Some clever eyes spotted this as early as late last week, and yesterday Google officially announced it :  You can now see your “ Relative CTR ” compared to other content ads (text or display ads) shown in the same ad spots on the same content network pages.

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Inside the New Google Display Network Performance Metrics

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Embedded Sitelinks Launch In the next two weeks, Google will be launching a new display format of Adwords Sitelinks, called Embedded Sitelinks.

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Google Adwords Announces Embedded Sitelinks Launch

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“Negative” keywords are just as important as the ‘positive’ keywords you bid on.  Effective targeting of your Adwords campaigns requires that you put your ads in front of the right users, and keep them away from users who are unlikely to be interested in your product or service.  Many keywords have multiple meanings from niche to niche, others many apply to a particular area of your niche that your product may not want to target. Poor broad-matching due to inadequate negatives can severely impact your keyword relevance quality scores as well as keyword-level quality scores are heavily measured based on ad click-through rates (CTR), and the more often your ad shows against irrelevant keywords, the lower your CTRs will be. Different Kinds of Negative Keyword Structures For search campaigns, negative keywords can be added either on a campaign-wide basis, or on an adgroup-only basis

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How to Research Negative Keywords

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Not every Adwords campaign starts off with the geographic targeting perfectly dialed in.  Often, marketers start by lumping a scads of countries in together, ignoring language and currency as well as differences in conversion rates from country to country. So how can you quickly segment out a country or group of countries that either need to have their bids customized (higher or lower), keywords tweaked, or daily budget settings adjusted

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Quickly Create & Tweak Country-Specific Adwords Campaigns

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If you have ever used Google’s AdWords Editor you know that it can save you a tremendous amount of time in making changes both big and small to your AdWords account. While most features of AdWords Editor are highly visible throughout the various menus and tabs, there is one hidden feature that can save you a tremendous amount of time and headache. This hidden feature is called Formula Words .

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AdWords Editor’s Best Kept Secret: Formula Words

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Changing adwords campaigns, particularly established campaigns that are working, can involve a lot of trial and error. We don’t want to ruin a good thing, yet all of us want to optimize for best results. In August 2010, Google rolled out a helpful tool called Adwords Campaign Experiments , otherwise known as ACE.

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How To Use Google Campaign Experiments To Optimize Adwords

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Google’s new Contextual Targeting Tool (currently in beta, some accounts have it already, more will see it roll out shortly) is a fantastic way to build out quick and dirty display network campaigns. Many advertisers build out their content campaigns using variations on the keywords used in their search campaigns, perhaps integrating a few other contextually-related keywords to round out the ‘theme’ of the adgroup, making it easier for Google to figure out where to put your ad, or simply start from scratch using Google’s keyword tool to throw together thematically-relevant keywords into new adgroups

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Review: Google’s Beta Contextual Targeting Tool

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I’ve been debating about whether to post on this or not, as it’s pretty much giving attention to quackery, but what the heck: There’s a persistent ‘grey technique’ that’s been mentioned offline a number of times that centers around the theory that you can artificially pump your account-level quality scores in Adwords by paying a ‘QS-tax’: bidding on and directing traffic straight through to the top Adwords advertisers that have the lowest possible (read .01c) minimum CPCs on their brand terms . The idea works like this: -You create a new search campaign in Adwords that has one or two keywords and one adgroup only.

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Can You Really Artificially Pump Account Quality Score?

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I have to say I’m starting to dig how Google’s been rolling reporting features directly into the campaign tabs lately.

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Get a Bird’s Eye View of Automatic Placement Performance

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I had to rub my eyes for a minute and check with some contacts to make sure this actually happened: I believe it USED to be when you created a content-only campaign and left the “Content Bid” field blank, that Adwords would just use the “Default Bid” for the adgroup in lieu of there being a specified content bid. I looked today and this is what I see: What Just Happened Here? Is it just me, or did they just FORCIBLY move everyone who left that Content Bid field blank into “auto” bidding?

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Really Google? Silent Change Forces Content Campaigns into Automatic Bidding

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