As agencies managing AdWords accounts, you know your clients are not alone in the auction -- any number of advertisers may be using AdWords to offer some of the same goods and services as them. You can monitor their performance and use optimization tools to improve ROI, but you still might not know how they're performing as compared to similar advertisers. We’re aiming to bring more transparency to AdWords with the launch of Analyze competition in the Opportunities tab . For now, this feature is only available to a small number of advertisers using the English language AdWords interface, but we'll expand this to more advertisers in the near future. ‘Analyze competition’ examines an account’s activity over the past two weeks and lists categories that represent the products or services a client is advertising. Categories are based on actual Google.com search terms and are matched up against a client's keywords, ad text, and landing page text. For each category associated with a client's account, you’ll see a bar graph, which shows individual performance compared to the average performance of other advertisers in the same category. When you hover over the data in the 'Competitive Range' column, you'll be able to see more details such as the exact size of the competitive range, the mean and median performance levels for this range, as well as data on the absolute top and bottom performers. In the case below, you’ll see that we’ve chosen to evaluate our performance based on how our CTR compares with that of other advertisers. In addition to CTR, you’ll also be able to look at competitive data for impressions, clicks, and average position, and you can segment data by advertiser location. (click to view full size image) As with other areas of the Opportunities tab, you’ll be able to export information from ‘Analyze competition’ to a .csv file. It’s important to remember that data in ‘Analyze competition’ is anonymous, and as part of our commitment to protect your clients' privacy, we don't reveal information about any advertiser's identity. Now that you know what ‘Analyze competition’ does, here are some tips on how to make the most of this data : Take action. Click the ‘Explore ideas’ button to see customized keyword, bid, and budget ideas for your clients' accounts. Consider clients' advertising goals and focus on the most relevant metrics. It’s not always a bad thing to perform below competitors on a metric that’s not important to clients. If you see that one campaign is performing poorly in comparison to the competition, you can get insight into changes you can make to improve that campaign. Just like the other areas of the Opportunities tab , we hope that ‘Analyze competition’ will help you uncover new opportunities to improve your clients' AdWords performance. To learn more about this feature, visit the Help Center , or watch this short video . To read more about and submit feedback on ' Analyze competition ,' as well as discover other new developments in AdWords, visit the Ad Innovations page. Posted by Alexandra Kenin, Product Marketing Manager
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AdWords brings you insight about the competitive landscape
For part 3 of our "Coffee break" series, we caught up with Ryan Van Horn, Account Coordinator at the digital agency Razorfish , who shared with us how his team used Ad Sitelinks to improve the user experience on branded search queries for the travel services and insurance company AAA . Here's what Ryan had to say: What was the primary campaign/product you were marketing for the client? AAA’s main focus is to drive consumers to sign up for AAA Membership service. In addition, AAA has several other metrics that are considered when determining the success of the program, such as travel bookings and user interaction with their maps services. What was the client's goal? Essentially, AAA wanted to improve the user experience on branded search terms. Consumers identify with the AAA brand in different ways. For some consumers, AAA is synonymous with roadside assistance, while others may associate AAA with insurance or discounts when traveling. The client wanted to find a solution that allowed the messaging on branded terms to convey the different services offered and to understand which message converted better, ultimately informing future testing opportunities. What Google solutions did you use to meet the goals? Ad Sitelinks have allowed the team to tailor ad copy that encompassed the various AAA services by leveraging four additional links below the main ad copy. The links allow us to send consumers deeper into the AAA website and direct them to the most relevant landing page. Can you describe the implementation process? We chose the four services deemed most valuable by the client - Membership (join), Travel (bookings), Discounts, and AAA Map Services (Triptik Travel Planner) - and created a link for each service. We then selected the most relevant landing page for each link and created tracking that allowed us to monitor the performance of each individual link. (click to view image) How did the Google solution perform? The implementation of the Ad Sitelinks helped to improve both clickthrough rates (CTR) and conversion rates, as consumers were able to click on the link that was most relevant to the service they were interested in and sent them to the most relevant landing page. What improvements did the client see as a result of this campaign? The program saw significant improvements in performance across the board. CTR increased by 6%. The average CPC decreased by 11%. Overall conversion rate increased by 11%. The campaign drove a 16% lift in weekly conversions. The cost-per-conversion was 14% more efficient after implementation. Did any results surprise you? While we were not surprised that overall performance improved, we were surprised by how much the performance improved. Initially, the Ad Sitelinks were launched within a campaign that only included the core branded AAA keywords. This particular campaign is a key membership volume driver and already had extremely high CTRs and conversion rates. To see CTRs increase by 6% and conversion rates increase by 11% was a much higher increase than we anticipated. If you did not use this Google solution, how would things have been different? Had Ad Sitelinks not been made available, we wouldn’t have had the ability to improve the overall user experience. Ad Sitelinks have allowed us to give the users options of other services offered by AAA. The program would have likely remained steady and would have not seen the improvements in performance. Overall, we feel that this ad placement enhanced searchers' interaction with the AAA brand while simultaneously improving performance of the core metrics. For more information on Ad Sitelinks, please visit the AdWords Help Center . Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team
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Coffee break with clients - AAA and Razorfish improve user experience with Ad Sitelinks
Do you find yourself creating templated ads for clients where only a few variables change, such as a city, price or product? With the Ads Multiplier , templated ads can now be produced much faster. The Ads Multiplier is a open source Google Apps Script for Google Spreadsheets that populates AdWords creative templates with a list of user-provided inputs. With the Ads Multiplier, just input variables, create the templated ad text and run the script to generate a new tab with your final ad creatives. The script is triggered via menu option: Ads Multiplier --> Generate Output. See the screenshots below for an example of what the Ads Multiplier script can produce for Awesome Airlines, a hypothetical travel client: Inputs: (click to view image) Templates: (click to view image) Completed Ads: (click to view image) The best way to access and use the Ads Multiplier is through the sample spreadsheet provided here , which includes the example data for Awesome Airlines. Just click on "Use this template" to download a copy of the template into your Google Docs and run the script. You can edit and add new inputs and reuse the template. We do recommend occasionally coming back and getting the latest template from the link here to ensure you have the latest updates to the tool. For more information on using the Ads Multiplier, please visit the Ads Multiplier wiki . Posted by Adam Hersly, Launch Manager, Partner Solutions Organization Global Tools Team
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Introducing the Ads Multiplier
For an agency today, it's very difficult to reach a client's customers online because their customers are consuming media everywhere. To reach users as they browse millions of websites across the Internet, agencies need to buy and to tailor ads across thousands of websites, and they need to measure how well these campaigns performed on all of these sites as well. At Google, we've built tools and platforms to address these challenges for agencies. Google is focused on delivering performance to advertisers and agencies through the Google Content Network (GCN), our ad network of over a million AdSense sites, which includes some Google properties like Google Finance and YouTube. One of the ways we deliver high performing ads is through contextual targeting, the science of matching the right ad with the right website content. For example, we might show an ad from a tech company on a tech review site because the ad will be relevant to the user and therefore, perform well for the advertiser. We've been working on helping agencies match the best ad through more precise contextual targeting that enables advertisers to focus on very specific themes. Over the past year, we've made over 60 improvements to our contextual targeting technology. In August, we enabled advertisers and agencies to do more precise contextual targeting , and we've seen that it can be used to effectively drive conversions. MediaWhiz tested this strategy for American Laser Centers to promote the client's hair removal and aesthetic services. The agency used both text and display ads to raise brand awareness as well as to drive customer action. Instead of creating a few ad groups with many keywords, it created hundreds of small, very specifically targeted ad groups containing around four to six keywords each. The highly targeted groups cut across a wide range of American Laser Centers’ business areas, covering laser hair removal, skin aesthetics spa treatments, at-home hair removal and many more related topics and themes. By using small, focused keyword lists in each ad group, the team was able to increase the relevance of the client's ads on the Google Content Network, helping to attract the exact customers interested in the services American Laser Centers offers. Using the Google Content Network Placement peformance report , MediaWhiz could optimize and measure exactly how well American Laser Centers' campaign did. According to Erick Maks, advertising director at American Laser Centers: This strategy of multiple ad groups containing tightly grouped keywords helped American Laser Centers raise its campaign conversion rate by 233 percent in the first three-month period. During the same period, by fine-tuning at the ad group level and reducing waste, it also cut impressions in half—while simultaneously increasing conversions by 365 percent. The complete case study is available for download here . If you're interested in additional resources, be sure to check out this post on using the Wonder wheel to generate ad group themes, and watch the recording of last year's webinar on more precise contextual targeting. Posted by Jesse Nichols, Agency Team
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Case study - Perfecting the art of matching the right ad to the right site
Our previous post in the Content Network Optimization University series covered the basics of setting up and launching a good campaign on the Google Content Network for your clients. Today we will cover more advanced optimization strategies. We've compiled these by observing best practices from the most successful advertisers on the network. Whether you're new to the Content Network or have been using it for a while, you can get better results from your campaigns. The best practices are structured along 3 key phases of a campaign - Build Effective campaigns Optimize for better results Expand your campaign for more traffic Build Effective campaigns Taking time up front to set up your clients' campaigns correctly goes a long way in getting higher quality traffic to their sites. Let’s recap the top strategies. Separate search and content network campaigns: Setting up a separate campaign just for the Content Network will will give you more control over daily budgets, ad groups, keywords and bids. Watch this demo on campaign setup. Create many, tightly themed ad group: AdWords can target your ads more precisely by building multiple ad groups, each with a small tightly-themed set of 5 to 20 keywords. Watch this demo on ad group setup and this demo on keyword selection . Copy your best performing text ads from search campaigns: For initial setup, it is best to use the text ads with the highest click-through rates from the clients' search campaigns. Watch this demo on ad text best practices. Setup same starting CPC bid as search campaigns: We recommend starting with the same maximum CPC bid as the search campaign ad groups you set up for your clients. Once AdWords has collected enough data, our smart pricing technology will automatically optimize bids on Content Network to give your clients more profitable clicks. Watch this demo on bidding tactics . Set up AdWords Conversion Tracking on your clients' sites: Install Conversion Tracking on clients' websites to measure sales and leads (conversions) they get from each ad group and placement. Watch this demo to learn how conversion tracking works on the Content Nework. Optimize for better results It is important to monitor clients' campaigns' performance and consistently optimize individual elements. Before making significant changes (e.g. changing bids, excluding high volume sites, pausing ad groups), wait until enough click or conversion data has accrued; we recommend 5+ conversions or 100+ clicks per site Exclude poor-performing sites: Get more qualified traffic and boost conversions by excluding sites that perform poorly for a campaign, based on number of clicks, average CPC and particularly conversions. Focus keywords and exclude less relevant keywords: Add more keywords that describe the clients' products and ad group themes in greater detail. Also, add negative keywords to fix cases of incorrect targeting caused by synonyms and similar, but less relevant keywords. Watch this demo on refining campaigns . Adjust bids to manage costs: Change bids for ad groups or individual sites based on conversion rate, average CPC and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) to meet clients' performance goals. Bid higher for better performing sites to get more traffic, and lower bids for lower performers. Use Conversion Optimizer to manage CPA: Google Conversion Optimizer is a fee tool that automatically manages bids at the site level to reach a maximum CPA bid, which is the amount a client is willing to pay for a conversion (such as a purchase or signup). Watch this video on how to use Conversion Optimizer . Expand campaign for more traffic To get additional traffic and boost sales from your campaign, we recommend using a Content keyword expansion strategy. Use the Wonder Wheel tool for ad group ideas: You can use Wonder Wheel on Google Search to brainstorm new ad group themes and keyword ideas. When you search for any topic on Google.com, Wonder Wheel will generate up to eight related topics for you to consider. Create new ad groups to reach additional parts of the network: Each topic in Wonder Wheel represents a possible ad group theme for a campaign. Simply click on any of the topics to see other searches and themes related to it. Also, any closely related topics that are less relevant to your product, are great candidates for a negative keyword lists. Watch this demo to learn how to use this strategy . Expand your keywords set to get more traffic: Once you have finalized ad group themes, use the AdWords Keyword Tool to get keyword ideas. Enter an ad group theme description or keyword under the "Descriptive words or phrases " tab. Select the 5 to 10 most frequently searched keywords and save them to your client's ad group. This will help to ensure that the list stays highly relevant to the ad group theme. You can find all the latest videos and updates on our YouTube channel . Posted by Aman Govil, Product Marketing Manager
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New best practices to find more customers on the Content Network