Google Adwords Mastery » Testing opportunities http://googleadwordsmastery.com Gaining competitive advantage through Google Adwords Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:33:02 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Put optimization ideas to the test—run AdWords Campaign Experiments in your Opportunities tab http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/ATHs/~3/p55e5NSEOOU/put-optimization-ideas-to-testrun.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/ATHs/~3/p55e5NSEOOU/put-optimization-ideas-to-testrun.html#comments Thu, 31 Mar 2011 22:50:00 +0000 Geoff Alexander
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."

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.

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
]]> http://googleadwordsmastery.com/index.php/2011/03/put-optimization-ideas-to-the-test%e2%80%94run-adwords-campaign-experiments-in-your-opportunities-tab/feed/ 0 AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) now available in AdWords reports http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/ATHs/~3/DMhku33_95E/adwords-campaign-experiments-ace-now.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/ATHs/~3/DMhku33_95E/adwords-campaign-experiments-ace-now.html#comments Wed, 23 Mar 2011 21:30:00 +0000 Geoff Alexander 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.




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
]]> http://googleadwordsmastery.com/index.php/2011/03/adwords-campaign-experiments-ace-now-available-in-adwords-reports/feed/ 0 New features to help you manage your Google AdWords Certification Program account http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/ATHs/~3/exVrB1_QTSs/new-features-to-help-you-manage-your.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/ATHs/~3/exVrB1_QTSs/new-features-to-help-you-manage-your.html#comments Mon, 24 Jan 2011 18:34:00 +0000 Geoff Alexander 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.


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:


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.



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


Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew
]]> http://googleadwordsmastery.com/index.php/2011/01/new-features-to-help-you-manage-your-google-adwords-certification-program-account/feed/ 0 There’s still time to meet your 2010 resolution to become Google AdWords certified http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/ATHs/~3/9cygGxuIxoA/theres-still-time-to-meet-your-2010.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/ATHs/~3/9cygGxuIxoA/theres-still-time-to-meet-your-2010.html#comments Mon, 20 Dec 2010 17:54:00 +0000 Geoff Alexander
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
]]> http://googleadwordsmastery.com/index.php/2010/12/theres-still-time-to-meet-your-2010-resolution-to-become-google-adwords-certified/feed/ 0 Opportunities Tab Beta: Now available to more advertisers http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/ATHs/~3/vktqQpzsf4M/opportunities-tab-beta-now-available-to.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/ATHs/~3/vktqQpzsf4M/opportunities-tab-beta-now-available-to.html#comments Tue, 08 Sep 2009 23:09:00 +0000 Geoff Alexander we announced US beta testing of the Opportunities tab, a new section in your AdWords account designed to help you find additional cost-effective traffic for your search campaigns.

Today we've begun expanding the beta to additional US advertisers, and we've also started including UK and Australian advertisers in the test. We'll make the Opportunities tab beta fully available to all English-language accounts over the next few business days.

Now that we're expanding the beta, we'd like to answer a few questions we heard during the initial test:

When should I use the Opportunities tab?
You can think of the Opportunities tab as your homepage for account optimization. You can use the tab to get a quick overview of Google's customized keyword and budget ideas for your campaigns and ad groups. You can also compare the impact of different ideas before making changes. So, if you're looking to increase your keyword coverage for a specific product, or have your ads appear more often for your existing keywords, the Opportunities tab is a great place to start.

We regularly update our list of ideas, so even if you've visited the Opportunities tab in the past, you may want to check back every few weeks to see if your keyword or budget ideas have changed.

Where did my AdWords Tools go?
We're not retiring any of the existing AdWords tools with the Opportunities tab beta test, but we've changed where they're found. If you're included in the Opportunities tab beta, you'll no longer see a Tools tab. Instead, you can access AdWords tools by clicking on the Opportunities tab and scrolling down the menu on the side of the page. You can also see lists of ideas by campaign by clicking on any of your campaigns listed in the menu on the left side.


To see a full list of available tools, simply click the "More tools..." link at the bottom of the list.

What optimization tools will I see in the future?
This beta test of the Opportunities tab is just a starting point for a broader set of optimization tools we hope to provide in the future. Over the coming months you can expect to see additional changes to the tab focused on giving you more insight into the broader search marketing landscape and more data to help you better estimate the effectiveness of new ideas.

Ultimately we want the Opportunities section of your account to evolve into a single destination you can visit whenever you want to get new ideas for increasing your ad coverage on relevant search terms, capturing additional clicks in your most profitable campaigns, or simply improving your overall ROI.

We plan to expand the Opportunities tab beta to all global advertisers over the coming weeks, and we'll continue working on improvements to the tab on an ongoing basis. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions for improving account optimization, please let us know by submitting feedback in your account.

Posted by Amanda Kelly, Inside AdWords crew
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