AdWords MENA Blog

Google Partners Goes Global: Empowering agencies with new leads, new tools, new opportunities

Thursday, December 26, 2013

Google is committed to making the web work for you. That’s why we’re proud to announce the worldwide launch of GooglePartners – a platform for the digital marketing community that helps businesses and agencies grow and thrive together.
Google Partners replaces Agency Edge, Google Certification Program, and Engage for Agencies by taking the best they had to offer and adding a new suite of powerful resources – all in a cleaner, simpler, more powerful interface. And it allows you to build a closer relationship with your clients.
With Google Partners, you can:

Earn leads: Connect with potential clients through Google Partner Search

Get certified: Take certification exams – for free – on an improved, more intuitive platform

Learn and develop: Gain insights tailored to your agency and its needs

Use offers: Receive offers that you can use to introduce clients to AdWords

Demonstrate credibility: Distinguish yourself in the marketplace by earning the Google Partner badge

Google Partners isn’t simply a new platform – it’s a better platform.
And it’s one that rewards your hard work by helping your business grow. By demonstrating that you’ve mastered best practices, you can earn the Google Partner badge – proof that we trust you and your clients should, too. We’ll provide you with customized tips every step of the way, so your company can get the badge and both you and your clients can shine. Because that’s how true partnership works.
To join Google Partners, please visit www.google.com/partners

‒ Posted by the Google Partners Team

Important Changes to AdWords Terms & Conditions In Europe, the Middle East, and Africa

Monday, November 11, 2013

The following changes apply to customers in Europe, the Middle East, and AfricaIf you’re using AdWords, you’ve agreed to our Terms and Conditions. These are important so we have a common understanding in basic areas like policy, cancellation, payment, dispute resolution and liability. With the advancements in our ad platforms and global growth, we need to make a few changes to keep up. So today we’re rolling out a new set of Terms and Conditions to many AdWords customers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.What’s NewOne of the main changes you’ll notice in the updated terms is that they accommodate new advertising products and services. For example, we now offer third-party ad serving in some situations, so you’ll see provisions about how we resolve ad serving disputes. Other changes include updated links to our policies and better consistency among our advertising terms globally.Important Action NeededYou’ll have 45 days to review and accept the new AdWords Terms and Conditions. If you don’t accept them within 45 days, your ad serving may be paused until you’ve reviewed and agreed to them.To review and accept the new AdWords Terms and Conditions, just sign in to your account athttps://adwords.google.com. You’ll automatically be taken to a page with the updated terms and conditions. Then click to indicate your acceptance.Not seeing the new terms when you sign into your account?Don’t worry! If you’re not seeing the new terms when you sign into your account, there’s nothing more for you to do right now. Because we’re updating the new terms on a rolling basis, you may be scheduled for a later time. Or your terms may already have been accepted by someone you’ve authorized to act on your behalf (for example, an advertising agency, or someone you’ve authorized to be financially responsible for your accounts).More InformationWe encourage you to read through the updated terms carefully. For more information about this change to our Terms and Conditions, including a complete list of countries and territories where these changes apply, please visit the AdWords Help Center.
Published by Jeannette Ashak - The Google AdWords Team

Select a new, better performing campaign type for acquiring customers on Search and Display

Thursday, November 7, 2013

People are always looking to connect with useful information in the moments that matter - whether searching on keywords related to a product or reading highly relevant content on websites beyond search. Starting today we’re offering a new way for advertisers to reach people as they visit Google and sites across the web: Search Network with Display Select.Search Network with Display Select extends the reach of your search campaigns to the Google Display Network (GDN). The GDN reaches 90% of the global online audience (Comscore September 2013) and includes 2 million publisher sites, like weather.com. Upgrading existing search campaigns to Search Network with Display Select is easy. In a few steps and without extra work, you could gain 15% more customers* by showing your ads at the right moments across search and the web.

How is this different from the old campaign type? In addition to extending the reach of search campaigns, this new campaign type offers better results on the display network than the old Search & Display Networks campaign type.Search Network with Display Select uses improved signals and methods of predicting when and where your ads are likely to perform best, and sets a higher bar for when to show them. That means your ads are more likely to be shown to a smaller number of prospective customers, who are more likely to be interested in your offerings. Compared to the old campaign type, initial tests show that advertisers, on average, could see a 35% higher click-through-rate, and a 35% lower cost-per-customer purchase on the display portion of their Search Network with Display Select campaigns.*

When to use the new Search Network with Display Select campaign type:

If you’re running Search Network only campaigns, consider trying this new campaign type for additional high quality traffic with no extra management required. When you enable Search Networks with Display Select, your search ads will be eligible to appear on both Google and pages with relevant keywords across the web. The majority of your campaign will still run on search, with a boost of high-performing placements in display.

If you’re running a Search & Display Networks campaign, consider switching to Search Networks with Display Select for better ROI.*

If you currently run Search and Display campaigns separately, we recommend you keep them separate for greater bidding, budgeting and targeting flexibility.Upgrading to Search Network with Display SelectSearch Network with Display Select is now the best option for advertisers running ads across search and display within a single campaign. So starting today and over the next few weeks, we'll be removing the current Search & Display Networks campaign type in the AdWords interface, and we're encouraging advertisers to switch existing campaigns to Search Network with Display Select. We've created a quick workflow in the AdWords interface that makes switching easy. Step-by-step instructions are also available in the AdWords Help Center. Please visit here to learn more.Posted by Ahmad Anvari, Product Manager*Based on initial test results, the average customer could see a 35% higher click-thru-rate and 35% lower CPA on the display portion of their new Search Networks with Display Select campaigns compared to existing Search & Display Networks campaigns. Based on initial test results, the average customer could also see 10-15% incremental conversions compared with Search Network only campaigns. Individual campaign performance may vary.

Improving Ad Rank to show more relevant ad extensions and formats

Sunday, November 3, 2013

When people use Google to research and buy things, they're interested in the most relevant and useful results. Ad extensions help by providing more information to potential customers and additional ways for them to respond. For example, they can call your business number, see your business location on a map, or choose an even more relevant landing page that you're promoting with sitelinks. Ad extensions typically improve clickthrough rate and overall campaign performance because they make ads more useful.Today, we're announcing improvements in the AdWords auction that let us more consistently show more relevant ad extensions and formats. Ad Rank improvements
Our system for ordering ads on search results pages uses a calculation called Ad Rank. Previously, Ad Rank was calculated using your max CPC bid and your Quality Score. With this update, Ad Rank will also take into account a third component: the expected impact from your ad extensions and formats. In addition, we've increased the importance of Ad Rank in determining whether your ad is eligible to be displayed with extensions and formats.Here are some more details and implications of these changes:

Ad extensions and formats can now influence the position of your ad on the search results page. If two competing ads have the same bid and quality, then the ad with the more positive expected impact from extensions will generally appear in a higher position than the other.

When estimating the expected impact of extensions and ad formats, we consider such factors as the relevance, clickthrough rates, and the prominence of the extensions or formats on the search results page.

Because Ad Rank is now more important in determining whether your ad is shown with extensions and formats, you might need to increase your Quality Score, bid, or both for extensions and formats to appear.

In each auction, we'll generally show your highest performing and most useful combination of extensions and formats among those eligible. So there's no need to try to guess which extensions will help improve your clickthrough rate the most.

You may see lower or higher average CPCs in your account. You may see lower CPCs if your extensions and formats are highly relevant, and we expect a large positive performance impact relative to other competitors in the auction. In other cases, you may see higher CPCs because of an improvement in ad position or increased competition from other ads with a high expected impact from formats.

For now, this update only affects search ads appearing on Google Search.

We've updated our Help Center articles on topics including ad extensions and how we rank ads to reflect these important changes.Recommendations for using extensionsExtensions make your ads more useful and can improve your campaign performance. So you should add extensions that make sense for your business type and campaign goals. With these improvements to AdRank, our systems will do even more to automatically serve extensions in the contexts when they're most beneficial.For example, consider someone downtown searching on a mobile phone for "auto repair." In this example, the user might be most likely to respond to your ad when they can click to call a phone number or tap a link to get directions to visit in person. So we may show a combination of call and location extensions with your mobile search ad.Now imagine if someone were searching for "auto repair" on a laptop computer in the suburbs. Say your ad earned the 3rd ad position above the organic results in this auction. We might show your seller rating and sitelinks because that's the highest performing and most useful combination of extensions that could be shown with your ad in this particular auction and ad position.We're always looking for ways to make ads more relevant to a user's intent and context. After months of testing, we're confident that these AdRank changes help achieve that goal by more consistently showing people the most useful combination of extensions and formats.
Published by Jeannette Ashak - The Google AdWords Team

Get more insight into the full customer journey with Cross-account Conversion Tracking and Search Funnels

Monday, October 28, 2013

The path to a purchase for today's online shoppers is rarely straightforward. People interact with a variety of ads along the way. For example, they may search for your product in the morning at home, then do a more specific search when they get to the office later in the day.For advertisers, this can make measuring conversions complex. It’s important to see a full picture of your customer’s path to purchase to determine which keywords and ads drive the most conversions.Over the next few months, we'll be rolling out many new features to give you a clearer picture of your conversions, your customer's path to purchase and your return-on-ad spend (ROAS). Up first on our list of new features are Cross-account Conversion Tracking and Cross-account Search Funnels.Cross-account Conversion TrackingIf you manage multiple AdWords accounts for your business, you know the work that goes into implementing multiple tags, one for each AdWords account, and merging conversion reports from other tools into AdWords. With Cross-account Conversion Tracking, you can now measure conversions across all your accounts with a single tag and a simple setup.Cross-account Conversion Tracking helps you:

Tag your site quickly and easily. Create one snippet of code to use across all of your accounts. This makes it easier and faster to tag your site and may also improve site load time.

Get more accurate conversion reporting. A single tag ensures that a conversion is only counted once across your accounts. With the cross-account tag, you’ll see assist conversions for all AdWords clicks leading up to a conversion, not just the clicks within one account. This can provide a holistic view of your advertising, and a better understanding of how keywords work together across accounts to drive conversions.

Track new accounts with ease. When you add a new AdWords account to your My Client Center account (MCC), you can enable Conversion Tracking with the check of a box. In addition, you no longer have to re-define all of your conversions when you create a new account.

To learn how to implement cross-account conversion tracking, read this article from our Help Center. For easier set-up, especially if you’re using tags for other efforts such as remarketing, Google Tag Manager can help you manage all of your tags on your website.Cross-account Search FunnelsWith Cross-account Conversion Tracking, you can use Cross-account Search Funnels reports in your MCC account to understand your customers’ path to conversion across all of the keywords in all of your accounts.These reports include:

Overview report: Learn how consumers interact with all of your ads across all accounts before making decisions.

Top Conversion Paths report: Know which combinations of keywords across your accounts drive the most conversions.

Assisted Conversions report: See upper funnel keywords across your accounts that might not be receiving enough value in your attribution measurement.

To learn more about your customer’s interaction with ads across your accounts, read this Help Center article on Search Funnels.We're excited to offer you these new features, and hope they help make tracking your conversions and optimizing your campaigns easier. The better you understand your customers journey, the better you can serve them. And that's good for business.Stay tuned for more conversion features coming soon!
Published by Jeannette Ashak - The Google AdWords Team

Analyze and optimize your search footprint with the new paid & organic report

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

One of our goals is to provide tools to help you better understand how people searching on Google are connecting with your business. That’s why we provide reports like the Search overview in Google Analytics, Search queriesin Webmaster Tools, the AdWords Search terms report and impression share reports.Today, we’re announcing the addition of the paid & organic report in AdWords, a new report to help you analyze and optimize your search footprint on Google. Previously, most search reports showed paid and organic performance separately, without any insights on user behavior when they overlap. The new paid & organic report is the first to let you see and compare your performance for a query when you have either an ad, an organic listing, or both appearing on the search results page.

Click here to enlarge

Here are some ways you can use the paid & organic report to measure and optimize your search performance:

Discover additional keywords. Use the report to discover potential keywords to add to your AdWords accounts by looking for queries where you only appear in organic search with no associated ads.

Optimize presence on high value queries. Use the report to improve your presence in paid results and monitor your high value queries for organic results.

Measure changes holistically. As you test website improvements or AdWords changes to bids, budgets, or keywords, you can more easily report the impact across paid, organic, and combined traffic.

IMPAQT, a digital marketing agency that specializes in helping clients with their paid and organic search marketing, shared their observations after beta testing the report.

The paid & organic report has been incredibly useful in understanding the interaction between paid and organic search, and the overall synergy when they are working together. For one of our client’s key branded queries, we saw an 18% increase in CTR when paid and organic work together, as opposed to only having the organic listing.

Getting started
To get started, you’ll need to link your AdWords account to a Webmaster Tools account. Linking requires you to be a verified owner of your site in Webmaster Tools or to be granted access by a verified owner -- it's easy to make the request from within AdWords. Even if you're not buying ads, you can still take advantage of the query-level organic reporting features available in this report. Detailed instructions on how to set up the link and access the report can be found in our help center.

We hope the new paid & organic report saves you time and helps you improve your performance as you're managing both types of search traffic for your business.

Published by Jeannette Ashak - The Google AdWords Team

Upgraded extensions to help you reach the constantly connected consumer

Friday, August 23, 2013

People are now constantly connected, searching and browsing the web across several devices throughout the day. As part of AdWords enhanced campaigns, we improved sitelink, call, and app extensions to help you reach people more effectively in this multi-screen world. Advertisers will have access to a lot of benefits after upgrading their extensions, so we encourage you to upgrade early to start using these new features:

Show mobile-specific messaging and phone numbers directly in your ad

Use ad group-level extensions to more precisely control which extensions show for each ad

Schedule extensions to run on certain days or during specific times so you can align your ads to your business hours

Review detailed reports, such as performance for each individual sitelink to help you optimize for ROI

It’s easy to upgrade your extensions. Visit this Help Center article to learn how. We’ll begin automatically upgrading legacy (existing) extensions on September 23, 2013. Below are some details about the upgrade process.What happens during the auto-upgradeDuring the auto-upgrade, we’ll upgrade extensions from campaigns that only have legacy extensions. For campaigns with both legacy and upgraded extensions, we’ll assume you’ve already gone through the upgrade process, and will mark your legacy extensions as deleted. Learn moreYou’ll be able to view statistics for all of your extensions, including legacy and deleted ones, in AdWords reports. Extension performance statistics will be reset they they’re upgraded, but your historical reports will still be available. Upgrading early means you start accruing stats on the new extensions now. Learn moreTo ensure your sitelink extensions continue to show when the auto-upgrade begins on September 23, please make sure that your sitelinks follow these two policies:

25-character limit policy Shorter sitelinks perform better because they provide a clear, succinct message to users searching on Google. Starting on September 23, sitelinks are required to have no more than 25 characters.

Unique sitelinks policy Customers have a better experience when they land on a unique page that matches the content from the ad they clicked on. Each new sitelink in a campaign or ad group must link to a unique landing page with original content.

Many advertisers are already taking advantage of these upgraded featuresMiller’s Bakery, for example, uses mobile-optimized call extensions to display a “call button” with its ads. They also use the scheduling feature to make sure this button only appears between 4 a.m. and 9 p.m., when their staff can respond to customer calls. After hours, the call button is removed and the ad directs searchers to a website contact form. These two features work together to help the bakery show potential customers the right ad at the right time, tailored to the right device.We hope you find these new features useful and encourage you to upgrade your extensions before September 23, 2013 to ensure that all of your extensions continue to show.

Published by Jeannette Ashak - The Google AdWords Team