In late September, we launched a beta version of the updated Keyword Tool. This tool is a new, streamlined way for you to identify additional keywords and add them to your account. Previously, we offered two distinct tools to expand your keyword list. The Keyword Tool generated keywords based on the content of the URL, words or phrases you entered into the tool. The Search-based Keyword Tool gave you insight into keywords that you may have been missing out on by identifying actual Google searches that were relevant to your site’s landing pages…

Cross posted from the Official Google Blog:As the advertising industry has grown and evolved, so too has our relationship with advertising agencies. These companies, from SEMs to the largest traditional agencies, play a critical role in the continued success of Google, our advertisers and our industry — so we spend a lot of time talking to agencies about how we can make it easier for them to work with us and our advertisers…

Over the past few weeks, we’ve posted 4 videos that suggested small changes you can make to your AdWords account to help you improve your performance. This week, we’ll provide you with some guidance for measuring the results of these changes.With AdWords, you can see how successful your advertising is by monitoring the statistics in your account. Understanding these statistics allows you to assess your results and further tweak your campaigns for even better performance…

Late last year we introduced you to the AdWords New Ad Formats Initiative. At the time, we explained that new formats would be a major focus for us in 2010 and gave you a sneak peak into the types of new ad formats heading your way.With the introduction of our new Ad Innovations site, there’s now an easier way to stay up to date with all the latest formats we’re working on. Using Ad Innovations, you can learn about high level themes like ad extensions and new ad models…

Cross posted from the Google Agency Ad Solutions Blog.

ad:tech San Francisco is this week, from April 19th to April 22nd, and we’ll be there. Our product experts will be on hand at the Google booth Tuesday and Wednesday to answer questions and provide updates on AdWords, Analytics, DoubleClick, YouTube, AdSense and the Google Content Network. In addition, we’re holding the workshops “Insights Lickety Split in AdWords Search Funnels and Google Analytics” and “Google Ad Innovations @ ad:tech,” as well as speaking at the session “Marketing Masters - The Bleeding Edge of Advertising Innovation…

Potential customers choose your website over your competitors’ based solely on what they see in your ads. If your ads don’t distinguish your site or really sell your message, then you’re probably missing out on valuable sales.To help you think about your ads from your customer’s perspective we’ve put together a quick video covering some best practices for improving the performance of your AdWords advertising…

As we announced earlier this month, we’ve included the iPad in our list of mobile devices with full internet browsers, making it easy for you to run your campaigns on it.Now that we’ve finished our rigorous iPad testing, we feel confident adding the iPad to the list of mobile devices that you can target specifically. To do this, simply edit the “Devices” section in your Campaign Settings, and select the iPad under ‘Advanced device and carrier options:(click for full size image)A few things to keep in mind:

• If your device settings are set for desktop and laptop computers only, your ads won’t show on the iPad…

The keywords you’ve chosen in your AdWords account are critical to your advertising success. Potential customers won’t be able to find your ad unless you’ve chosen the right keywords, which could lead you to miss out on valuable sales.Check out the video below to see the three simple steps you can take to improve your keywords and make sure you’re effectively reaching your potential customers…

Our mobile phones are with us for a large part of the day. When you’re on the go and there’s no time to turn on a laptop or computer, it’s natural to reach for your phone when you need to conduct a search, especially now that many phones have the capability to access the Internet. According to the Kelsey Group, there are currently 54.5 million mobile Internet users in the United States, representing 25% of online users…

Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog:
Small businesses are especially close to my heart. When he retired from teaching, my father ran a small art company in Maine, and I saw firsthand how fulfilling — and how difficult — it was for him to realize his dream of running his own business. Unfortunately, his business closed its doors after just a few years. His key challenge: attracting qualified customers…

As an AdWords advertiser, you’re in complete control of your advertising costs. Today, we’d like to highlight some tools and strategies that you can use to make sure that you’re spending effectively.For example, you can focus your budget on what gets you the best results by raising the CPC bid for your most successful keywords and lowering it for less successful terms. What’s more, there are simple, free tools in your account with the information you need to make these decisions…

Like many of you, we’re excited about the upcoming release of Apple’s iPad and the promise of tablet computers. Innovative products like the iPad are on the cutting edge of a whole new class of devices that promise to make accessing information and content easier and more fun.

Over the past year, we’ve been working to make sure that our advertising products work well on a different class of exciting new devices - mobile phones with full Internet browsers like the iPhone and those running Android…

In the past year, Google’s advertising tools have moved 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 that provide more context and value to those who see them, 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…

Did your smartphone suddenly start blinking and buzzing like crazy? No need to worry– it’s probably just getting excited about AdWords for mobile, our new mobile interface for Android, iPhone, and Palm Pre devices.We’ve heard that your smartphone and AdWords account have been pining for each other. Over the past few months, many of you have let us know how much you’d like to have fast and easy mobile access to AdWords, which is why we’re now testing a streamlined mobile experience…

Our previous post in the Content Network Optimization University series covered the basics of setting up and launching a good campaign on the Content Network.Today, we’ll 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 by employing some of these strategies…

Taking a little time to organize your account can help you to better target your potential customers. It can also save you time and effort when it comes to managing your advertising.

The video below will show you how a few minor changes to your account structure can make a big difference to your advertising performance.

(click to view video)

Use these simple tips to structure your account for success, and keep an eye out for the rest of our series of short video clips which we’ll post over the coming weeks!

Did you find this video useful? We’d love to hear your feedback, so let us know…

Imagine you’re a travel company, and you’re trying to excite users during the holiday season about deals to tropical Caribbean destinations. Users may come to your website, browse the offers and think about booking a trip, but decide that the deal is still not cheap enough. Then, they continue to browse the web. If you later decide to offer discounted deals to the Carribean, how do you reach these users who have already expressed interest in travelling there?To help you do this, this week we’re rolling out a new feature called remarketing…

In order to help you make more informed decisions about your AdWords keywords, ad groups, and campaigns, we’re excited to release a new set of reports for your AdWords account: AdWords Search Funnels (beta). Currently, conversions in AdWords are attributed to the last ad someone clicks before making a conversion, masking the fact that many customers perform multiple searches before finally converting…

About one in three mobile search queries are made by people who are looking for something in their local area. This means that local businesses have the opportunity to reach mobile users when they’re nearby and looking to take immediate action. Here are a few tips to help you reach these potential customers.1) Control how your business appears in organic search resultsSince more people search for businesses online than anywhere else, it’s important to make sure your business listing can be easily found on Google…

One of our goals is to democratize access to display advertising and make it accessible and open — like search advertising — so new advertisers can participate easily. We launched Display Ad Builder in 2008 to help you easily set up and run display ad campaigns.Display Ad Builder is a self-service tool within AdWords that helps you choose from dozens of professionally designed templates to run ads across the 1 million sites that make up the Google Content Network — including YouTube — in a matter of minutes…

More and more people are accessing the internet on their mobile devices. Take advantage of this trend by making sure that your ad campaigns are opted in to show on mobile devices with full internet browsers. If you’d like to take things to the next level, create separate mobile-focused campaigns so that you can optimize your keywords, ad text and landing pages for people using mobile devices.To help you understand what mobile optimization looks like, we thought we’d share the approach that Razorfish, a global digital advertising agency, took for one of their retail clients:

• The Razorfish team started by duplicating the existing desktop campaigns and switching the settings to target mobile devices with full internet browsers…

Two types of advertisers run campaigns across the Google Content Network. The first group, direct response advertisers, measures the success of their campaigns by looking for clicks, traffic to their sites, and sales. In contrast, brand advertisers typically use display ads to raise awareness and purchase consideration for a product or service a person might buy down the road. Other advertisers are looking to achieve a combination of these goals…

Recently, we announced new click-to-call phone numbers for local ads that appear on mobile devices with full internet browsers, like iPhone, Android or Palm Pre. This week, we’re bringing the same click-to-call benefits to national advertisers through phone extensions. Phone extensions allow you to add a phone number that will be displayed whenever your ad is triggered, regardless of the user’s location…

Every day, thousands of AdWords advertisers use Google Ad Planner to research websites and select where to advertise online. We’re continuing to improve this tool in order to provide the deepest, most accurate insight into online audiences possible. To that end, we’ve improved how Ad Planner calculates site traffic by over 10%, and we’ve changed its name to DoubleClick Ad Planner. Visit the DoubleClick blog to read more about the traffic improvements and the new name…

The Internet is going mobile. Every week, tens of millions of people search on Google from their mobile phones and generate hundreds of millions of searches. Using mobile ads, you can reach these consumers while they’re on-the-go.Please join us for an upcoming webinar about what we’re seeing in the mobile ad space and how you can incorporate mobile advertising into your marketing strategy.Specifically, we’ll cover how you can:* Understand mobile trends and what they mean for your business* Drive consumer action online and in the store* Optimize your strategy for the mobile platformRegister here for the webinar to be held on March 2, 2010 at 11:00am PST / 1:00pm CST / 2:00pm EST…

We want to let you know that the changes to our pharmacy policy in the U.S. and Canada will start to go into effect today.As we explained a couple weeks ago, this update means that Google AdWords will only accept advertisements from VIPPS and CIPA certified pharmacies, and that these pharmacies can only target ads within the countries where they are accredited.To ensure that users see the most relevant and useful ads possible, pharmaceutical manufacturers and VIPPS and CIPA certified pharmacies will be allowed to run on prescription drug and pharmaceutical-related keywords…

You may recall that towards the end of 2009, we began testing a new feature called AdWords Comparison Ads. This feature lets users compare multiple relevant offers with ease, and it provides advertisers with a new sophisticated and flexible cost per lead format. Speed is of the essence for many users, so we’ve made sure that Comparison Ads shows targeted offers in less than a second. The initial test covered mortgage-related queries in the US…

Last week, we showed you how to use Google Analytics to understand how mobile visitors interact with your website. We also showed you how to use that information to optimize your AdWords campaigns. This week, we’ll show you how you can tailor your campaigns to reach the most relevant mobile audience.What mobile device are they using?Ensure that your ad is only displayed to the right mobile audience…

On Saturday, February 20th, 2010 the AdWords system will be unavailable from approximately 10AM to 2PM PST, for maintenance. While you won’t be able to sign in to your accounts during this time, your campaigns will continue to run as usual. AdWords system maintenance typically occurs on the second Saturday of each month from 10AM to 2PM.We’ll continue to update you via the blog as we always have, but please make note of the February 20th date and of our scheduled maintenance further down the road…

Over the last several months, we’ve been introducing new ways to analyze and segment your campaign data. As we continue to introduce more data types, we want to make sure that it’s easy for you to access these reporting controls. That’s why we’ve introduced a new analysis toolbar in the Campaigns tab of your account. This toolbar consolidates key functionality from the “Filter and views” and “More actions” menus, and appears at the top of each of your data tables:(click for full size image) You can use the toolbar to quickly apply a filter to the data you’re viewing or customize the columns on each tab…