Simplifying bidding on the Google Display Network

If you use managed placements to manage bidding or targeting on the Google Display Network, you might have at one point questioned why you saw three separate default bids in your ad groups: a regular default bid, a managed placements bid, and a Display Network bid.

We’ve heard feedback from advertisers that it’s confusing to work with these three default bids (and most of you don’t even use default bids for your managed placements--preferring to set bids individually). In an effort to simplify things, we’ll be removing the managed placements default bid starting on March 15, 2011.

After this change, you’ll be able to continue managing default values for both managed and automatic placements by using a single Display Network default bid. Individual bids for managed placements will allow you to maintain the flexibility you have today.

Here’s how this change will affect you:

• Starting today, we're no longer allowing managed placement bids to be set for new ad groups containing placements. You won’t be required to enter a new bid when you add managed placements for the first time (we’re launching this change gradually, so it may take about a week to reach your account).
• Starting on March 15, we’ll automatically update existing managed placement bids. There are several changes we’ll make in order to make sure your ads will continue to serve as normal with the bids you intended. Learn more about the changes that apply to your account in our Help Center.
• If you’re eager to say goodbye to the managed placements bid today, you can do that too! You can change your managed placements bid to 0, which will cause it to disappear from your account (this change is also launching over the next week).

One important note: AdWords Editor 7.6 is not compatible with this change. Any changes to managed placements bids in this version of Editor will result in an error. Please make sure to download the latest version of AdWords Editor to manage your bids.

If these changes apply to your account, you’ll be receiving an email from us with additional details and will also see an announcement in your AdWords account. There’s no need to take any action in your account, but you can always feel free to adjust your bids at any time.

Posted by Lisa Shieh, Inside AdWords crew

Learn about using Remarketing in the AdWords Online Classroom (UK)

This Wednesday, January 19, we'll be hosting a live online course on Remarketing in the AdWords Online Classroom (UK). This free, hour-long, interactive presentation will be delivered by an Online Media Specialist and will take place at 3pm GMT (7am PST). There will also be time for Q&A.

Remarketing is a simple way to connect with your website visitors. After driving traffic to your site with search ads, you can then remarket to those people who reach your site by showing them tailored ads as they browse through sites on the Google Display Network.

During this session we'll take you through the benefits of using remarketing and how to set it up in your account. If you advertise with AdWords and are interested in the Google Display Network then we encourage you to attend.

Be sure to sign up now!

And you can also check out all our on-demand courses on the AdWords Online Classroom site.


Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

Contextual targeting just got easier for your display campaigns

This week, we’re launching the Contextual Targeting Tool to help you more easily reach customers as they spend time on millions of sites in the Google Display Network.

As you may already know, contextual targeting helps you reach potential customers as they read webpages related to your products or services. Now, with this tool, you can create contextually-targeted campaigns more easily and quickly, while generating more clicks and conversions for your campaigns.

What does the Contextual Targeting Tool do?
This tool automatically builds keyword lists that can be used to show your ads on relevant webpages in the Google Display Network. Tightly-themed keyword lists are the basis of effective contextual targeting, and with the Contextual Targeting Tool, you no longer have to build them manually. In minutes, you can build dozens, even hundreds, of keyword lists, scaling your campaign performance while ensuring accurate targeting for your ads. This means you can get more clicks and conversions for your campaigns and you can do it more quickly.

How do I use it?
Let’s say you sell soccer equipment and gear. Normally, you'd have to build out separate ad groups for each of your product lines, like soccer gear, soccer balls, soccer cleats, etc. With the Contextual Targeting Tool, simply type each product category into the search box, and the tool will automatically generate tightly-themed keyword lists for you. For example, when you enter soccer gear into the tool, you get more specific ad groups, such as youth soccer gear, discount soccer gear, soccer uniforms, soccer bags, etc.

click for full size image

These new ad groups can help you get additional traffic and sales, as you may not think of creating them when manually building out your campaigns. Along with the new ad groups, the tool provides suggested bids and predicted placements to give you an idea of the types of sites in the Display Network where your ads can appear.

The Contextual Targeting Tool has been available to advertisers using AdWords Editor. This week, all advertisers will be able to access it from the Opportunities tab in their AdWords account. You'll still need AdWords Editor to implement the ad groups in your account for now (download AdWords Editor). However, this requirement will be lifted and you’ll be able to implement new ad groups directly from your AdWords account in the coming months.

You can learn more about using the Contextual Targeting Tool by watching this video. We hope this tool will help you more easily and efficiently reach your goals with your Display Network campaigns.


Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

Significant advances for Display Ad Builder

On the Google Display Network, we've been working hard to make display advertising accessible to everyone, no matter what your size or budget. In 2008, we launched Display Ad Builder to help you design display ads in minutes for free. Now, 100 new advertisers try Display Ad Builder every day.

Today we are announcing a number of improvements to Display Ad Builder to help you achieve all your marketing goals, from driving conversions to building your brand.

Quickly manage hundreds of ads with bulk copying and editing
With the newest version of AdWords Editor, you can now copy your Display Ad Builder ads across campaigns and make basic bulk edits, including ad names, destination and display URLs, and ad statuses. AdWords Editor makes it easier to customize your display creatives. For example, you could create an ad for marathon training tips, make multiple copies of the ad, then go into Display Ad Builder to customize the creative to mention the Chicago marathon for users in Chicago and the Philly marathon for Philadelphia.

Sample Display Ad Builder ad copied using AdWords Editor and then customized based on user location.
click for full size image

If you're already using AdWords Editor, you'll be prompted to upgrade automatically. Just follow the instructions to keep your unposted changes. If you’re not using AdWords Editor, visit our website to learn more and download it.

Drive engagement with social and expandable templates
Display Ad Builder also can help build your brand and engage users with our new social and expandable templates. We are testing social templates, which include the latest tweets from your Twitter account in the creative. Social templates are really useful if you want to run timely promotions that change daily. You can run a new tweet, instead of creating an entirely new creative. Social templates can also help you build your Twitter follower base.

An ad created using one of Display Ad Builder's social templates.
click for full size image

We've also released expandable templates, which encourage more interaction from interested users by increasing your ad’s real estate on the page. When a user clicks on your expandable ad, it expands to twice its width or height, depending on the format.

Create the perfect ad by customizing your templates
We're also launching template customization to give you greater flexibility to create the ad you want. You can now move text boxes and images where you want within the template. Also, text boxes can be resized, so you can include more content. Combine these new features, with 180 templates, nearly 100 fonts, and unlimited color options to chose from.

Now you can move around text boxes and pictures and re-size text boxes to customize templates to fit your needs.
click for full size image

Never tried Display Ad Builder? Try our free demo to see how it works. To start creating your ads, go to your ‘Ads’ tab in a new or existing campaign in your AdWords account. Then, click ‘New Ad’ and select ‘Display Ad Builder.’


Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

Expand your business - Chrome fast

Editors note: This is a guest blog post from the Chrome Web Store team, presenting you a new opportunity to grow your business on the web.

Growing revenue and traffic are important goals for most online businesses. The Chrome Web Store that we made available a few days ago can help you with both.

By distributing your web content and applications through the store, you can connect with more than 120 million people who use Chrome regularly. You can also earn revenue both by selling your apps to Chrome users and by showing ads within them. And the best part? Creating an app is quick and easy.

To learn more about how to take advantage of this opportunity and how you can build your app, check out our new website at www.google.com/chrome/CreateAnApp or watch the video below.



Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

See potential placements for Google Display Network campaigns

Since the inception of the Google Display Network, contextual targeting has helped you to reach users effectively. This type of targeting allows you to show your ads next to related web content that users visit across millions of sites on the Display Network.

Today, we’re announcing an AdWords feature that provides you with example sites in the Display Network where your ads may appear when using contextual targeting. The example sites are based on the keyword list you provide when creating your campaign, and are available for campaigns that are solely running on the Display Network. Starting this week, the feature will be available to a limited set of advertisers, and will become more broadly available in the coming weeks.

Since contextual targeting happens in real-time across millions of sites in the Google Display Network, with this feature, you get insight into the types of sites where your ads can appear. Seeing example sites before your campaign runs can help you to refine your keyword lists to ensure optimal targeting. Along with example sites where your ads can appear, you can also see a suggested bid for your ad group. The example placements we provide are meant as a guide to help you get a sense of where your ads can appear. They’re not an accurate representation of actual placements, which can vary with the dynamics of the ad auction once your ads are showing.

While this feature provides a deeper level of transparency before your ads run, as always, once your campaigns begins to run, you can access site- and URL-level reporting that shows the specific places in the GDN where your ads actually appeared.

To see potential placements when creating your campaign, your can click the "See potential placements" button when selecting keywords for display-only ad groups in the new ad group creation interface. Please visit our Help Center to learn more.

Posted by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew

Performance at Scale on the Google Display Network

One of our key goals is to help you drive better performance with your display advertising campaigns.

As users increasingly spend time across a growing number of sites, however, display advertising is becoming more challenging. Last year alone there were 47 million new web sites created*. Contextual targeting can help by automatically showing your ad to users on web pages related to your products on the millions of sites in the Google Display Network (GDN). But building and managing your campaigns can still be time-consuming. So how do you reach your target audience easily and efficiently while meeting your business goals?

Today, we’re launching two tools -- the Display Campaign Optimizer and the Contextual Targeting Tool -- to help you maximize your performance on the GDN, while saving you valuable time and resources.

Display Campaign Optimizer. This new tool automatically manages targeting and bidding for your Display Network campaigns with the goal of increasing your conversions while meeting your advertising objectives. You simply provide us with your target cost-per-acquisition (CPA), creatives and budget, and the Display Campaign Optimizer goes to work, showing your ads in all the right places, automatically. It monitors your campaign performance and, in real time, adjusts your campaign accordingly. Your campaigns stay optimized, as it “learns” and does more of what’s working and less of what isn’t. For example, Seventh Generation, a company that sells eco-friendly household cleaning, baby care and personal care products, was looking to connect with more “green” consumers across the web and get them to download coupons from their site for use in-store. After implementing the Display Campaign Optimizer, the tool delivered 60% of the coupons downloaded from their site, with a CPA 20% below their target. Further, analysis of our beta testers showed that on average, campaign using Display Campaign Optimizer were likely responsible for almost one-third of the accounts’ total conversion volume with CPAs within 6% of their peer group CPA.**

The Display Campaign Optimizer is now available globally for larger campaigns running on the Google Display Network.

(watch on YouTube)

Contextual Targeting Tool. While the Display Campaign Optimizer is an automated solution that does all the heavy lifting on your behalf, the Contextual Targeting Tool helps you more efficiently build your own display campaigns. This tool is ideal for those of you who prefer transparency and control over your campaigns’ targeting and bidding. The Contextual Targeting Tool builds tightly themed keyword lists for your display campaigns, which are used to contextually target your ads. Tightly themed keyword lists are the basis of effective contextual targeting. With this tool, you can build dozens, even hundreds, of ad groups in minutes, quickly scaling your campaign performance while ensuring accurate targeting and control over your campaign.

For example, if you sell yoga gear, normally, you might take the time to build out separate ad groups around each of your product lines, such as yoga mats, yoga clothing, yoga gear, etc. Inputting each product category into the Contextual Targeting Tool will generate even more tightly themed keyword lists. For example, inputting ‘yoga mats’ into the tool generates more specific ad groups, such as designer yoga mats, thick yoga mats, yoga mats with designs, etc. These are all separate ad groups that can help you generate additional traffic and sales, that you wouldn’t necessarily think of creating when manually building out your campaigns.

This week, we’re beginning a phased launch of the Contextual Targeting Tool, and it will become available to more advertisers over the coming weeks and months.

Whether you’re looking for easier ways of building out your display campaigns or looking for a more robust, automated solution that continually optimizes bids and targeting, we think these tools will help you easily and efficiently achieve performance at scale with your display campaigns.

Posted by Woojin Kim, Product Manager and Shaun Seo, Product Manager


* Source: Netcraft Web Server Survey, Dec. 2009
** Source: Internal analysis of active beta testers, in comparison with peer group advertisers. Oct. 2010

YouTube Homepage: Promoted Videos advertisers can get it while it's hot

Cross posted from the YouTube blog.

For big advertisers on YouTube, the YouTube homepage is often seen as the holy grail. It's the highest-profile placement on YouTube, providing marketers with the ability to deliver a big impact and drive attention to content, trailers or advertising. To give you an idea of the scale we’re talking about, the homepage has been delivering nearly 45 million impressions per day and 18 million unique visitors a day in the U.S. — that's the equivalent to the ratings of several top-rated prime-time television shows combined. While impressions and unique visitors are never guaranteed, users who visit the homepage are actively looking for the next video to watch, so advertisers naturally want to be part of the action.

A little known fact is that a few days each quarter, we open up the YouTube homepage to Promoted Video advertisers. These companies end up getting a bit of extra exposure from their campaigns. There are a couple of ways to make sure your ads show up on the homepage, should the opportunity arise. First, log into your AdWords account, and under "Campaign Settings," consider the following:

• In order for Promoted Videos ads to appear on YouTube browse pages, watch pages, and on the homepage, select "Display Network"
• To appear *only* on YouTube placements, select "Relevant pages only on the placements I manage" and add youtube.com as a managed placement.
• To appear *only* on the homepage, select "Relevant pages only on the placements I manage" and add youtube.com::pyv-top-right-homepage as a managed placement
• Set a specific bid for the homepage and keep in mind that it is a more competitive placement
• Please note: this feature is only available in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K., and The U.S.

Because the dates we run Promoted Videos on the YouTube homepage vary, we unfortunately don't have a set schedule for you. However, we typically know about 48 hours in advance. If you have a managed account, you can ask your Google representative to let you know when these opportunities arise so that you can increase your bids to improve your chances of showing up.

Several advertisers – large and small – have found great success showing Promoted Videos on the homepage. One YouTube advertiser, Dynomighty Design, grew their entire business by using Promoted Videos and getting placements on the YouTube homepage. Founder Terrence Kelleman says: "YouTube helps us sell our product, learn about our audience and build a strong brand image. And as a small company with a limited advertising budget, YouTube has become our main advertising strategy. Not only are costs low with Promoted Videos, but healthy conversions also make YouTube our #1 referring site in terms of traffic and revenue." To read more about Dynomighty's story, check out their original YouTube video and their feature on the Official Google Blog.

The YouTube homepage has a captive, engaged audience and it's our goal to let advertisers understand how best to reach customers that would be interested in hearing from them. For more information about advertising on YouTube, visit youtube.com/advertising, and for more information on Promoted Videos, check out ads.youtube.com.

Posted by Mark Sabec, Product Marketing Manager, YouTube

New Tutorial: Exporting Google Display Network Placements from Ad Planner into AdWords

DoubleClick Ad Planner helps you research and identify the web sites most likely to attract your audience. With Ad Planner, you can select sites, add them to your media plan and easily export them directly into your AdWords account as a new campaign, or add them to an existing campaign or ad group.

Many of you requested this feature because you wanted an easy way to plan and buy Google Display Network (GDN) campaigns using Ad Planner.

Exporting to AdWords is easy and this online tutorial will show you how to take advantage of it. In this video, you’ll learn more about:

• Creating a media plan and finding GDN placements
• Exporting your plan to AdWords
• Setting up a new campaign or adding to existing campaign in AdWords

Click here to watch the video

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

Google Display Network series: Measure everything. Optimize relentlessly.

In the last three weeks, we showed you tools to effectively plan your display advertising campaigns, develop compelling ads, and target your ads to reach precisely the right audience across millions of both popular and niche sites in the Google Display Network (GDN). In today’s final post, we’ll dive into measuring and improving your online display campaigns with powerful, free tools that bring accountability to your display advertising investment.

Campaign reporting and optimization

On the GDN, you have real-time reporting for every site and URL where your ads ran. You can view basic metrics like impressions, clicks, clickthrough rate (CTR) and cost, or, by implementing our free AdWords Conversion Tracking, you can measure conversion metrics to determine your campaign’s return on investment (ROI). We also recently introduced viewthrough conversion reporting to provide a more complete picture of your display campaign performance.

With rich site- and URL-level data like this, you can see exactly what’s working and respond on the fly. This means you can increase bids for sites generating lots of sales or decrease bids for, or exclude, poorer-performing sites.

With Conversion Tracking enabled, you can also unleash our bid management tool, Conversion Optimizer, to help increase your conversions while decreasing your cost-per-acquisition (CPA). One of the most powerful bid management tools available, the average campaign using Conversion Optimizer sees a 21% lift in conversions with a 14% lower CPA*.

Web analytics and optimization

Your campaign’s performance is heavily influenced by the experience visitors have on your site.Google Analytics is a free tool that helps you measure user behavior on your site, providing metrics like time spent on your site, page views, traffic sources, bounce rate, and more. Using this information, you can identify areas on your site you need to improve to increase conversion rates and ultimately, your ROI. Although Google Analytics works independently of Conversion Tracking, it’s possible to automatically import your Analytics data into Conversion Tracking, enabling you to consolidate reporting and optimization across these measurement tools.

While Google Analytics tells you what’s happening on your site, Website Optimizer empowers you to change it. You can show your visitors multiple versions of a page or elements on a page to test which are most effective, thereby getting more of your visitors to convert into customers.

Measurement beyond the click

Finally, research shows that the impact of display ads extends beyond immediate clicks and conversions. After seeing display ads, many users search for the advertised product or brand, or visit the advertiser’s web site days or weeks after having seen a display ad, even if they didn’t click on it. 

Recently, we launched Campaign Insights to help you measure the impact of your display campaigns beyond immediate clicks and conversions. Campaign Insights calculates the incremental lift in both online search activity and website visits that result from a display ad campaign. By comparing a data set of thousands of advertisers who saw a particular display ad with an equivalent group that did not see the ad, we can determine the incremental change directly attributable to the display campaign. With this insight, you can establish your display campaign performance, beyond just immediate clicks.

This post ends our series on the Google Display Network. Over the past four weeks, we hope you’ve discovered new ways Google can help you run successful display campaigns. For more on the GDN, please visit our microsite.

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

* Analysis compares performance of Conversion Optimizer campaigns over the course of a year with a control set of campaigns and represents the average impact of Conversion Optimizer. Actual impact may vary form campaign to campaign.

Google Display Network series: Your toolbox for creative display ads

In last week’s installment of our Google Display Network series, we showed how DoubleClick Ad Planner can help you effectively plan your display ad campaigns and reach the right audience. Today we’ll talk about creating compelling display ads and the options available on the Google Display Network (GDN). Let’s look at each category of options you have today:

Great impact through Rich Media and Video. Rich media and video formats engage users at a whole new level, drawing them in and encouraging interactivity in a way not possible with other ad formats.

Example of a great rich media ad run by Volvo and the agencies Euro RSCG New York and Media Contacts:

(Click here to view ad)

If you use rich media and video formats to engage your customers, here’s what we offer through our DoubleClick Rich Media and Video solutions:

• Choice of a variety of rich Media formats, based on your campaign objective.
• Access to DoubleClick Studio, a free rich media production and workflow tool.
• Analyze data on more than 100 unique interactions in every creative unit with Audience Interaction Metrics.
• Integration with DoubleClick for Advertisers, a robust ad management, serving, and reporting solution that simplifies trafficking, reporting and billing of your Rich Media campaigns.
• If you’re already working with another rich media vendor, we have many approved vendors we work with.

Build display ads in minutes. Creating display ads can be resource-intensive, and for many marketers, it may not be in the budget. So we introduced Display Ad Builder in 2008, a free tool for creating professional-looking display ads in minutes. Here’s what you can do with Display Ad Builder:

• Create image, video (InVideo, Click-To-Play), Flash and rich media (including expandable) ads using hundreds of fully customizable templates or templates tailored for specific industries.
• Stay true to your brand with your own images, text, videos and logos.
• Automatically convert the ads you design into most standard IAB ad sizes.

(click for full size image)

Display Ad Builder is also great for testing different messages and creative elements, or to get insights for more complex display campaigns managed by your in-house team or agency.

Stand out by blending in. Text ads are a versatile ad format that are easy to create and edit. They’re especially effective as an extension of your existing search campaigns. Simply opt your search campaign into the GDN and your ads will show to users as they surf relevant web pages via our contextual targeting technology. Text ads also complement display campaigns by engaging users who ignore display ads (i.e. banner blindness). Further, they give your campaign wider reach since not every publisher may accept display ads, or may only accept a limited number of display ad formats and sizes on their site.

(click for full size image)

Whether your goal is to drive awareness or generate immediate sales, the robust creative toolbox available on the Google Display Network can help. We’ll see you next week when we talk about how you can reach your audience with the targeting technologies available on the GDN.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Marketing Manager, Google Display Network

Google Display Network series: Effectively planning your online display campaigns

Cross posted from the Google Agency Ad Solutions Blog

We recently introduced a new umbrella name for our online display media offerings, the Google Display Network (GDN), to make our advertising solutions clear. You also heard from us about the investments we’re making in display advertising and the promise it holds to drive great marketing results. In this series of posts, we’ll cover what you can do today on the GDN.

We’ve been busy working to improve every step of your display campaigns: from media planning and developing creative to choosing targeting, measuring results and improving your campaign. Each week over the next month, we’ll talk about the solutions available to you in each area, starting with campaign planning.

With millions of sites on the web, how do you find the exact people who’ll respond to your message? We introduced DoubleClick Ad Planner to help. It’s a free research and media planning tool to help identify web sites most likely to attract your audience. The insights provided by Ad Planner continue to get deeper and more robust. Let’s take a look:

Research sites by those you know your audience visits, or by defining your audience based on what you know about them. This can include geography, demographics, interests, sites they visit or keywords they search. Recently, we released more features to help you research more effectively:

• Pre-defined audiences: select from commonly used audiences like Baby Boomers to save time or if you don’t know how to define your audience.
• Ad Planner 1000: quickly reference and target the web’s largest sites.
• Subdomain and ad placementdata: do more granular media planning.
• Lists: create lists of your favorite sites and placements for future use.

Manage your site results by applying a variety of site ranking methods:

• See sites that are most likely to attract your target audience, as well as larger, mass-media sites to ensure campaign scale. Or, see a balance between the two.
• Filter to see just sites in the Google Display Network, or all sites that accept advertising.
• Apply other filters to see sites accepting certain ad formats, sites in specific categories like Video Games or sites with a particular domain suffix like .edu.

View robust site details. For each site, you can see detailed information and audience visitation patterns. The Site Overview shows general site information like a site thumbnail, description and site categories. Traffic Statistics and Demographics show unique visitor metrics and demographic information. Online Activity shows what other sites your audience visits or keywords they search. Finally, Ad Specifications show placement type, impressions/day and accepted ad formats and sizes. Most recently, we introduced audience interest information, showing the aggregate interests of a site’s visitors. It complements the demographic data available in Ad Planner, providing a deeper view into a site’s audience.

Build, analyze and export your media plan. After researching, you can select sites and add them to your media plan. As you do, you’ll see unique users, reach, and page view statistics. You can then analyze your media plan by reviewing its aggregate demographic statistics. When you’re ready, you can export sites directly into your AdWords account or into CSV format to import into MediaVisor.

Beyond robust features like these, Ad Planner provides true scale for your campaigns. With it, you can go beyond the most common sites, tapping into millions of others in over 40 countries and 20 languages. Web site owners can also claim, manage and share their data on Ad Planner, providing another level of up-to-date and accurate information for your media planning.

You can stay on top of new enhancements in our Ad Planner release notes. Stay tuned for our next post about developing effective ads and the solutions available on the Google Display Network.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Marketing Manager, Google Display Network

Introducing the Google Display Network

Over the past year, we’ve been focused on investing in display advertising, and we’ve seen great momentum from the increasing number of you running display campaigns with Google. We’ve rolled out new features and targeting options and more precise measurement tools. To provide more places for you to run display ads, we’ve added more publisher sites (through Google AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange) to our ad network of over one million sites. Meanwhile, many of you have continued to run ads on YouTube and our own properties. In an effort to make our display media offerings clearer to advertisers like you and agencies, we’re creating a new umbrella name for all these properties, the Google Display Network. 

The Google Display Network will comprise all of the sites (apart from search sites), where you can buy ads through Google, including YouTube, Google properties such as Google Finance, Gmail, Google Maps, Blogger as well as over one million Web, video, gaming, and mobile display partners (our display partners include all of our AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange partner sites that allow text and/or display ads). The Google Display Network offers all ad formats -  text, image, rich media, and video ads - enabling you to unleash your creativity and engage potential customers across the Web. 

You can run ads on the Google Display Network the same way you always have. Either place bids through AdWords or make reservations on YouTube and Google Finance with the help of a Google account team.

In the upcoming weeks, you’ll see a change in the AdWords interface reflecting this new term, and you’ll see Google Display Network where you might have seen Google Content Network mentioned. We’ve also launched a new website showcasing the sites and benefits available to you on the Google Display Network. 

We’re working hard to offer the best display advertising solutions and we look forward to introducing new features on the Google Display Network that help you reach your advertising goals. 

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management

New Ad Planner features: the Ad Planner 1,000 and greater integration with AdWords

Today, we’re introducing several new features that integrate DoubleClick Ad Planner data with other Google advertising solutions. These features help streamline the process of planning and building online ad campaigns and give you useful data for making more informed media planning decisions.

Ad Planner Top 1,000 Most Visited Sites

One of these new key releases is the Ad Planner 1000 list, a list of the top 1,000 global sites on the web by unique users as measured by Ad Planner. Published monthly, this list details the number of unique visitors, number of page views, and reach for each of the sites included. It’s a great way to quickly reference the most popular sites on the web.

The Ad Planner 1000 list is another step in the evolution of Ad Planner in providing reliable traffic and audience information for websites. In conjunction with it, the Google Content Network just released an Ad Planner 1,000 targeting feature. We hope that the combination of these two features helps provide you with more actionable data to use in your display ad campaigns.

Exporting Google Content Network Placements to AdWords

We’ve heard from many of you that you’d like to be able to easily buy Google Content Network placements that you find through Ad Planner. With the newly launched Export to AdWords feature, you can now simply export Google Content Network placements from Ad Planner into AdWords. These exported placements will be set up as a new campaign or ad group within your AdWords account. If you’re running text ads or display ads on the Google Content Network, this is an easy way to build media plans of managed placements.

Creating Lists in Ad Planner

To help you create your own list of favorite sites to save and add to your media plans, we’ve also recently launched ‘Lists’ in Ad Planner. With ‘Lists’, you can store sites and placements in lists for future use in media plans. To get you started, we’ve made the Ad Planner 1,000 list available to all Ad Planner accounts as both an online reference and as a downloadable file.

Our goal with the AdPlanner 1000 and other recent updates is to offer you new tools that allow you to plan more efficiently, and more data so that you can make more informed advertising decisions.

Visit www.google.com/adplanner to check out the new features.

Posted by Rohit Kundaji, Software Engineer and Wayne Lin, Product Manager

New tool for brand advertisers on the Google Content Network

Over the past year, we've focused on building new solutions on the Google Content Network for campaigns focused on branding. Last year we introduced frequency capping to help you manage how often your Content Network campaigns reach the right people. We then launched an “above the fold” filter to allow you to show ads only in places that appear on potential customers’ screens when the page loads. We also developed innovative tools to measure the impact of brand campaigns.

Today, in response to feedback from many of you who run branding campaigns, we're announcing a new filter that allows you to show your ads only on AdSense sites among the 1000 largest on the web, as defined by DoubleClick Ad Planner. This new feature will ensure that your ads reach a large number of users, but only on well-known sites best suited for branding goals.

To activate the new filter, select ‘non Ad Planner 1000’ within the ‘category filters’ section of your AdWords account. Keep in mind that not all sites in the Ad Planner 1000 are in the Google Content Network and that your ads will only show on those sites that are.

It's important to note that the Ad Planner 1000 does not take performance statistics into account, and that by enabling this filter, you may be excluding many sites that are relevant to your advertised products. Additionally, with this or any of our other brand filters enabled, your campaign will run on fewer sites, so you may need to raise your bids if you’d like to maintain your impression levels. We recommend experimenting to determine which feature or combination of features best meets your goals.

We hope this new feature gives you greater control and assurance over where your ads appear and makes the Google Content Network an even more powerful environment for effective branding campaigns.

Posted by Katrina Kurnit, Inside AdWords crew

Improvements to view-through conversion reporting for display campaigns

This week, we’re making two new feature enhancements to our view-through conversion reporting to help you more effectively measure the ROI of your display campaigns on the Google Content Network. View-through conversion reporting, which we launched last year, helps you measure the conversions that result from users who have seen but not clicked on your display ads. The enhancements we’re making will allow you to customize this reporting to better fit your needs.

Customizable view-through conversion window. You’ll be able to set a custom range for the window of time for which you’d like view-through conversions reported. Previously, this window was set to 30 days, meaning we reported on the number of view-through conversions that occurred up to 30 days after a user saw your ad. Now, you’ll be able to customize this time-frame, based on what makes sense for your product or service. For example, if you’re a local pizza shop looking for users to download a coupon and order a pizza, users will generally respond to your ad within a day or two after seeing it. In this case, you might set a reporting window that’s much shorter than if you were an auto dealership, for example, as it may take several weeks before a user schedules a test-drive, given the a longer sales cycle for automobiles.

De-duplication of search conversion reporting. In addition, you’ll also have the option to exclude reporting for view-through conversions that are duplicated across both the Search and Content Networks. If you enable this feature, we will exclude from your view-through conversion reports conversions that come from users who have also clicked your search ads. These conversions will only be attributed to your search ads.

If you decide to apply these settings for your campaigns, please note that they will affect data moving forward in your account.

We believe these improvements will make view-through conversion reporting more accurate and actionable for you. If you’re using view-through conversion tracking today, we recommend you evaluate these two new options and implement them based on your needs. However, try to avoiding flipping back and forth between enabling and disabling these settings as this can muddy the usefulness of your campaign metrics.

If you’re advertising using display ads on the Google Content Network, but are new to view-through conversion tracking, we encourage you to implement it to more effectively track the ROI of your display campaigns. Remember, display ads often drive performance beyond immediate clicks and conversions, like from users who may visit your site and make a purchase after seeing your display ad, even if they haven’t clicked. Learn more in our Help Center.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

Reminder: Upcoming webinar on display advertising opportunities

We wanted to remind you that this week we’re holding a webinar about our recent innovations in display advertising and how marketers are incorporating it into their strategies.

Join us on May 20, 2010 at 11:00am PST / 1:00pm CST / 2:00pm EST.

Specifically, we’ll discuss:

• Google's vision and recent innovations in display advertising
• How to best take advantage of our offerings, from planning to improving your campaigns
• How advertisers are incorporating the Google Content Network into their marketing strategy

Hope to see you there!

Posted by Katrina Kurnit, Inside AdWords crew

New best practices to find more customers on the Google Content Network

Our previous post in the Content Network Optimization University series covered the basics of setting up and launching a good campaign on the Content Network.

Today, we'll cover more advanced optimization strategies. We've compiled these by observing best practices from the most successful advertisers on the network. Whether you're new to the Content Network or have been using it for a while, you can get better results from your campaigns by employing some of these strategies.

Build effective campaigns

Taking time up front to set up your campaign correctly goes a long way in getting higher quality traffic to your site. Let’s recap the top strategies:

• Separate Search and Content Network campaigns: Setting up a separate campaign just for the Content Network will give you more control over daily budgets, ad groups, keywords and bids. Watch this demo on campaign setup.
• Create many, tightly themed ad groups: AdWords can target your ads more precisely if you build multiple ad groups, each with a small tightly-themed set of 5 to 20 keywords. Watch this demo on ad group setup and this demo on keyword selection.
• Copy your best performing text ads from Search campaigns: For initial setup, it's best to use the text ads with the highest click-through rates from your search campaigns. Watch this demo on ad text best practices.
• Setup the same starting CPC bid as your Search campaigns: We recommend starting with the same maximum CPC bid as your Search campaign ad groups. Once AdWords has collected enough data, our smart pricing technology will automatically optimize your bids on the Content Network to give you more profitable clicks. Watch this demo on bidding tactics.
• Set up AdWords Conversion Tracking on your website: Install Conversion Tracking on your website to measure the sales and leads (conversions) you get from each ad group and placement. Watch this demo to learn how conversion tracking works on the Content Network.

Optimize for better results

It's important to monitor your campaign’s performance and consistently optimize individual elements. Before making significant changes (e.g. changing bids, excluding high volume sites, pausing ad groups), wait until enough click or conversion data has accrued. We recommend having at least 5 conversions or 100 clicks per site.

• Exclude poor-performing sites: Get more qualified traffic and boost conversions by excluding sites that perform poorly for your campaign, based on the number of clicks, the average CPC and the number of conversions.
• Focus your keywords and exclude less relevant keywords: Add more keywords that describe your product and ad group theme in greater detail. Also, add negative keywords to refine your targeting and prevent impressions on irrelevant sites. Watch this demo on refining your campaigns.
• Adjust your bids to manage your costs: Change your bids for ad groups or individual sites based on conversion rate, average CPC and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) to meet your performance goals. You should bid higher for better performing sites to get more traffic, and lower for poorly performing sites.
• Use Conversion Optimizer to manage your CPA: Google Conversion Optimizer is a free tool that automatically manages bids at the site level to reach a maximum CPA bid, which is the amount you're willing to pay for a conversion (such as a purchase or sign-up). Watch this video on how to use Conversion Optimizer.

Expand your campaign for more traffic

To get additional traffic and boost sales from your campaign, we recommend creating a keyword expansion strategy for the Content Network.

• Use the Wonder Wheel tool for ad group ideas: You can use Wonder Wheel on Google Search to brainstorm new ad group themes and keyword ideas. When you search for any topic on Google.com, Wonder Wheel will generate up to eight related topics for you to consider.
• Create new ad groups to reach additional parts of the network: Each topic in Wonder Wheel represents a possible ad group theme for your campaign. Simply click on any of the topics to see other searches and themes related to it. Any closely related topics that are less relevant to your product are great candidates for your negative keyword list. Watch this demo to learn how to use this strategy.
• Expand your keyword list to get more traffic: Once you have finalized your ad group themes, use the AdWords Keyword Tool to get keyword ideas. Enter ad group theme descriptions or keywords under the 'Descriptive words or phrases' tab. Select the 5 to 10 most frequently searched keywords and save them to your ad group This will help to ensure that your list stays highly relevant to your ad group theme.

You can find all the latest videos and updates on our YouTube channel. We hope these tips help you get even better results from your Content network campaigns!

Posted by Katrina Kurnit, Inside AdWords crew