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Many ads are aimed at interrupting a consumer to get them to pay attention to the ad, but this approach has proven less effective on the Web, as consumers often come online to pursue an interest or perform a task, such as finding a local restaurant or booking an airline ticket. To address this, many advertisers are moving away from interruption toward helping consumers accomplish their tasks by offering commercial messages that are useful, helpful and relevant…

Last week, we shared with you a few tips to reach your audience on the go. This week we’ve launched a new site, Go Mobile! to help you be even more effective with mobile advertising.Even if you’re already taking advantage of the mobile opportunity in AdWords, this resource can help you think about other ways to integrate mobile into your broader marketing strategy, including:

• Taking advantage of the device’s ability to detect location
• Engaging with your audience any where, any time
• Using mobile to participate in the conversation

For more ideas on how to Go Mobile! please visit: http://www…

From time to time you’ve probably noticed the ‘Ads by Google’ message on ads around the web — we display this label because we want users to have an awareness and understanding of the ads they see online and where they come from.As more and more advertisers use rich media ad formats, such as Flash and interactive ads, we want to provide the same benefit to users for those ad formats.So today we’re starting to add the “Ads by Google” message to rich media ads in a way that’s unobtrusive to your ad creative and the publisher site, but as user-friendly as our current “Ads by Google” notices on other ad formats…

Earlier this year we posted on how to advertise your business on YouTube through Promoted Videos, and now you can advertise with Promoted Videos directly through AdWords.If you have a video about your business, Promoted Videos allow you to drive viewership of your videos by targeting the hundreds of millions of searches that happen on YouTube every day. You can also use Promoted Videos to have your videos appear on the YouTube homepage, video watch pages, and across the AdSense network…

Last week Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik, hosted a Think2010 webinar on “Using Data to Better Connect with Your Customers.” He discussed how to find and use data from Google tools such as Trends for Websites, Insights for Search, Ad Planner and the Search Based Keyword Tool. You can use the data to focus on your most relevant audiences, maximize your return-on-investment, and drive your businesses forward — now and as you charge forward into 2010…

Coming to ad:tech New York? So are we. We’re organizing a number of sessions at ad:tech and its partner conference, Content Revenue Strategies (CRS), to help you get more out of your search and display spend with Google. Here’s the lowdown:The Google Ads Factory Tour, 11/4/09-11/5/09The Factory Tour consists of two days of live workshops at ad:tech NY designed to provide you with a comprehensive overview of Google’s latest measurement and optimization tools…

On Saturday, October 10th, 2009 the AdWords system will be unavailable from approximately 10AM to 2PM PDT, 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 October 10th date and of our scheduled maintenance further down the road…

Every month we run free AdWords webinars to help you better understand your online advertising and to answer your questions live.Coming up in October we have:

• Optimizing for the Content Network
• Export Series: Using AdWords to reach new markets
• Export Series: Using mail services to grow your export business
• Export Series: Using Online B2B Marketplaces
• Export Series: Selling to customers who don’t speak English
• Make Your Website Work: A Manager’s Perspective

For more details and to sign up today, please see our webinar calendar…

Welcome back to the Think2010 series. In last week’s introductory post, we noted that this series will be devoted to looking forward, focusing on themes, trends and perspectives to help plan for the coming year. In this second post, we’ll get the ball rolling by providing a collection of perspectives from some very important people - everyday consumers.In our random (and diverse) sampling a couple things seem to be ringing true…

Earlier this year, we mentioned our plans to improve the measurement of conversions for display advertising campaigns on the Google Content Network. Today, to help you better measure the value of your display advertising campaigns, we’re announcing a new feature called View-through conversion reporting on the Google Content Network.Display ads are influential in increasing brand awareness and driving purchase consideration, and with View-through conversion reporting, you can better measure the impact of your display ad campaign for those instances where your ad is seen, but not immediately clicked on…

Feeding off the momentum of improvements we’ve made over the past year in AdWords, we recently released beta versions of the updated Keyword and Placement Tools.We’ve maintained the core functionality of these tools, but have added some new features that we hope will make them more useful for you. If you use English as your AdWords interface language you may have noticed that you already have access to these tools, and availability to all English advertisers as well as other languages will be rolling out over the next few weeks…

You may have seen our post on the Official Google Blog, announcing the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange. The Ad Exchange is a real-time marketplace to buy and sell display advertising space.The “buyers” in the Ad Exchange are typically ad networks and agency-run networks with their own ad serving and optimization technologies, while the “sellers” are large publishers.We’re excited about what the launch of the Ad Exchange means for you, our advertisers…

For today’s Inside AdWords post we have a note from our Chief Economist at Google, Hal Varian. Hal and his team spend most of their time studying the AdWords auction and finding ways to make it more efficient. Today he’d like to share a new tutorial he and his team have put together on how to bid for maximum profitability on AdWords: Last month we launched a new feature of AdWords called Bid Simulator…

We’ve posted before about how testing your website landing page can increase your conversions from AdWords. Back in July we held a webinar on the “7 deadly sins of landing page design” and next week we’ll hold the second webinar in that series: “Planning and running your first experiment in Google Website Optimizer.”The webinar will cover how to plan and set up your first experiment for testing your website landing page, while also providing tips and best practices that will benefit even those of you who are already pros at testing and optimizing your landing pages…

On Saturday, September 12th, 2009 the AdWords system will be unavailable from approximately 10AM to 2PM PDT, 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 September 12th date and of our scheduled maintenance further down the road…

In July we announced US beta testing of the Opportunities tab, a new section in your AdWords account designed to help you find additional cost-effective traffic for your search campaigns.Today we’ve begun expanding the beta to additional US advertisers, and we’ve also started including UK and Australian advertisers in the test. We’ll make the Opportunities tab beta fully available to all English-language accounts over the next few business days…

Last week we announced new high-end “Elegant” ad templates that can help you build great looking ads in minutes. Today we’re releasing additional “Elegant” templates in the “General” category, as well as templates in a brand new “People” category. This new category enables advertisers to use templates that have professional images featuring people In addition to these new templates, we also added 13 premium fonts that you can use to make ads with maximum visual appeal…

Now that most advertisers are using the new interface exclusively, we want to share some efficiency tips to really unlock the potential of the new interface.Focusing on what’s importantIn the Keywords tab you have several tools that help you focus on what matters to you.First, you can customize columns to show only the metrics you care about and in the order you want. You can then use filters to focus on keywords that match a certain criteria…

Today we held the last in the series of new interface webinars. Each week we get lots of great questions from attendees about the new interface. Today on New Interface Thursdays we’re going to highlight some of the top questions and answer them.How do I delete keywords?To delete a keyword, select the checkbox next to it and then click on the Change status menu at the top of the table. There, you’ll find the option to delete…

For today’s Inside AdWords post we have a note from our Chief Economist at Google, Hal Varian. Hal and his team spend most of their time studying the AdWords auction and finding ways to make it more efficient. Today he’d like to share some research that he and his team have done on conversion rates by ad position:Advertisers often ask us how conversion rates vary with position. Everyone is aware that higher positions tend to get more clicks and therefore more conversions in total…

You’re probably already familiar with the concept of Quality Score and know that it plays a major role in the way that Google decides when to show your ads and how to rank them. But, even seasoned AdWords veterans still have questions about ads quality, which is why we’ve put together the Search Ads Quality Getting Started Guide. Since introducing the concept back in July 2005, we’ve done a lot of work to make Quality Scores more detailed, accurate, and transparent…

A few weeks ago, we introduced location extensions - the new way to run local ads in AdWords. Today, we wanted to tell you a bit more about location extensions and give you some best practices for setting them up in your account.First, it’s important to know that there are two ways to set up extensions. You can set up extensions at the campaign level or at the ad level.Setting up campaign level extensions means that Google will dynamically match a campaign’s text ads with the most relevant address in your account based on information like a user’s location or a user’s search terms…

Creating display ads that look truly professional is hard work. Last year, we launched Display Ad Builder to help you easily design display ad campaigns. Since then, we’ve provided advertisers in over 40 countries with more than 90 templates to streamline the design process. Today, we have introduced a new set of “Elegant” ad templates in the “General” category of Display Ad Builder that make it even easier to create high quality display ads…

Next week is the Search Engine Strategies San Jose conference, and Google will be there. If you’re coming to the conference, we’d love to meet you. Googlers will be speaking in a number of sessions on topics ranging from website architecture to quality score. Also, Nick Fox, Business Product Management Director for Google AdWords, will be giving Wednesday’s keynote.Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

• Duplicate Content - Greg Grothaus - 9am-10:15am
• The Next Wave for Online Video - Erin Bouchier - 11:45am-12:45pm
• Successful Site Architecture - Johannes Henkel - 11:45am-12:45pm
• How to Turn Your Web Analytics into a Money Making Machine - Avinash Kaushik- 1:45pm - 2:45pm
• Keeping it Local - Josh Siegel - 4:30pm-5:30pm

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

• Convert Your Visitors to Customers - Nitin Mangtani - 10:45am - 12:00pm
• Conference Keynote - Nick Fox - 1:00pm - 2:00pm
• Google AdWords, Analytics & Website Optimizer Secrets Revealed + Google Science Fair - 2:30pm - 3:45pm
• Real World Multivariate Testing - Trevor Claiborne - 4:00pm - 5:15pm

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

• Extreme Site Makeover - Tiffany Lane - 10:30am - 11:45am
• Quality Score - Jonathan Alferness - 10:30am - 11:45am
• Images & Search Engines - RJ Pittman - 2:15pm - 3:30pm
• Search Becomes the Display OS - Rajas Moonka - 3:45pm - 5:00pm

We’re looking forward to meeting you next week…

The new interface helps you focus on the data you care about with tools like filters and customizable columns. But wouldn’t it be great if, instead of having to search for important changes in your metrics, you could be notified when a change you care about occurs?That’s why we’ve released a new feature called custom alerts. Custom alerts help you stay on top of your account’s performance by notifying you whenever important changes occur in your account…

On Saturday, August 8th, 2009, the AdWords system will be unavailable from approximately 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. PDT due to system maintenance. While you won’t be able to sign in to your accounts during this time, your campaigns will continue to run as usual. We apologize for any inconvenience.Posted by Amanda Kelly, Inside AdWords crew

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For the last two months, we’ve been hosting weekly webinars about the new AdWords interface. In each webinar, members of the AdWords team walk through the changes in the new interface, show how you can use the new features to manage your advertising campaigns, and answer your questions.Over the weeks, many advertisers have joined us to learn more about the new interface. Here’s what a couple of them had to say about the webinars:I’d like to thank you for today’s webinar…

Have you ever wondered how many impressions or clicks you could have received if you had used a different maximum CPC bid? Until now, finding the right bid has typically involved a lot of trial and error.The bid simulator, launched today, is a feature of the new AdWords interface that shows you the potential impact of your bid on your advertising results. While it can’t predict the future, the bid simulator allows you to explore what could have happened if you had set different keyword-level bids…

From August 11 - 14 the Seminars for Success will host its first summit featuring in-depth training on Google’s online marketing suite. Daily workshops will cover Google AdWords, Google Analytics and Website Optimizer along with special sessions on social marketing, mobile strategies and more. The summit will take place in Burlington VT, and you can register online for one or all four days of the summit…