Put optimization ideas to the test—run AdWords Campaign Experiments in your Opportunities tab

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Many of you have used the Opportunities tab to find keyword, bid, and budget ideas for your account. With each optimization idea, we provide estimates for how these ideas may affect your impressions, clicks, and cost. Now you can test these optimization ideas on your own campaigns when you run experiments in the Opportunities tab.

This new feature uses AdWords Campaign Experiments to run experiments on the keyword and bid ideas in your Opportunities tab. Experiments run on 50% of your AdWords traffic for thirty days, during which time you’ll have the chance to compare your original campaign setup with your test setup. You can decide at any time whether you want to apply your experiment settings to 100% of your traffic. If you take no action after thirty days, your experimental changes will be applied to your campaign automatically.

The ability to run experiments in the Opportunities tab has already launched in some English-language accounts and will be available to all English-language accounts over the next few days.

Start an experiment in just a few clicks:

1. Select keyword or bid ideas you want to test.
2. Select the checkbox for "Evaluate this idea for up to 30 days."
3. Click "Apply now."

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Keyword experiment setup in the Opportunities tab

Monitor your experiment performance:

When your experiment is running, you’ll be able to monitor your experiment performance from the Ideas page of the Opportunities tab.

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Monitoring experiment performance in the Opportunities tab

You’ll also be able to view performance statistics for individual keywords and bids on the Keywords tab when you segment by "Experiment."

For those of you who have wanted to try ACE but didn’t know what to test, this should help get you started. This is also a great feature for those of you who want to see a positive performance improvement before making changes to all of your traffic.

No matter how your new keywords and bids perform relative to your original setup, you’ll leave your experiment with more knowledge than you had previously, which means every experiment is a good experiment.

Posted by Lisa Shieh, Inside AdWords crew

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AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) now available in AdWords reports

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Experiments are only as useful as the results they produce. For those of you who use AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) to run experiments on your keywords, bids, placements, ad groups, ad creatives, and more, you’ll be happy to know that you can now run an AdWords report to evaluate your experiment performance. You can evaluate data in your report or easily export to a spreadsheet (no more cutting and pasting)!

ACE reports are now one of the many reports you can run from the Campaigns tab (or through the API!). When you run a report segmented by “Experiment,” you’ll see a side-by-side comparison of the performance of your experimental campaign changes (“experiment”) versus your original setup (“control”). You’ll also be able to see the level of statistical significance for your experiment performance, which should help you judge if experiment performance was due to chance or an actual difference in performance. You can learn more about evaluating your results and statistical significance here.

Understanding your experiment's performance can help you determine whether you’re ready to accept your changes fully, remove changes or keep running your experiment. Reports also serve as an important record of experiment outcomes as you won’t see your past experiment data after you’ve accepted or removed your changes.

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ACE can provide you with invaluable real-time data on how campaign changes affect your account. Whether you find that you have significant improvements to make or your account is running just fine, every experiment is a good experiment! To learn more about ACE, watch our video series on YouTube or visit the AdWords Help Center.

What are you waiting for? Ready, set, test!


Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

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New features to help you manage your Google AdWords Certification Program account

Monday, January 24, 2011

In 2010, we introduced a new Google AdWords Certification Program to equip you and your companies with more up-to-date, comprehensive, strategy-focused training and certification on the latest tools and best practices for managing AdWords accounts. Along with the revised certification program, we launched Google Partner Search, an opt-in, online, searchable directory that helps advertisers identify Certified Partners to help them manage their AdWords accounts.

Over the last few months, you’ve shared feedback with us that you’d like features that make it easier to associate your individual certification with a company and more intuitive to add users to your company profile. We’re pleased to share that we’ve now released features to address each of these points of feedback.

Request to link your individual qualification to a company
Historically, to join a company in the Google Certification Program, you would need to be invited by an Administrator on your company’s account, making it difficult to join if you didn't know the Administrator. To fix this challenge, we now offer a feature enabling you to search for your company and request to join yourself. If you would like to contribute your individual qualification to a company account, you may now do so by clicking on the “My Company” link and searching for the company you wish to join. Be sure to type in at least one complete word that matches the company’s name.

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Companies -- easily manage Professionals and Administrators
We’ve made it more intuitive for your company to manage the Professionals and Administrators within the Company account, as well as to review requests from users requesting to join the company, with the updated Account Access page.

On the “Users” tab, account administrators can change a user’s status to either Administrator or Professional, as well as revoke access:

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The “Incoming requests” tab allows account administrators to see all requests to join from individuals and either accept or reject them. Finally, the “Invitations sent” tab can be used to directly send invitations to qualified individuals.

Add or update Google Accounts associated with your profile
We know that qualified individuals may change companies or use multiple email addresses throughout the day. We’ve therefore made it possible for you to add multiple Google Accounts to your account, as well as to change the primary email address at which you receive communication for the Google Certification Program.

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For more information on the new Google Certification Program feature changes, visit the Help Center.


Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

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There's still time to meet your 2010 resolution to become Google AdWords certified

Monday, December 20, 2010

Long lines at the shops got you down? Dreading yet another ugly sweater party or family cookie exchange? Kicking yourself for not becoming Google AdWords certified in 2010?

No need to fret, there’s still plenty of time left in the year. To become Google AdWords certified, you'll need to pass the Google Advertising Fundamentals Exam and one of the three advanced exams (Search Advertising, Reporting and Analysis, or Display). You can register for exams here, and take them from the comfort of your own office or home -- the perfect activity to do while sitting in front of a cozy fire waiting for mysterious, magical home invaders to bring you gifts. As a bonus, you’ll be able to give your company the holiday gift of another certified individual to add to its profile page!

We’ve made it easy for you to prepare for the exams. The AdWords Learning Center offers text lessons (some with interactive modules) for each topic on the exam, which you can review at your own pace. In addition, if you can’t quite squeeze in training this year, we have numerous AdWords Seminars for Success in early 2011 in a number of major cities throughout the US.

For more information, please visit the Google AdWords Certification Program homepage.


Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

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