Google Data

Originally posted on the Google Analytics blog

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 Active View 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.

Posted by Stefan F. Schnabl, Product Manager, Google Analytics

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.

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.  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.

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
• Sitelink text cannot be the same as other sitelinks in the same ad group/campaign or the main ad that’s serving
• 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

Originally posted on the official Google blog

Ten years ago we launched AdSense to help publishers earn money by placing relevant ads on their websites. I can still remember the excitement and anticipation as AdSense went live that first day.  Our small team huddled together in a cramped conference room, and right away we saw that publishers were as excited about AdSense as we were.

Fast-forward 10 years, and AdSense has become a core part of Google’s advertising business. The AdSense community has grown to include more than 2 million publishers, and last year alone, publishers earned more than $7 billion from AdSense. AdSense is a community that thrives because of all the content creators we are so fortunate to partner with. Their stories inspire us to do our part to make AdSense great.

On this occasion, it’s especially inspiring to hear the stories of partners who have been with us since the very beginning—like a retiree in New Zealand who was able to pursue her dream of writing about her garden, a tech support expert in Colorado who can spend more time with his kids, and a theme park reviewer who now sends employees around the world to test and review rides—all thanks to money earned from AdSense.

As part of our 10th anniversary celebration, we hope you’ll tune into our live Hangout on Air today at 10 a.m. PDT (5 p.m. GMT) on the AdSense Google+ page. I look forward to joining several of our partners to share stories from the early days of AdSense, talk about how we’ve all grown since then, and discuss the future for publishers and online advertising. And if you want even more 10th anniversary celebration, just visit our AdSense 10th anniversary page at any time.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, SVP, Ads and Commerce

This week, we published some of the reasons advertisers have already upgraded more than 3 million legacy campaigns to enhanced campaigns. If you have already upgraded all of your campaigns, then you are all set!  If you still have some legacy campaigns in your account, this post will cover what will happen to campaigns that are auto upgraded starting on July 22, 2013.

Default upgrade path
We strongly encourage everyone to upgrade before July 22, 2013 so your campaigns are set up as you’d like. If you don’t, then the AdWords system will upgrade them using the following default settings.

Campaigns will be configured, like all new AdWords campaigns, to reach customers across all devices. Upgraded campaigns require a mobile bid adjustment setting, which influences your bids, ad position, and click volume on mobile devices. The table below shows how the mobile bid adjustment will be set depending on the devices targeted by a legacy campaign. Of course, you’re free to change your default mobile bid adjustment and all other campaign settings after a campaign is automatically upgraded.

Special cases
What we’ve described above covers the vast majority of legacy campaigns. But there are some special cases with different default upgrade settings, like a legacy campaign that runs ads on the Google Display Network and uses device-specific targeting. Details on these special cases are in the AdWords Help Center.

Upgrade quickly and easily today
If you’re upgrading one or multiple campaigns, we recommend that you use the AdWords upgrade center. It’s quick and takes you step-by-step through the process. Learn more or visit the upgrade center now.

We’re here to help
We want you to be successful with AdWords, so please contact us if you’d like any assistance with the upgrade to enhanced campaigns. For more details, tips and resources on succeeding with enhanced campaigns, please check out our help center articles and enhanced campaigns website.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President of Engineering

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

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Google Analytics team

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.

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

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

It’s a typical Friday night quandary—you want to see a movie, but the question is, what movie should you watch? The decision to see a specific film actually involves quite a bit of research, and as moviegoers are increasingly turning to search to learn more about various titles, we have been able to identify general search patterns that give us insight into awareness and intent levels. In ‘Quantifying Movie Magic with Google Search,’ we examine how Google search and paid ad click patterns can predict box office revenue, and what digital engagement can tell us about the moviegoer decision-making process.

We took a look at 99 of the top box office hits in 2012, and drew these key findings about the way people search for movies:

• The decision to see a movie is a very highly-considered research process. On average, moviegoers consult 13 sources before they make a decision.* And people are now searching more than before – while overall new movie releases were down last year, searches in the movie category on Google are up 56% from 2011 to 2012, signaling an increase in digital engagement and appetite for more information.
• Trailer-related search trends four weeks out from a movie release provide strong predictive power for opening weekend box office revenue. Interestingly, while we see more search volume in weeks closer to the release week, the Google and YouTube search patterns four weeks out from the release have the strongest link to moviegoer intent. At four weeks out, trailer search volume on Google coupled with both the franchise status of the movie and seasonality can predict opening weekend box office revenue with 94% accuracy.
• Opening weekend prediction modeling shows high correlation between search volume / paid click volume and box office revenue. In the seven day window prior to a film’s release date, if a film receives 250,000 search queries more than a similar film, the film with more queries is likely to perform up to $4.3M better during opening weekend. When looking at search ad click volume, if a film has 20,000 more paid clicks than a similar film, it is expected to bring in up to $7.5M more during opening weekend.
• Moviegoers search differently for big movie releases. During slower box office weeks, we see more searches on generic terms (such as “new movies” or “movie tickets”), whereas during the week of a tentpole movie release we see more searches on movie titles (such as “The Hunger Games” or “Avengers”). For tentpole film releases, marketers have the ability to capture more interest by advertising on title-related search terms, whereas for non-tentpole releases it is important to advertise on more generic terms.
• 48% of moviegoers decide what film to watch the day they purchase their ticket, so it’s important to have a continued search presence through opening weekend and beyond.*

By understanding how and when moviegoers search for information, movie marketers have the opportunity to adjust their strategies to further engage, and more importantly, convince moviegoers to choose their film. To learn more, download the full whitepaper from Think with Google.

Posted by Andrea Chen, Principal Industry Analyst, Media and Entertainment

*Source: Google Social Research Study, December 2012

Advertisers understand that sometimes it’s easier to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’ when promoting a business. As search ads continue to evolve, we want to make it easier for you to do both. Today we’re announcing the beta launch of image extensions, which will allow you to add new visual elements to your search ads.  We’ve added many extensions to search ads to help you be more relevant to users.  Image extensions enable you to more accurately convey the body style of a car, the cut of a pair of jeans, or a particular shade of eyeshadow, making your ads richer and more informative so they stand out in a crowded marketplace.

As the web evolves, Google users expect richer and more diverse content. More than one in six searches on Google today provide results with visual content. Image extensions will show in some cases when we determine that a search is likely for visual content. For example, it is more likely that your image extensions will show for a query like luxury car designs than locations of nearby car dealerships.

You can choose the images that you want displayed with your search ads and send them to us for review.  You must have the necessary rights to the the images you wish to display with your ads.  We encourage you to submit your images as we continue to experiment with and improve our visual ad formats.

Image extensions are currently running in English globally.  If you are interested in participating in the image extensions beta, contact your account manager or fill out this form.

Posted by Awaneesh Verma, Product Manager, Ad Formats

Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) is a valuable product to help advertisers keep their AdWords campaigns effective and relevant.  DSA maintains a fresh index of your inventory using Google’s organic web crawling technology to help ensure ads are generated based on the most recent content on your website.

Since we’ve opened up the product to all advertisers last October, thousands of advertisers have successfully used DSA to target their websites.  On average, they’re getting a 5-10% increase in clicks and conversions and positive ROI.  Just like keyword based campaigns, DSA works best when it’s properly set-up and optimized.  In this post, we’ll cover some tips and best practices for optimizing Dynamic Search Ads.

1. Start off with broad targets
   Dynamic Search Ads helps advertisers target long-tail queries without having to create and manage a long list of keywords.  To realize the true benefit of DSA, target your whole website or large portions of your website to help identify segments of traffic never targeted before.

   Qoo10, an e-Commerce leader in Asia, used this technique and immediately benefitted from DSA’s ability to “fill the gaps” between their existing keyword coverage and what they sell online.  As Muhd Fitri Khamis, Qoo10’s Marketing Executive, notes: “If you start off with targeting a few pages rather than the whole domain, the results may not be as compelling.”  Today, Qoo10’s DSA campaign accounts for 10% of sales coming from AdWords campaigns and the CTR of their DSA campaign is 33% higher than other campaigns.

2. Use negative targets
   Especially in the early stages of your DSA campaign, you should use the search terms and categories report to exclude searches and parts of your web site that you don’t want to advertise or that underperform.  A good starting set of negative targets are any keywords you have paused or deleted in the recent past as well as any pages unrelated to selling products such as customer help pages and general FAQ’s.

   You can learn more about how to set-up exclusions to block certain pages of your website as well as how to add negative keywords in this Help Center article.

3. Group highly related pages and products of similar values together
   Similar to keywords and ad groups, group highly related pages or products with similar economic values within the same target to increase ad relevance and ROI. For example, you might group your beach vacation rentals together in one target and group your ski lodge rentals together in another target.  You also might want to bundle high-priced, high-margin products separately from low-priced, low-margin products.  For example, group high-end electronics separately from accessories.

   You can do this by creating more narrow targets as explained in our FAQ’s.  This approach will help create more targeted ads for users and help increase ROI by setting different bids for products of different economic values.

4. Use conversion optimizer or target CPA
   Dynamic Search Ads is best coupled with CPA based bidding.  CPA based bidding helps give you a more automated approach to bid management and by clearly defining your ROI goals, you can ensure that you will continue to hit your CPA goals even as you expand your campaign reach and as the content on your website changes.

   This combination worked extremely well for Soft32.com, a large software download company, who successfully combined DSA with Conversion Optimizer to automatically set-up campaigns targeting thousands of their landing pages – all while keeping within their target CPA.  Founder & CEO Lucian Todea said the company was able to take advantage of the power of the long tail, and within just a couple of months had seen DSA deliver a 15% increase in conversions.

5. Don’t set it and forget it
   As your website structure and content changes, please make sure your DSA campaign is kept up-to-date to reflect your latest changes.  Remember also to regularly check your search terms and categories report to raise bids on high performing pages and add poor performing pages and queries as negative targets.

For step-by-step directions on setting up a Dynamic Search Ads campaign, please visit the AdWords Help Center.  You can also view a recorded webinar to learn more about Dynamic Search Ads.

Posted by Jen Huang, AdWords Product Manager

Upcoming June webinars:

Every event is led by Google product experts and includes time for live Q&A.

Visit our webinar site to register for any of the live sessions and to access our large library of recorded content. You can also stay up-to-date on the schedule by adding our Learn with Google calendar to your own Google calendar to automatically see upcoming webinars.

Today’s post about using automated bidding within enhanced campaigns is the fifth in our bidding best practices series. The previous blog posts covered calculating mobile, location and time bid adjustments. 

We launched bid adjustments for device, location and time of day to help you control your bids without duplicating campaigns as part of enhanced campaigns. We’ve heard from many advertisers that these tools help them improve results and efficiency. However, for some advertisers – particularly those with large programs and accounts – managing campaigns at scale can still be time-intensive and complex.

Since bidding is fundamentally important to your success with AdWords, we’ve developed a set of automation tools to help improve your performance and save you time.

Benefits of AdWords bid automation
For almost any advertiser, using the right automated bidding solution can drive better results and improved efficiency. Here are some key benefits to using AdWords automated bid strategies in enhanced campaigns.

• Save time by optimizing keyword bids for your goal at scale. Automated tools dynamically change bids to meet your advertising goals across your keywords — whether it’s 100 or 1 million keywords — saving you time and effort.
• Create and manage campaigns independently from bidding strategy. New flexible bid strategies let you apply multiple bidding strategies within a single campaign or across campaigns. This provides you the freedom to optimize towards multiple advertising goals in the same campaign or across campaigns without being constrained by account structure. Read more about these below.
• Improve performance with auction-time bidding. Two flexible bid strategies, Target CPA and Enhanced CPC, use a combination of real-time performance signals including location, device, partner site and operating system to set specific bids at every auction. With auction-time bidding, these automated tools automatically calculate bid adjustments for you.
• Optimize over time to continuously improve results. Our automated tools adapt to performance changes over time, saving you the effort of manually evaluating performance reports and continuously changing bids to keep up with performance fluctuations.
• Easy to try. AdWords bid automation tools are free to use and available to all advertisers right in the AdWords interface.

When to use bid automation
In this section, we’ll provide guidance on when to use each of Google’s automated bid strategies within enhanced campaigns.

Target CPA (the flexible bid strategies version of Conversion Optimizer) is our most powerful bid automation tool. This bid strategy sets an optimum bid for every auction by predicting the likelihood of a conversion. It uses real-time inputs such as location, time, device, and network placement. Apply this strategy to ad groups or campaigns if your main goal is to maximize conversion volume while maintaining a target CPA. Target CPA will automatically set and optimize your bid adjustments for you, however, a -100% mobile bid adjustment will keep your ads from appearing on mobile devices.

Enhanced CPC can improve performance by adding automation on top of your manual bids. This automated bid strategy will refine your manual bids using the same real-time conversion prediction technology as Target CPA. You can still apply bid adjustments with this automated strategy if you know that device, location or time of day affects your conversion value in ways that are not measured in the conversion tracker. For example, if you want to use automation, but know that your mobile clicks drive value beyond online conversions, such as store visits, you can enable Enhanced CPC in combination with a bid adjustment for mobile to account for the difference in expected value per click.

The last two flexible bid strategies apply bid automation and work with existing manual bid adjustments. If your goal is getting the most clicks within a target spend, you can implement the Maximize Clicks bid strategy. Alternatively, if you’re more interested in visibility with top position impressions, you can try the Target Search Page location strategy. Read more about these strategies here.

If you’ve implemented one of the four flexible bid strategies, you can monitor your performance in the Shared Library and adjust if necessary.

While it might take some time to refine your automated bid strategy, the benefits of bid automation will improve your performance while saving you time and effort. To read more about automation and bidding adjustments, check out our Help Center.

Posted by Andrea Cohan, Product Marketing Manager, AdWords

Today’s post will provide guidance on using time bid adjustments.  It is the fourth post in a bidding best practices series. Previous posts covered optimization strategies for setting location and mobile bid adjustments as well as prioritization.

In our constantly connected world, people are searching on multiple devices throughout the day for places to go, things to buy, and ways to stay entertained. People often use similar search results in different ways depending on the time of day that they search. For example, if someone is searching for “Hawaii vacations” during the workday, she may just be doing research for an upcoming trip.  When she returns home and conducts the same search in the evening, she may be more likely to have all the info she needs to book the flights and hotels.

With this constant connectivity, search marketers can now receive web traffic from across the globe and around the clock. Most businesses can still identify peak days and times when they see better ROI and lower costs.  At other times, customer activity might be slower and some businesses may wish to drive additional visits even if the cost is a bit higher.

If your business sees regular cycles of customer behavior and AdWords performance during the week, then using the time bid adjustment feature in AdWords enhanced campaigns may make sense for you.  This feature can help you improve results by allowing you to increase or decrease bids by day of the week or time of day.

Getting started with time bid adjustments
Before making any adjustments, it’s important to choose the right level of granularity for analysis.  For example, will you adjust bids by day of the week, eight hour increments, or down to the hour?  While you may be tempted to optimize down to the hour, it’s important to ensure that you have sufficient data to make decisions for each time period.  A general rule would be to have 1,000 clicks and 30 conversions for each time period you’re looking to optimize.

Calculating your time bid adjustments
Once you decide that using time bid adjustments are right for your business, compare the performance of your ads at varying times to your overall performance goal.  This will allow you to easily determine the right bid adjustment for each time period.

If you are setting a goal using a cost per action target, your bid adjustment can be calculated as follows:

Time bid adjustment = 100%* (( Campaign Goal  ÷ Actual Performance) – 1)

For example, let’s say you are an online retailer who sees better traffic and performance on weekdays as opposed to weekends. You would like to target a $30 cost per acquisition overall, but you are experiencing a $25 cost per acquisition on weekdays and a $40 cost per acquisition on weekends.  To meet your performance goal and maximize efficiency you can use a time bid adjustment.  Simply adjust your bids on weekdays by +20%, and on weekends by -25%.  This allows you to optimize for your goal by bidding more aggressively on weekdays when conversions are more cost effective, and less aggressively on weekends when performance is lower.

Test and Learn
Constant iteration is a key part of the optimization process. To ensure you are optimized over time, check the performance for each time adjustment regularly on the Time subtab in your campaign settings. Raise your bid adjustment where your performance exceeds your goal and lower your bid adjustment where your performance falls short of your goal. This will allow you to optimize your bids and adjust to changing consumer behavior.

Tips
You should also take this opportunity to study your internal data to understand when you have peak activity in terms of conversion rates, order size, and overall volume.  If you have a physical store or run a call center, you may consider using those hours of operation as guideposts for setting your time bid adjustment.  Studying the volume of activity during the times you are open can give you a good sense of when you may wish to raise or lower your bids.  For example, if your call center is closed during the night, you may wish to decrease bids during this time to avoid sending customers to unsupported lines.  By the same token, if you operate a physical store and see lulls in traffic during certain hours, you may wish to increase bids during this time and run ads with promotional offers to drive more people to your business.

Reminders
Time bid adjustments are a key part of enhanced campaigns.  To use time bid adjustments alongside location and mobile bid adjustments, you’ll need to upgrade your campaigns.  Starting on July 22, 2013, we will begin automatically upgrading all campaigns to enhanced campaigns.

Later this week, we’ll dive deeper into ways you can use tools like flexible bid strategies to automate your bid settings based on specific business goals like cost per acquisition.

Posted by Ting Zhang, Global Search Solutions

The ability to make changes to your AdWords account in bulk enables you to spend more time optimizing your campaigns to grow your business, and less time on repetitive tasks.  Just last month, we launched keyword bulk uploads to help you add, edit and remove keywords at scale.  Today, we are happy to announce bulk uploads for ads and ad groups.

Imagine you download a report from the Ads tab and want to test different creatives in ad groups that are underperforming.  You might also want to turn off certain ad groups, or change the budget for others.  Instead of toggling back and forth between AdWords and your spreadsheets, you can now download reports from the Ads and Ad Groups tabs, make changes directly in your spreadsheet, and upload them directly to your account.

Uploading changes to your ads and ad groups is simple.  Just like with keywords, when you download a report you will be prompted to make the report “editable.”

After making your changes, you can save your changes in CSV, TSV and Excel formats.  To upload this file, click “Reports and uploads” on the left navigation panel, and then select the “Uploads” tab.  You will see a new column here titled “Upload type,” shown below.

You can only upload one report type at a time; for example, if you want to make bulk changes to both your keywords and your ad creatives, you would have to do this by editing and uploading two separate reports.

As with keyword bulk uploads, there is no way to cancel or automatically reverse your changes once a report has been submitted.  Please remember to save a copy of your original downloaded report if you need to know what your settings were before you made changes and submitted a bulk upload.  You can also view your change history and reverse any unintended changes manually.

To learn more about bulk uploads for ads and ad groups, visit the bulk uploads article in our Help Center or discuss in our AdWords Community.

Posted by Prashant Baheti, Product Manager, AdWords

On Tuesday, June 4th DoubleClick will host its annual digital leadership summit, thinkDoubleClick, with provocative conversations about the future of digital marketing and media, and you’re invited to join via live stream by registering here!

Hear executives from advertising, agencies and publishers discuss some of the big questions in digital such as:

• How do creatives leverage, but not be overwhelmed by, technology to deliver next-generation consumer experiences?
• What unique experiences are publishers developing that add value to consumers and advertisers alike?
• How do CMOs best use social with other marketing channels to build strong brands?

The full agenda for the thinkDoubleClick event is listed below.  You can join in the conversation on June 4 by using the #thinkDCLK hash and commenting during the live stream.

Register here for the thinkDoubleClick summit
June 4, 2013
9 am – 12:15 PDT

We look forward to seeing you on June 4th at thinkDoubleClick.