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

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

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

New AdWords Integration Platform

Advertisers like to see reports in Analytics which are fresh - reflecting their up-to-the-minute AdWords settings - and consistent with the AdWords reporting. Today, Google Analytics is excited to announce that it is rolling out a new AdWords integration infrastructure for our advertisers to realize these benefits. More importantly, the new integration is laying a foundation for adding new AdWords dimensions quickly -  such as Ads - and paving the path for a rich set of reports such as enhanced campaign bid adjustments and Google Display Network targeting settings. Highlighted below are a few ways in which the new platform will start impacting AdWords reports in Google Analytics.

Improved data freshness and consistency
With the new infrastructure, reports will reflect the most recent AdWords settings such as campaign or ad_group names keeping them fresh and consistent with AdWords. In the example below, a user has renamed their campaign thrice from “Big Deal”   “Big Deals”   “Big Deal - Car Accessories”. In the current reports, visits are attributed to the three different campaign names while clicks are attributed to the newest campaign name. After this change,  both visits and clicks metrics would be associated with the most recent campaign name: “Big Deal - Car Accessories”, thus collapsing multiple rows into a single row.

Current Behavior
Campaign
Visits
Impressions
Clicks
Big Deal
542
0
0
Big Deals
381
0
0
Big Deal - Car Accessories
72
68724
1023

New Behavior
Campaign
Visits
Impressions
Clicks
Big Deal - Car Accessories
995
68724
1023

Laying the foundation for richer reporting
The new integration is laying the foundation for adding new AdWords dimensions quickly and for creating new reports with speed. Very soon, advertisers would be able to access reports based on their Enhanced Campaigns’ targeting settings; reports containing rich information to help fine tune ads targeting settings and bid adjustments for improved ROI (Return On Investment).

Show and hide AdWords data via linking
The new integration allows users to show or hide data for auto-tagged AdWords accounts by linking or unlinking the account to a profile. If a user un-links an Adwords account from a profile, all historical data pertaining to the account would be hidden by rolling them up into (not set).

Over the next few weeks, the new AdWords integration platform will be rolled out to GA accounts gradually.

Posted by Narendra Singhal, Google Analytics Team

Webinar Video: Combined Power of AdWords and Analytics

Last Tuesday, Rachel Witalec and Simon Rosen, Global Sales Strategy Leads, shared tips for getting more out of your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts by using them together. During the webinar, they showed why it’s important to link your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts (which is now even easier to do) and how to see Google Analytics data in AdWords as well as AdWords data in Google Analytics. They also presented a live demo of the reports and how to use them.

If you missed the webinar, you can check it out here:



Read on below for answers to some of the top questions we received during the webinar:

Why should I link my AdWords and Google Analytics accounts?
Linking your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts is an important practice to ensure the two measurement tools can work together to help you get the most from your advertising. The bottom line is that linking Analytics and AdWords gives you powerful information that can tell you where you should be spending more or less based on real ROI data. When you link accounts, the data can flow both ways - from Google Analytics to AdWords (for example, engagement metrics or remarketing lists), and from AdWords to Google Analytics (for example your AdWords cost data). In particular, you can take advantage of powerful features such as:
We covered this topic in detail during the webinar, so watch the video above to learn more.
    Could you share the list of resources that were provided during the webinar?
    Of course! Here are the links and resources we shared:
    What are the best practices around importing Google Analytics Goals? If i’m using AdWords Conversion Tracking should I also import goals?
    If you’re currently using AdWords Conversion Tracking, there are still benefits to also importing some of your goals from Google Analytics. In particular, some goals (such as engagement goals) can’t be tracked with AdWords Conversion Tracking, so importing these into AdWords can complement your Conversion Tracking data. However, it’s important not to import any goals that you are already tracking through AdWords Conversion Tracking as this can create double-counting and duplication, which would make your conversion data hard to interpret.

    Is it possible to link a My Client Center (MCC) account to Google Analytics?
    At this time it’s not possible to link an MCC to Google Analytics. Each individual AdWords account within an MCC needs to be linked to the appropriate Google Analytics property. Learn more here.

    How do I import Google Analytics engagement metrics into AdWords?
    The process for importing the metrics is straightforward, but it’s important to note that there are a couple of additional steps needed beyond linking the AdWords and Analytics account. The full set of instructions can be found here.

    I have noticed discrepancies between the data in my AdWords and Google Analytics accounts, do you know why?
    AdWords and Google Analytics differ in some very important ways regarding how they measure and report on data. It’s important to understand these key differences, which are outlined here. Additionally, there are key differences between AdWords Conversion Tracking and Google Analytics, which are covered in detail here.

    Can someone help me get more support with AdWords and Google Analytics?
    Yes, Google partners with a global network of certified partners to help. For AdWords, you can get support directly from Google or you can work with a Google Certified Partner to help with your AdWords management. You can learn more about both of those options here. If you’re looking for help with Google Analytics, you can tap into our global network of Google Analytics Certified Partners, who offer paid services for anything from Google Analytics tag implementation to product training to more strategic support. Learn more here.

    What is a tag?
    Tags are tiny bits of website code that let you measure traffic and visitor behavior, understand the impact of online advertising and social channels, use remarketing and audience-based marketing, test and improve your site, and more. The tags we mentioned in the webinar are AdWords Conversion Tracking and Google Analytics. These both help you understand the performance of your digital campaigns. While AdWords tracks the performance of your Google AdWords campaigns, Google Analytics tracks the performance of any traffic to your website -- such as from email marketing campaigns or social media. You can learn more about how they’re different here and through some of the content in the webinar.

    What is a conversion?
    A conversion is an action that a customer takes on your website that has value to your business, such as a purchase, a sign-up, or a view of a key page. These actions are called conversions because a customer's click translated -- or converted -- to business. Think of it as the cha-ching! from your cash register. A conversion happens when someone clicks your ad and then does something that’s valuable to your business, such as an online purchase or a call to your business from a mobile phone. Conversions help you understand how much value your ads bring to your business. You can read more here

    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:
    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

    See the full Impact of Unclicked Display and Video Ad Impressions using Google Analytics

    Every customer journey is different — a customer may see your display or video ads, receive an email, and then click through to your site from a search ad or organic search listing. Often, viewing display ads can attract your clients’ interest in your product and brand even if no click occurs. Traditionally, measurement technology separated out impressions or “view throughs” from clicks, but this separation missed out on valuable data on the impact of display advertising.

    Thanks to our integration with the Google Display Network (GDN), Google Analytics can now break down the separation between clicks and impressions and give a more complete view of the customer journey. When a user views display ads on the GDN, or video ads on YouTube, and later visits your website and converts, these interactions with your brand can now be captured in Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels reporting.

    GDN Impression Reporting is now available through limited whitelist. You can sign-up through this form to participate. Please note that we cannot guarantee access, but we will do our best to provide this feature to as many users as possible. Please also note that this data will only surface in the Multi-channel Funnels reports in Google Analytics. For more information on how to enable the feature in GA please see our help center article.

    Read on below for more tips on how to make the most of this new feature.

    How does Display fit on the conversion path?
    By enabling GDN Impression Reporting in Google Analytics, you can learn how your display impressions assist your conversions.


    In the Multi-Channel Funnels Overview Report you will see two additional conversion metrics. Impression Assisted Conversions shows how many of your conversion paths were touched by a display impression. Rich Media Assisted Conversions shows how many of your conversions had a rich media interaction on the path to conversion. Rich media interactions are user interaction with YouTube or rich media ad formats, such as ad expansion, video control (such as play, pause, and resume), or switching a video ad to full screen.

    With the new Interaction Type selector you can now immediately filter your reports based how your users interacted with your marketing.

    • Select Impression to see conversion paths from customers who saw your GDN display ads but did not click on them.
    • Add Direct to the mix, to see who saw an ad and then visited your site directly to convert on a relevant transaction or Goal.
    • If you want to focus on Rich Media interactions, you can select this interaction type to see how your users convert after interacting with your rich media and YouTube ads.

    How do I quantify the impact of display on the conversion path?
    In the Multi-Channel Funnels Top Conversion Path report you can see two new path elements, which indicate the presence of a display interaction. The “eye” symbol indicates a pure display impression from a non-interactive display image. This means a user has been exposed to your display ad on the journey to conversion, without clicking on it. The “movie” symbol indicates a user has interacted with one of your Rich Media ads, such as a YouTube video ad.

    Now you can see how many conversion paths, and how much associated value, has been driven through paths which benefited from a display impression or rich media interactions. To better quantify your brand targeted display efforts, consider breaking out these campaigns using custom channel grouping.



    Assigning partial credit to valuable display interaction touchpoints
    You can use the custom model builder from the Attribution Modeling tool to assign partial credit to these display events. Consider giving these events on the user’s conversion path more credit, and compare this against your baseline model.

    We also added a new set of dimensions to help you define valuable custom segments for your analysis. Want to see how many users are watching your TrueView video ads fully? Just create a custom segment using one of our new dimensions, TrueView. The full list of new dimensions is:
    • Above the Fold: This dimension uses the Google Above the Fold measurement solution. The value is “Yes” if the ad was in the visible area of the screen when the page was loaded.
    • Video Played Percent: The value can be “>=25%”, “>=50%”, “>=75%”, and “100%”, allowing you to see how much of a video ad was watched.
    • TrueView: If a user has watched more than 30 seconds of an ad, or watched the ad completely, this will have a value of “Yes.” This is a payable event.
    Enabling GDN Impression Reporting in Google Analytics
    Once we have whitelisted your account, please ensure you have successfully linked your AdWords account to your Google Analytics account. Linking accounts takes just a few moments. Under ‘Data Sources’ > ‘AdWords’ you can then see an entry for each linked AdWords account. In the row there is a toggle switch named ‘GDN Impression Reports’, which turns the display impression data from the Google Display Network On and Off. Data is recorded from the time the switch is turned On.


    We hope these new tools will help you understand the full impact of your display campaigns through Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution. Sign up today for GDN Impression Reporting in Google Analytics.

    Webinar Next Tuesday 6/18: Unleashing the Combined Power of Google Analytics and AdWords

    Register for next week’s webinar: Register here

    In many ways, Google Analytics and AdWords were made for each other. AdWords helps advertisers reach an audience and reports on advertising performance, and Google Analytics can tell you what actions your users take when they actually get to your site. You may have a high clickthrough rate (CTR) in AdWords, but what if you could see that 70% of those users left immediately after arriving on your landing page? While understanding the conversion rate of AdWords ads is critical, it’s also important to understand what happened to the users that did not convert or complete the action you wanted them to. For example, did users ‘bounce’ after landing on your site or did they view a few other pages and then leave? How much time did they spend on your site? Which keywords drive the majority of your Ecommerce revenue?

    Thanks to built-in Google product integrations that provide unique insights into your data, you can view reporting and data in Google Analytics that directly relates back to your advertising in AdWords. Understanding how to use both of them together will help you refine your AdWords campaigns and improve the performance of your business.


    Next Tuesday, join Rachel Witalec and Simon Rosen, Global Sales Strategy Leads, for a detailed look at how to use Google Analytics and AdWords together. In this webinar, we'll show you why it's important to link your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts, how to see both Google Analytics data in AdWords and AdWords data in Google Analytics, and walk through a live demo of the reports and how to use them. You'll learn how to make your marketing more effective by analyzing Google Analytics data, such as bounce rate, pages per visit, conversion rate, and Ecommerce revenue in conjunction with AdWords factors, such as keyword performance, ad copy, ad groups, and more. The webinar will also include a live Q&A section.

    Date: Tuesday, June 18, 2013
    Time: 10am PDT / 1pm EDT/ 6pm GMT
    Duration: 1 hr
    Level: 101 / Beginner
    Register: Register here

    AdWords Editor 9.9 is now available

    We're pleased to introduce AdWords Editor version 9.9, now available for Windows and Mac. Changes in this version include Google Display Network updates, import and export improvements, and new campaign settings. Here's an overview of the changes:

    Google Display Network updates
    Manage your ad group flexible reach settings with the new "Flexible reach" panel on the ad groups tab, or by using CSV import. We've also simplified the campaign-level Display Network settings (now simply "Enabled" or "Disabled").

    Import and export improvements
    You can now use CSV import to update your campaign-level settings for the Google Search Network and Google Display Network. You can also choose how AdWords Editor handles importation of duplicate ads with different URLs.

    New campaign settings
    We've added a new option for device targeting (BlackBerry) and a new ad rotation setting (Rotate indefinitely).

    For more details about these changes and other updates in the new version, read the 9.9 release notes.

    The next time you launch AdWords Editor, you'll see a prompt to upgrade to version 9.9. To learn more about upgrading, including how to keep unposted changes and comments when you upgrade, please review these instructions. You can also download version 9.9 from the AdWords Editor website.

    Note: 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 March 13, 2013.

    Posted by Mark Martel, Google Ads Team

    Making large-scale changes faster and easier in AdWords

    Have you ever needed to adjust your AdWords bids by 5% for several thousand keywords? Or had to find and replace a bit of text in your ad copy across a couple hundred ads? Maybe you’ve changed your web address and need to update all of your visible URLs and destination URLs across your account.

    We love making AdWords faster, simpler and more beautiful. So I’m happy to announce our new bulk editing features in the AdWords interface. With these tools, you’ll be able to more quickly and easily make large-scale changes across your entire account.

    Initial preview
    Initially, we’re releasing these bulk editing features to a limited number of AdWords accounts to collect your feedback and ensure everything works as expected. We hope to expand availability to everyone in the coming weeks.
    Update (Dec. 4, 2012): These features are now available in all AdWords accounts globally.
    Do more, quickly and easily
    Here's a summary of the kinds of changes you'll be able to make.

    Keywords
    • Search and replace text in the keyword or destination URL
    • Append text to the keyword or destination URL
    • Set new bids, including increasing to first page or top of page CPC
    • Increase or decrease bids
    • Change keyword match types
    • Add/remove labels
    Ads
    • Search and replace text in the ad or URL
    • Append text to the ad or URL
    • Change the capitalization of the text
    • Add/remove labels
    Ad Groups
    • Increase or decrease bids
    • Set new bids
    • Add/remove labels
    Campaigns
    • Increase or decrease budgets
    • Set new budgets
    • Add/remove labels

    You’ll be able to preview changes before you apply them. If you’re making a lot of changes, they’ll run in the background. That means you can leave the page and do other things in your account (or even log out entirely!) while bulk changes are in progress. A progress bar lets you know how close your changes are to completion. You can review your changes after they’re done.

    Below is an example of how easy it is to change “Road bike” to “Commuter bike” in over 25,000 ads with a single click.



    Keeping things simple
    As these new editing features become available in AdWords, you might also notice a few changes to buttons and menus to reduce redundancy and keep things simple for new users.

    The “Edit” button will become an “Edit” drop-down menu. We’ll also be phasing out the “Edit in table” view since its multi-item editing capabilities will be far surpassed. Now when making a change to an individual campaign element, you can just click on it to enter editing mode.

    More details and feedback
    We’ll be updating articles throughout the AdWords help center, including our AdWords glossary entry on bulk edits, as we roll out these new editing features.

    Please share your comments about the new bulk editing features with us if you use them over the next few weeks. Your feedback helps us make AdWords even better.

    Impression share reporting changes are here

    Impression share (IS) is the number of impressions you received in a campaign or ad group divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive. Today, we are rolling out several improvements and changes for AdWords impression share reporting announced back on October 1st. Here’s a recap of what’s new and some tips on how to use impressions share metrics.

    What’s new
    Here’s a list of the improvements.
    1. Distinct search and display columns. We’re adding new columns to cleanly separate search and display impression share. 
    2. “Hour of day” segmentation. Based on your feedback, we’re enabling “Hour of day” segmentation so you can evaluate how your ad coverage varies by the hour. 
    3. Filters, charts and rules. You’ll be able to apply filters, see charts, and apply automated rules using IS metrics. 
    4. Accuracy. We’re improving the accuracy of how we calculate impression share data. 
    As previously mentioned on our blog and social media, along with these changes, historical IS reporting data is now only available going back to October 1, 2012.

    Tips on using impression share metrics
    Many optimization experts advise a regular review of impression share metrics in well-performing campaigns and ad groups where you want more volume. Use the “Search Impression Share” (or “Display Impression Share” for display campaigns) and look for values below 100%. A lower IS metric means more opportunity for incremental impressions, clicks and conversions.

    Once you’ve identified well-performing campaigns or ad groups with good growth potential, you’ll want to determine which changes to make to increase your results. Start by looking at the “Lost IS (budget)” (for either Search or Display). This column tells you what percent of the time your ads didn’t appear because your daily budget was insufficient. To reduce lost impressions due to budget, simply raise your daily budget. In general, you’ll end up acquiring more customers at a similar ROI.

    When you’re satisfied with the results you’re seeing by reducing your “Lost IS (budget),” you can then look at your “Lost IS (rank).” This tells you what percent of impressions you missed out on due to an ad rank that was too low. To address this, you can optimize to improve your Quality Score or increase your bids. If you decide to increase your bids to increase ad impressions, closely watch how your other key performance metrics like cost per acquisition, profit, and return on ad spend are affected.

    Phasing out old IS columns in February 2013
    With the new IS columns now available, we’re planning to phase out the old IS columns in February 2013. Any saved reports using old IS metrics columns will need to be updated to use the new columns. When you try to access a report in the AdWords interface that’s using the old IS columns, you’ll be guided through the necessary steps to replace them with the new IS columns.

    More Discussion
    We hope these changes and tips help you make better optimization decisions. To exchange ideas about using IS metrics with other advertisers, you can click over to the AdWords Community. We also encourage you to contact AdWords support if you have questions.

    Posted by Dan Friedman, AdWords Product Manager

    AdWords Hangouts on Air series - Answering your most frequently asked questions

    Wonder what to do when you can’t find your ad? Or how to diagnose the cause of a performance fluctuation?

    We’re introducing a new Hangout on Air series on the Google Ads +Page where AdWords specialists from the 866-2-GOOGLE support team will discuss many of the issues you contact us about most frequently.

    On November 8 at 11 AM PDT, the AdWords experts will help you identify reasons your ads might not always appear to users. And then on November 15 at 11 AM PDT, we’ll talk about how to discover what causes spikes and dips in your AdWords traffic.

    To join the Hangouts, just sign into Google+ and add the Google Ads +Page to your circles. Each week we’ll put up a post soliciting your questions. Then, on Thursday, navigate to your Stream where you’ll be able to view our Hangout live with just one click.

    See you there!

    Posted by Courtney Pannell & Divya Vishwanath, AdWords support team

    Make better decisions in AdWords with your Google Analytics data

    A version of the following post originally appeared on the Inside AdWords Blog.

    Google Analytics users already know how useful it is to analyze advertising and web data together. Now we’re making it possible to use your Google Analytics data right in AdWords. After setting up AdWords to import your Google Analytics data, you’ll have access to key metrics like Bounce Rate, Pages Per Visit, and Average Visit Duration directly in the AdWords interface. With more performance data available right where you’re managing your campaigns, you can make better informed decisions and improve your AdWords ROI.

    Using your Google Analytics data
    With Google Analytics you can find insights that matter, including how visitors arrive at your website, how they use it, and how you can keep them coming back. Here are some ways you can take advantage of the new Google Analytics data available in AdWords to improve your results.
    • Attract more engaged users. If highly engaged users are an important goal, sort your ad groups to find the ones that deliver visitors who stay on your site the longest (“Average Visit Duration” or “Pages Per Visit”), and bid more for these.
    • Discover opportunities to convert more engaged visitors. You might find certain keywords or ads that have relatively low conversion rates, but great engagement metrics. You could lower your bids by a little and move on. Or you could see this as a great opportunity to convert clearly engaged visitors into buyers. By adjusting your offer, adding an incentive (like a coupon or discount code), or making your call to action more obvious and accessible, you might be able to improve your ROI and your conversion volume. To look for these types of opportunities, create a filter based on conversion rate and sort by Average Visit Duration, Pages per visit, or Bounce Rate.
    • Identify ads with badly matched landing pages or inaccurate targeting. Pages with both low conversion rates and low engagement metrics (low Average Visit Duration or High Bounce Rate) could indicate a poor landing page for a particular ad or keyword. It might also suggest inaccurate targeting. To identify and troubleshoot these problems, set up a filter for low conversion rate and low engagement rate and regularly monitor it. Since you’re using Google Analytics, you can easily set up A/B testing on the landing page using a Content Experiment.
    Success in action
    Casamundo, the biggest vacation rental listing service in Europe, has been an early tester of this new feature. They've used Google Analytics since 2008 and over the past 5 years they've grown and refined their AdWords campaigns to over 50 million active keywords across 10 languages. Their analysis shows that converting visitors research vacation rentals over an average of 7.4 visits, so understanding whether their ads and keywords can create strong engagement is vital to their business and how they optimize their AdWords campaigns. Seeing high bounce rates and low average time on site for a keyword means that the offer or destination page might not be a good match for that keyword.

    Having easier access to Google Analytics data right in AdWords has helped Torge Kahl, Online Marketing Manager, at Casamundo make better decisions and make optimizations more quickly. According to Torge: 
    “The combination of using both Google AdWords and Google Analytics has proved to be the perfect set of tools for us to achieve our goals, and we're very happy to see this combination get more integrated and powerful. Using Analytics data right within AdWords has let me better optimize our account and significantly improve the return on our AdWords investment."
    More details
    Please visit the AdWords Help Center for step-by-step directions on how to connect your Google Analytics profile data to your AdWords account and for more details. 

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

    Posted by Dan Friedman, AdWords Product Manager

    You can now see mobile ad performance in Google Analytics.

    Starting this week, some of you will see enhanced Analytics reports with mobile ad performance metrics. All AdWords reports in the new interface will be gaining a new visual toggle as shown below for “All”, “High-end Mobile” and “Tablet” ads.  All AdWords metrics available in Google Analytics can be segmented by these new mobile and tablet dimensions.

     

    As more consumers begin to make use of tablets or high-end mobile devices, businesses need to understand this shift towards mobile and adapt your marketing mix. This mobile ads reporting enhancement in Google Analytics is one of many steps that we are taking towards helping you make more sense of how mobile advertising interacts with your business.

    Please let us know what you think, and suggest any other mobile measurement options you’d like to see that help make sense of your mobile advertising effectiveness.

    - Phil Mui, Google Analytics team

    Linking all of your AdWords accounts to Google Analytics

    This is part of our series of posts highlighting the new Google Analytics. The new version of Google Analytics is currently available in beta to all Analytics users. And follow Google Analytics on Twitter for the latest updates. This week, Gavin Doolan, an Analytics specialist shares some of improvements to AdWords linking in Google Analytics v5.


    We are happy to announce a new feature that will allow you to use multiple AdWords accounts with Google Analytics more effectively.


    Previously it was only possible to link a single AdWords account to a single Google Analytics account. This made it more challenging to use auto-tagging and the AdWords reports inside of Google Analytics.


    Starting today, you can now link multiple AdWords accounts to your Google Analytics account. The new data sources section in the Google Analytics account settings area makes it easy to use auto-tagging with multiple AdWords accounts and import your AdWords data into Google Analytics.


    Let’s take a look at how to set this up:


    Before you start, make sure that you're using a Google account that has access to both your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts, and is an Administrator for the Analytics account.


    If you want to link multiple AdWords accounts to a single Analytics account, you need to set the new version of Analytics as your default:


    1. Sign into Google Analytics at http://www.google.com/analytics.
    2. Click New Version at the top right of the page.


    3. Click Make this version default.
    If you skip this step, you won’t see the new linking interface when you sign into AdWords.




    Linking your accounts


    1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
    2. Click the Reporting and Tools tab, then click Google Analytics.
    3. Click the gear icon at the top right.




    4. Click All Accounts at the top left of the page.




    5. Click the account to which you want to link the AdWords account.




    6. Click the Data Sources tab.




    7. Click the AdWords tab.
    8. Click Link Accounts button.




    If you are linking from a My Client Center child account the process is very similar. You can more in this article: Linking Analytics Accounts to My Client Center (MCC) Accounts.


    Improvements to applying AdWords account data to multiple profiles


    Now that you can link multiple AdWords accounts to Google Analytics, we’ve also made it easier import your AdWords data into multiple profiles in Google Analytics. We have put together a quick video demonstrating how to do this:




    If you’re less of a visual learner, you can always find instructions on how to link accounts in the Google Analytics Help Center.


    Happy linking!
    Gavin Doolan
    Google Analytics Team

    Launch: Intelligence Just Got Smarter!

    Hopefully, by now, you’re making good use of the Intelligence report in Google Analytics. If you’re looking to avoid the feeling that Google Analytics is “puking” too much data at you - a phrase coined by Google’s beloved analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik - you're not alone. We've heard you, and Intelligence is your first stop. As we mentioned in a previous post introducing Intelligence, it’s your dedicated assistant, monitoring your website traffic for significant changes that you should know of. Wondering what’s going on under the hood of your site traffic? Intelligence will tell you.

    And it’s improving and getting smarter. Here are two improvements we’re announcing today.

    New! AdWords Alerts

    If you have linked your Google Analytics account with an AdWords account, Intelligence will now automatically surface important changes in your AdWords campaigns performance right in Google Analytics. So, in addition to the alerts you are used to getting, such as time on site and revenue, you’ll now receive alerts about your AdWords campaigns and the traffic they are bringing to your website.

    You might already be familiar with custom alerts in Google AdWords, which alert you when important changes you specify happen in your account. With AdWords alerts in Analytics Intelligence, you benefit from automatic detection of significant changes, with no extra work for you to configure these yourself. For example, you might see an alert if the CTR for one of your campaigns increased unexpectedly. Or you might find that revenue from one of your destination URLs has dropped significantly from the week before. In both cases, you didn’t need to know ahead of time what to look for. These important changes are automatically detected and brought to your attention.

    Here's how to use them. AdWords alerts in Analytics Intelligence work just like automatic alerts have in the past. You can learn more about how to use Analytics Intelligence here: http://www.google.com/analytics/analytics-intelligence.html.

    In order to use AdWords alerts in Analytics Intelligence, you need to have a linked AdWords account. Additionally, you need to have destination URL auto-tagging turned on. If you already use the AdWords reports in Analytics, you’re all set.

    1. Sign into your Analytics account

    2. Select Intelligence from the left-hand navigation

    3. Choose daily (default), weekly, or monthly alerts

    Directly underneath the graph, you’ll see check boxes for Custom Alerts, Web Analytics, and AdWords, which is next to the orange arrow in image above.

    If you want to focus solely on your AdWords alerts, you can uncheck Custom Alerts and Web Analytics. Then, you can adjust the sensitivity slider to see just the most significant alerts or create an advanced segment to more closely investigate the change.

    New #2! More options in Custom Alerts

    It always easy to create a custom alert if there is a metric you’d like Intelligence to specifically monitor. See the orange arrow again, below:

    You name the alert, apply it to a profile, designate a time period, and then set conditions for the visitor (such as City matches New York, or Campaign matches Fall Sale), and the metric (such as time on site greater than 5 minutes, or % of new visits is greater than 30%).

    And now, we’ve added a ton more options in the Alert Conditions drop downs, including all of the 20 goals you have configured in each profile. They’ve also been dressed up for a night on the town, wearing their actual goal names such as “Goal8 Value: Visited >10 pages.” Only goals that you have configured will show up in the list, keeping the drop-down menu clean and courteous.

    Among the other conditions and metrics now available: e-commerce and AdWords metrics, as well as more traffic sources, and more content page metrics. And remember, you can tell Intelligence to email you when an alert is triggered.

    Intelligence is getting smarter and smarter, making you more effective. Try it out if you haven’t already.


    The New AdWords Reports in Google Analytics

    Last month, we made a number of announcements around the Google Analytics ecosystem. Along with launching the Google Analytics Application Gallery and making the new, faster page tag the default, we released a major update of the AdWords reports in Google Analytics. As of today, all Analytics users now have access to the new AdWords reports. With this update, you have access to three new reports, 10 new dimensions, and more AdWords metrics.

    The Growing Google Analytics Ecosystem

    Google Analytics is not simply a product but also a growing ecosystem of developers, tools, users, and partners. Today at the eMetrics Summit in San Jose, Brett Crosby made several announcements that highlight this ecosystem.

    All Google Analytics customers have access to a worldwide network of Google Certified Partners (formerly known as Google Analytics Authorized Consultants). And now the ecosystem is growing further with developers who are creating a variety of applications on the Google Analytics platform. Today, we’re announcing the Google Analytics App Gallery. Among the current list of 32 apps, you’ll find tools like Excellent Analytics, which lets you work with your Analytics data in an Excel spreadsheet, and the Analyticator for Wordpress, which automatically implements Google Analytics across your entire WordPress site. There are many more applications in the gallery, so go take a look. And if you’re a developer, you can learn how to publish apps in the App Gallery here.

    Google AdWords is another important part of the ecosystem. Website owners drive traffic using AdWords, and use Google Analytics to understand the performance of that traffic. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be making a new set of AdWords reports available in Google Analytics. These reports expand significantly on the AdWords reports you currently see in your account. For example, you can break out your AdWords traffic by actual search query, match type, distribution network, and many other AdWords attributes. We’ve added reports for day parting, placements, and destination URLs. For a 3-minute overview of what you can accomplish with the new reports, check out this video.




    Also, developers can now access AdWords information via the Google Analytics APIs. This makes it much easier to combine your AdWords and Google Analytics data for both analysis and automation. We’re very excited to see third party applications that use this capability to offer new functionality to advertisers. For details, check out this article, which includes a code sample and more, on Google Code.

    Also part of the AdWords/Analytics ecosystem, AdWords Search Funnels was announced one month ago, and today is available in all AdWords accounts. We’re also making two short tips videos available (tip 1 and tip 2) that illustrate just a couple of the ways you can use Search Funnels.

    Finally, supporting the ecosystem of all websites using Google Analytics, the new faster page tag comes out of beta. The asynchronous tracking snippet will soon be the default snippet when you set up a new profile. This new page tag will speed up your site and every site that uses Google Analytics across the web. If you want to upgrade from your existing tag (which we highly recommend), you can learn how to do that here.

    We'll follow up with deep dive posts on each of these topics next week. Thanks for being part of the ecosystem.

    Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team

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