertising, and a better understanding of how keywords work together across accounts to drive conversions. 
• Track new accounts with ease. When you add a new AdWords account to your My Client Center account (MCC), you can enable Conversion Tracking with the check of a box. In addition, you no longer have to re-define all of your conversions when you create a new account. 

To learn how to implement cross-account conversion tracking, read this article from our Help Center. For easier set-up, especially if you’re using tags for other efforts such as remarketing, Google Tag Manager can help you manage all of your tags on your website.

Cross-account Search Funnels

With Cross-account Conversion Tracking, you can use Cross-account Search Funnels reports in your MCC account  to understand your customers’ path to conversion across all of the keywords in all of your accounts.

These reports include:

• Overview report: Learn how consumers interact with all of your ads across all accounts before making decisions.
• Top Conversion Paths report: Know which combinations of keywords across your accounts drive the most conversions.
• Assisted Conversions report: See upper funnel keywords across your accounts that might not be receiving enough value in your attribution measurement.

To learn more about your customer’s interaction with ads across your accounts, read this Help Center article on Search Funnels.

We're excited to offer you these new features, and hope they help make tracking your conversions and optimizing your campaigns easier. The better you understand your customers journey, the better you can serve them. And that's good for business.

Stay tuned for more conversion features coming soon!

Posted by Vishal Goenka, Product Manager, Conversions in AdWords

Analyze and optimize your search footprint with the new paid & organic report

One of our goals is to provide tools to help you better understand how people searching on Google are connecting with your business. That’s why we provide reports like the Search overview in Google Analytics, Search queries in Webmaster Tools, the AdWords Search terms report and impression share reports.

Today, we’re announcing the addition of the paid & organic report in AdWords, a new report to help you analyze and optimize your search footprint on Google. Previously, most search reports showed paid and organic performance separately, without any insights on user behavior when they overlap. The new paid & organic report is the first to let you see and compare your performance for a query when you have either an ad, an organic listing, or both appearing on the search results page.

Click here to enlarge

Here are some ways you can use the paid & organic report to measure and optimize your search performance:

• Discover additional keywords. Use the report to discover potential keywords to add to your AdWords accounts by looking for queries where you only appear in organic search with no associated ads.
• Optimize presence on high value queries. Use the report to improve your presence in paid results and monitor your high value queries for organic results.  
• Measure changes holistically. As you test website improvements or AdWords changes to bids, budgets, or keywords, you can more easily report the impact across paid, organic, and combined traffic.

IMPAQT, a digital marketing agency that specializes in helping clients with their paid and organic search marketing, shared their observations after beta testing the report.

The paid & organic report has been incredibly useful in understanding the interaction between paid and organic search, and the overall synergy when they are working together. For one of our client’s key branded queries, we saw an 18% increase in CTR when paid and organic work together, as opposed to only having the organic listing.

Getting started
To get started, you’ll need to link your AdWords account to a Webmaster Tools account. Linking requires you to be a verified owner of your site in Webmaster Tools or to be granted access by a verified owner -- it's easy to make the request from within AdWords. Even if you're not buying ads, you can still take advantage of the query-level organic reporting features available in this report. Detailed instructions on how to set up the link and access the report can be found in our help center.

We hope the new paid & organic report saves you time and helps you improve your performance as you're managing both types of search traffic for your business.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Product Manager, AdWords

Manage upgraded sitelinks in the new version of AdWords Editor

Starting today, you can download the latest version of AdWords Editor, which now supports upgraded sitelinks for enhanced campaigns. With version 10.2, you can:

• View and manage sitelinks and settings, including device preference, using the new "Sitelinks (upgraded)" tab.
• Add, edit, or remove sitelinks at the campaign or ad group level.
• Copy and paste upgraded sitelinks between campaigns or ad groups.
• Include upgraded sitelinks in imports and exports.

To learn more about managing upgraded sitelinks in AdWords Editor, and to read more about the new version, see the version 10.2 release notes.

Note: All AdWords campaigns are now upgraded to enhanced campaigns. As such, AdWords Editor 10.2 only supports enhanced campaigns.

The next time you launch AdWords Editor, you'll see a prompt to upgrade to the new version. To learn more about upgrading, including how to keep unposted changes and comments when you upgrade, please review these instructions. You can also download the new version from the AdWords Editor Help Center.

Support for previous versions of AdWords Editor will continue for four months to allow you time to upgrade. To ensure uninterrupted use of AdWords Editor, you will need to upgrade by December 13, 2013.

Posted by Rob Newton, Inside AdWords Crew

Upgraded extensions to help you reach the constantly connected consumer

People are now constantly connected, searching and browsing the web across several devices throughout the day. As part of AdWords enhanced campaigns, we improved sitelink, call, and app extensions to help you reach people more effectively in this multi-screen world. Advertisers will have access to a lot of benefits after upgrading their extensions, so we encourage you to upgrade early to start using these new features:

• Show mobile-specific messaging and phone numbers directly in your ad 
• Use ad group-level extensions to more precisely control which extensions show for each ad
• Schedule extensions to run on certain days or during specific times so you can align your ads to your business hours
• Review detailed reports, such as performance for each individual sitelink to help you optimize for ROI

It’s easy to upgrade your extensions. Visit this Help Center article to learn how. We’ll begin automatically upgrading legacy (existing) extensions on September 23, 2013. Below are some details about the upgrade process.

What happens during the auto-upgrade
During the auto-upgrade, we’ll upgrade extensions from campaigns that only have legacy extensions. For campaigns with both legacy and upgraded extensions, we’ll assume you’ve already gone through the upgrade process, and will mark your legacy extensions as deleted. Learn more

You’ll be able to view statistics for all of your extensions, including legacy and deleted ones, in AdWords reports.  Extension performance statistics will be reset they they’re upgraded, but your historical reports will still be available. Upgrading early means you start accruing stats on the new extensions now.  Learn more

To ensure your sitelink extensions continue to show when the auto-upgrade begins on September 23, please make sure that your sitelinks follow these two policies:

• 25-character limit policy Shorter sitelinks perform better because they provide a clear, succinct message to users searching on Google.  Starting on September 23, sitelinks are required to have no more than 25 characters.  
• Unique sitelinks policy Customers have a better experience when they land on a unique page that matches the content from the ad they clicked on.  Each new sitelink in a campaign or ad group must link to a unique landing page with original content. 

Many advertisers are already taking advantage of these upgraded features
Miller’s Bakery, for example, uses mobile-optimized call extensions to display a “call button” with its ads.  They also use the scheduling feature to make sure this button only appears between 4 a.m. and 9 p.m., when their staff can respond to customer calls. After hours, the call button is removed and the ad directs searchers to a website contact form. These two features work together to help the bakery show potential customers the right ad at the right time, tailored to the right device.

We hope you find these new features useful and encourage you to upgrade your extensions before September 23, 2013 to ensure that all of your extensions continue to show.

Posted by Karen Yao, Senior Product Manager

Attract new customers with local ads on the Google Maps app

Over one billion people use Google Maps services every month. On the Google Maps app, these users are often searching for local businesses - from restaurants, to car dealerships, to dentists, and more. Recently, we launched a new version of the Google Maps app for Android, iPhone, and iPad where we introduced several new features. Today we’re introducing an updated ad experience we think is more attractive for users and more effective for advertisers.

Relevant ads on the Google Maps app can now appear at the bottom of the screen after a user performs a search. They include a title, ad text, and a link to get directions. Users can tap or swipe upward to see more information — this is a new click type known as “Get location details” and results in a standard CPC charge.

Search ads in the Google Maps app (click to enlarge)

When users click on an ad to get location details, they’ll see additional information such as the business’s address, phone number, photos, reviews and more. From here, there are a number of paid and free click actions they can take. Free actions include saving business information for later, sharing a business with a friend, or starting navigation. Aggregated reporting for these free clicks is available in your account.

Ads expand to show location details in the Google Maps app (click to enlarge)

Paid clicks include the initial 'get location details' click, get directions, click-to-call and clicks on the ad headline. AdWords will only charge for up to two paid clicks per ad impression. Reporting for these paid clicks can be found by segmenting reports in your account by ‘click type.’

Getting started with ads on the Google Maps app
To show ads on the Google Maps app, advertisers need to add location extensions to their search campaigns or create an ad with AdWords Express. If your campaign is not showing ads on mobile devices or on Google search partners, you'll also need to change those settings.

You can find more information about ad pricing, free clicks, and ad eligibility in the AdWords Help Center. The new Google Maps app is available free on Google Play and in the  App Store.

Posted by Salahuddin Choudhary, Product Manager, Google Maps

Easily compare your ad performance over time

Which campaigns are down this week? How is my performance this month compared to last month? If you’re like most advertisers, you ask yourself these questions on a regular basis. Over the next few days, we’re rolling out a feature that makes it much easier compare metrics across different time periods by putting the data right in your AdWords tables.

Once “compare dates” is enabled in your date selector, you’ll see a new + button at the top of many columns. Click the + above Clicks, for example, and the Clicks column expands to show you this week’s Clicks, last week’s Clicks, the absolute change and the percent change.

Click to enlarge

This new functionality has been added to many reports across AdWords, on most metrics. All of the additional columns are also sortable and filterable, which makes it easy to answer questions like:

Which campaigns saw the largest increase in clicks?
Which ad groups saw conversions drop by more than 20%
Which keywords saw an increase of at least 100 clicks?

You can also use filters on these columns. This makes it easy, for example, to create a saved filter which finds all campaigns that saw a decrease in clicks of 20% or more:

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

For more details on how to view, sort, and filter on time comparison data, visit our AdWords Help Center.

Posted by David Rodriguez, Product Manager, AdWords

All your display planning and targeting needs, all in one place

For some time now we've been working to unify all our helpful AdWords display tools in one easy and streamlined location. Today we're taking another big step in that direction by integrating three of our classic tools — The Contextual Targeting Tool, the Placement Tool and the Google Ad Planner — into the new Google Display Planner. As we mentioned in an earlier blog post, Display Planner is our new unified research and planning tool, bringing you targeting ideas and estimates that can help you build better display campaigns.

All the functionality you're used to is now part of Display Planner — and with all the tools in one place, everything's easier. Display Planner is built into AdWords, so with one click you can add all the keywords, placements, or other targeting ideas you choose directly into your campaigns. Display Planner also makes them easy to download and share with your team members.

The Contextual Targeting Tool and the Placement Tool will be sunsetted in the next few days, and Google Ad Planner will be deprecated in early September. If you use Google Ad Planner and have existing media plans and site lists, you should export and save them in the next few weeks.

Learn More
For more information on transitioning to Display Planner please check out the Guide to Display Planner for AdPlanner users and make sure to sign up here for our Display Planner Webinar on September 18th, 2013 1pm EST!

Ready to start using Display Planner now? You'll find it in the Tools and Analysis menu in your AdWords account.

Posted by Max Cohen, Product Manager Google Display Network

Bid Adjustment Reporting in Google Analytics

Our constantly connected world presents a great opportunity for marketers to be more effective and relevant to customers by optimizing for context -- device, location and time. Earlier this year, we launched enhanced campaigns to help advertisers take advantage of these new opportunities and manage their ad campaigns more effectively. Bid adjustments make it easy to raise or lower your bids based on user context.

To help you optimize your bid adjustments, we're introducing bid adjustment reporting in Google Analytics, allowing you to analyze performance for each of your bid adjustments across devices, locations, and time of day. You can access the new report by going to Traffic Sources > Advertising >AdWords and clicking the Bid Adjustments link.

With the new Bid Adjustments report, you can take advantage of the full range of visitor metrics available in Google Analytics to optimize your bid adjustments. This provides a window into your users’ behavior, allowing you to optimize bid adjustments based on behavior & goal conversion data like bounce rate and time-on-site.

In addition, with Ecommerce tracking enabled in GA, you can now use this data to fine-tune your bid adjustments in AdWords based on the actual revenue generated, instead of conversions. This means you can optimize for ROI instead of CPA goals.

A quick example illustrates this (illustrated in the above screenshot). Imagine a hotel chain has set Time bid adjustments of +20% on Saturday and Sunday after observing a better ROI on those days. Using this new report in GA, the hotel chain now observes that their ROI on Sundays is actually higher than on other days of the week. The hotel chain's analyst finds that customers book more expensive rooms and longer stays on Sundays. Using this information, the hotel chain increases its existing Time bid adjustment for Sundays.

This new bid adjustment report is available in all Analytics accounts that are linked to AdWords. We recently made it much easier to link your accounts, so now is a great time to do so if you haven’t already. 

Posted by Nikhil Roy, Product Manager, Google Analytics Team