Tag Archives: Google AdWords

The new AdWords experience is now available to everyone

When we first announced the rollout of the new AdWords experience, our goal was simple: to introduce a faster and more intuitive AdWords that's focused on helping you reach your business goals. Starting today, the new AdWords experience is available to all advertisers.

Get more done, faster
First, you’ll notice that your account pages load faster—on average, 20% faster—so you can quickly get to the information you need and get on with your day.

We’ve removed the clutter and made navigation a breeze so you can do more in less time, like adding multiple ad extensions to your campaigns in a single step. Customers like iProspect North tell us that the new design and layout saves them 30% more time on average when completing everyday tasks.

Finally, easy access to key insights about your customers, like visualizations of the days and hours they're most engaged with your business, help you take immediate action to drive better results.

Innovations to help you reach your goals
Whether it’s driving more valuable calls to your business or improving your mobile experience, you need tools that help you reach your unique business goals. Innovations like call bid adjustments and the “Landing pages” page were built exclusively for the new experience to do just that—with many more to come.

The faster AdWords in action
From a U.K. agency helping their client surpass its goals, to a small juicing business tripling its growth—we’re inspired by the stories we hear from businesses around the world, large and small. See some of these inspiring stories:



Getting started
To get familiar with the new experience, take the guided tour.

To find what you need, our how to videos are here to help you navigate, and the AdWords Help Center has been updated with all the latest features. You can also check out the Best Practices guide for recommendations and tips on how to make the most of the new experience. And we encourage you to leave feedback by clicking on the help icon in the top right corner of your account.

We look forward to hearing your feedback about how Google can continue building a better AdWords for your business.

Posted by Jerry Dischler, Vice President of Product Management, AdWords

Across the U.S., businesses are using the web to grow


When their 10-year-old daughter asked if she could raise alpacas on the family ranch, Jim and Kelley Hobart figured, “Why not?” They welcomed the animals onto their land and soon thereafter discovered the many benefits of alpaca wool. It was soft, durable, warm and eco-friendly—it had to be shared with the rest of the world. To the delight of their daughter and alpaca lovers everywhere, the Hobarts launched Alpaca Direct in 2005, producing quality yarns and apparel made from the unique fiber.



Jim and Kelley never imagined that a curious request from their youngest daughter would transform into a full-fledged business, or that a small storefront in Hayden, ID, would become a popular travel destination for knitting enthusiasts worldwide. Yet today Alpaca Direct is at the heart of a vibrant and global knitting community. With the help of the web, they’ve brought the warmth of alpaca wool to more than 100,000 customers across 30 countries. As Kelley says, “With Google tools, we can do that, and [customers] can be part of our community.”


In 2016, Google’s search and advertising tools helped provide $222 billion of economic activity for 1.5 million businesses, website publishers, and nonprofits across the U.S. Our 2016 Economic Impact Report explores that economic impact state-by-state and the local businesses that are helping to drive it.   



While working on a small leather goods line in New York City, Tanya Menendez and Matthew Burnett realized how difficult it was to find local manufacturers. In an effort to democratize that access, the two started Maker’s Row, an online marketplace that helps small businesses find American factories to make their products. They use AdWords to both establish factory partnerships and find new customers, and YouTube to, as Tanya describes, “put a face behind the products that are made in the United States.” In five years, the company has helped 120,000 small businesses source and create products in 11,000 American factories.






After serving as a U.S. Marine for six years, Nick Baucom founded a company, Two Marines Moving, in Alexandria, Virginia. His goal was to keep his fellow veterans gainfully employed, while giving local residents a moving option they could trust. Today, Two Marines Moving employs more than 100 veterans. They use Search and AdWords not only to find customers,  but also to recruit employees. Nick has opened a second location in Florida and hopes to create job opportunities for 500 veterans in the next five years, vowing that “veterans will always have a home here.”





Across the U.S., businesses large and small are using the web to find their customers, grow, and make an impact. We’re proud to be part of their stories.


Posted by Claire Mudd, Director, Americas Small Business Marketing

This National Small Business Week, Build Your Online Skills with Lessons from the Pros

The web is helping small businesses grow. As the place where people turn to learn, discover, find, and buy things, it’s connecting customers to small businesses and small businesses to customers. Being online can have a big impact–in fact, businesses that are online grow 40 percent faster and are twice as likely to create new jobs than those that remain offline.1


We see the power of the web working for American small businesses. Millions of small businesses are found on Google Search and Maps every single day across the nation.


With a little bit of elbow grease and the help of technology, we believe every business can grow online. So together with our partners, we’re continuing our mission to help make that happen. Through our Get Your Business Online initiative, we’re bringing together free resources and tools to help you this National Small Business Week and beyond.


Learn from the pros through bite-sized lessons
Build your online business and marketing skills with five-minute lessons from Primer, our free mobile app. To celebrate National Small Business Week, we’re happy to announce new lessons created by small business experts Anita Campbell, John Jantsch, Ramon Ray, and Rhonda Abrams. Each has created a special lesson from their decades of experience working with and coaching small businesses. We’re also excited to share new web-based lessons.


Get your business online
Be where your customers are. Get your free listing on Google Search and Maps.  Show pictures of your business, list your hours, and add your phone number so customers can just click to call you or get directions. Businesses with complete listings are considered twice as reputable.2 Use this handy tool to get started.


Make sure your website works on mobile
Did you know that more than half of all Google searches happen on mobile phones? Mobile shoppers want quick results–53 percent say they’ll wait no more than three seconds before abandoning a site.3 How fast does your website load? Use the free Test My Site tool to see how well your site works on mobile. We’ll email you a personalized assessment with specific recommendations on how to make it better.


Want even more?
During National Small Business Week (and throughout the year), Google and our partners are hosting in-person workshops to help you grow your business online. Find a workshop near you.


Small businesses are the heart of our communities. Thank you for making the places we call home, home.


Happy National Small Business Week.


Posted by Soo Young Kim, Head of Marketing, Get Your Business Online   



2 Google/Oxera, The Benefits of Complete Business Listings, December 2014.

3 Google Data, Global, n=3,700 aggregated, anonymized Google Analytics data from a sample of mWeb sites opted into sharing benchmark data, March 2016. Think With Google.

How we fought bad ads, sites and scammers in 2016

A free and open web is a vital resource for people and businesses around the world. And ads play a key role in ensuring you have access to accurate, quality information online. But bad ads can ruin the online experience for everyone. They promote illegal products and unrealistic offers. They can trick people into sharing personal information and infect devices with harmful software. Ultimately, bad ads pose a threat to users, Google’s partners, and the sustainability of the open web itself.

We have a strict set of policies that govern the types of ads we do and don’t allow on Google in order to protect people from misleading, inappropriate, or harmful ads. And we have a team of engineers, policy experts, product managers and others who are waging a daily fight against bad actors. Over the years, this commitment has made the web a better place for you—and a worse place for those who seek to abuse advertising systems for their own gain.

In 2016, we took down 1.7 billion ads that violated our advertising policies, more than double the amount of bad ads we took down in 2015. If you spent one second taking down each of those bad ads, it’d take you more than 50 years to finish. But our technology is built to work much faster.

Last year, we did two key things to take down more bad ads. First, we expanded our policies to better protect users from misleading and predatory offers. For example, in July we introduced a policy to ban ads for payday loans, which often result in unaffordable payments and high default rates for users. In the six months since launching this policy, we disabled more than 5 million payday loan ads. Second, we beefed up our technology so we can spot and disable bad ads even faster. For example, “trick to click" ads often appear as system warnings to deceive users into clicking on them, not realizing they are often downloading harmful software or malware. In 2016, our systems detected and disabled a total of 112 million ads for “trick to click,” 6X more than in 2015.

Here are a few more examples of bad ads we took action against in 2016:

Ads for illegal products
Some of the most common bad ads we find online are ads promoting illegal activities or products. Although we've long had a policy against bad ads for pharmaceuticals, last year our systems detected an increase online. We disabled more than 68 million bad ads for healthcare violations, up from 12.5 million in 2015.

Similarly, we saw more attempts to advertise gambling-related promotions without proper authorization from regulators in the countries they operate. We took down more than 17 million bad ads for illegal gambling violations in 2016.

Misleading ads
We don't want you to feel misled by ads that we deliver, so we require our advertisers to provide upfront information for people make informed decisions. Some ads try to drive clicks and views by intentionally misleading people with false information like asking, “Are you at risk for this rare, skin-eating disease?” or offering miracle cures like a pill that will help you lose 50 pounds in three days without lifting a finger. In 2016, we took down nearly 80 million bad ads for deceiving, misleading and shocking users.

Bad ads on mobile
If you’ve ever been on your phone and suddenly, without warning, ended up in the app store downloading an app you’ve never heard of, a “self-clicking ad” could be to blame. In 2015, we disabled only a few thousand of these bad ads, but in 2016, our systems detected and disabled more than 23,000 self-clicking ads on our platforms, a huge increase year over year.

Ads trying to game the system
Bad actors know that ads for certain products—like weight-loss supplements or payday loans—aren’t allowed by Google's policies, so they try to trick our systems into letting them through. Last year, we took down almost 7 million bad ads for intentionally attempting to trick our detection systems.

In 2016, we saw the rise of tabloid cloakers, a new type of scammer that tries to game our system by pretending to be news. Cloakers often take advantage of timely topics—a government election, a trending news story or a popular celebrity—and their ads can look like headlines on a news website. But when people click on that story about Ellen DeGeneres and aliens, they go to a site selling weight-loss products, not a news story.

To fight cloakers, we take down the scammers themselves, and prevent them from advertising with us again. In 2016, we suspended more than 1,300 accounts for tabloid cloaking. Unfortunately, this type of bad ad is gaining in popularity because people are clicking on them. And a handful of scammers can pump out a lot of bad ads: During a single sweep for tabloid cloaking in December 2016, we took down 22 cloakers that were responsible for ads seen more than 20 million times by people online in a single week.

Promoting and profiting from bad sites
When we find ads that violate our policies, we block the ad or the advertiser, depending on the violation. But sometimes we also need to suspend the website promoted in the ad (the site people see after they click on it). So, for example, while we disabled more than 5 million payday loan ads last year, we also took action on 8,000 sites promoting payday loans.

Here are some examples of common policy violations we saw among bad sites in 2016:
  • We took action on 47,000 sites for promoting content and products related to weight-loss scams.
  • We took action on more than 15,000 sites for unwanted software and disabled 900,000 ads for containing malware.
  • And we suspended around 6,000 sites and 6,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods, like imitation designer watches.

Publishers and website owners use our AdSense platform to make money by running ads on their sites and content, so we have strict policies in place to keep Google's content and search networks safe and clean for our advertisers, users and publishers. When a publisher violates our policies, we may stop showing ads on their site, or even terminate their account.

We've had long-standing policies prohibiting AdSense publishers from running ads on sites that help people deceive others, like a site where you buy fake diplomas or plagiarized term papers. In November, we expanded on these policies, introducing a new AdSense misrepresentative content policy, that helps us to take action against website owners misrepresenting who they are and that deceive people with their content. From November to December 2016, we reviewed 550 sites that were suspected of misrepresenting content to users, including impersonating news organizations. We took action against 340 of them for violating our policies, both misrepresentation and other offenses, and nearly 200 publishers were kicked out of our network permanently.

In addition to all the above, we support industry efforts like the Coalition for Better Ads to protect people from bad experiences across the web. While we took down more bad ads in 2016 than ever before, the battle doesn’t end here. As we invest in better detection, the scammers invest in more elaborate attempts to trick our systems. Continuing to find and fight them is essential to protecting people online and ensuring you get the very best from the open web.

Posted by, Scott Spencer, Director of Product Management, Sustainable Ads

Help Holiday Shoppers Find Your Business

Since 1992, Werkheiser Jewelers has been helping customers find the perfect holiday gift–from picking out an engagement ring to restoring cherished family heirlooms. While they’ve kept their love for tradition alive, the way they do business has changed with the times.

Today, 78% of shoppers online use the Internet for holiday research.1 That includes jewelry shoppers searching for a gift for that special someone. Alyssa Rizzo-Berg, Media Marketing Manager at Werkheiser Jewelers, explains, “Maybe they’re looking to buy that first big piece of jewelry or an engagement ring. Because of Google, they’re able to find us.”

We all rely on small businesses to help make our holidays special, and we rely on the Internet to help us find the right local spots. Is your business ready to connect during this busy time of year?
In the next few weeks, Google and our partners are bringing hundreds of local workshops to a city near you to help your business get ready for the holidays. On October 26th, we’re also hosting a live workshop online with the U.S. Small Business Administration. Join us to learn how to create a free business listing on Google, optimize your website for mobile, and advertise online.


- OR -



We hope to see you there. And from our team to yours, happy holidays!

Posted by Emily Harris, Program Manager, Let's Put Our Cities on the Map

1. Ipsos MediaCT, Google Post Holiday Shopping Intentions Study, January 2015, n=1,500.

Academy for Ads: On-The-Go Training for Google’s Ad Products

Becoming a digital advertising expert takes time, and it’s important to get off to a good start. Only 50 percent of marketers say they’re confident in their knowledge of digital advertising,1 despite the wide range of educational materials available – sometimes “more” isn’t the same as “better.” You’ve told us that you want quick, bite-sized training in more interactive formats. And we heard you.

We’re pleased to announce Academy for Ads, a new digital training platform designed to help you learn how to use Google’s ad products in a mobile-first world. We built Academy for Ads to promote learning on-the-go, whether you’re on a laptop, a desktop, or a mobile device.

Grow your Google product know-how
Guided by input from our team of product experts, Academy for Ads courses cover the topics that matter most to Google advertisers – from AdWords basics and the essentials of campaign management to bid strategies, reporting, optimization, and more ways to successfully advertise with Google.



Learning paths, Assessments, and Achievements
We’ve organized the courses into “Learning paths” that you can walk through at your own pace. At the end of each path, take an Assessment and earn an Achievement to show that you know your stuff. Earning an Achievement for AdWords helps prepare you to take the AdWords Certification exam in Google Partners, or try deeper education offerings such as AdWords Academy.


A few example Learning paths:
  • Digital concepts: Learn the essentials of online ads, including third-party ad-serving, programmatic buying, remarketing, and more.
  • Get started with AdWords: Learn the basics of AdWords and prepare for the AdWords Certification exam offered by Google Partners.
  • Get started with AdWords Display: Learn how you can show ads to your online audience via the Google Display Network.
Academy for Ads also offers training for DoubleClick clients, with Learning paths covering Bid Manager and Ad Exchange – and more to come.

Get started
If you already use Google Partners, you can sign in through the Partners portal at g.co/learnwithpartners — or, you can go directly to g.co/AcademyforAds to sign up and start sampling courses and Learning paths. We’re constantly adding more content, so if you like what you learn, keep coming back for more.

Posted by Tracy Bizelli, Head of Academy for Ads

1. 6 Fundamentals to Managing Digital Marketing in 2015, TFM Insights (January 2015)

3 Ways to Get More from AdWords Express Right Now

In 2011, with 13 years of interior design and window covering work under her belt, Sandra Anderson set off on her own to start Anderson Custom Window Coverings, Inc. She offered high quality support at a lower cost than many competitors, and was driven to get things right on the first try. But when she opened her business, she found it difficult to bring customers through the door with traditional methods like flyers and a listing in the phone book. That’s when Sandra decided to try Google advertising.

Today, Sandra says 80% of her new customers come from Google ads, and she relies on AdWords Express, our smart advertising tool, to manage campaigns for her so she can focus on running her business. For small businesses without a professional marketer on staff, AdWords Express can lighten the load – and over the last year, the number of businesses using AdWords Express has nearly doubled, with more signing up every day.

We’re thrilled to see business owners finding success with AdWords Express, and are determined to make it a one-stop shop for helping to grow your business. To reach this goal, we’re introducing 3 new features to help you reach a larger audience and understand exactly how your ad is impacting your business.
  1. Ad Scheduling – Choose to run your ad at specific times
    Nearly one third of searches for local businesses in the US come from consumers who want to make a purchase immediately.1 Ad scheduling is a simple way to make sure your ad only runs at times you choose, (during your hours of operation, for example), so you reach your customers at exactly the right time.
    You can choose custom hours or link to your Google My Business account to automatically run your ad only during your business hours.
  2. Map Actions – Understand how your ads drive people to your store
    Map Actions shows you how many customers who’ve viewed your ad go on to view your business on Google Maps – which can be vital, since over 1/3 of visitors in the US use online maps to find local businesses.2 If you care about whether your ads drive people to your storefront, Map Actions might just be your favorite new tool.
    Map actions shows how many customers interacted with your
    Google Maps listing after viewing your ad. 
  3. Verified Calls – Get better call tracking
    Right now we’re piloting a new way for advertisers to track which phone calls they receive come from customers who clicked “Call now” on an ad on their mobile phones. Advertisers who opt into Verified Calls will also see detailed information about incoming calls, including the area codes and call duration. We’ve already rolled this out to many AdWords Express advertisers, and hope to expand it to all users soon.
    New insights into verified calls allow you to see time, duration, and location of each call along with overall trends in call volumes.
If you’re already advertising on AdWords Express, start understanding more about your performance with these new features today. Or, if you’re just getting started, visit google.com/adwords/express, or check out our help center to learn more.

Posted by Kavi Goel, Senior Product Manager, AdWords Express

1. Google Consumer Barometer
2. Google Consumer Barometer

Traits that Spell Success

With the Rio Summer Olympic Games just around the corner, we thought we’d look at an uncommon, yet exceptional, group of business owners for our answer: Olympian small business owners. As it turns out, many of them start a second career by running a business of their own bringing the same spirit of passion, perseverance, and ingenuity from their athletic careers.

Passion
Judy Geer and Dick Dreissigacker – two USA Olympic rowers from the 70s and 80s – came to Vermont because it allowed them to combine their passion for active living and the natural environment into what is now known as the Craftsbury Outdoor Center. As Judy puts it, “It’s great that we help train Olympic athletes at our center, but it’s bigger than that. For me, it’s all about helping more people have great experiences, whether they’re getting exercise or just enjoying our surroundings.” Despite its remote location, Judy’s deep commitment to sustainability and lifelong sports practice keeps both local residents and aspiring athletes from across the country coming back. Customers can tell when business owners get out of bed in the morning because they love what they do.

Perseverance
Setbacks are common parts of the journey for any athlete or small business owner. The important thing isn’t the number of obstacles you avoid, it’s the way you bounce back from the ones you can’t miss. When four-time kayaking world champion Eric ‘EJ’ Jackson found his kayak designs rejected by manufacturers across the country, he didn’t give up – and his motto is “no compromising,” so buckling to tradition wasn’t an option. Instead, EJ’s relentless drive to create on his own terms resulted in Jackson Kayak, now a leading manufacturer within the industry. Jackson Kayak now sells products online and through dealers across the country.

Ingenuity
Since the beginning, four-time track and field Olympian and world record holder Michael Johnson has experimented with new ways to tell the story of his performance training center, Michael Johnson Performance. Because he wanted to attract local customers, moving some of his advertising budget online made sense so he could reach them with geo-targeted ads.

With more potential customers finding him on mobile, Michael Johnson also drove growth for his business with mobile ads. “Two-thirds of our customers find us through mobile,” says Johnson. “With Google AdWords, we can see exactly who we’re reaching and that’s invaluable to us.” Making connections with new customers is key to growing any business, and a willingness to experiment with new ways of reaching those customers is a vital part of any business owner.

Learn how all kinds of small business owners – mom and pops to all-star Olympians – are using Google AdWords to grow their businesses by visiting g.co/AdWordsGoForGold.

Posted by Claire Mudd, Head of Americas SMB Marketing

Get Better Insights With Google My Business

Search engines have become the most popular way for people to find info about local businesses1 – and millions of business owners rely on Google My Business to reach new customers on Google Search and Maps. In fact, the average well-maintained Google My Business listing gets five times more views than listings which haven’t been claimed by their owners.2

Today we’re announcing some exciting changes to Google My Business, designed to let our users see where and how people are finding them on Google.

Where are people seeing your listing?
Now when you log into Google My Business, not only will you see the total number of views for your listing, you’ll also see a breakdown of how many are coming from Google Search vs. Maps.

How are people finding you?
Though some people search for you on Google by name, others search more generally for what you have to offer. (For example, “pizza restaurants in [your town].”) In fact, when researching a future purchase, 76% of people consider more than one business before making their final choice.3 Now you can see who visited your listing after searching for it directly, and who discovered your business while looking for a broader category.

To better serve our users, we’re focusing these new insights on Google Search and Maps, and removing Google+ statistics from the dashboard. With deeper insights on how people are finding your business on Google, you can make sure your efforts to maintain and promote your business are paying off. Keep your listing up-to-date by adding photos, responding to reviews, and updating your hours so that users find helpful, relevant information when they’re looking for you directly. And, if you want to reach more customers who are searching for your business category, consider promoting your listing with AdWords Express.

We hope these changes make your life a little simpler, and we’re excited to introduce even more insights into your customers' behavior soon. To learn more, check out our help center. Happy Tracking!

Posted by Tom Pritchard, Product Manager Google My Business

1. 82% of consumers use Search Engines to find information about local businesses (Google Consumer Barometer)
2. Google Internal Data
3. Google Consumer Barometer

Go the Extra Mile with #SmallBizGames Challenges

Summer’s coming to an end, and with Fall just around the corner, small businesses are preparing for the upcoming season and looking ahead to the holidays. To help business owners brush up on their marketing skills at this key moment, we’re proud to share ten #SmallBizGames digital marketing challenges. Every day for the next two weeks, we’ll share a different digital marketing challenge aimed at improving your small business’ online presence – try your hand at setting up a Google My Business page, building your first AdWords keyword list, or creating a custom email address for your business. Each daily challenge is designed to hone your digital marketing skills and help you reach more customers online.

To participate or learn more, join the Google Small Business Community or follow us on Twitter. Best of luck in conquering the #SmallBizGames challenges!