Google AdWords Articles

7-31-15 8:49pm PST

Google Ads Developer Blog
Relaxing constraints on ad group name uniqueness
Have you ever found it frustrating that you can never reuse an AdGroup name after removing the AdGroup, since a removed AdGroup cannot be modified? We have awesome news for you!

Now, AdGroupService doesn’t consider REMOVED AdGroup names when verifying that an AdGroup name is unique within a Campaign. If an AdGroup is in a REMOVED state, then the name of that AdGroup can be reused. This is already the case for Campaigns, and we’ve extended this relaxation of constraints to AdGroups.

If you have questions or need clarification, visit us on the AdWords API Forum or our Google+ page.

Nadine Sundquist, AdWords API Team
7-31-15 2:57pm PST
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Check us out in Business Week and Entrepreneur,
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http://www.benzinga.com/pressreleases/15/07/m5655729/disruptive-advertising-named-top-enterprise-ppc-firm-by-topseos-com-for

All information at website below
http://get.disruptiveadvertising.com/adwords-eval-pulse2/

any questions or to schedule by email contact;
assesment@diruptiveadvertising 7-31-15 2:24pm PST



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If you need Page One Keyword Rankings for sure, see photos below
and contact for Request for Proposal, why wait months for what I can do in weeks since 1994.

Brian M Rye
bmr1965@gmail.com or salessection21@gmail.com
1-two06-316-0142

 7-30-15 11:00pm PST

Inside AdWords
Search Ads on Google Play and new app promo tools roll out to advertisers and developers
People turn to their phones billions of times a day for I want-to-know, I want-to-go, I want-to-do, and I want-to-buy moments. And in these intent-rich moments, they often turn to apps to get what they need. Runners may search for a “mileage tracker” app as they start training for a marathon, foodies may look for “restaurant” apps to check out the trendiest new places in town, and frequent fliers may search for “top games” to play before a long flight. In fact, search is one of the biggest drivers of app installs in the Play Store.

That’s why we’re investing in new ways to help people discover apps with Search Ads on Google Play and innovating on new technologies to simplify campaign management and improve measurement for developers.

They’ve arrived: Search Ads on Google Play

Search Ads on Google Play will begin to roll out today to all advertisers and developers who use Search app install campaigns on AdWords.

Google Play reaches more than 1 billion people on Android devices in more than 190 countries. With such an extensive reach, Search Ads on Google Play can provide consumers new ways to discover apps that they otherwise might have missed and help developers drive more awareness of their apps.

Companies like Booking.com and Nordeus are already extending their app promotion strategy to include showing ads on the Play Store.
Tomislav Mihajlović, CMO of Nordeus shared that, "Search has already been a key component of our app promotion strategy to reach high-quality users. With new Search Ads on Google Play, we have an even bigger opportunity to connect with people in the moments they’re looking for new apps to download. We are already seeing significantly more app installs from Search with the addition of Google Play inventory for our game Top Eleven.”

Improved conversion tracking for Android

As we expand the opportunities for developers to promote their apps, we’re also committed to providing conversion tracking tools that work seamlessly across channels and align with whichever measurement solution a developer chooses to use. That’s why we’re introducing Android first app opens, a new conversion tracking solution that measures when a user first opens an app after clicking on an ad and completing an Android app install. In addition to providing app conversion tracking across Search, Display and YouTube, this new solution also allows developers to better align the conversion volume they see in AdWords with the data they see in a third-party measurement solution. First app opens are the standard conversion type for third-party solutions, so we’re working with key partners like Tune, AppsFlyer, Kochava, Adjust and Apsalar to ensure data consistency and give developers the freedom to use reporting and optimization features across AdWords and third-party solutions of their choice.

An even easier way to scale your app install ads across Google networks

In a few weeks, Universal App Campaigns will make it even easier to promote your apps on Google Play and across all Google properties, including: Search, YouTube, the AdMob in-app network, and the 2M+ sites on the Google Display Network. Simply let us know what your ad will say, who you want to reach, your budget and target cost-per-install, and we’ll do the rest.

As the apps ecosystem continues to grow, we’re dedicated to creating products that help developers get their apps to the users who will love them. From adding search ads to Google Play, to improving Android conversion tracking and simplifying campaign management with Universal App Campaigns, we hope these new tools will bring even more success to our app developer community.

Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Director, Product Management, Mobile Search Ads
7-28-15 4:00pm



Inside AdWords

Google's official blog for news, tips and information on AdWords
\



 by Jen Huang, Senior Product Manager, AdWords

link to Article 

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2015/07/introducing-more-powerful-dynamic.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FATHs+%28Inside+AdWords+-+EN%29/


Whether it’s “hotels near me” or “nearby hotels,” people often search for the same things differently. So reaching your customers in the moments that matter can sometimes be a moving target. In fact, of the billions of searches made on Google every day, 15% of them have never been seen before.1 Couple that with shifting product inventory and content hidden deep within your website, people don’t always find what they’re looking for. That’s why three years ago we introduced Dynamic Search Ads (DSA).

Today, we’re excited to announce that DSA has been enhanced and retooled from the ground up, and is now available to all advertisers globally.
What’s Dynamic Search Ads?

DSA helps you reach your customers with the right information, in the moments they’re searching -- without the need to manage keywords. Using Google’s organic web crawling technology, DSA indexes your website to determine which searches to show ads for. If a search is relevant to the content on your website, Google will automatically create an ad to enter into the auction. Your ads’ headlines and landing pages are generated based on the products and services you offer, and what people are searching for. These highly targeted ads also complement other AdWords campaigns by delivering value for relevant searches that aren’t covered by existing keywords.

Show ads based on your website

Now, there’s an even more powerful way for you to reach your customers. In addition to crawling and indexing your website, DSA now organizes your website content into recommended categories for targeting your ads. Recommended categories are customized to your products and services, for example “furniture,” and only trigger ads for search queries where you have a relevant landing page. Each category can also be refined to show additional, more specific categories.
Recommended categories for DSA
For example, you might drill into the recommended category for “furniture” to advertise just your “dining room furniture” or “living room furniture.” Select as many or as few categories as you want, or select the option to show ads based on your entire website.

Ad previews and insightful recommendations

Once you’ve selected your categories, we’ve added new tools to provide more transparency into how your ads will show. For each recommended category, you’ll now see samples of the search queries you’ll be targeting, the text ads that’ll appear, and the pages your customers will land on. To help get your campaign started, a recommended bid is also calculated for each category. These recommendations are based on the performance of your existing keywords that are targeting similar search queries.

Many customers have seen early success with these enhancements to Dynamic Search Ads.

As a global player, trivago constantly faced the challenge of covering their huge hotel inventory throughout all markets. DSA and the new categories allowed them to do just that, even in markets with limited resources. Leveraging the scalability of DSA, trivago was able to roll out DSA to over 25 markets in a short period of time.


Hayneedle.com, one of the nation’s largest online retailers, helped beta test DSA. They used their new recommended categories to deliver a 5% incremental lift in qualified search traffic to their website.


Immense reach with incredible ease

DSA is now more powerful than ever -- and it takes less than 10 minutes to set up your first campaign. An improved workflow guides you through campaign creation, which includes a more intuitive way to ensure your ad templates remain relevant to your dynamic ad targets.

You can learn more about Dynamic Search Ads in the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Jen Huang, Senior Product Manager, AdWords
1 Internal Google data.
Labels: , 
7-28-15 12:52pm PST



Google 
Inside AdWords
Google's official blog for news, tips and information on AdWords

 By Sven Herschel, Product Manager for Google Merchant Center 

Link to Article 

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2015/07/easily-update-and-validate-ads-with-new.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FATHs+%28Inside+AdWords+-+EN%29



Posted: 
Your data feed is key to promoting your products on Google.com — it lets you capture the attention of shoppers by letting them know you’ve got exactly what they’re looking for. To help you seamlessly update ads and quickly get products in front of new customers, today we’re excited to announce two data feed enhancements to Google Merchant Center — one that improves efficiencies for large retailers, and one that helps small retailers get on board more easily:
  • Online product inventory feeds: a new feed type that lets you quickly update price, availability and sale price of your key products. This is especially useful for larger retailers that need to change these attributes frequently. 
  • Google Sheets add-on: a Sheets extension that connects your spreadsheet directly to Merchant Center for a faster and easier upload. This is especially useful to for smaller retailers looking to get up and running quickly with shopping ads.
Whether you use Google Sheets or text file formats to upload your products, these new data feed enhancements make it faster and easier to upload your most up-to-date product information to Google Shopping and find more customers online.

Online product inventory feeds help you quickly update key attributes 

If the price, availability, or sale price information for some or all of your products changes frequently, online product inventory feeds is a new feed type to make quick updates to these product attributes, without having to re-submit the full product feed:
  • Save time with even faster feed processing: Submit new information for price and availability throughout the day to update these specific attributes. You can submit updates for just a small subset of your products for faster processing. If there’s an error processing your online inventory feed, your full product feed will not be impacted.
  • Show shoppers the most accurate product details: When your pricing or availability suddenly changes, update your affected items on the fly, allowing fresher information to appear on Google Shopping. 
For more information on how to get started with online inventory feeds, check out our Help Center article.

Validate and upload your feed directly from Google Sheets

Google Sheets was designed to provide a fast and friendly way to get started with shopping ads for small and medium sized retailers. If you use Google Sheets to upload your inventory to Google Merchant Center, the newGoogle Sheets add-on simplifies how you create, upload and validate feeds:
  • Validate your products directly from Sheets: The sidebar in the add-on allows you to validate individual rows or your entire Google Sheet, showing you any errors and warnings before you upload your data feed. 
  • Upload your products directly from Sheets: From the sidebar, you can upload your entire spreadsheet into Merchant Center, without leaving Sheets. The results of your upload are displayed directly in the sidebar, giving you immediate feedback on feed processing.
For more information on how to get started with Google Sheet add-on, visit our Help Center article.

Be sure to check out these two new enhancements today to get up and running on Google Shopping and make the world your storefront.

Posted by Sven Herschel, Product Manager for Google Merchant Center 
Labels: , , 

7-27-15 9:59am PST

Search Engine Watch

How The Google Display Network Boosts Search PPC Performance: A Case Study

By Melissa Mackey

link to Article 

http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/opinion/2419286/how-the-google-display-network-boosts-search-ppc-performance-a-case-study#



Over the years, the The Google Display Network (GDN) has been knocked for poor performance. Advertisers have long complained about low-quality placements and low conversion rates.
To be sure, performance on the GDN isn't the same as search, in that the ads are shown on content sites and matched based on content and topics, rather than keywords. Advertisers should not think of display as an extension of search, but rather as a distinct channel.
Still, low conversion rates are often a reality. But low conversion rates on the GDN alone can be deceiving. In fact, the GDN can boost performance in your search PPC campaigns. Here's a case study illustrating how:

Background

Our client had recently launched a new suite of products and services in the financial services industry, and wanted to generate leads. We ran a GDN campaign for 12 weeks, using both text and image ads. Campaigns were targeted based on keywords and in-market segments. While we knew display would act primarily as an awareness play, the primary goal was still lead generation.

Results

The results for the display campaign weren't great on their own. In the 12 weeks the campaign was live, we only got 10 conversions:
gdnchart2
The campaign generated a lot of impressions and clicks, but precious few leads. On the surface, it looks like a failure.
Let's look at results for search, which ran for a total of 23 weeks: nine before display launched, and two after it was paused.
conversionsbyweek
Search conversions peaked when display launched, and fell off after display ended. And conversion rates decreased after display was paused.
Here's a closer look at weekly averages before display launched, while it was running, and after it was paused:
gdnchart1
Impressions increased by an average of 45 percent while display was running, and fell off when display was paused to about the same level they were before display. This indicates that more people performed searches while the display campaign was running. It's possible that the display campaigns influenced more people to search for the client's product after seeing a display ad.
Conversion rate also increased dramatically while display was running - by 52 percent. The display campaign may have attracted searchers who were more qualified, and converted at a higher rate. Even more interesting is the fact that conversion rates fell significantly when display was paused, even though the search campaign had been optimized heavily by this point.

Confounding Factors

Of course, no longitudinal case study like this is without confounding factors. Seasonality could have played a role in influencing conversion rates. The campaign ran from January to June, and display was live from mid-March through May. It's possible that the second quarter of the year is just naturally the busiest time for this client. We don't know, since this was the first time they'd used PPC, but it's definitely possible.
Also, as mentioned earlier, we were constantly optimizing the search campaign. The heaviest optimization was done during the first few weeks - before display launched. Would conversion rates in the search campaign have risen anyway, just due to optimization? It's possible, but the fact that search conversion rates fell off when display was paused leads me to believe that display was part of the impact.

Conclusion

If we had looked at display on its own, we would easily have decided it was a failed experiment. A 0.12 percent conversion rate is low by anyone's standards, and the cost per lead was high. When combined with a search campaign, though, overall results improved greatly. Without display, we would have had fewer overall search conversions, based on the data. Display appears to have positively impacted the search campaign.
The next time you're thinking about pausing a low-performing display campaign, look carefully at its impact on your search campaigns. You may be pleasantly surprised.

7-27-15 9:59am PST

Search Engine Watch

How The Google Display Network Boosts Search PPC Performance: A Case Study

By Melissa Mackey

link to Article 

http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/opinion/2419286/how-the-google-display-network-boosts-search-ppc-performance-a-case-study#



Over the years, the The Google Display Network (GDN) has been knocked for poor performance. Advertisers have long complained about low-quality placements and low conversion rates.
To be sure, performance on the GDN isn't the same as search, in that the ads are shown on content sites and matched based on content and topics, rather than keywords. Advertisers should not think of display as an extension of search, but rather as a distinct channel.
Still, low conversion rates are often a reality. But low conversion rates on the GDN alone can be deceiving. In fact, the GDN can boost performance in your search PPC campaigns. Here's a case study illustrating how:

Background

Our client had recently launched a new suite of products and services in the financial services industry, and wanted to generate leads. We ran a GDN campaign for 12 weeks, using both text and image ads. Campaigns were targeted based on keywords and in-market segments. While we knew display would act primarily as an awareness play, the primary goal was still lead generation.

Results

The results for the display campaign weren't great on their own. In the 12 weeks the campaign was live, we only got 10 conversions:
gdnchart2
The campaign generated a lot of impressions and clicks, but precious few leads. On the surface, it looks like a failure.
Let's look at results for search, which ran for a total of 23 weeks: nine before display launched, and two after it was paused.
conversionsbyweek
Search conversions peaked when display launched, and fell off after display ended. And conversion rates decreased after display was paused.
Here's a closer look at weekly averages before display launched, while it was running, and after it was paused:
gdnchart1
Impressions increased by an average of 45 percent while display was running, and fell off when display was paused to about the same level they were before display. This indicates that more people performed searches while the display campaign was running. It's possible that the display campaigns influenced more people to search for the client's product after seeing a display ad.
Conversion rate also increased dramatically while display was running - by 52 percent. The display campaign may have attracted searchers who were more qualified, and converted at a higher rate. Even more interesting is the fact that conversion rates fell significantly when display was paused, even though the search campaign had been optimized heavily by this point.

Confounding Factors

Of course, no longitudinal case study like this is without confounding factors. Seasonality could have played a role in influencing conversion rates. The campaign ran from January to June, and display was live from mid-March through May. It's possible that the second quarter of the year is just naturally the busiest time for this client. We don't know, since this was the first time they'd used PPC, but it's definitely possible.
Also, as mentioned earlier, we were constantly optimizing the search campaign. The heaviest optimization was done during the first few weeks - before display launched. Would conversion rates in the search campaign have risen anyway, just due to optimization? It's possible, but the fact that search conversion rates fell off when display was paused leads me to believe that display was part of the impact.

Conclusion

If we had looked at display on its own, we would easily have decided it was a failed experiment. A 0.12 percent conversion rate is low by anyone's standards, and the cost per lead was high. When combined with a search campaign, though, overall results improved greatly. Without display, we would have had fewer overall search conversions, based on the data. Display appears to have positively impacted the search campaign.
The next time you're thinking about pausing a low-performing display campaign, look carefully at its impact on your search campaigns. You may be pleasantly surprised.

7-25-15 5:32pm PST

Article from

Search Engine Watch 

PPC Automation Methods for Retail Search Advertising By Tara Johnson 


link to Article 

http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2416717/ppc-automation-methods-for-retail-search-advertising




As retail text ads shift into a new era, retailers with large product catalogs or significant investments in PPC channels know it can be difficult to stay ahead of their channel management. With so many products and concurrent campaigns, it becomes less realistic to dedicate the product-level attention that each SKU deserves.
Helping retailers with their advertising strategy and staying ahead of the competition, PPC automation is used for a variety of purposes, including:
  • Reporting - Metrics, custom metrics and KPIs
  • Alerts - Low-performing campaigns, ad groups, keywords
  • Recurring Tasks - Ad creation, ad copy: pricing, sales, inventory
  • Advanced Optimizations - Pause low-performing creative, optimize for custom metrics
Types of PPC automation include automated rules, AdWords API, AdWords scripts, AdWords-only platforms and enterprise cross-channel bid platforms. Ways retailers can leverage bid automation strategies include:

AdWords' Existing Automation Features

Automatic bidding is the simplest of the AdWords bidding strategies. There are a variety of automation tools available within AdWords (flexible bid strategies) that can enhance CPC, target search page location, target CPA, maximize clicks or target ROAS.

Related articles


Custom Algorithms and Rules

While these may be considered "less-sophisticated data algorithms," they will allow more room for customization and are available to external data sources, like weather data, stock info and more.

Bid Using Offline Conversion Data

Retailers can upload offline conversion data directly into AdWords and adjust bids based on offline data. This is useful for lead generation and retail shops with longer buying cycles.

Build Your Own Rules and Algorithms with AdWords Scripts

Retailers can store historical data in Google Drive using sheets, or host the data in a flat .csv or .txt on their server. This data can be used to inform actions on bids and schedule bid adjustments daily or weekly, depending on the volume of keywords and traffic.
Knowing when it makes sense to introduce automation into channel management is critical to scaling growth on avenues like text, shopping, display, and social advertising. At the bare minimum, retailers should be leveraging four basic PPC automation applications: pausing dead URLs, addressing out of stock product pages and improper 301/302 redirects, and basic reporting to guide your optimizations.
While automation is an innovative way to combine strategy and technology to leverage opportunity in the e-commerce ecosystem, it is important to note automation is driven by human strategy.
Although technology drives efficiency within a well-structured campaign strategy, it does not create a well-structured campaign strategy. In simple terms, you don't want to rely on automation alone against your competitors and expect to win, but you should know how to leverage automated technology to enhance your bidding strategy.

About the author



  • Tara Johnson

Tara Johnson

Tara graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a B.S. in Journalism/Business. Her passion for creative publishing and quality reporting...

7.24-15 6:30am PST


AdWords Scripts Discovery - Pause and Enable Ads Based on Dates

link to Article in SearchEngineWatch.com

http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2417479/adwords-scripts-discovery-pause-and-enable-ads-based-on-dates


AdWords Scripts Discovery - Pause and Enable Ads Based on Dates

To help further our knowledge, our team recently started coming together for bi-weekly “Incubator” sessions, where we work together to tackle large-scale problems in our Paid Media accounts. The great part about the meetings is that it gets us all focused on one issue. The issue is defined by the Biddable Manager on the account, and all team members, whether familiar with the account or not, pitch in to come up with solutions.
The first issue we tackled seemed quite relevant to what many businesses struggle with in their accounts today – the scheduling of ad copy – so I thought sharing was necessary.
To give some back story, the issue we were trying to solve was for a non-traditional school, where we run paid search ads to promote new courses and workshops available on site. The school employs a number of instructors and holds a number of workshops and courses scattered throughout the year, all of which are searchable in Google. To create a personalized message based on the user search, our team had multiple ads running using specified dates - for example, "Register Before ___ to Reserve Your Seat!"
The trick with this strategy is that we had to pause and enable these ads manually – each day executing a search in AdWords for any ad copy that showed a course was ending. This was taking a significant amount of time for our Biddable Manager, because we did not have a way to automate specific ads in an AdWords to pause or enable on a given date (like with sitelinks). Pausing and enabling can be done at the campaign level in AdWords or at the ad level through third-party tools like DoubleClick Search, but not in the AdWords engine, which most businesses use to manage their accounts.
To solve this issue, our team scoured the Internet and pieced together an AdWords Script from multiple sources that runs off labels, allowing our team to pause or enable ads based on dates within the given label. Now, with our new AdWords Script, these ads automatically pause on the last day to register, as stated in the ad copy and in the label. Overall, this new AdWords Script saved our team 6-10 hours per month of manual account updates. Across other accounts, the script has saved numerous hours – making our team and our client accounts more efficient.
This is just one use case for the Script. Since its development, it has also been applied to our e-commerce businesses during sales or promotions, when the goal is to pause or enable ads on certain dates without having to create a separate campaign. Once the Script is added and tested, it runs smoothly without the need for reapplication. Another great feature of the Script - once the ads are paused or enabled, the label is removed notifying our team that the action has been completed. Want to see if you have any more upcoming promos? Just search for labels in your account - if you don't have any labels in the given format, nothing else is scheduled to run and you can continue running evergreen ad copy or start thinking of new promotions to run.
How to Test and Activate the Script:
  1. Create ad copy using specific dates. Include at least one ad copy version that uses today’s date and make sure that the ad is enabled once you upload through Editor (and then to the engine), even if the campaign or adgroup is paused.
  2. Once your ads are created, label your ads in bulk with the action you want the Script to take, knowing it will run daily. Keep in mind that this format must be used for the ad labels: Pause on YYYY-MM-DD or Enable on YYYY-MM-DD. For your test ad, label with “Pause” using today’s date. Tip: To label multiple ads quickly, use Excel and a formula that pulls the date from the ad copy and puts it in to a separate cell, which you can then upload to Editor in the Label column attached to your ads.
  3. Once all the ads are labeled, navigate to the AdWords engine, go to Bulk Operations on the left-hand menu and click “Create and Manage Scripts” under the “Scripts” heading.

    johnstone-image1
  4. From here, click the red +Script button and add the following Script.

    var ENTITY = 'Ad'; //or Ad or Campaign
var PAUSE_PREFIX = "Pause on "; //look for labels "Pause on 2013-04-11"
var ENABLE_PREFIX = "Enable on "; //look for labels "Enable on 2013-04-11"
 
   
function main() {
  var todayStr = Utilities.formatDate(new Date(), AdWordsApp.currentAccount().getTimeZone(), "yyyy-MM-dd");
  var pauseStr = PAUSE_PREFIX+todayStr;
  var enableStr = ENABLE_PREFIX+todayStr;
  Logger.log("Looking for labels: " + [pauseStr,enableStr].join(' and '));
    
  var labelsArray = buildLabelArray(pauseStr,enableStr);
    
  if(labelsArray.length > 0) { 
    var labelsStr = "['" + labelsArray.join("','") + "']";
    var entityIter;
    if(ENTITY === 'Keyword') {
      entityIter = AdWordsApp.keywords().withCondition("LabelNames CONTAINS_ANY "+labelsStr).get();
    } else if(ENTITY === 'Ad') {
      entityIter = AdWordsApp.ads().withCondition("LabelNames CONTAINS_ANY "+labelsStr).get();
    } else if(ENTITY === 'Campaign') {
      entityIter = AdWordsApp.campaigns().withCondition("LabelNames CONTAINS_ANY "+labelsStr).get();
    } else {
      throw 'Invaid ENTITY type. Should be Campaign, Keyword or Ad. ENTITY:'+ENTITY;
    }
      
    while(entityIter.hasNext()) {
      var entity = entityIter.next();
      pauseEntity(entity, pauseStr);
      enableEntity(entity, enableStr);
    }
  }
}
  
//Helper function to build a list of labels in the account
function buildLabelArray(pauseStr,enableStr) {
  var labelsArray = [];
  try {
    var labelIter = AdWordsApp.labels().withCondition("Name IN ['"+pauseStr+"','"+enableStr+"']").get();
    while(labelIter.hasNext()) {
      labelsArray.push(labelIter.next().getName());
    }
    return labelsArray;
  } catch(e) {
    Logger.log(e);
  }
  return [];
}
  
//Helper function to pause entities
function pauseEntity(entity, pauseStr) {
  var labelIter = entity.labels().withCondition("Name = '"+pauseStr+"'").get();
  if(labelIter.hasNext()) {
    entity.pause();
    entity.removeLabel(pauseStr);
  }
}
  
//Helper function to enable entities
function enableEntity(entity, enableStr) {
  var labelIter = entity.labels().withCondition("Name = '"+enableStr+"'").get();
  if(labelIter.hasNext()) {
    entity.enable();
    entity.removeLabel(enableStr);
  }
}
  5. After your Script is implemented, click “Preview”. If the Script is working correctly, you should see that you ad labeled to pause on today’s date, will show as paused in the preview. If you see this, activate your Script by clicking “Save” and specify how often you want it to run. For our purposes, our team runs the Script daily at 1 AM.
Have you used any new AdWords Scripts lately? If so, feel free to leave comments and questions in the discussion below. 

7-23-15 3pm PST

10 Steps to Audit Any Pay Per Click Account

artilce repost from Adwords.Google.com

Auditing your PPC account is a necessary step to ensure success, but it doesn’t have to be over whelming. This article focuses on the 10 most important pillars you need to check in order to have a solid PPC account on Google AdWords.
Are you making sure your keywords are retrieving relevant terms? Most of the time advertisers are investing money on terms that are just not good enough or not 100 percent relevant. Spotting these terms can save you a lot of money. What to look for in a search term report:
  • One word broad match keywords
  • Exact match negative keywords
  • Long tail keywords
    • You can look at your search query report by clicking on “details”, “search terms” and “all” in the keywords tab
    source: adwords.google.com
    source: adwords.google.com
    2. Location Targeting Set Up Are you getting clicks from locations you don’t want to target? This is a common issue for many accounts and it has an easy solution. Simply go into your campaign settings and select target “people in my targeted location” to avoid traffic you do not necessarily need. You can set it up in your location settings in the settings tab: source: adwords.google.com
    source: adwords.google.com
    Having a period at the end of the first line of an advertising message will show a larger headline when displayed in the first three positions on Google. Also, it makes your extensions stand out more. Additionally, I would suggest including a product feature or benefit in the first line of the ad in order to attract the eye of your potential customer. This is an example of an advertising message without a period at the end of the first line: source: adwords.google.com
    source: adwords.google.com
    This is an example of advertising message with a period at the end of the first line: source: adwords.google.com
    source: adwords.google.com
    4. Advertising Extensions Ad extensions are becoming critical to the success of a campaign. Proof of this is the fact that Google is now considering ad extensions as an important element of the quality score formula. You should make sure the account is at least taking advantage of the following extensions:
  • Site links
  • Call extension
  • Location extension
  • Social extension
  • Review extension
    • You can find all advertising extensions below the extension tab at the adgroup or campaign level:
    source: adwords.google.com
    source: adwords.google.com
    Are the keywords in the account grouped in the right adgroups? As you may already know, having a high quality score can save you a lot of money, therefore you need to maximize you chances of getting as close to 10/10 as possible. Also, grouping keywords in tight groups helps to improve the CTR as long as the ads are well written. Increasing the CTR will have a huge impact on the quality score and reduce costs even more. 6. Connection with Google Analytics Make sure to have properly connected Google AdWords and Analytics because this can save you a lot of time and money! I strongly recommend to use two features from within the AdWords interface:
  • Evaluate the average time on site of keywords and find out if your landing page is performing poorly or if you need to pause many of your keywords
  • Call extension
  • Evaluate the bounce rate by advertising messages and find out what kind of messages produces the best results!
    • You can link Google AdWords to Google Analytics to get extra columns in AdWords by clicking on “My Account” and then on “Account Access”. You can now click on “Linked Accounts” and move forward with the Google Analytics linking:
    source: adwords.google.com
    source: adwords.google.com
    Are you optimizing  your account customizing bids and exposure to geographical performance? Let’s assume you target the whole USA and find out that Florida and New York are performing with a CPA 50 percent lower than other states. You might want to segment your targeting in those states and allocate a higher bid to generate more sales in Florida and New York. Similarly, you could lower the bid for low performing states. You can change a geographic bid in the location tab under settings: source: adwords.google.com
    source: adwords.google.com
    How is your account bidding? You need to make sure that each keyword has a custom bid tailored to its level of profitability. Do not always aim to be in the top positions, but rather focus on being profitable. Are you running on CPA bidding? Make sure to pause all unprofitable keywords and test new ones as you go. Also, test how different CPA goals affect your conversions volume. Is a company running on the display network? if not, why? If yes, are they doing it right? The display network has huge opportunities but it requires surgical targeting to generate a good CPA. The most common mistake is to target the display network only via keywords without any placement or topic. Make sure to create a custom targeting to take advantage of all available options. 10. Remarketing Campaigns Many companies have remarketing campaigns that are simply targeting a bunch of people who have visited their website in the past. The right approach is to target by product or service and to segment into as many lists as possible to create a better customer experience and maximize the conversion rate Auditing an account helps save you money and time, and it should be regularly done both on new and old accounts. The ten points mentioned above should be checked routinely to keep your account healthy. We are all aware that it requires more than 10 points to review an account. I am looking forward to creating an even bigger list with all of your contributions! Screenshots taken 01/27/2014. 
    7-22-2015 5pm PST

    This article is great  from Google Inside AdWords Blog
    it is for AdWord PPC Firms and Companies, the average Joe doing his own AdWord
    Campaigns should be considering getting help after reading the knowledge and experience it takes in keyword Research and Testing just for the average AdWords Campaign.
    Brian M Rye
    Blog Author

    ATRICLE REPSOT FROM

    Inside AdWords

    Google's official blog for news, tips and information on AdWords

    Posted by Jonathan Alferness, Vice President, Product Management, Google Shopping


    Link to Aticle

    http://adwords.blogspot.com/2015/07/winning-shopping-micro-moments.html


    Posted: 
    Last year, mobile devices used before or during shopping trips influenced just under one trillion dollars — or 28% — of in-store sales in the United States.1 Those sales grew from the billions of shopping micro-moments that power today’s buying economy. Fewer people wait to head to the mall on Saturday to go shopping; thanks to smartphones, shopping now happens anytime and anywhere. Read on for the latest ways we’re helping retailers reach shoppers in those crucial I-want-to-know, I want-to-go, and I want-to-buy moments.

    I-want-to-know: Giving immediate answers for every shopping need
    We're improving the mobile experience on Google to aid shoppers as they browse, compare, and research products.

    1 in 5 people swipe to interact with shopping ads, expressing a strong desire to learn more.2 So we’re rolling out a new enhancement that gently expands the shopping ads as you swipe, revealing information like product ratings and availability at a nearby store. The result: more qualified traffic driven directly to retailers. This feature will begin rolling out on Chrome for Android this month, with iOS to follow in the coming months.
    Expandable shopping ads

    Conversational search is also really important -- we’re seeing more shoppers literally asking Google to help them learn more about products. So we’re rolling out new experiences that answer them right back.

    On searches for the top-rated products, such as “Best women’s Nike running shoes,” we’re starting to show newly-designed shopping ads with authoritative rankings and product ratings. The new design is so helpful to those specific users that we've seen click-through-rate increases of up to 11% for retailers for these queries.3Product queries that include “reviews” or “recommendations" are also increasingly common, so we’re showing new product review cards with product ratings and snippets from the most useful reviews from around the web. Finally, shoppers who want to learn more about a product’s features, like the resolution of the camera they’re considering purchasing, may now see a product attribute card with the most relevant information.
    New experiences for shoppers searching for the best products, product reviews and attributes

    I-want-to-go: Helping shoppers find local stores
    1 in 4 people who avoid stores say they do so because they don’t want to waste their time finding out that the thing they want isn’t in stock.4 So we’re doing more to serve people who clearly want to focus on products that are available within driving distance.

    In late 2013, we launched local inventory ads, which show shoppers when the product they want is available at a nearby store. We’ve seen very positive results: retailers who enabled local inventory ads on mobile and desktop campaigns saw a 2% increase in overall clicks and no drop in online conversion rate when local inventory ads were served instead of shopping ads (PLAs).5 Because we’ve seen that LIAs are good for both shoppers and retailers, we’ll now be showing many more local inventory ads than we did before by prioritizing showing LIA over shopping ads on local intent shopping queries, like “coffee maker near me”. This new experience increased clicks on shopping ads by 85% for these queries.6
    Local inventory ads for local intent queries

    What if you could give shoppers the right information at the right time – without them even needing to ask?Google Now does just that by bringing people the information they need at the moment they need it. We’ve recently released two new cards for shoppers.

    The Google Now in-store card appears when a shopper is near a store, displaying useful information such as sales, closing hours, loyalty card data, and more. When she clicks “Search store inventory,” a Google-hosted, retailer-branded local storefront allows her to browse that store’s shelves 24 hours a day. Also newly available is the Google Now price drop card. This card highlights a significant price reduction on a product the shopper has previously browsed, giving her a compelling reason to make that purchase now, online or in-store.
    Google Now in-store card, local storefront & Google Now price drop card

    I-want-to-buy: Making it easy to purchase on mobile
    US retailers’ conversion rates on desktop computers are 2X higher than on mobile.7 So we’re working on new solutions to help retailers increase mobile engagement and sales.

    There are lots of great shopping apps out there, and we want to encourage shoppers to use them. That’s why we’re starting to work with a select group of global retailers including eBay, Flipkart and Zalando to add deep links to their apps right in their shopping ads, driving people straight to their mobile app instead of their website. This is a tremendous new opportunity for retailers and app developers to drive engagement with their shopping apps, and we’ll be expanding it to more advertisers in the coming months.
    App deep linking for shopping ads

    Finally, to help smartphone shoppers buy with ease from their favorite retailers, we'll be testing Purchases on Google. When a shopper searches on mobile for a product such as “women's hoodies”, she may see a shopping ad with 'Buy on Google' text. After clicking the ad, she's taken to a retailer-branded product page hosted by Google. Checkout is seamless, simple, and secure, thanks to saved payment credentials in her Google Account.
    Purchases on Google

    For retailers, opting in to Purchases on Google means improved mobile conversions thanks to a simplified checkout process. Participating retailers only pay for clicks on the shopping ads to the product page; all clicks and interactions on the product page are free. While Google hosts the product page and provides purchase protection for customers, retailers own the customer communication and can offer customers the option to receive marketing and promotional messages. “Customers increasingly want to shop on their own terms. Purchases on Google facilitates that flexibility while maintaining the merchant’s ability to own the customer relationship.” says, Peter Cobb, eBags Marketing EVP and Shop.org Chairman.

    Although we're still in early experiments with a limited number of retailers, we see Purchases on Google as a big step towards helping retailers drive more mobile conversions and win more customers. “Purchases on Google will simplify our customers’ ability to search for items on Google and then buy with Staples.” said Faisal Masud, Executive Vice President of Global E-Commerce, Staples, Inc. “Working with Google on this offering will make the discovery and purchase process even easier for the customers we serve, with the power of both of our companies behind it.”

    Jason LaRose, Chief Revenue Officer, Digital at Under Armour echoes a similar sentiment: "As the consumer continues to rapidly adopt mobile as their primary device, we have to move at a similar pace in how we reduce purchase friction and enhance the user experience with our brand. Google's technology solutions help us innovate, so our collaborative efforts are rich and ongoing.”

    Greater expectations
    With shoppers today, big expectations come from the smallest moments. That's good news, because retailers now have the technology to deliver on those expectations. The tools we shared this week can help retailers be there in those billions (and trillions!) of micro-moments with the right experience, and in the right context, to win the moments that matter the most.

    To learn more about Google’s solutions for retailers, visit google.com/retail or contact your Google account manager.

    Posted by Jonathan Alferness, Vice President, Product Management, Google Shopping
    1Deloitte, Navigating the New Digital Divide: Capitalizing on Digital Influence in Retail, May 2015.
    2 Google Shopping internal data, Q2 2015.
    3 Google Shopping internal data, Q1 2015.
    4 Google, Ipsos MediaCT and Sterling Brands, Digital Impact on In-Store Shopping, May 2014.
    5 Google Shopping internal data, randomized user A/B experiment using Adwords Conversion Tracking for mobile and desktop, controlling for product mix and excluding local-only products, June 2015.
    6 Google Shopping internal data,  randomized user A/B experiment, June 2015.
    7 Aggregated data from Google Analytics for the US retail vertical, May 2015.

    Labels: , , , 
    7-22-2015 3:15pm PST The Complete Guide to PPC Audits By Jacob Baadsgaard AdWords, Analytics June 18, 2015 Link to Article in Disruptive Advertsing Blog https://www.disruptiveadvertising.com/adwords/the-complete-guide-to-ppc-audits/ PPC audits are all about opportunity. Yep, you heard me right. While the word “audit” typically merits comparisons to medieval torture, PPC audits are all about discovering unrealized opportunities. Let’s face it, no matter how good you are at PPC, there’s always something you could be doing better. PPC audits help you find that something. So, without further ado, let’s take a step back and look at what’s going on with your accounts. What’s working? What isn’t? Let’s figure out how to take things to the next level. Why Are You Using PPC? First things first. One of the biggest mistakes online marketers make is focusing on irrelevant metrics. Ultimately, the only metric that matters is the profitability of the business. Sure, CPC, CTR, CPA and the rest of the acronym soup are good indicators, but CTR doesn’t pay salaries. With any PPC audit, I recommend hauling out the old marketing calculator. Does the business case for PPC still add up? Consider the following: What are you trying to achieve with your PPC campaigns? Your objectives need to be clear and profit-driven. Newsletter sign-ups should lead to income in a definable way. Ecommerce sales should grow while maintaining decent margins. Sales leads should convert at an acceptable rate. Whatever the reason for your PPC campaign is, it’s important to make sure that you are achieving that goal in a way that benefits your bottom line. Example: If your goal is lead generation, you need to make sure that your lead conversion rate is high enough to justify the your cost per lead. A $5 CPA may look great; but, if your sales team only converts 1 out of 100 leads, you need to make at least $500 profit per sale just to cover marketing expenses. That might add up, it might not. What Has Changed? Online marketing is anything but static. Costs change. Market interest changes. Search terms change. Competition changes. And the list goes on… Not only do you need to accommodate for changes in your campaigns, you also need to account for those changes in your overall online marketing strategy. Example: Continuing the previous scenario, a new competitor enters the market and the two of you start duking it out for top spot. Your CPA jumps to $7.50. Fortunately, you make $800 profit per sale before marketing expenses; but, at the new CPA, does PPC still make sense? If the business case for online marketing doesn’t add up, that’s a hard stop. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. You need to take a hard look at the situation and decide if PPC is really worth the investment. In many cases, you can make more progress by looking at the big picture than you can by hashing out the details. Analytics Seriously, you’re not using analytics? Okay, so you probably are using analytics, but you’d be surprised how many companies don’t take advantage of this essential resource. Sure, PPC platforms give you a few tools that monitor CTR, conversions and a smattering of other metrics, but that’s just the beginning. If you’re using Google AdWords, it’s easy to link your account to Google Analytics. From there, you can start to look at metrics like average time on site or bounce rate to determine what happens after someone reaches your landing page. At Disruptive Advertising, we have a mantra: PPC + CRO + Analytics = ROI In other words, the key to making your online marketing campaigns successful (ROI) is optimizing every step in the process. It’s hard to produce good PPC and CRO without good analytics. In essence, analytics is the key to translating PPC audit shortcomings into actionable opportunities. If you’ve got analytics up and running, then use that data! If not, I’m gonna keep on laughing… just do it Let’s Get Down to Business Okay, now that you’ve got your business case and your analytics put together, it’s time to take things up a notch. With any analysis, it’s important that you are looking at a representative set of data. At a minimum, you probably want to look at least 3 months of data for a specific concern; however, generally speaking a year or more of results is best. At Disruptive Advertising, we offer clients a free 32-point PPC audit that builds off of the following list to help us identify key improvement opportunities. To date, we haven’t met anyone who aced everything, so dig in! 1. Account Structure A disorganized account makes data analysis both meaningless and practically impossible. If the campaigns don’t have some sort of rhyme or reason (hopefully not your fault), you need to get in and sort things out. Ideally, ad group names should give context to the campaigns inside. A PPC audit is kind of like a crime scene investigation, the “who, what, where, when and how” give you a frame of reference. Who are you marketing to? (pregnant women, 49ers fans, etc.) What are you marketing? (nausea bands, fan gear, etc.) Where are you marketing? (the east coast, San Francisco, etc.) When are you marketing? (early mornings, Monday nights, etc.) How are you marketing? (morning sickness, coolest man cave, etc.) Odds are, at least one of these is an important part of your campaign. Add it to the campaign name! If you find yourself asking, “now what am I looking at here?” you probably need to reevaluate your naming convention. Organizing your account is critical to determining what factors give you a good ROI. Remember, you can’t learn from chaos. could you help me 2. Networks Make sure you know what your campaigns are up to. One slip of the mouse and they’ll take off with your money. Look at the Network Settings for your campaigns. Are you targeting both Search and Display networks with the same campaign? Don’t do it! If you are running a Display network campaign, look at your placements. Most of the time, you should at least have some managed placements. If you don’t, now’s a good time to find some. If you do, check and see how they are performing. Placements that don’t perform should be excluded, winners may deserve extra time and attention. It’s hard to meet your core objectives if you aren’t running your campaigns in the right spots. Always check to see if your money is going to the right place. 3. Targeting Location targeting is an often-missed opportunity to cut down on irrelevant clicks. You might have the world’s most brilliant campaign; but, if you’re advertising a local spa to the whole country, you’re probably wasting a lot of money. On the flip side, if you find that you are more successful in certain locations or that some ad groups or keywords perform better in a given area, you may want to create campaigns dedicated to that location (check the Geographic report). At the very least, you can increase your bids for those areas to ensure that you aren’t outranked. Overall, using location targeting can be a great way to reduce costs and increase the effectiveness of your campaigns. It’s an easy kill that can quickly put more money in the bank. 4. Keywords Now we’re getting to the meat of the audit. Keyword selection is the lifeblood of PPC. However, anyone who has tried PPC knows that successful keywords aren’t always the terms you expect. Given the importance of keywords to your campaign’s success, it’s always worth taking a long, hard look at your choices to ensure that everything is adding up appropriately. Assuming you have the right terms, here are 4 ways to get more out of your keywords: 1. Search Term Report There are a lot of ways the wrong search can end up triggering your ad. The Search Term Report can help you identify weaknesses in your keyword strategy. Keep an eye out for one-word, broad-match keywords; exact-match negative keywords; and irrelevant long-tail keywords. 2. Negative Keywords The right negative keywords will save you money. Period. Take a look back up at that Search Term Report and find all of the searches that trigger your ads but don’t trigger results. If you’re looking for some quick kills, Techwyse has a helpful list of terms you should mark as negative keywords for different account types. 3. Grouping Grouping keywords correctly can do wonders for a variety of metrics. Good keyword grouping allows you to write highly relevant ads and landing pages that maintain search continuity. In other words, your ad only triggers when a search is relevant to the ad. The ad contains the search term the user is looking for. And, so does the landing page. Group your keywords appropriately and this should be a piece of cake. 4. Custom Bids Your bids should be tailored to what works. There are quite a few ways to do this, but ultimately you want to spend most of your money on the things that make you the most money. Look at which keywords sell and assign your bids accordingly. 5. Ads Good ad copy is incredibly important. As with keyword selection, a thorough review of PPC ad development and psychology is beyond the scope of this guide (see here for some good pointers); but, there are a few things you should definitely watch out for: 1. Message Mismatch As mentioned previously, PPC works best when you have an unbroken trail from intent to conversion. If your ad matches what the searcher is looking for, they’ll probably click on it. For this reason, ads typically perform well if the ad copy includes some or all of the keywords that triggered the ad. Note, dynamic keyword insertion can be helpful here, but you have to pull it off right. At this point, people are pretty wary of advertisements, so “Want to DIY Bookshelves?” probably won’t generate many clicks. If you’re going to use dynamic keyword insertion, make sure the resulting ads don’t throw up red flags. 2. Poor Grammar or Spelling Your ad says a lot about your product. If your grammar and spelling is shoddy, people will assume your offering is also shoddy. After all, if you don’t care enough to do your sales pitch right, what are the odds you do a good job on anything? First impressions are critical in marketing, don’t waste your impressions on a typo. 3. Dangling Description Lines If you use it right, description line 1 can really work to your advantage. If you make the top of the page, description line one moves up to your headline—provided that the line ends with a period. Work that feature! Not only does it make whatever you say in line 1 look better (see previous point), it also gives you more headline real estate. Double win! It should go without saying, but good ads sell good. Rewriting bad ad content is always a good way to improve your CTR, quality score and, ultimately, your bottom line. Props to you if you caught the grammatical error in that last paragraph… 6. Quality Score A lot has been written about how keyword quality score affects your campaigns (for a really interesting article on the relationships between quality score and various metrics, click here). Regardless of where you stand on the quality score debate, improving your quality score reduces your cost-per-click. A big part of the quality score debate, of course, is the time it takes to improve your quality score. If you’re looking for a win in this area, don’t expect results overnight. Quality score is essentially determined by how well your ad and site meet customer needs over time, so look at your keyword selection, ad relevance, landing page content and click-through-rate to get an idea of whether or not your ad is succeeding. In my opinion, a good quality score is the result of good marketing. If you are reaching your target audience correctly, both your business and your quality score should naturally improve (which both saves and makes you money!). 7. Extensions In today’s competitive online marketing environment, extensions have become something of a must. First off, if you’re fighting for top spot, extensions give you a lot more real estate. Second, they focus your clicks on what your customers really want to see. That’s another double win! Successful extensions, however, require a bit of planning and work. Ask yourself, Which extensions best fit my marketing goals? Put a location extension up for an online retailer and you might as well just post a CTA titled “Click Here to Give Google My Money.” If a call extension is set to run 24/7, but the company only takes call from 9 to 5, you’re setting the stage for a lot of missed opportunities. Do it right, and setting up extensions can have significant effects on the profitability of an online marketing campaign. 8. Remarketing Check your remarketing campaigns. If you don’t have any, consider adding some. Retargeting can be a great way to cheaply pull potential customers back to your site. After all, if they visited your site before, they are much more likely to visit again (and hopefully convert this time). If you are running remarketing campaigns, look at your audience selections (under Shared library) and make sure they are all collecting members. Double-check that you have designated audiences for each level of abandonment. Lastly, make sure you’ve put the right cookies with appropriate lengths in your website code. Retargeting tends to be an easy online marketing option to neglect, but ensuring that your campaign is running appropriately is an easy way to increase conversions without breaking the budget. Summary At their core, PPC audits really are all about finding actionable opportunities to make more money. Whether it’s putting together the business case for PPC, monitoring analytics data or implementing a fix that makes your account sing, watching your efforts turn into dollars is just plain fun. You’ve heard my two cents, now I want to hear yours: Where have you seen the biggest opportunities in your PPC accounts? Is there anything you would add to this PPC audit list? The following two tabs change content below. Jacob Baadsgaard Founder and CEO Jake is the CEO and fearless leader of Disruptive Advertising. His face is as big as his heart, and he loves hugs, improving ROI, and coming up with killer account strategies. From Brian M Rye Blog Author "This is good stuff, but at the end of the day hire the best and don't do your own AdWords Campaigns", 7-22-2015 3pm

    New guide for setting up AdWords API authorization using the OAuth 2.0 Playground by JoshRadcliffe, AdWords API Team

     Article from Google Ads Developer Blog

     link to artice http://googleadsdeveloper.blogspot.com/


     New guide for setting up AdWords API authorization using the OAuth 2.0 Playground Posted: Wednesday, July 22, 2015 For those of you who’d prefer to generate an OAuth refresh token using only a browser, there's a new guide on how to use the OAuth 2.0 Playground: https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/guides/oauth_playground The guide walks you through the authorization setup required by the AdWords API for a Web application--via a browser session--without the need to execute any command-line scripts. More OAuth resources OAuth 2.0 Authentication for the AdWords API Using OAuth 2.0 to Access Google APIs Still have questions? Feel free to visit us on the AdWords API Forum or our Google+ page. - Josh Radcliff, AdWords API Team Labels: adwords_api, oauth FeedMappings for location targeting available via the AdWords API Posted: Wednesday, July 15, 2015 What's changing? Starting on or after July 23, 2015, if you are using v201506 of the AdWords API, then FeedMappingService.get and FeedMappingService.query will return FeedMapping objects created for location targeting. These FeedMapping objects will have criterionType 77, and will not have a value for placeholderType. There will be no change in behavior for v201409 or v201502. You will start seeing these objects if either of the following is true: You created a Feed linked to your Google My Business account. You created a Location targeting feed through the AdWords user interface, under Shared library -> Business data. Why the change? Starting with v201506, LocationGroups.feedId is required if your matching function includes a LocationExtensionOperand. Specifying a feedId in this situation allows AdWords to target the areas surrounding the locations in a location targeting feed. This may be the same feed you are using for location extensions, or a separate feed containing additional locations you want to use strictly for targeting. The key point is that the Feed referenced by LocationGroups.feedId must have a FeedMapping with criterionType 77. What should you do? If your application retrieves FeedMapping objects, make sure it will properly handle objects where placeholderType is null and criterionType is set. If you want to create LocationGroups objects that use a LocationExtensionOperand, you can now use FeedMappingService to find the ID of feeds that have a FeedMapping with criterionType 77. Learn more Check out the following resources for more information on Location Groups: The updated placeholders documentation describes the required fields for a location targeting feed. The AddCampaignTargetingCriteria example in the targeting folder of each client library shows how to set up a LocationGroups object using the ID of your location targeting feed. The AdWords Help Center has an overview of using Location Groups. Still have questions? Feel free to visit us on the AdWords API Forum or our Google+ page. - Josh Radcliff, AdWords API Team Labels: adwords_api, LocationExtensionOperand, LocationGroups
    7-21-15 1pm PST

    From Google AdWords Blog a Great New Tool, Google Insights 
    BM Rye

      link to article

     http://adwordsagency.blogspot.com/2015/07/googlecominsights-your-new-home-for.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AdwordsAgencyBlog+%28AdWords+Agency+Blog%29

    Google.com/Insights: Your New Home for Google’s Insights Tools

    Monday, July 20, 2015 | 12:00 PM
    Today, our lives are lived in moments. We share vacation photos with family and check in on what our friends are up to. There are also other types of moments: the I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, I-want-to-do, and I-want-to-buy moments. These moments, when we act on a specific intent and expect an immediate answer, happen all the time and all along the consumer decision journey. And they’re increasingly happening on digital platforms.
    As we are now able to immediately act on our impulses to answer a question, learn a skill or find the best product for us, the link between our action and our intent has never been closer. The challenge for marketers is to quickly aggregate all of the intent behind these moments into something meaningful, some sense of understanding what consumers truly desire.
    Enter Google. Google has the innovative technologies to turn this massive data set into data that can help people create new services and solve big problems.


    Even with the biggest of data sets, it’s hard to engineer an insight.  Google provides the factbase of category, consumer, brand, and content data from which just about anyone can find something interesting. But in the hands of experts – the brand managers, planners and creatives of the world – your expertise can turn our findings into true insights. When we can put our data and our tools into your hands, truly groundbreaking work is possible.
    Google.com/Insights: A centralized location for Google’s insights tools
    To help you better harness the power of our data, we have redesigned Google.com/insights as a central starting point for the insights discovery process.  Here, you can understand how our solutions help you to understand the intent behind the moments that matter:    
    • Google Consumer Surveys: make confident business decisions with fast, accurate, and insightful market research
    • Google Trends: Anticipate industry trends before they happen, with real-time insights into search behavior
    • Google Correlate: See how seasonality, location, and world events affect search behavior relevant to your industry
    In addition, you will find links to compelling, research-driven insights we have published so far, as well as examples on how other brands have partnered with Google and used our data and tools to successfully drive their businesses forward.
    Companies of all sizes and across all industries rely on our data and tools to discover how to find solutions to problems and understand what moves consumers.  Today and tomorrow, Google will be there to partner with marketers to help solve their most challenging questions.
    | Email Post

    7-21-15 1pm PST

    From Google AdWords Blog a Great New Tool, Google Insights 
    BM Rye

      link to article

     http://adwordsagency.blogspot.com/2015/07/googlecominsights-your-new-home-for.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AdwordsAgencyBlog+%28AdWords+Agency+Blog%29

    Google.com/Insights: Your New Home for Google’s Insights Tools

    Monday, July 20, 2015 | 12:00 PM
    Today, our lives are lived in moments. We share vacation photos with family and check in on what our friends are up to. There are also other types of moments: the I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, I-want-to-do, and I-want-to-buy moments. These moments, when we act on a specific intent and expect an immediate answer, happen all the time and all along the consumer decision journey. And they’re increasingly happening on digital platforms.
    As we are now able to immediately act on our impulses to answer a question, learn a skill or find the best product for us, the link between our action and our intent has never been closer. The challenge for marketers is to quickly aggregate all of the intent behind these moments into something meaningful, some sense of understanding what consumers truly desire.
    Enter Google. Google has the innovative technologies to turn this massive data set into data that can help people create new services and solve big problems.


    Even with the biggest of data sets, it’s hard to engineer an insight.  Google provides the factbase of category, consumer, brand, and content data from which just about anyone can find something interesting. But in the hands of experts – the brand managers, planners and creatives of the world – your expertise can turn our findings into true insights. When we can put our data and our tools into your hands, truly groundbreaking work is possible.
    Google.com/Insights: A centralized location for Google’s insights tools
    To help you better harness the power of our data, we have redesigned Google.com/insights as a central starting point for the insights discovery process.  Here, you can understand how our solutions help you to understand the intent behind the moments that matter:    
    • Google Consumer Surveys: make confident business decisions with fast, accurate, and insightful market research
    • Google Trends: Anticipate industry trends before they happen, with real-time insights into search behavior
    • Google Correlate: See how seasonality, location, and world events affect search behavior relevant to your industry
    In addition, you will find links to compelling, research-driven insights we have published so far, as well as examples on how other brands have partnered with Google and used our data and tools to successfully drive their businesses forward.
    Companies of all sizes and across all industries rely on our data and tools to discover how to find solutions to problems and understand what moves consumers.  Today and tomorrow, Google will be there to partner with marketers to help solve their most challenging questions.
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    7-21-2015 11am PST

    How to Use Price Point Testing to Get the  Most Out of Your 

    PPC Campaigns

    Link to orignial article on Disruptive Advertising Blog

    https://www.disruptiveadvertising.com/ppc/how-to-use-price-point-testing-to-get-the-most-out-of-your-ppc-campaigns/


    June 24, 2015By PPC
    Price Point Testing












    If you’ve ever run a Paid Search campaign through Google Adwords, Bing Ads, or any other platform, you know there are dozens of levers you can pull that can affect campaign performance. Broadly speaking, the types of changes you can make fall into two broad categories:
    1. Increasing or decreasing raw traffic: Includes adjusting bids and budgets, and expanding keywords.
    2. Optimizing traffic for conversions: Includes ad tests, keyword refinement, and Conversion Rate Optimization.
    Both of those are important—in fact, they’re the main tools a PPC Ninja has to work with—but, it’s easy to spend so much time looking at keywords and ads that you forget that PPC advertising is just part of a bigger picture: selling an actual product or service for a profit!
    Today, I want to write about a third category, one that’s related to optimization but covers something more fundamental than just PPC: how much the thing actually costs.
    Product Prices
    To illustrate this point, let’s talk about an experiment I recently ran with a client that led to a significant increase in profits.

    The Experiment

    Our client handles document processing for individuals and small businesses, offering several distinct price points ranging from $99 to $199 for different tiers of service. We’d been running a profitable AdWords campaign for several months with some solid wins coming from landing page and keyword tests. Our average cost per conversion was around $75, with an average conversion value of $165, so the client was netting about $90 per conversion.
    But, we wondered, what if we tested the same services at higher price points? Would people still sign up? Would it kill conversions? Would margins increase? I predicted that higher prices would lead to fewer and more expensive conversions, but the question was: Would that be offset by higher conversion values?
    We decided to run a test. To make sure the test gave us usable data we followed 3 steps.

    1. Define the Change and the Timeline

    The client shifted each offering’s price up by $100—a pretty significant increase. However, since the client services a niche industry and doesn’t have to worry about being undercut by too many competitors, we figured that a major price change would provide us clear, solid data to work with. We didn’t want to confound any of that data, so we agreed that I’d hold off on the usual ad and keyword tests. Instead, we decided to sit tight and let the price change play out for at least a week.

    2. Let the Data Run Its Course

    The first few days after the price change our number of conversions actually increased.
    More people signing up for more money? Yes, please!
    It would have been tempting to call the experiment a huge success right out of the gate. But, I knew from experience not to trust just a few days’ data. Sure enough, things leveled out after a few days, which goes to show how important it is not to get too excited over a small data sample, good or bad. Good testing requires patience!
    Of course, if our conversions had dropped to zero we might have had to act; but, for the most part, testing is an exercise in diligently watching without touching.

    3. Compare the Right Data

    Since our test was a before-and-after experiment, we didn’t have a control group to compare our numbers with while the test ran, so instead I compared the data to the next best thing: our numbers immediately before the test over a similar time period. Luckily, our results had been fairly stable prior to the test, so the results were pretty trustworthy.
    If there had been recent keyword or ad tests that had dramatically affected results, it would have been important to control for that as much as possible (for example, I could have excluded keywords that had only recently been added).

    The Results

    After two weeks we had enough data to make some early conclusions. Here’s what we learned:

    Higher prices = fewer conversions

    Our total conversions dropped 6% compared to our previous weekly average. So, as I’d predicted, higher prices meant a few more people said “no way!” and failed to sign up for the client’s services. Still, 6% is a relatively small number so that might fluctuate in coming weeks. Conclusion 1 is therefore a little tentative, but changing the price seemed to have a relatively minor negative impact on conversions.

    Uh oh, cost per conversion went way up!

    Conversion volume may have gone down slightly, but cost per conversion jumped from $75 to $95. That’s a 26% jump! HUGE red flag, right!? Well, maybe…but remember, at the end of the day conversions and cost per conversion aren’t the PPC metrics that actually matter. What matters is, did we make more money per lead and increase net profits?

    But wait! Higher value per conversions + increased net profits = Success!

    Luckily, thanks to AdWords conversion values, we know exactly how much we made per conversion. In this case, our average conversion value jumped from about $165 to $215, an increase of 32%! In case you’re not doing the math yourself, that means average profit per conversion went up by $30, which was more than enough to make up for a small drop in conversion volume.
    great scott

    Lessons Learned

    This particular experiment can’t exactly replicated in any industry, but some basic principles should be applicable. Here are some lessons you can use when you’re testing price changes in your PPC campaigns:

    1. Don’t Overlook Prices

    As I mentioned at the very beginning, PPC account managers typically focus on clicks and conversions, but taking a look at prices means looking at the bigger picture and optimizing for profitability. If you can, try a fairly dramatic price increase (or decrease) so you can make a strong conclusion from the data. Then, for the next test, maybe try something in between to find the optimal price point.

    2. Track Your PPC ROI

    If you don’t know how much you’re making, you won’t know how tests affect your bottom line. For eCommerce, platforms like Google make it easy to track revenue. For other industries with longer or offline sales funnels it can be tougher, but tracking ROI is critical to knowing how effective your PPC campaigns are.

    3. Test the Right Way

    Be sure you know what parameters you’re testing, what data you’re going to compare your results to, and don’t make major changes while you’re running a test. While the test is running, don’t panic over small data points and let the bigger trends make the decision for you. Your test might not result in better results like ours, but at least you’ll have made a data-driven decision, which will put you in a great position for your next test.

    Conclusion

    Next time you’re looking at your PPC accounts wondering what to test next, don’t forget prices. If you’ve experienced success (or failure) doing this, let us know in the comments!
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    My LinkedIn profile

    Casey Walrath

    Account Strategist & Content Marketing
    Casey is an account strategist and blogging/content and IT czar here at Disruptive Advertising. When he's not cuddling up to his cardboard cutout Chewbacca, he's cuddling up with his cardboard Jar Jar Binks.



    7-20-2015 11:50pm PST

    From Disruptive Advertsing Blog

    by Casey Walrath Adwords

    Full article with all visual aids

    https://www.disruptiveadvertising.com/adwords/4-tips-for-using-labels-in-adwords-like-a-pro/

    June 30, 2015By AdWords

    4 Tips for Using Labels in AdWords Like a Pro




    My wife loves post-it notes. I even gave them to her for Christmas as a stocking stuffer…and she thought it was a good gift!  And there’s a good reason why: Post-its are awesome. You can use them for everything from leaving reminders to writing passive aggressive messages to strangers. There are even apps to simulate post-its on your computer desktop, which clearly shows that my wife and I aren’t the only ones fond of them.
    Thankfully, for those of us in the pay per click marketing industry, Google offers its own version of post-it notes for Google AdWords users: Labels! They’re not quite as fun as real life stickynotes, but AdWords labels are incredibly useful nonetheless.
    Labels allow you to create color-coded tags in you can view in a column right next to your clicks, impressions and conversions at the Campaign, Ad Group, and, Ad, and Keyword levels. They’re a great visual reminder for keeping track of all sorts of things, from campaign organization and much more.
    AdWords labels have a lot of potential; but, like a post-it note, an AdWords label is only as useful as you make it. So, let’s discuss a few ways to use labels for a more productive AdWords experience.

    How Do I Create Labels in AdWords?

    To create a label, just check one or more of your campaigns, ad groups, or keywords and then click the Labelsdrop-down and select Create New Or, you can apply an existing label by checking the appropriate box. To make things even easier, AdWords lets you apply multiple labels simultaneously.
    You can also select Manage Labels to see a list of all active labels and delete ones that aren’t in use. You can even change the label color if you aren’t happy with the random color Adwords assigns to new labels.
    In fact, custom color-coded labels can be extremely handy if you find yourself using lots of them—which just might be the case after you finish reading this!

    Editing Labels in AdWords Editor

    Google recently added the ability to edit labels in its offline AdWords Editor software, something that becomes incredibly handy when you’re making bulk changes. Editor can’t create new labels, but you can assign and view existing ones with the Labels button on the bottom menu.

    So, now that we know how to create and edit labels, let’s talk about…

    How to Use AdWords Labels Like a Pro

    Here are a few common (or maybe uncommon) ways I’ve used labels for accounts I’ve managed:

    1. Use Labels to Group Campaigns

    If you find yourself (like I sometimes do) working on AdWords accounts with hundreds of active campaigns, keeping track of what’s happening where can be a pretty daunting task. For these campaigns, labels save you a lot of time and headache.
    For example, let’s say you have a nationwide, 50 state/50 campaign account. Every account has the same ad groups: Tall Widgets, Short Widgets, and Wide Widgets. You can apply an Ad Group label for each of those product categories to get a quick, at-a-glance view of all your different types of widgets across multiple campaigns. Or, you can use labels to group Search vs. Display campaigns, or to mark your top performing campaigns.
    Labels for organizing and grouping campaigns can also be combined with other tactics, including our next one:

    2. Use Labels as Advanced Filters

    AdWords comes with fairly robust filtering system once you learn how to use it, and using labels can be a great way to simplify and save time for filtering tasks that you perform often.
    For example, imagine your account has a lot of similar ads pointing to a variety of destination URLs. AdWords lets you filter by destination URL manually, but it might be simpler to create a label for every ad that points to a specific URL. That way, when you need to find ads with that URL, you can use the Filter By Label drop-down to select it. In addition, you can also filter by multiple labels at the same time.
    Going back to our Widgets business, let’s say you want to compare the performance of all Tall Widget ads with at least 20 conversions. If you’ve create a label for your Tall Widgets landing pages, you can filter by that label and then add your filter for greater than 20 conversions. Then you can sort the list by various AdWords columns, including Clicks, Impressions, Click Through Rate, and more!

    3. Use Labels as Reminders

    If you’ve ever been in a relationship (business or personal!), chances are you’ve gotten in trouble at some point because you forgot something important. I know I have. Luckily, labels are a handy way to create visual reminders to check something and avoid problems.
    For example, say I start testing a few new keywords in a specific AdWords campaign. Whenever I do new keyword tests I always create a calendar reminder to review the new keywords to make sure everything’s working properly. Then, as a backup, I’ll sometimes apply a label to the campaign as well, so next time I check the account I’ll see a bright reminder that says “Review Keywords From July 20″.
    If you use this strategy, I recommend applying the label at the campaign level, even if your changes were to keywords, ads, or ad groups. That way you’re more likely to see it later. Also, if you use a lot of reminders, use Manage Labels (mentioned above) to clear away unused ones periodically to avoid clutter.

    4. Use Labels to Track Changes

    This is probably the the most useful yet underused way to apply labels in AdWords. Lets face it, AdWords is big and complicated. If you’re been managing an account for a long time (or if you’re managing more than one account), it’s easy to forget when you made a specific change or started a test.
    AdWords has a nifty feature to track change history, but it’s not always easy to use. Labels can help! I like to use them to track when I make significant changes to bids or ads, or when I create new keywords. Usually I’ll include the date, and sometimes the amount of the change (i.e. “Raised Bids 20% Jul 20″).
    Then, when I’m reviewing account performance, I can use that date for easy before-and-after comparisons.
    Labels are also really useful for changes AdWords doesn’t track. For example, you might apply a label to a campaign with the date you changed a landing page or altered your checkout process, so if your numbers change as a result you’ll have an easy reference point.

    Conclusion

    Hopefully you’ve been inspired to try out some new tactics for using labels in your AdWords accounts! (and seriously, Microsoft: get with the picture and add labels to Bing!). They’re great for people who love to stay organized and even better for people like me who have trouble getting organized in the first place. My wife doesn’t use AdWords; but, if she did, labels would be her favorite feature.
    Have you found any creative or useful ways for using labels in your own campaigns? Let us know in the comments!
    The following two tabs change content below.
    My LinkedIn profile

    Casey Walrath

    Account Strategist & Content Marketing
    Casey is an account strategist and blogging/content and IT czar here at Disruptive Advertising. When he's not cuddling up to his cardboard cutout Chewbacca, he's cuddling up with his cardboard Jar Jar Binks.





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