Advertising is about getting your message in front of the right people. Whether you need to increase brand awareness or maximize ROI on direct response campaigns, your challenge continues to be about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. How can you do this intelligently, and at scale? Audience Solutions on the Google Display Network (GDN) provides the insight you need, connecting potential customers by with exactly what they are looking for — when they are ready to buy…

Starting today, if you’re running display ads through the Google Display Network, you may begin seeing the +1 button and personal annotations with your ads. Now, with a single click, people can recommend your ads’ landing pages to their friends and contacts.As we explained in our initial announcement several weeks ago, we believe that incorporating personal recommendations into display ads has the potential to change the way people view advertising…

When searching on Google, users appreciate results that are relevant and deliver a great experience after they click. In August, we announced trials in Brazil, Spanish-speaking Latin America, Spain, and Portugal1 that increased the weight given to relevance and landing page quality in determining Quality Score and how ads are ranked on Google. The goal was to improve the user experience with search ads…

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)When CafePress first started printing shirts in 1999, online retail was still a nascent industry and Google had yet to sell its first ad. Soon CafePress started selling products through search ads on Google, and their business took off. Today, CafePress hosts millions of shops online where customers can choose from more than 325 million products on nearly any topic, from wall art to phone cases…

Global Top Contributor Summit: real people behind user names and friendly smiles instead of emoticons. Meeting offline for the first time! 

As you may have read in the official Google blog, the Global Top Contributor Summit recently took place in sunny California. This two-day event brought together for the first time over 250 Top Contributors from Google forums. Top Contributors are longtime members of the Google Help Forums who, over time, have distinguished themselves as true experts by providing helpful tips, advice, and support to other forum visitors…

Last week, we shared examples of how direct response marketers are driving strong results with display advertising. But you’ve heard it before — beyond driving immediate clicks and conversions, display builds brands. And as digital budgets accelerate, for an increasingly growing number of brands, display advertising has become an important part of their strategy. In fact, in the recently conducted Advertiser Intelligence Reports study, by Advertiser Perceptions, advertisers are planning on spending more digital display dollars in the next 12 months for brand goals than direct response…

In July, we launched our first issue of Think Quarterly, a publication that packages up the insights and ideas that we learn from both inside and outside of Google. Today we’re launching our second edition, the “People” issue. It explores the latest technologies connecting us and the big ideas driving society forward.One way we can gain insight into people’s actions, intentions, and future actions is through their search behavior…

(Cross-posted from the AdWords Agency Blog)Few would argue that online display advertising is playing an increasingly important role in the marketing mix. While we frequently talk about how the vast majority of our top advertisers have run a Google display campaign in the last year while continuing to increase their investment, today we’re shining a light on some specific examples.For each brand we’re highlighting today, display was an integral part of their broader marketing strategy…

Earlier today we announced several exciting new additions to Google+, including many on mobile. We’d like to announce one more addition for our AdWords advertisers, +1 on the Google Display Network.Since its introduction on search results and search ads, the +1 button has been installed on over a million websites across the web with over 4 billion impressions daily. Starting early October we’re expanding that to include display ads across the web on both desktop and mobile…

If you’re designing display ads and have direct response goals, your ads need to catch the user’s eye, convey key information, and encourage them to click and explore your website. To get you started, we’ve put together the top ten tips learned through the collective experience of hundreds of Google AdWords account teams. These ten tips will help drive effective direct response marketing campaigns…

To improve our user experience with Google AdWords, today we’ll begin reviewing paused ads in the same way we review active ads. We’re proactively reviewing paused ads to eliminate unnecessary delays in getting your ads approved and ultimately enhance your ability to plan and manage campaigns.New and existing unreviewed paused ads will be sent through the standard ad approval process. This means that paused ads will be subject to our AdWords advertising policies, and ads that violate one or more of our policies will be disapproved…

Two weeks ago, we headed up to San Francisco to participate in the Search Engine Strategies conference. Over two days, our AdWords and DoubleClick representatives were able to share, listen, and learn with several hundred of you. For those unable to attend, here’s a summary of some of the recent innovations we highlighted at the show, and a few photos from our booth on the expo floor.

The AdWords team took the stage to share some of our latest Ad Innovations with the SES audience…

We’re excited to announce a new metric in AdWords, top of page bid estimates, to provide additional assistance in optimizing your ads to show above the search results. Analogous to first page bid estimates, this metric approximates the cost-per-click (CPC) bid needed for your ad to appear regularly in the top positions above the search results.
This feature compliments the new “Top vs. side” report segment, which allows you to see how your ads perform above and to the side of Google search results…

Are you looking to infuse new life into your marketing strategy? If so, we’d like to tell you more about Google Affiliate Network, a powerful platform that gives you access to trusted affiliate publishers who actively promote your products and drive high-quality traffic to your site. Best of all, you only pay for valid conversions.

What is affiliate marketing?

Over one third of global marketers use affiliate marketing as a key component of their online marketing strategy…

Today, we’re excited to announce Adwords Editor 9.5! This version supports Campaign Experiments, Location Extensions, and plenty of other features to boost your productivity while managing your AdWords campaigns. We’ve highlighted the key changes below, and you can see the complete list of feature updates in the AdWords Editor Version 9.5 release notes.

AdWords Editor Version 9…

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)
In June we launched the +1 button for websites, making it easier to recommend content across the web. In July, the +1 button crossed 2 billion daily views, and we also made it a lot faster. Today the +1 button appears on more than a million sites, with over 4 billion daily views, and we’re extremely excited about this momentum.

It’s just the beginning, however, and today we’re launching two more features that make +1 buttons more useful for users and publishers alike…

(Cross posted on the Google Small Business Blog)
School is back in session and here at Google, we’ve been looking for ways to help you learn how to grow your business online. Many of you have been looking for one central place to go to get smart about online tools and strategies, and we hear you. That’s why we’re pleased to introduce Learn with Google, a new educational site designed to be a one-stop shop for businesses to learn about Google products and services like AdWords, Google Apps, Places, Analytics, and more…

Today, we’re announcing a small update to ValueTrack, a feature for those of you who use third-party tracking software or have access to your web logs. With the new additional ValueTrack parameter we’ve recently added, {adposition}, you can now see the position on the page that your ad appeared in.

Starting now, your destination URL can include the {adposition} parameter. The {adposition} parameter works for search campaigns and google…

Evaluating the success of display campaigns can be an exercise in relativity. You gauge current campaigns against past performance or compare across multiple campaigns and advertisers within your roster of brands or clients.

But in seeking more comprehensive benchmarks that reflect trends going on in the display industry, you might find yourself falling short. Advertisers and agencies alike are looking for more data to answer the basic questions of “How do I know if my display ad campaigns are doing well?” and “Are there credible benchmarks can I use to compare the results on my current campaign?”

It’s no surprise then that our display benchmarks have met with much enthusiasm since we first started publishing the data in 2009…

Advertisers often wonder whether search ads cannibalize their organic traffic. If search ads were paused, would clicks on organic results increase and make up for the loss in paid traffic? Google statisticians recently ran over 400 studies on paused accounts to answer this question.

In what we call “Search Ads Pause Studies,” our group of researchers observed organic click volume in the absence of search ads…

On Thursday, August 4, we held a webinar about how to use today’s powerful targeting technologies to run effective display advertising campaigns for direct response goals. Specifically, we covered:

• The “targeting toolbox” for direct response campaigns on the Google Display Network
• Strategies for prioritizing and applying the available targeting options to maximize campaign performance and efficiency
• Tools, tips and best practices for maximizing ROI

For those of you who missed the webinar, a recording is now available, which you can watch below…

YouTube’s Promoted Videos recently passed the one billion mark in the number of video views delivered to advertisers. Promoted Videos allow you to promote your video against search results on YouTube, against related videos on YouTube, or across the Google Display Network. Promoted Videos help you bring your business to life—letting your customers see you, hear you, and connect with you online…

Calling all AdWords Advertisers!

Starting today and running throughout the next 3 months, the AdWords team will be holding live webinars every Tuesday and Wednesday at 3pm BST (7am PDT).

These live webinars are delivered by Google Search, Display, YouTube and Mobile Specialists and are a fantastic way for you to learn more about AdWords and greatly improve the performance of your campaigns…

(Cross posted on the Official Google Blog, Small Business Blog, and Lat Long Blog)Today, we’re officially introducing AdWords Express, a faster and simpler way to start advertising online in under five minutes. We first launched this product as Google Boost last October for a small number of local businesses. Since then, we’ve continued to improve the product and enabled all U.S. businesses new to online advertising to reach customers with ease…

Contextual. Audience. Remarketing. Demographic. Marketers have many options when it comes to targeting their display campaigns. The emergence of these technologies has transformed display into a powerful direct response medium, delivering measurable performance at scale for marketers. But with the plethora of options to choose from, where do advertisers and agencies begin? Please join Google for an upcoming webinar to learn more about how to approach targeting strategies for your campaigns on the Google Display Network…

Call Metrics, a simple way to get more phone calls and detailed call reports with AdWords, is now available to all advertisers in the US and Canada. Availability was limited since the introduction in November 2010, so thanks for holding.Call Metrics works by assigning and placing a toll-free forwarding number next to your ad text on Google search pages. When a user sees your ad and calls the number, AdWords registers the call and forwards it to your business…

If you write your ads in any language other than English, you may have wished that you could make your display URL consistent with the rest of your ad by showing your internationalized domain name. Today, we’re announcing that we now support non-ASCII characters, including non-Latin characters and Latin characters with accents and diacritics, in display and destination URLs.When you create an ad in AdWords, you can now enter Unicode characters in the display and destination URL fields…

Back in April we announced that we were introducing telephone support for all of US and Canadian AdWords customers. We said then that we would roll out this support to advertisers in other countries. Today, I am happy to announce that we have added Europe to our list.Our European-based AdWords customers will now be able to speak to a local-language AdWords specialist on one of the following numbers…

A few months ago, our Chief Economist, Hal Varian, wrote a post about understanding the average position metric. As Hal explained, there is a big difference between when your ad appears in position #1 above the search results and when your ad appears in position #1 on the side. Quoting Hal, “This distinction is important, since, on average, ads that appear above the search results tend to get substantially more clicks than ads that appear on the right-hand side…

This week we’re making a minor change to the way Google Display Network campaign settings work. This change will affect campaigns that meet these criteria:

• Are opted in to the Google Display Network
• Are targeting only keywords in at least one ad group
• Have the campaign setting “Relevant pages only on placements, audiences, and topics I manage”

BackgroundWhen you set up a Google Display Network campaign, you have two options to choose from:

• (1) Relevant pages across the entire network
• (2) Relevant pages only on placements, audiences, and topics I manage

With option (1), Google automatically places your ad on relevant webpages based on the keywords in your campaign…