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
Catherine Schenquerman is an avid traveler and a savvy digital marketer. As the interactive marketing manager for Carnival Cruise Lines, she has been able to merge her love of travel with her interest in experimenting with innovative digital marketing strategies. Since 2006, Carnival Cruise Lines has worked with its digital agency, Razorfish , to implement successful Google search campaigns that both generate new leads and build brand awareness. But Catherine and her team wanted to explore ways to drive bookings as well. They wanted to be more precise about how they connected with customers at the critical moment in the purchasing cycle, when customers were planning vacations and were about to book a cruise. Catherine sat down with Razorfish to review innovative approaches they could try, and they decided to explore contextual targeting using the Google Content Network. Experiment, Measure and Iterate The Razorfish search marketing team quickly got to work. First, they set out to optimize the core components of the campaign within ad groups, and then apply those to their content campaign on the Google Content Network. These optimizations resulted in nearly 400 new ad groups with tightly-themed keyword groupings, each with roughly 8–12 keywords per ad group. The new groupings allowed Carnival to better tailor its messages and precisely focus each message on specific sites and content. Carnival and Razorfish used two Google Content Network tools to measure and fine-tune its efforts. They began by using DoubleClick Ad Planner , a free media planning tool to help identify websites that its target customers are likely to visit, and then used the Placement Performance Report , which shows performance statistics for ads on specific domains and URLs in the Google Content Network. Smooth sailing Within the first few weeks of the Google contextually-targeted campaign, the Carnival team began to see a significant increase in cruise bookings sourced from the campaign. After five weeks, online cruise bookings from the Google Content Network increased 284 percent and delivered a 72 percent reduction in cost per conversion. They also saw a 36 percent increase in leads. “The Content Network proved to be a great new way for us to extend our reach, by giving us both the push and pull,” Schenquerman explained. “The push to associate our ads with relevant content and help stir demand, and the pull to capture someone who says ‘I want to learn more’– and then to pay for that on a cost-per-click basis, makes a lot of sense.” Building on the success of their text ad campaign, Carnival recently decided to start running display ads on the Google Content Network. They applied what they learned from their search campaigns to run high performing display ads. Razorfish and Carnival Cruise Lines have been very successful in bring the science of search to the art of display. Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team
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Carnival Cruise Lines Charts their Course with the Google Content Network
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
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
If you're a regular reader of the blog, in the last year you've seen Google's advertising tools move in some exciting directions. We've introduced more data-driven and efficient campaign management with the new AdWords interface , easier account optimization with the Opportunities tab , and new ad formats like Ad Sitelinks and Product Extensions , to name a few. But where is advertising with Google headed next? Which new tools, formats and features will make it possible for you to communicate with your customers in more meaningful, creative ways? We've started a new project, Google Ad Innovations , to answer that very question. Google Ad Innovations is a website where you can explore Google's latest advertising technologies, watch short video demos to learn more, and try out select new tools. The technologies we'll highlight on Google Ad Innovations are at various stages of development, from early tests to fully released features. Here are a few of the new releases you'll find on Ad Innovations right now: Remarketing -- a way to show your ads to users who have previously visited your website as they browse sites across the Google Content Network AdWords Search Funnels -- a set of reports that help you understand the Google.com search ad click and impression behavior leading up to a conversion Location Extensions with multiple addresses -- an ad format which displays a list of nearby store locations when your customers are performing local searches Click-to-Call Extensions -- an ad format that let mobile phone users call you directly from your ads Analytics Intelligence -- a Google Analytics feature that automatically identifies significant changes in your site traffic Although there's a lot to look at on Ad Innovations, we want it to be more than a show and tell site. Every Ad Innovations page will have a feedback link: if you see a feature that can be improved, or if you think we've hit on a valuable new idea, let us know! The comments and suggestions you leave while using Google Ad Innovations will go directly to the Google team working on the feature. So, if you want to stay on the cutting edge of advertising products, visit Google Ad Innovations — we’ll regularly add new tools and features to the site, and we can't wait to hear what you think! Posted by Devin Sandoz, Product Marketing Manager
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Google Ad Innovations: Where ads are going next