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Jun 29

Import your Google Analytics Goals into AdWords and use them with Conversion Optimizer

(Click to view larger image)

In order to track your return on investment (ROI) from AdWords, you need to be able to see which keywords, ads and campaigns lead to conversions on your site. If you use Google Analytics, you can now import your Google Analytics Goals and Transactions into your AdWords account to use as conversion actions. This lets you track the ROI from your AdWords campaigns directly inside the AdWords interface. In the past, you needed to separately install AdWords Conversion Tracking to make use of this feature.

If you’re new to Conversion Tracking, a “conversion” happens when a visitor to your site completes a desired action (such as making a purchase or requesting a quote). A conversion is very similar to the concept of a Goal or Transaction in Google Analytics, and is crucial to assessing the ROI from your online advertising spend.

One of the benefits of importing your Google Analytics Goals and Transactions into AdWords is that you can use them with the Conversion Optimizer, an AdWords CPA bidding tool that has been shown to help advertisers get more conversions from AdWords. Conversion Optimizer makes it a lot easier to manage your AdWords bidding and maximize results.

Here’s how to get started importing your Google Analytics Goals and Transactions into AdWords:

Link your Accounts, Enable Sharing and Setup a Goal

First you need to link your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts and create at least one Google Analytics Goal or track at least on Google Analytics Transaction. You’ll also need to enable data sharing in Google Analytics by completing the following steps.

Sign in to your Google Analytics account.
Click “Edit Account and Data Sharing Settings.”
Make sure you’ve selected at least the “With other Google products only” options under “Share my Google Analytics data.”
Click “Save Changes” to finish.

Import your Goals into AdWords

Navigate to the “Conversion Tracking” page from within your AdWords account.
Click “Link your Analytics goals and transactions” from the Conversion Tracking table.

Select the Goals or Transactions you want from the list.
Edit the action name so you can identify the goals in your AdWords reports.
Select “Link” from the bottom of the table to finish.

That’s it! Your imported Goals and Transactions will show up in your account, along with AdWords conversion metrics. You can use this data to see which ads, keywords and campaigns are bringing in the best ROI and then optimize your campaigns based on this information.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Inside AdWords crew

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Jun 29

New Interface Thursdays: Finding features from the previous interface

The basics of AdWords, such as bids, budgets, and Quality Score, haven’t changed with the new interface. Still, every once in a while, you might find yourself asking, “Where did that go?” Here’s a set of pointers to help you pick up where you left off in the previous AdWords interface.

Search my campaigns

In the previous interface, you could search your campaigns using a search box in the top corner of your account. In the new interface, we’ve replaced this functionality with text filters. You can now search for ads or keywords across your account by setting up a text filter. For searches you run often, you can save the filter to quickly access it at any time. Filters allow for more than just searching though, and you can read our earlier post to learn more about how filters can help you zero in on the data you care about most.

Keyword destination URLs

If you’d like to edit the destination URLs for individual keywords, you can do so by clicking the checkbox next to the keywords you’d like to edit, and then clicking on the “Edit” button at the top of the table. This will open up all keyword fields for editing, including the destination URL. If you’d like to see your destination URLs in your Keywords tab all the time, you can do so by customizing columns. By customizing columns, you can also find additional metrics like Quality Score that you might want to view and add them to the table.

Negative keywords

In the previous interface, you created negative keywords by adding a - sign to them. For example, you would add -free if you didn’t want your ads to appear for searches containing the term free. Negative keywords were also mixed in with your regular keywords in your overall keyword list. With the new interface, negative keywords now have a home of their own. You’ll find a section for negative keywords under your regular keywords in the Keywords tab. You can also view your campaign and ad group level negative keywords side by side.

Google Analytics and Website Optimizer

Where did the Analytics tab go? If you’re looking for Google Analytics or Website Optimizer, you’ll now find them under the Reporting tab at the top of your account.

Other questions?

If you’d like a side-by-side comparison of how to complete common tasks in new interface, we have a What’s Changed page on the New Interface website.

Finally, we’re providing webinars as another resource to help orient yourself in the new interface. The first webinar is tomorrow, June 19th at 11 AM PDT, and there’s still time to register. We’ve scheduled the second webinar for June 26th also at 11 AM PDT.

We hope to see you at a webinar, and please continue to send us feedback on the new interface.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Inside AdWords crew

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Jun 29

Advertisers share their success stories and AdWords tips

After reorganizing their ad groups, ExecutiveChefEvents.com saw a 140% increase in their click-through rate (CTR). Many advertisers ask us how to improve their performance, and the answer is that simple one day projects, like the one ExecutiveChefEvents.com completed, can lead to big improvements in your performance.

Click on any of the video links below to see how these AdWords advertisers received more visitors to their websites, more paying customers, and more awareness about their businesses with a few simple changes to their campaigns. Each video will show you the problems the advertiser was having in their campaigns, how they improved their performance, and how you can do the same.

Expanding keywords: After adding keywords to their account, Adventures Cross Country saw a 55% increase in the number of people who filled out forms on their site. Watch the video and see how adding new keywords with consistent CPCs can help you reach more customers.

Organizing ad groups: After creating tightly themed ad groups, ExecutiveChefEvents.com saw an influx of visitors to their site and a 140% increase in their click-through rate. Watch the video and see how reorganizing your campaigns makes it easier for your customers to find you.

Testing new ads: After testing new ads, Studio 132 saw a 200% increase in CTR and a huge increase in phone calls for their services. Watch the video and see how testing ads with optimized rotation helps attract more potential customers.

Adjusting bids: After raising some keyword bids to meet or exceed their first page bid recommendations, MoonKnight Networks saw their call volume shoot up by 200%, with a 270% increase in CTR. Watch the video and see how adjusting bids can help you get more exposure and more clicks for your ads.

You can also view the entire playlist of videos here: www.google.com/optimization-success.

Posted by Amanda Kelly, Inside AdWords crew

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Jun 29

New Interface Thursday: Exploring campaign settings

A few of the changes we’ve made in the new AdWords interface improve how you manage your campaign settings. In today’s post, we’ll cover these changes.

Edit Settings for Multiple Campaigns

Have you ever wanted to quickly see which of your campaigns are running on the Google Content Network? Or compare ad scheduling settings for multiple campaigns at once?

Now you can, using the new account-level Settings tab. On the All Online Campaigns page, click the Settings tab to see the primary settings for all your campaigns in a single table.

Some settings, like campaign name or daily budget, can be changed directly in the table using in-line editing. To edit advanced settings such as location targeting and ad scheduling, simply click on the setting you’d like to change and you’ll be taken directly to the Settings tab for that particular campaign.

You can also use bulk editing to change settings for multiple campaigns at once. Say, for example, you’d like to copy the Networks & Devices settings from one campaign to three others.

Simply select all four campaigns, click Edit, then use the copy-down button to copy the setting across all selected campaigns.

Better Organized Settings

We’ve also changed how campaign settings are grouped together within the campaign-level Settings tabs for easier navigation.

The Audience section contains settings to specify the audience you want to reach. Language, location, and demographic targeting for the Google Content Network are now grouped together in this section.

The Bidding and Budget section now contains advanced settings such as position preference and delivery method in addition to campaign mainstays like daily budget and bidding option.

Finally, you’ll notice a new campaign setting in the Advanced Settings section: frequency capping, which lets you limit the number of times your ad is shown to the same unique user on the Google Content Network.

New Interface Webinars

If you want more help learning the new interface, we’re holding two free webinars in the next week to help you get up to speed. During the 1-hour sessions, we’ll walk you through the new interface, show you the new features, and answer your questions.

The first webinar is tomorrow, Friday, June 26th at 11 AM PDT. Following that, the next one is on July 1st at 9:30 AM PDT. You can register on our new interface webinars page.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

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Jun 29

An Update on Sitemaps at Google

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Jun 29

Webmaster Central YouTube update for June 8th - 12th

Want to know what’s new on the Webmaster Central YouTube channel? Here’s what we’ve uploaded in the past week:

Matt Cutts answered a few new questions from the Grab Bag:

Matt also went over a great example of whitehat linkbait:

And if you’ve ever thought about hiding text, here’s one technique that didn’t fool Google:

Feel free to leave comments letting us know how you liked the videos, and if you have any specific questions, ask the experts in the Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

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Jun 29

Best practices for Product Search

Webmaster Level: Beginner to Intermediate

If you run an e-commerce site and you’d like your products to be eligible to be shown in Google search results, then check out our “Product Search for Webmasters” video. In addition to the basics on Product Search, I cover:

Attributes to include in your feed
FAQs

Will my products’ rankings improve if I include custom attributes in my feed?
Do product listings expire after 30 days?
How often should I submit my feed?

More information can be found in the Product Search Help Center.

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

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Jun 29

Reconsideration requests: Now with notifications

If you’ve submitted a reconsideration request via Webmaster Tools, you’ve probably wondered what happens once Google receives it. We’ve always done our best to act upon these requests as quickly as possible, but until now we haven’t notified webmasters once we’ve processed their requests.

As of last week, after your request has been processed, we’ll confirm this by sending a message to your Message Center in Webmaster Tools. (Prefer to be notified by email? You can do that too.) Sometime after you receive a reconsideration request confirmation message, check your site’s performance in search results. If it’s doing well, it means that Google has reviewed your site and believes that it adheres to our Webmaster Guidelines. If your site still isn’t performing well in search, we recommend reviewing our Webmaster Guidelines and also checking out these possible reasons why your site might not be doing as well as you expect.

Posted by Ben D’Angelo, Software Engineer, Search Quality

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Jun 29

Flash indexing with external resource loading

Webmaster Level: All

We just added external resource loading to our Flash indexing capabilities. This means that when a SWF file loads content from some other file—whether it’s text, HTML, XML, another SWF, etc.—we can index this external content too, and associate it with the parent SWF file and any documents that embed it.
This new capability improves search quality by allowing relevant content contained in external resources to appear in response to users’ queries. For example, this result currently comes up in response to the query [2002 VW Transporter 888]:

Prior to this launch, this result did not appear, because all of the relevant content is contained in an XML file loaded by a SWF file.

To date, when Google encounters SWF files on the web, we can:

Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.
Discover links within Flash files.
Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
Index sites scripted with AS1 and AS2, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated. Update on June 19, 2009: We index sites with AS3 as well. The ActionScript version isn’t particularly relevant in our Indexing process, so we support older versions of AS in addition to the latest.

If you don’t want your SWF file or any of its external resources crawled by search engines, please use an appropriate robots.txt directive.

Written by Janis Stipins, Software Engineer

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