Serving enhancement for Ad Sitelinks

Over a year ago, we launched Ad Sitelinks on Google.com as way to help you enhance your top-performing ads with additional relevant information. The results for Ad Sitelinks have been stunning, with the two-line format increasing clickthrough rates, on average, by over 30%.

We’ve also been impressed by your creativity. Since we launched Ad Sitelinks, we’ve seen you employ many different strategies when deciding which links to use in your ads. A willingness to test and experiment with different links has helped some advertisers, like Nationwide Insurance, get results that blow past the network average.

To help you get the most from Ad Sitelinks, we’re launching a serving enhancement designed to help improve your overall performance. In the past, we simply used the order in which you entered your Sitelinks to rank which ones to serve. For example, while you could enter up to ten Sitelinks for a campaign, we primarily used the top four for any ad in the campaign (as long as they met our policy guidelines).

We received requests from many of you to improve this logic by automatically determining which Sitelinks to show based on historical performance. We’re happy to say that, starting today, that’s exactly what we’re doing. Now, we’ll be using the historical performance of your Sitelinks to determine which ones to serve.

With this new serving enhancement, AdWords will automatically rotate your Sitelinks and show the ones with the best clickthrough rates more frequently. We’ll do this optimization at the ad group level, which means that although you’ll continue to set Ad Sitelinks at the campaign level, we’ll optimize which Sitelinks to show based on their performance for each ad group.

To make sure that you’re getting the most from Ad Sitelinks, check for the following:

1. Make sure that you have more than four Sitelinks entered so that we have options to rotate and optimize.
2. Include several shorter Sitelinks in your list, since our one-line Sitelinks format has a lower overall character limit than the two-line format.
3. Continue to rank your Sitelinks in priority order. We’ll continue to use your rank order as a factor, in addition to historical performance, when determining which Sitelinks to show with your ad.

To learn how to get started with Ad Sitelinks, visit this link in the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Lisa Shieh, Inside AdWords crew

Using Google AdSense to Complement Your AdWords Account

As AdWords users, you know how effective AdWords can be in driving traffic to your website and how it can turn curious visitors into regular customers. But since not every visit leads to a sale, wouldn’t it be great to have other ways of making money from those visits?

Google AdSense is a free program that helps you earn revenue by displaying relevant ads on your site. We give you a piece of code to put on your site, you choose where to place ads, and you earn revenue when visitors click on them. (To learn more about Google AdSense, watch this video.)

DesignerApparel.com is an AdWords and AdSense client that has had great success using these two products together. DesignerApparel.com offers premium designer clothes at affordable prices. They implemented AdSense for Content and AdSense for Search and specifically targeted certain pages within their site. DesignerApparel.com had complete control over what types of ads appeared.

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“We have come to think of AdSense revenue as a partial but instant rebate on our AdWords investment,” said Dominic Ang, President of MyPerfectSale.com, the owner of DesignerApparel.com. “While we were initially concerned about potential cannibalization, we have found out that using certain spots for AdSense such as the end of a page or in exit pages can drive significant additional revenue with no loss in our core e-commerce revenue."

To try Google AdSense, visit our homepage or sign up for an account. You can also learn more about Google AdSense here and find the latest news and tips on our nifty AdSense blog.

Posted by Lisa Shieh, Inside AdWords crew, and Jennifer Bahk, AdSense team

Tips from a frustrated bank shopper

Last week we conducted secret shops for a client and their competition as part of our strategic planning process. We walked into nearly 40 financial institution branches in 2 1/2 days.

After doing these shops for clients all over the country, it never ceases to amaze me how horribly wrong things can go with customers who walk into our branches.

Folks who walk in your front door are the hottest of all possible leads. They have made the effort to leave their home and travel to your branch - at that point, they have done all that we should expect of them. Yet, banks and credit unions across the country EXPECT the customer to read brochures to determine what's best for them AND to call back when they are ready to open an account.

Here are a few tips from a guy who's shopped hundreds of banks and credit unions:

• Get 'em talking: By asking some basic questions, you can learn about what the customer wants AND begin to build a rapport. Ask about their families, where they work, where they bank now, why they want the account. With a handful of standard questions, the conversation will flow.
• Listen before you talk: When someone wants information about your checking accounts, they don't mean ALL of your checking accounts. This isn't a test of your front line's product knowledge - they simply want to know which account is best for them. Unless you've hired a group of mind readers, the only way to determine that is to listen to the prospect.
• They came there for a reason: They drove to your branch once - don't make them come back until they're a customer. Ask to open the darn account now!
• Don't give up: If it's not convenient to open the account now, it's our job to follow-up with the customer. Don't expect them to be so dazzled by your brochure that they are compelled to pursue you. Ask politely for their contact information so you can follow-up. If they refuse, provide your business card and tell them the hours your typically there.

A little extra effort can go a long way. Take it from me - most of your competition is simply handing off brochures with no effort at all to begin a relationship or make a sale.

Good luck,

Eric

How to Get Notified When a Person Adds You to a Twitter List (via @ListNotify, a "Twitter Tuesday" post)

Have you discovered @ListNotify yet? We've talked about the benefit of creating your very own twitter lists in this space before, and have talked about a handy list service (Formulist) to help you build your lists.  Today, I have another tool to add to your twitter experience for our weekly "Twitter Tuesdays" together: List Notify.

How does @ListNotify work? When a twitter follower adds YOU to one of his or her own twitter lists, ListNotify will automatically notify you via a handy tweet.

I like this free service because I think it’s helpful to receive this kind of notification.

Acknowledgement of the listing you've received by sending the twitter user a thank you for the listing tweet may be in order.

I typically send thanks if it is clearly a list the twitter user manually created, adding me personally. Make sense? You can usually detect an auto Formulist-style listing, because of the standard list names often used (such as “people-like-me”, or “recently followed me”, etc.).

How to Get Notified When You are Added to a Twitter List (via ListNotify):

1. Sign in to your Twitter account
2. Follow @ListNotify
3. Visit their website (http://ironmonkeyventures.com/listnotify/) – you may have to refresh the page once to view
4. Allow access to Twitter
5. Select whether you’d like a tweet or direct message when someone new adds you to a list

Here are a few helpful links to previous posts if you’re ready to explore creating your own lists on Twitter:

How to Create a List in Twitter

How to Create Lists Using Formulists in Twitter

Laura Catherine Otero is a marketing professional and blogger in Charleston, SC who has been active in social media since 2005.  If you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing to this blog via Email or  RSS. Laura can also be found on Twitter (@LauraCatherineO), Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

The Keyword Tool helps you go mobile

When you’re out and about, is your phone your go-to computer? If you find yourself doing mobile searches for information, directions, or even real-time price comparisons, you’re not alone--mobile search is growing fast. Over the past two years, Google's mobile searches have grown by more than five times. Furthermore, in the third quarter of 2010, Google mobile searches jumped 130% year over year.

Given the growth of mobile search, it’s no surprise that more and more of you are looking to capitalize on the mobile advertising opportunity. If you’re already a mobile advertiser or if you’re looking to make your jump onto the small screen, your job has just gotten easier.

Mobile Statistics in the Keyword Tool

The Keyword Tool now helps you build a better keyword list to target mobile users. Under "Advanced options," you can now search for keywords for devices with mobile WAP browsers, mobile devices with full Internet browsers (think iPhone and Android phones), or all mobile devices (sum of devices with WAP browsers and devices with Internet browsers).

When you do a keyword search, the statistics you see for Competition, Global and Local Monthly Searches, and Local Search Trends are all specific to the device or devices that you’ve selected.

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Let us know what you think of this new feature by clicking the “Send Feedback” link in the Keyword Tool or by going directly to our feedback form.

Posted by Lisa Shieh, Inside AdWords crew

Put a Critical Eye to Your Website

How many times have you visited a bank/credit union website and leave the site without a clear sense of what about that financial institution is different from all other financial institutions? It’s a common problem that we see way too often. Take a look at your website. Is your brand infused into the design, copy, and functionality of your website?

Here are a few ways to optimize your website:

DESIGN – The website content should be easily navigated by customers in a user-friendly interface. As a general rule of thumb, customers should be able to find what they are looking for within 3 clicks. Also, the design and images/photography on your website should also convey your brand.

COPY – It is now recommended that your content be refreshed every 3 days in order to optimize search capabilities. However, this doesn’t mean to overload your website with content – keep content fresh and relevant, but not cluttered. Remember, not only does your copy need to easily read by human beings, but it also needs to be easily read by search engines too!

FUNCTIONALITY – Adding functionality will help to transition your website to become a value-added resource instead of a static website. The functionality allows for your users to interact with your brand. Each value-added resource should support your brand. Consider adding operational functionalities such as online account opening and online chat, but also consider including value-added functionality, such as customer updates, email newsletters and financial resources.

Users only have a 6-second attention span before they click elsewhere. Make sure you are clearly defining what is uniquely different about your organization in order to win them over!

Best,

Jamie

Learn how to get the most for your budget in a live online course

On Wednesday, January 12th, we’re hosting a free live online course in the AdWords Online Classroom (UK) about getting the most for your AdWords budget through basic optimisation and targeting.

In this live course, we’ll cover ways to manage your budget through effective targeting and basic optimisation. We’ll first look at how you can improve targeting by adjusting location and network settings. This will be followed by a discussion of how good account structure, multiple ad variations, and effective keywords will help you get the most for your money.

This hour-long interactive course will be presented by AdWords Specialists at 3:00 pm GMT (7:00 am PST) on Wednesday, January 12th. At the end of the session, there will be time for Q&A.

Make sure you sign up now and visit the AdWords Online Classroom (UK) for additional live and on-demand courses.

Posted by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew