I don’t think the people at Google ever sleep because this week Adwords Insider announced the launch of two new online services: Google Global Market Finder and Google Ads for Global Advertisers. Global Marketing Finder is a free online tool that helps you determine potential customers overseas. Just enter in keywords and select the marketing you’d like to explore. Ads for Global Advertisers is a website that contains step-by-step guides and tools to take you from a local to a global market. If you are interested in opportunities for expansion, these tools will definitely help take you to the next level.
So, we made it through the MSN/Yahoo merger. We’ve come out on the other side. We came, we saw…but maybe we haven’t quite conquered yet. Jason Tabeling with SearchEngineWatch wrote a post back in March about preparing your accounts for the merger, and now he’s revisiting some of his predictions in this week’s post called “Early MSN/Yahoo Post-Merger Metrics…” Not surprisingly, CPCs have risen. But how have CTRs fared? Check out Tabeling’s post at SearchEngineWatch.
Adwords has announced that there will be more automated rules that can be used and options for advertisers starting soon. Basically, the automated features of Adwords have become more expansive, and these features will be ready for all advertisers to use soon. The Adwords Blog states a few different examples in their post: being able to enable ads promoting a special offer late during the night when the sale goes live, being able to raise your bids to the first page for all keywords in a campaign that involve a certain word (such as “sale”) and being able to increase daily budget on one day while decreasing it during a low traffic day. So be on the lookout for these new features!
In 2010, local results became a really. big. deal. From Google to small blogs, everyone has been talking about its importance, and by now we’ve all been saturated with ways to ensure we use this new development to our advantage. But, is there such a thing as being too local? Glenn Gabe thinks so. Specifically, advertisers need to carefully filter location extensions in their ad text. Otherwise, this handy automated feature may leave you with some very upset, lost consumers. His article on Search Engine Journal provides a step-by-step breakdown of how to change your location extension settings, as well as why you should. SEOs should definitely check out his post, especially because incorrect location extensions may be affecting your campaigns without you even realizing.
Google introduced AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) a few months ago. This free tool helps measure the result of changes to keywords, bids, ad groups and placements before the changes occur. Yesterday, Google added text and display ad testing to ACE. Users can now run experimental changes on a percentage of AdWords traffic. According to Gordon Zhu from the Inside AdWords crew, you can now test various components of both ad types. In addition to testing ads against others of the same type, ACE now lets you test text ad performance to your display ads on the Display Network.
