AdWords MENA Blog: 2012

AdWords Editor 9.9 is now available

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

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 importing 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, visit 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: Jeannette Ashak - Google AdWords team

Making large-scale changes faster and easier in AdWords

Thursday, November 8, 2012

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 genuinely excited to announce our new bulk editing features in the AdWords interface. With them, 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’s working as expected. We hope to expand availability to everyone in the coming weeks.

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. And 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 being completed. And you can review your changes after they’re done.

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 retiring the “Edit in table” view since its multi-item editing capabilities will be far surpassed. And when making a change to an individual campaign element, you can already 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.

Posted by: Jeannette Ashak - Google AdWords Team

New cities in U.A.E are now available for targeting on AdWords

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Starting from this week, we’rolling out city targeting for Dubai and Abu Dhabi in United Arab Emirates to help you reach more customers in local markets with your AdWords campaigns.

The countries with city and region targeting options in AdWords are (click to see the full list):

Location targeting helps you tailor your ads towards specific markets, analyze your AdWords campaigns by market, and optimize your campaigns for higher return-on-investment. Now, you can go a level deeper and optimize the performance of your AdWords campaign at the city level. In your campaign settings you can target Abu Dhabi or Dubai as target locations or exclude one of these cities to reach the rest of U.A.E. (click to see more info on Advanced Location Options)

Here are a few steps that you can take to optimize your AdWords campaign:

Run an AdWords geographic report or Analytics report to determine where your users are located and where you’re getting your most valuable traffic.

Adjust your campaign setup: o Run a campaign targeting the best-performing cities and increase the bids on the keywords in that campaign to maximize your ad impressions in those cities. o Consider setting up a regionally- (or nationally-) targeted campaign with potentially lower bids on the same keywords to capture additional traffic from outside your top-performing cities at a lower cost.
Adjust bids accordingly to optimize for the highest campaign ROI.
We hope that with the expansion of city targeting, advertisers in U.A.E. will be able to reach their local customers more effectively. Visit our Help Center to learn more about getting started with this feature.

Posted by: Jeannette Ashak - Google AdWords team

AdWords Editor users: Upgrade to version 9.8.1 before October 28, 2012

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

As we announced in June, AdWords Editor versions 9.5.1 and 9.7.1 will no longer be supported after October 28, 2012. If you continue using version 9.5.1 or 9.7.1 after this date, you'll encounter errors downloading accounts, posting changes to campaign settings, or checking changes. To avoid these issues, please upgrade to the latest version (9.8.1) at your earliest convenience.You can upgrade to version 9.8.1 through the auto-update prompt that appears when you run AdWords Editor. To preserve unposted changes and comments, select the "Backup then Upgrade" option in the prompt. You can also download the latest version from the AdWords Editor website.For a complete list of version-specific changes, please see our release notes. To see which version you're using, go to the Help menu > About AdWords Editor (Windows) or the AdWords Editor menu > About AdWords Editor (Mac).

Posted by Jeannette Ashak - The Google AdWords Team

Keeping AdWords Policies Current

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Recently, we’ve been explaining how our systems and policies stop unwanted ads from showing on Google and elsewhere. One part of these efforts is our constant review of our policies for advertisers, to make sure they keep up with evolving practices on the web that can harm users’ experiences.

We regularly update our AdWords policies, clarify what they mean, and step up their enforcement where needed to ensure the best experience for our users and business partners. This year, we’ve already rolled out more than 30 updates to our policies, and today we’re updating our AdWords policies on Software Principles, Arbitrage, Advertiser Claims, and Relevance, Clarity and Accuracy. We’re announcing these updates now to enable advertisers to review their accounts and ensure that they’re in compliance; they’ll come into effect on October 15.

Details of these updates can be found here, along with more information for advertisers about how they can come into compliance with our policies. Here’s a quick overview:

We've added several specific examples of the kinds of advertiser behavior typically associated with arbitrage (sites that are designed solely or predominantly to show ads).

We've made it even clearer how advertisers must be fully transparent in their ads when describing the experiences on their landing pages.

We've beefed up our rules about the use of keyword insertion in ads.

We've reworked our AdWords policy governing Software Principles to ensure that users are given important information before downloading software on their computers and that the software is not harmful or hard-to-uninstall.

The web and its ecosystem of advertisers, publishers, and users continue to evolve rapidly. Over time, practices develop that can lead to a negative experience for users. In addition, some actors become more sophisticated in their ability to defeat the intent of our policies. Today’s changes make the guidance clearer for everyone and tighten the rules and enforcement needed to keep the online advertising ecosystem clear, consistent, and useful for consumers. The bottom line is that these revised policies and increased enforcement will help provide everyone with a safer, more trustworthy experience online.Posted by Jeannette Ashak - The Google AdWords Team

Unique sitelinks policy will be more proactively enforced

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Since launching in 2009, sitelinks have provided users options to get to more useful destinations on your web site directly from your text ad. Hopefully you’ve already been using sitelinks to improve your campaign performance. Maybe you’re now preparing your campaigns to be eligible for enhanced sitelinks, which offer an even bigger boost.

Our existing policy has required each sitelink in a campaign to link to a different landing page. That means a user would have a meaningfully different experience on the landing page from each sitelink. Recently, though, we've noticed an increase in the number of sitelinks created with the same landing page URLs or identical content on the landing pages. So starting today, we are beginning more proactive enforcement of our policy.

How it will work
We’ll initially focus on new sitelinks and any sitelinks that you change. As your ads are being served, our systems will verify that your sitelinks meet the policy standards. Sitelinks that don’t meet the standards will be restricted from appearing.

Impact on format and performance
To increase the chances of having more sitelinks shown with your ads, we recommend loading 6-10 unique sitelinks into your campaigns.

Having fewer eligible sitelinks could keep your ad from showing in larger 2-line and 3-line formats, where more eligible sitelinks are required. Remember, larger formats are more visible and have higher average clickthrough rates (CTR). And if you don’t have enough eligible sitelinks in your campaign, then your ads may not display sitelinks at all.

Future enforcement with existing sitelinks
We realize that manually checking and fixing duplicates among your existing sitelinks and landing pages might take some time. So we’re delaying proactive enforcement with existing sitelinks for a few months. But don’t wait until the last minute. And remember, any sitelink that you add or change will be subject to proactive enforcement right away.

Getting started
We suggest doing a basic sweep, starting with campaigns that show sitelinks most often. These are probably your campaigns with branded keywords, like the name of your business and its best-known products and services.

Here’s how you can work through this using the AdWords interface.

Log into the AdWords interface and click on the “Ad Extensions” tab.

Select “Sitelinks Extensions” from the drop down menu.

Sort your sitelink extensions by impressions or clicks by clicking on the column header.

Click on each sitelink in the top campaign and follow it through to its landing page (there’s no charge for these clicks).

Fix any duplicates you find by hovering over the extension area and clicking the pencil icon (see image below).

You can then work your way down through each campaign in your account. If you want to be completely thorough, you’ll need cross-check the landing pages on your Ads and Keywords tab with those of your sitelinks for each campaign.

For more details or help with sitelinks, please visit the AdWords Help Center or contact AdWords customer support.

Posted by Jeannette Ashak - The Google AdWords Team

An easier way to view advertising policies

Friday, August 31, 2012

Understanding AdWords advertising policies is an important part of successfully managing your account and delivering ads that are safe and useful to users. To help you understand how policies affect the delivery of your ads, we recently introduced a status insights icon on the Ads tab. We’re now following up with another feature to help you identify policy issues more quickly: a new Policy Details column.

The Policy Details column allows you to scan and sort policy issues across all of your ads (without hovering individually over each status one by one). You’ll find information like:

Approval status for each ad

Disapproval reasons, if applicable

Specific policies that can limit where your ads show

This information is available for paused ads as well, which can be particularly helpful if you want to know the status of your paused ads or if you need to temporarily pause a campaign while you work out some policy problems.Here’s what the Policy Details column will look like, alongside some fictional example ads:

To find this new column, navigate to your Ads tab and click the “Columns” button to start customizing your columns. Under the “Attributes” section, click to add “Policy details” and save. You’ll then see the new Policy Details column in your Ads tab. (One note: this new policy column isn’t yet downloadable in your reports, but we’re working on it!)
Posted by Jeannette Ashak - The Google AdWords Team

Free Webinar - Special Ramadan!

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Ramadan is coming soon! For many of our advertisers it is an important month for their business and we would like to help you get the most out of your campaigns.

Please join us for an upcoming webinar from Google AdWords and we will give you some advice on how to build a successful Ramadan campaign as well as general best practices.

Date: June 26, 2012
Time: 1:30 pm GMT / 3.30pm KSA
Language: English
Register: Here

After registering, you will receive a link to access the webinar.

Written by Jeannette Ashak - The Google AdWords Team

Diagnose ads faster with new status insights icon

Thursday, March 29, 2012

This week we’re introducing a status insights icon in the Ads tab that provides visibility into the approval status and potential policy limitations for each individual ad creative. The new icon will be particularly valuable if you’re advertising products or services that are restricted by our advertising policies to show only in specific countries or with certain keywords

To use the new status icon, simply hover over the speech bubble in the Status column of the Ads tab next to the ad of interest.

We’ll tell you if the individual ad is showing for the default keyword and location displayed in the hover. If you would like to re-diagnose the ad with with a different targeted location or keyword, you can edit the parameters from right within the hover:

This new icon complements the existing ad diagnosis tools, which include the status hover on the Keywords tab, a batch option to diagnose many keywords at once, and the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool.

Posted by Georgios Fanis - Google AdWords MENA

Announcing AdWords campaign limits increase

Monday, March 26, 2012

Last year we increased the limits for all advertisers to 500 campaigns and 3 million keywords per AdWords account. Today, in response to feedback from many of our advertisers, we are pleased to announce yet another AdWords campaign limit increase.

It is now possible to have 10,000 campaigns (includes active and paused campaigns) per account. With this change, it is now possible to easily manage and monitor more campaigns in a single place.

AdWords Editor, the AdWords API, and all other AdWords services are compatible with the new limits.

A full list of all account limits, including creative and ad extension limits, is available in the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Georgios Fanis - Google AdWords MENA

Google Analytics is now available in 9 new languages

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Recently we introduced new and improved Google Analytics, so that you can quickly find even more powerful and useful data to improve your internet marketing efforts.

Now, we are proud to say Google Analytics is available in 9 new languages including Arabic. This makes Google Analytics quite a Polyglot, and it is in total available in 40 languages now.

To change the language of Analytics account to any of these new languages, you have to activate the new interface, if you haven’t already, by clicking on the “new version” button at the top of the account. Then, navigate to the settings page where you can select the new language.

You can also now enjoy reading the newly revamped Analytics help center in Arabic.

We are confident this will improve the usage of Google Analytics across the world, and help website owners and AdWords advertisers get even more out of their internet marketing efforts.

Happy data mining!

Posted by Georgios Fanis - Google AdWords MENA

The tools that will make all the difference – Part 9

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

This is the final post in our series 'The tools that will make all the difference’. The aim of the series was to introduce you to additional tools that might be new to you, and to help you use Google AdWords in order to achieve your online advertising goals more successfully. The final post in the series will introduce Google Analytics.

Google Analytics

About the tool:

A free Google tool that displays statistics for your website and allows you to find out where your website visitors came from and what kind of interaction they had with your website.

How does it help?

By installing this tool on your web pages, you can view richer information, such as:

Identify how many visitors were led to your site by specific keywords
Identify the entry source to your website (Google AdWords ads, Google's organic search engine, by clicking a link that was attached to an email, etc.)
Identify the browsers that your visitors use (and hence improve their user experience on your site).
Identify the geographic source of your site's traffic.
Learn which are the most and least viewed pages on your site, and make improvements accordingly.
Identify pages on your site that visitors tend to leave.
View the values of time on site per page.
Compare the data across different time ranges.

How to use it?

First you need to set up a Google Analytics account at:

http://www.google.com/analytics

Then, just like with the Conversion Tracking tool, you should copy a code snippet and paste it into the HTML code of your site. See detailed instructions at:

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55522

Finally, you should link your Google AdWords account with your Google AdWords account, as specified on the following page.

Posted by Georgios Fanis - Google AdWords MENA