Stepping into the future together

Our two most important goals for AdWords are to make ads more relevant and useful for users, and more effective and simple to manage for advertisers. That's why I was so excited to announce enhanced campaigns this past February. With enhanced campaigns, we're making it easier to reach people in the moments that matter with ads that are more relevant to their intent and context.

We’ve written a lot about enhanced campaigns in the past four months.  In addition to our help center articles and dedicated website, you can see lots of best practices, customer stories, webinar recordings and details about new features in the “enhanced campaigns” label on our blog.

Since we introduced enhanced campaigns, advertisers have upgraded over 6 million legacy campaigns, representing almost 75% of active campaigns. And starting today, we will begin upgrading all remaining campaigns automatically, bringing everyone onto the new AdWords platform. As with many product launches, the rollout will be gradually completed over several weeks.

Results with enhanced campaigns
Many advertisers who've upgraded and optimized their enhanced campaigns have already reported positive results and time savings. Here are a few recent examples:

• Pizza Hut reported that mobile ROI increased by 20% since upgrading to enhanced campaigns. They've also found that mobile CTR has increased by more than 60% while their cost per order on smartphones has dropped by 17%.
• Autobytel, a site for car buyers and owners, grew conversions by 10% at the same CPA after upgrading and optimizing their enhanced campaigns. They now manage 30% fewer campaigns, leaving the marketing team with more time to focus on optimizing the user experience. “We are getting the right conversions at the right price, while marketing efforts are more focused on user experience rather than managing the account,” said Billy Ferriolo, Senior Vice President, Consumer Acquisition and Product Development. (download .pdf)
• Miller's Bakery, a thriving family-run business in New Jersey, generated more custom cake orders using features like location and mobile bid adjustments, upgraded sitelinks, and upgraded call extensions. After upgrading, the bakery’s in-store visits increased by 10-20%, business during peak hours nearly doubled, and web clicks from nearby cities climbed 20-35%. “Our customers interact with our business using multiple screens,” said owner Dwight Miller. "If we didn’t advertise on both desktop and mobile, we’d miss out on a lot of customer touch points.” (download .pdf) 

Tips for success after upgrading
All AdWords campaigns benefit from good set-up and regular optimization. So whether you upgraded your campaigns yourself or let it happen automatically, we encourage you to review and optimize all newly transitioned enhanced campaigns. Here are a few tips (details are in this Help Center article):

1. Review your mobile bid adjustments. For most campaign types, the auto-upgrade default is based on bids from similar advertisers. Visit the campaign ‘Settings’ tab to optimize for your business. 
2. Identify unwanted keyword duplication in overlapping campaigns. If you previously had similar legacy campaigns for each device type, we suggest identifying matching campaigns and eliminating unwanted duplicate keywords in your enhanced campaigns.
3. Review Display Network campaigns. Verify that your display ads are reaching users on desired devices and that you're using your desired bidding strategies.
4. Start taking advantage of the powerful enhanced campaign features. We recommend trying out upgraded sitelinks and upgraded call extensions to start. Then you can further boost results by creating mobile preferred ads and setting bid adjustments for location and time.

You can visit our enhanced campaigns website for more success stories and best practices, including a guide on how to bid like a pro with enhanced campaigns. And please contact us if you have questions or need help.

Stepping into the future together
Consumers will continue to have access to more screens and be able to switch between them as they shop, play and communicate. Enhanced campaigns are an important step towards helping advertisers connect with consumers more simply and smartly in this multi-screen world. We've been inspired by advertisers and partners around the world who are already embracing this new opportunity. Thank you for joining us on the journey and stepping into the future together.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President, Ads and Commerce

Review extensions: The new 'Don't take our word for it' tool for your search ads

Richer information about your business can help potential customers understand why your product or service is right for them. Advertisers have long found it valuable to show positive reviews, awards, or accolades in their ads. Today, we're bringing this capability to your search ads. With review extensions (beta), you can show accolades from reputable third parties right in your search ads.

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You can submit either a direct quote or a summary of a key point from a review, as shown above.

It's important, both for you and for users, that the reviews provided be high-quality:

• Content displayed in review extensions must come from a reputable 3rd party source, and must comply with standard AdWords policies.  
• It’s your responsibility to ensure that you’re allowed to use a specific review in your ads.  
• To protect users and other businesses from deceptive claims, we use automated and human-based systems to confirm the validity and policy compliance of all review extensions.  

Currently, review extensions are available globally in English only.  Please stay tuned for updates as we expand to other languages.  We're looking for more advertisers to participate and soon we'll be adding support for review extensions in the AdWords interface. If you would like to participate in the beta, please contact your AdWords representative.

Posted by Lakshmi Kumar Dabbiru, Software Engineer, AdWords

Introducing a new way for brand advertisers to reach their ideal customer

Brand Advertisers often know who they want to reach, but connecting online with the audience that matters most to their brand at scale has proven to be a challenge. To help address this, we’re excited to announce the launch of Affinity Segments in AdWords and YouTube, which have been designed with TV-style audiences in mind to help solve the problem of connecting with ideal customers online. To understand someone’s affinity, our system takes into account the types of pages a user visits, along with how often and how long they spend there, associating interest categories with each person’s browser. Optimized for reach and frequency, Affinity Segments helps advertisers reach those most likely to enjoy their brand.

Make life easier
With Affinity Segments, we make it easy by helping brand advertisers reach their ideal audience via 80 unique lifestyle segments based on Interest Categories and Demographics . Brands can now reach their target audience at scale based on their interests – such as green living, fashion, or travel – and watch engagement grow.

And it doesn’t stop there. We know that as an advertiser you’re probably used to buying audiences offline for TV, and we know how challenging buying an online audience can be. To make life even easier for you, we defined our affinity segments the same way you target your TV audiences, so you can achieve massive reach online using the same segments you use on TV.

Mazda Canada drives success using Affinity Segments
Like most advertisers out there, Mazda Canada has been on the lookout for a solution that would enable them to reach precise audiences at scale. Over the past decade, the Mazda6 has undergone a few key redesigns – 2013 marked the launch of an all-new model combining Mazda’s signature design style with SKYACTIV Technology, its cutting-edge performance and fuel-saving technology, as well as some innovative safety features including Smart City Brake Support and Rear Cross Traffic Alert. The launch of this flagship vehicle demanded an innovative marketing approach: to build awareness of these technological advancements, inform consumers of the car’s new features, and drive them to the Mazda6 website to engage directly with the brand.

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They knew their target audience: male urban professionals who are typically interested in technology and up-to-date on all the latest gadgets and automotive advancements.

Mazda Canada decided to give Affinity Segments a try, selecting the “technophile” segment to connect them with their ideal tech-savvy customers, who have demonstrated an interest in technology through visits to various websites focused on new gadgets.  By targeting the technophiles segment across Google Display, Mazda reinforced the messaging and impact of its television campaign geared to the same type of audience. Mazda saw impressive results and reached 10X more users than they were able to with previous campaigns, greatly exceeding their expectations.

“Affinity Segments delivered perfectly for this campaign in allowing us to reach many users in a short period of time who we knew would have a predisposition to appreciate the Mazda6’s technology upgrades.” said Michael Tsang, Interactive Marketing Manager at Mazda Canada. As a result of their overwhelming success, Mazda Canada decided to integrate Affinity Segments into their online media mix for their other car models and as a vital component for their advertising efforts.

Connect with the people who care
Affinity Segments offer broader reach by encompassing the broad passions that reflect a user’s lifestyle rather than niche curiosities.  Our wide variety of segments let you reach your perfect audience – from hardcore gamers, to foodies, to luxury shoppers, we have a high-reach segment designed to connect you with your ideal customers. If there isn’t a segment that is a perfect fit for your brand’s needs, you can contact your account manager to create a custom segment just for you.
Consumers can also update their own interest categories through Ads Settings – which gives users control over the ads they see online.

Learn More
Just like Mazda, you too can use Affinity Segments to expand your reach across the Google Display Network and focus on engaging with individuals who match what your brand is all about – delighting customers and creating future brand advocates.

To find out how to get started with Affinity Segments today, visit our Help Center for more information.

Posted by Diya Jolly, Senior Product Manager

Improving Analytics & AdWords Account Linking

Many businesses advertise to find new customers, and optimizing advertising campaigns to reach the right people will increase marketing effectiveness and ROI. Google Analytics helps marketers achieve this by offering insights into customer behavior on an advertiser’s websites, apps, and other properties. By linking AdWords and Analytics accounts together, these rich insights from Analytics can flow into AdWords.

Today, we’re happy to announce some useful improvements making it easier for Google Analytics and AdWords account owners to link their accounts.

Here are a few specific benefits of combining AdWords and Analytics data:

• Importing Analytics goals and transactions into AdWords allows marketers to define success in powerful ways, often without having to retag your site
• Site engagement stats help marketers better understand marketing performance and how to optimize
• Remarketing with Google Analytics allows marketers to reach new audiences
• Importing AdWords data into Analytics lets marketers see data across many accounts in aggregate and combined with rich site metrics

All of these features depend on linking AdWords and Analytics accounts, and this process is now easier than ever before. Previously, linking accounts involved multiple steps on many pages spread out between two products, and this process has now been consolidated into just a couple steps all in one linking wizard.

Once the new linking process launches to all Analytics accounts in the coming weeks, you’ll be able to create additional links from the Admin section of your Analytics account. (If you’re logged in to your AdWords account, you can also link accounts by going to Tools and Analysis > Google Analytics and following these same instructions.)  Just click AdWords Linking in the Account column, and then click the New link button to start the linking wizard.

To take advantage of simplified account linking, benefit from combining data in both products, and get more out of your marketing campaigns, follow the steps above to link your accounts or learn more in our help center.

Posted by Chris Morgan and Matt Matyas, Google Analytics Team

Bringing intent, context, and audience together for better performing search campaigns

Along with a user's query, context signals like location, time of day, and device have become increasingly important in showing people the right ads with their search results. With enhanced campaigns, it's now easier to reach people in the moments that matter across all screens, with ads that are more relevant to a user's intent and context. Now we're incorporating another powerful capability to tailor your search campaigns for different audiences – remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA). With this feature, you can modify your search ads, bids, and keywords based on your visitors' past activity on your website. As we transition out of the beta test of RLSA, announced in July 2012, we'll be making the feature available to all advertisers using enhanced campaigns over the next few days.

Combining intent, context, and audience for better search ads 
Search ads work great because they're relevant to the user's intent and context. And users who have recently visited your website often find your ads to be even more relevant. RLSA brings intent, context, and audience together to let you tailor your search campaign when past site visitors are searching on Google for your brand, products, and services. Here are some ways to improve your campaign performance using RLSA.

1. Increase ad visibility for high value customers by adjusting your bids. For example, you could increase your bids by 20% for visitors who have previously researched high-end cameras while on your site when they subsequently search for ‘cameras’ on Google. And you could increase your bids by 40% for past site visitors who have previously purchased high-end equipment from your site. It's easy to set up RLSA bid adjustments and they combine with other enhanced campaigns bid adjustments for location, device, and time.


2. Expand your reach and results with broader keywords. For example, bidding on broad keywords such as ‘gifts’ or ‘presents’ during a holiday season might not convert well enough to meet your ROI goals. But if you use RLSA to run those keywords just for repeat customers, they may convert better and allow you to grow your total sales with a profitable ROI. 

Advertiser success with RLSA
Advertisers in the beta have seen strong results with RLSA. Here are some examples:

• Tirendo, a European online tire retailer, saw a 161% conversion rate increase with RLSA, leading to a 22% overall sales increase. And the incremental conversions were efficient, with a 43% lower average cost per order than previous campaigns. Read more.
• WorldStores, a leading UK home furnishings and garden store, increased total orders 8% by using RLSA to increase bids for past site visitors. Conversion rates for this segment were 130% higher and average cost per conversion was 43% lower, even with the higher bids.

Tags and list management
RLSA shares the same site-wide Google Remarketing Tag and list management tools as remarketing on the Google Display Network (GDN). So you can start using RLSA immediately if your website is already tagged for remarketing on the GDN.

Transparency and control for users
We believe users should have transparency and be in control their ad experience. That's why we provide adjustable Ads Settings and inform users when an ad has been influenced by a past visit to a particular advertiser's website.

Learn more
For help getting started with RLSA, check out this article in the Help Center. You can also join us at tomorrow's Learn with Google Webinar: Reaching the Right Audience with Remarketing on Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 1pm ET.

Posted by Rahul Lahiri, AdWords Product Manager

New top movers report to track how your ad performance has changed

Many of you start each day by asking: What is driving a change in my clicks or cost? What campaigns or ad groups saw the the largest moves? Did any of my recent changes break something?

To help answer these questions, we’ve created the top movers report to show you which campaigns and ad groups have experienced the largest changes in clicks and cost, and highlight changes you made which might have contributed to those moves. Even if your overall account performance metrics appear unchanged, the top movers report will look inside your campaigns to highlight big moves that might have been easily overlooked.

How it works
To view the top movers report, click the Dimensions tab, then View: Top movers. The report compares performance for two consecutive time periods of equal length, and finds the campaigns and ad groups that experienced the largest change between the two periods. You can compare periods of 7, 14, or 28 days, or look at reports generated in the last 90 days.

The report will start by finding up to 10 of the largest moves in clicks or cost and present a summary at the top. If a top mover saw an increase, it goes into the “Top increases” category. If it’s a decrease, it goes into the “top decreases” category. When changes aren’t significant enough to be a top mover, they will roll up into “Other changes.”

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The table below will give details for each top mover. When possible, we offer a “possible cause” for the move, like “bids were increased” or “new keywords were added”.

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Note that “possible causes” only considers changes made to your account. It won’t tell you, for example, if your competitors have raised their bids or introduced new ads.

Top movers is our latest effort to save you time and money by helping you understand changes in performance.  For additional information about using this new report, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by David Rodriguez, Product Manager, AdWords

Reconnect with site visitors using beautiful, customized dynamic ads

As we continue to expand our advertising solutions, our goal is to provide a great user experience for both advertisers and consumers. We know that advertisers are always looking for new ways to reach their customers with compelling ads that drive engagement and conversions. Today, we are excited to announce the launch of dynamic remarketing to all clients with a Google Merchant Center account. We are also currently piloting this new feature in the travel and education sectors and plan to expand availability to more sectors later this year.

Beautiful, tailored ads to reconnect with customers
Dynamic remarketing lets you automatically create beautiful, customized ads that connect with shoppers across the web, by reminding them of items they've seen on your site. You can build ads quickly with dozens of templates to choose from that you can customize to reflect the design elements of your brand. We have also made it easy to get started by automatically creating dynamic text and display ads for you.

Sample dynamic ads (see more here):

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Advertisers have seen great results compared to their traditional remarketing campaigns:

• Sierra Trading Post, a U.S. retailer of outdoor gear and clothing, saw a 2x higher clickthrough rate and a 5x higher conversion rate
• As Europe’s premiere “heavy metal online shop,” EMP Merchandising grew conversion rates by 230% and decreased their cost of sale by 30%.

You can read more about other client successes on Think Insights.

Optimizing dynamic ads to drive performance
Dynamic remarketing delivers tailored ads 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. You can benefit from our:

• Auto-optimized layouts which predicts the best performing layout for each impression
• Product recommendation engine which optimizes the combination of related and popular products that show in your ads [Learn more]
• Real-time bidding algorithm which helps boost performance by calculating the optimal bid for each impression

For help on getting started reference this Help Center article.

Making it easy for advertisers
Managing campaigns more efficiently is just one of the many benefits of remarketing with Google. Last year, we introduced a site-wide remarketing tag and remarketing with Google Analytics that both made it easy to get started with your campaigns. You can also use the tag to discover new customers similar to your site visitors with Similar Audiences, which has been recently made available to all clients in AdWords.

Remarketing drives great ROI for advertisers, it can also bring publishers significant revenue lift, as studies have shown, and compelling ads for consumers. We’ve also given consumers options to exercise control over their ad experience with features like the Ads Settings and Mute this Ad.

To learn more about what remarketing with Google can do for your business, register for our upcoming Learn with Google Webinar: Reaching the Right Audience with Remarketing on Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 1pm ET.

Posted by Aitan Weinberg, Group Product Manager

Give your sitelinks additional detail in enhanced campaigns

Ads that provide detail and precision can help people make more informed decisions.  Sitelinks help people find information deeper in your site so they can get to where they want to go faster.   In February 2012, we improved sitelinks by using text from other ads in your account or My Client Center to create sitelinks with additional detail.  Today, we’re going one step further by enabling you to nominate specific text for your sitelink descriptions from within your AdWords account.  This will allow you to control the descriptions that display when this sitelink format shows.

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In our testing, users have reported that sitelinks with additional detail were more useful and relevant, and clickthrough rates were significantly higher than the same ad with traditional 2- and 3-line sitelinks.

The new sitelink format with additional detail is available only in enhanced campaigns with upgraded sitelinks.  Enhanced campaigns enable you to reach people with the right ads in the right context - location, time of day and device type -  without setting up and managing numerous campaigns. All campaigns will be upgraded to enhanced campaigns on July 22nd.

After upgrading to enhanced campaigns, you will have the option of adding extra text to your sitelinks - simply fill out both lines of the "Description" field when creating a new sitelink or editing an existing sitelink.

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Note that your ads won't always show sitelinks, and when they do, the format that appears could vary.

The core guidelines for sitelinks remain the same with these improvements:

• Sitelinks cannot violate the duplicate sitelink URL policy
• Sitelink text cannot use keyword insertion
• In addition to this 4 sitelink view, there is also a 2 sitelink variation

To learn more about sitelinks with additional detail, check out the sitelinks article in the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Conrad Wai, Product Manager, Ad Formats

New ways to see how you stack up against the competition with Auction insights

The Auction insights report gives you valuable insight into how your ad performance compares with that of other advertisers.  For example, based on the impressions you’re eligible for, you can see how often your competitors’ ads are appearing above yours or whether one of your competitors has a higher impression share than you on an important keyword.

Before today, you could only get this data one keyword at a time - making it hard to see the bigger picture of where you stand relative to your top competitors.  Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ve added some exciting new functionality to the Auction insights report that will make it easier for you to get a bird’s eye view of your competitive landscape.

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Now, in addition to running an Auction insights report on a single keyword you can also run a report on any of the following scenarios:

• Groups of keywords.  For example, you may want to run a report on all keywords that contain a certain brand term, or that have the same label.  Simply filter your keyword list, select the keywords you want to include, and run an Auction insights report on the selected terms to see how your performance on those terms compares to that of your top competitors.
• Individual or multiple ad groups.  You’ve probably already arranged your keywords into meaningful groupings within ad groups.  For example, if you sell men’s wear, you may have an ad group for “Father’s Day gifts” with keywords all about Father’s Day.  Now, from the ad groups tab, you can select one or more ad groups to run an Auction insights report.  This will show you how your performance on all eligible keywords within those ad groups compares to advertisers who most commonly compete with you on those terms.
• Individual or multiple campaigns. Sometimes you may be interested in a high level picture of who’s competing with you across a wide range of topics.  In those instances, you can select one or more campaigns from the campaigns tab, and run an Auction insights report there to see how the competitive landscape looks at that high level.

We hope that these new features provide you additional insights to help you optimize your campaigns more efficiently.  We are rolling this feature out today and you should expect to see it in your account within the next few hours.

For more information on how to run an Auction insights report, how to interpret your data, or create a filter, visit the AdWords Help Center.  You can also join us for our Hangout on Air Tuesday, June 25th at 10:00 AM PST/1:00 PM EST where we will cover a few of the great things you can do with the new functionality in this report.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Product Manager, AdWords

Get a Head Start with Enhanced Campaigns: Why to Upgrade Now

Enhanced campaigns offer an array of new features to drive better performance and efficiency. With more than three million campaigns already upgraded, we’ve heard many great examples of advertisers finding new pockets of revenue and reaching new customers with enhanced campaigns – all while saving time. As the the auto-upgrade approaches on July 22, we’re introducing some new features in the Upgrade Center today to make the process of upgrading even easier. Upgrade today to start realizing the benefits right away.

5 reasons to upgrade now
By upgrading now and becoming a pro with the new features before the auto-upgrade, you can get a head start on driving better performance – and a jump start on the competition. Here are some of our advertisers’ top reasons for upgrading:

• Discover local opportunities: Use the location bid adjustment to easily and effectively engage with users based on location and proximity. This allows you to find and optimize for pockets of revenue you may not have even known existed.
  
  After upgrading to enhanced campaigns and leveraging geo bid adjustments, Peter Hughes, Manager of SEM at Constant Contact stated, “Suddenly, we realized that California has a great cluster of small and medium sized businesses.  Cool - we’ve already geo-targeted that.  But guess what?  Who knew that North Dakota had such a great ROI.  In the old, legacy world, I never would have figured it out because it did not fit into my selective scaling model.”


• Expose the true power of mobile: Implement a mobile bid adjustment to make sure you’re driving the right value for on-the-go consumers while gaining better insight into the results mobile can drive for you.
  
  American Apparel upgraded early to reach customers across all screens. They started by setting mobile bid adjustments at 100% and saw impressive results.  Since the upgrade, mobile conversions have grown 2X and aggregate click-through-rate has increased 7%.  Sean Singleton, Marketing Manager, stated, “We are going from trial to fine-tuning the way we execute our multi-device marketing strategy.  With enhanced campaigns, it’s very easy to test and iterate so we are quickly establishing internal best practices in terms of how to best run enhanced campaigns.”


• Drive more leads through calls: Use call extensions and measure calls as conversions to drive cost-efficient leads while providing a better ad experience for your customers.
  
  Woodbridge, a financial investment firm, took advantage of upgraded call extensions and new reporting features, increasing the volume of calls from smartphones from 20% to 57%, with overall smartphone leads almost doubling.  In addition, conversion rates from both desktop and mobile devices increased by 6%.


• Reach new audiences on the Google Display Network with powerful bidding:  Drive impression share to a specific audience using custom display bids across characteristics like demographics, interest categories or topics.
  
  Stathis Konstantinidis, who runs Global Marketing at Westwing, said, “With the upgrade to enhanced campaigns we have greater insight into how our converting audience looks on adgroup level. This is very important to us as we have quite a distinct idea of our target group. We can use this information in order to push the impression share of our ads within the converting audience and decrease the impressions within the less performing audience for driving conversions & decreasing the CPLs.”


• Manage campaigns in less time: Dive into enhanced campaigns to see how the powerful features work together to streamline your workflow and get you to happy hour sooner.
  
  Dutch shoe retailer, Schuurman Schoenen, reduced its total number of campaigns by 60% and dramatically cut its marketing team’s workload.  “I used to spend twice as much time to maintain and fine-tune campaigns,” says Kayo Klein Obbink, Schuurman Schoenen’s online marketer.

Improvements to the upgrade center
In April, we announced the enhanced campaigns upgrade center to help you transition from legacy campaigns to enhanced campaigns. We’re introducing some additional features, rolling out over the next week, that will make upgrading even easier and give you greater control over the merging process:

• Increased flexibility when copying keywords: When merging campaigns, have increased control over how keywords are copied (or not copied) from the mobile to the desktop campaign.
• Automatic labelling of newly copied keywords: When keywords, ads, or ad groups are copied or merged, they will be labelled as having been modified by the upgrade center.
• Uninterrupted keyword level tracking: When you have two matching campaigns with different mobile and desktop keyword-level destination URLs, they will be merged automatically. The mobile URL will show on mobile phones and the desktop URL will show on non-mobile.
• ... and coming soon: Bulk upload functionality: Ad extensions and ad groups will soon be exportable to AdWords Editor.

We hope that the Upgrade Center and other resources we’ve shared will give you the tools you need to ease the transition to enhanced campaigns.

Don’t wait to upgrade
We will begin automatically upgrading all legacy campaigns on July 22nd, 2013.  Please continue to share your feedback with us as you are going through the upgrade process.

Posted by Andy Miller, Head of Mobile Search Solutions