Today’s post will provide guidance on using time bid adjustments.  It is the fourth post in a bidding best practices series. Previous posts covered optimization strategies for setting location and mobile bid adjustments as well as prioritization.

In our constantly connected world, people are searching on multiple devices throughout the day for places to go, things to buy, and ways to stay entertained. People often use similar search results in different ways depending on the time of day that they search. For example, if someone is searching for “Hawaii vacations” during the workday, she may just be doing research for an upcoming trip.  When she returns home and conducts the same search in the evening, she may be more likely to have all the info she needs to book the flights and hotels.

With this constant connectivity, search marketers can now receive web traffic from across the globe and around the clock. Most businesses can still identify peak days and times when they see better ROI and lower costs.  At other times, customer activity might be slower and some businesses may wish to drive additional visits even if the cost is a bit higher.

If your business sees regular cycles of customer behavior and AdWords performance during the week, then using the time bid adjustment feature in AdWords enhanced campaigns may make sense for you.  This feature can help you improve results by allowing you to increase or decrease bids by day of the week or time of day.

Getting started with time bid adjustments
Before making any adjustments, it’s important to choose the right level of granularity for analysis.  For example, will you adjust bids by day of the week, eight hour increments, or down to the hour?  While you may be tempted to optimize down to the hour, it’s important to ensure that you have sufficient data to make decisions for each time period.  A general rule would be to have 1,000 clicks and 30 conversions for each time period you’re looking to optimize.

Calculating your time bid adjustments
Once you decide that using time bid adjustments are right for your business, compare the performance of your ads at varying times to your overall performance goal.  This will allow you to easily determine the right bid adjustment for each time period.

If you are setting a goal using a cost per action target, your bid adjustment can be calculated as follows:

Time bid adjustment = 100%* (( Campaign Goal  ÷ Actual Performance) - 1)

For example, let’s say you are an online retailer who sees better traffic and performance on weekdays as opposed to weekends. You would like to target a $30 cost per acquisition overall, but you are experiencing a $25 cost per acquisition on weekdays and a $40 cost per acquisition on weekends.  To meet your performance goal and maximize efficiency you can use a time bid adjustment.  Simply adjust your bids on weekdays by +20%, and on weekends by -25%.  This allows you to optimize for your goal by bidding more aggressively on weekdays when conversions are more cost effective, and less aggressively on weekends when performance is lower.

Test and Learn
Constant iteration is a key part of the optimization process. To ensure you are optimized over time, check the performance for each time adjustment regularly on the Time subtab in your campaign settings. Raise your bid adjustment where your performance exceeds your goal and lower your bid adjustment where your performance falls short of your goal. This will allow you to optimize your bids and adjust to changing consumer behavior.

Tips
You should also take this opportunity to study your internal data to understand when you have peak activity in terms of conversion rates, order size, and overall volume.  If you have a physical store or run a call center, you may consider using those hours of operation as guideposts for setting your time bid adjustment.  Studying the volume of activity during the times you are open can give you a good sense of when you may wish to raise or lower your bids.  For example, if your call center is closed during the night, you may wish to decrease bids during this time to avoid sending customers to unsupported lines.  By the same token, if you operate a physical store and see lulls in traffic during certain hours, you may wish to increase bids during this time and run ads with promotional offers to drive more people to your business.

Reminders
Time bid adjustments are a key part of enhanced campaigns.  To use time bid adjustments alongside location and mobile bid adjustments, you’ll need to upgrade your campaigns.  Starting on July 22, 2013, we will begin automatically upgrading all campaigns to enhanced campaigns.

Later this week, we’ll dive deeper into ways you can use tools like flexible bid strategies to automate your bid settings based on specific business goals like cost per acquisition.

Posted by Ting Zhang, Global Search Solutions

Today’s post about calculating mobile bid adjustments is the third in a bidding best practices series. The previous post covered improving your results with location bid adjustments.

People are now constantly connected and switching seamlessly between devices. In fact, more than 38% of our daily media interactions occur on mobile¹. This presents advertisers with new opportunities to reach customers anytime, anyplace, on any device. At Google, we want to help you capitalize on these opportunities and develop new strategies for your business to win on mobile.

Mobile bid adjustments in AdWords enhanced campaigns give advertisers the power to optimize bids across devices — all from a single campaign. In today’s post, we’ll help you understand how to calculate a mobile bid adjustment that accounts for the total conversion value your mobile ads drive for your business.

Review your current desktop and mobile performance
Before calculating your mobile bid adjustment, you can run an AdWords report to review your current desktop and mobile performance. While online conversions, app downloads, and calls are easy to track in AdWords, other conversions such as in-store visits may be harder to attribute directly to your ads. For those conversions, you may need to estimate their value. The closer you can estimate the value of these conversions, the more optimized your bid will be on mobile.

Calculate your mobile bid adjustment
The key to optimizing your mobile bid adjustment is to identify the ratio of mobile vs desktop (and tablet) conversion value. This is calculated by dividing your value per click on mobile by your value per click on desktop.

We’ll illustrate this calculation using the table below. Let’s say this data belongs to a national retailer with mobile and desktop websites as well as physical stores. In the past month, this retailer saw 10,000 clicks from her mobile ads and 10,000 clicks from her desktop and tablet ads.  Her mobile ads drove $900 of revenue from phone calls to her stores, $5,000 from online sales and $5,000 from in-store visits for a total of $10,900. During this same month, her desktop and tablet ads drove $100 of revenue from calls, $10,000 from online sales, and $2,000 from in-store visits for a total of $12,100.

Click to enlarge image

With this information, the retailer calculates the value per click (for mobile and desktop) by dividing the total value (i.e., the total revenue from all conversion types) by the total number of clicks, respectively. In this case, the mobile value per click is $1.09 and the desktop value per click is $1.21.

The retailer’s mobile bid adjustment is the ratio of these two values: she divides the value per click on mobile by the value per click on desktop and then subtracts 1. In this case we have (1.09/1.21) - 1, or a -10% mobile bid adjustment that can be entered into AdWords.

Iterate and test
As with all online marketing techniques, mobile bid adjustments aren’t something you should just “set and forget.” Frequent iteration and testing will help you account for changes in seasonality or business operations.  Due to varying screen sizes on mobile, we also recommend that you keep a close eye on your mobile impression share so that your ads show in the top positions.

Learn more
To learn more about mobile bid adjustments, visit the AdWords Help Center or watch this recording of this hangout on air, “Enhanced Campaigns: Optimizing Mobile Strategy.”

To use mobile bid adjustments, you’ll need to upgrade your campaigns to enhanced campaigns. Starting on July 22, 2013, we will begin automatically upgrading all campaigns.

Next week, we’ll dive deeper into ways you can use tools like conversion optimizer and eCPC to automate your bid settings based on specific business goals like ROI.

Posted by Andy Miller, Head of Mobile Search Solutions

¹http://www.google.com/think/research-studies/the-new-multi-screen-world-study.html

What’s the future of digital media and marketing? How are CMOs thinking about leveraging digital to reach and engage audiences? What marketing channels are proving most effective in building brands digitally - paid, owned or earned?

These are some of the questions executives from across the digital marketing ecosystem will address at thinkDoubleClick, Google’s annual discussion on the state of digital.

Register now to join the event livestream on June 4th, 9:00 AM - Noon Pacific. Registration enables you to participate in the conversation, and ask speakers and panelists your questions with #thinkDCLK.

thinkDoubleClick 2013 speakers include:

• Wendy Clark, Senior Vice President, The Coca-Cola Company
• Jim Lanzone, President, CBS Interactive
• Peter Horan, President & COO, Answers
• Meredith Kopit Levien, Group Publisher & Chief, Forbes
• Randall Rothenberg, CEO, IAB
• Lorraine Twohill, Chief Marketing Officer, Google
• Michael Learmonth, Chief Editor, AdAge

We look forward to seeing you on June 4th!

Missed last year’s event? It’s not too late to catch up with the videos below.

Posted by Scott Brown, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

Toni Fingerroos, a games developer in Finland, became inspired to create a mobile app. He devoted 3 months to building it, often working 16 hour days. That idea became the hugely popular Hill Climb Racing, and the game has grown to be part of a successful app business called Fingersoft.

Hill Climb Racing has been downloaded in over 145 countries on both iOS and Android. AdMob consistently generates nearly 100% ad fill rates and enables Toni to monetize the game on a global scale. He uses AdMob house ads to promote his app too.

“Hill Climb Racing has over 60 million downloads. About 40% [of the revenue] comes from advertisements, and AdMob is our cornerstone,” says Toni. Hear more about Toni’s story in the video below.

Download the PDF version of the case study here.

Posted by Mike Schipper, Product Marketing Manager, AdMob

Today’s post about improving results with location bid adjustments is the second in a bidding best practices series. The series began with prioritizing and iterating on your bid adjustments.

Your advertising performance almost always varies by location, no matter what kind of business you run. The good news is that if you optimize your bids for different locations, you can increase your sales and ROI.

Optimizing bids for better performance by location
With enhanced campaigns, it’s now much easier to boost bids in locations where your performance is stronger and reduce bids where performance is weaker. Before enhanced campaigns, you’d have to set up and manage an identical campaign for every location where you wanted unique bids. Since this was hard, the most common approach to location optimization has been to cut out underperforming locations using targeting exclusions. But in the long run, this approach can limit your growth and reduce your business competitiveness. So we recommend using bid adjustments rather than location exclusions.

Calculating location bid adjustments
Start by downloading a location performance report. Here’s how, using the AdWords interface:

1. Set the date range to the past 30 days (longer if your campaign is on the smaller side).
2. Click on the “Location details” button and select “What triggered your ad.”
3. Click the View button and select Region.
4. Click Download.

To maximize orders or leads at a particular CPA or ROI level, a common best practice for setting bid adjustments is to equalize your target metrics across all locations. As a math formula, it looks like this:

Location bid adjustment = 100% * ( ( Campaign goal ÷ Actual performance ) - 1 )

Here’s an example from a campaign with a cost-per-action goal.

Example of calculating your location bid adjustment

Location	Conversions	Cost	CPA	CPA Goal	Location bid adjustment
Florida	100	$800	$8	$10	100% * [(10÷8) - 1] = +25%
New York	120	$1080	$9	$10	100% * [(10÷9) - 1] = +11%
Ohio	70	$1050	$15	$10	100% * [(10÷15) - 1] = -33%
Pennsylvania	85	$850	$10	$10	100% * [(10÷10) - 1] = 0%

You can implement your bid adjustments in the AdWords interface (directions) or using the AdWords Editor (directions).

Businesses with local stores or service areas
Closer customers are often more likely to buy from you and less costly to serve. So if your business has local stores or service areas, you should consider optimizing your bids based on customer proximity. For example, you can easily set one location target for customers within 2 miles of your business locations, and a second target for customers within 20 miles of your business locations (directions). Then use the approach described above to calculate your optimum bid adjustment for your two location extension targets.

Tips and reminders

• Maintain a broad location target to cover your entire potential market. Targeting too narrowly can limit your reach, clicks and conversions.
  
  
• It’s OK to set overlapping location targets with bid adjustments. We’ll only apply the most specific location bid adjustment. For example, say you have a +10% bid adjustment for Canada and a +20% bid adjustment for Montreal. When someone searches in Montreal, your bid will be increased by 20%. And you’ll see distinct performance stats for Montreal and all of Canada except Montreal on the Locations subtab on the campaign Settings main tab.
  
  
• Be careful when you don’t have much data. Otherwise your calculated bid adjustments could end up being too high or too low, and you could end up with worse results instead of better. If you don’t have statistical expertise on hand, we recommend not adjusting bids in locations with fewer than 1000 clicks and 30 conversions, as a general rule of thumb. Lengthening the date range for your reports to the past 90 days or more can help.
  
  
• Periodically check performance and increment your bid adjustments. From time to time, check your performance for each location target on the Locations subtab. Incrementally raise your bid adjustment where your performance is above your goal, and lower your bid adjustment where your performance is below your goal. This will allow you to optimize your bids over time and adjust to changing consumer behavior.
  

Posted by John Sullivan, Global Search Solutions

With over 85 billion app downloads across the Google Play and Apple App stores, advertisers need to know how to promote their apps as efficiently as possible. They need to understand what channels drive the most engaged users and find ways to increase user engagement within their apps. With AdWords, advertisers can accomplish these goals by attributing app downloads to the right channels, measuring in-app activity, optimizing media spend towards the most valuable channels and reaching existing users with targeted messages.

Join Google on Tuesday, May 21st (10am PT/1pm ET) for a webinar about how you can drive deeper engagement with your app users. The webinar will walk you through Google’s basic app promotion tools and introduce new features.

Sign up for our webinar today by registering here.

We look forward to seeing you on May 21st!

Posted by Cameron Grace, Display Product Launch Lead

We’re committed to helping app developers with discovery, distribution and monetization on all platforms so they can continue doing what they do best: creating awesome apps.  Last year, we integrated our AdMob inventory into the AdWords system, giving mobile app developers access to many more new advertisers. And we’ve continued to invest in tools to help app developers succeed.  

Today at I/O, we’re announcing that we’ve rebuilt AdMob, incorporating the best technology from our other ad platforms, like AdSense. It’s a particularly great tool to help small mobile app developers grow their business.

Starting today, we’ll begin rolling out the new AdMob to our developers. We expect it to be available for all of our developers globally in the coming months. If you’re an AdMob developer, you’ll see a notice in your account asking you to upgrade to the new AdMob.

With the new AdMob, some of the features available are:

• Smarter app promotion: Conversion Optimizer helps many AdWords advertisers increase conversions while decreasing cost per acquisition. We’re now bringing Conversion Optimizer to app developers using AdMob to promote their apps, so they can get the best possible number of installs for their budget.  Choose a target cost per acquisition for each download, and Conversion Optimizer will show ads when they are most likely to lead to an install.
• Robust ad filters: Ensuring that your app is showing quality, relevant ads is important for app developers. Now, developers will have more control over which ads appear in their apps, by blocking sensitive categories,  so they can increase relevancy and protect their brand.
• Maximized earnings: If developers want to show ads in their apps from more than one ad network, they can use AdMob Mediation with a new, simplified setup.
• Local payments: We’re introducing local currency payments, so developers don’t need to spend time calculating currency conversions and organizing money transfers.
• Intelligent reports: The new reporting interface enables app developers to slice the data in many ways with multi-dimensional reports that help them identify opportunities to grow. They can break down their reports over time by app or ad unit, platform, country, bid type, and more.

If a developer is just starting out, AdMob can connect them to more than a million advertisers globally, providing a consistent source of advertising revenue which can grow as their downloads take off.

We want AdMob to open up opportunities for many more app developers worldwide to help them build successful businesses. Join us at Google I/O at 11:15 AM PST today or watch a livestream of our talk: Build a Great App Business with AdMob, and see new demos.

Posted by Vishay Nihalani, Product Manager, AdMob

What is top of mind for mobile leaders in the agency community?  How are agencies helping their clients win with mobile?  In an effort to better understand the challenges that agencies face when it comes to mobile, and to strengthen our efforts to help them tackle and overcome these challenges, we decided to bring together a group of mobile evangelists from the agency world.  At a recent event in New York City, we asked a few of these mobile leaders what excites them - and what challenges them - about mobile today.  Today, we are excited to share these interviews with you on Think Insights, Google’s hub for marketing insights and inspiration for advertisers and agencies. 

One of the topics that we found to be top of mind for everyone is the challenge of mobile measurement in a multi-screen world.  "We need to get beyond the old metrics of the Internet, television and print, and define what the new metrics are for mobile engagement," shared Jeffery Hinz, Managing Partner & US Digital Director at MediaCom.  Zach Morrison, VP & Director of SEM at Elite SEM, outlines the so-called "holy grail" of understanding consumer behavior across multiple devices to see the full customer journey.  As Morrison says, "The first thing people do in the morning is wake up and grab their phones and the last thing they do at night is do something on their tablet - I think the next biggest thing is tying it all together."

We also spoke with our mobile champs about topics ranging from brand building strategies to showrooming to where they think mobile is headed next.  Be sure to check out the full interviews on Think Insights.  We hope you will find what these mobile thought leaders had to say as interesting and thought-provoking as we did.

Posted by: Samantha Podos Nowak, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

People are constantly connected and moving from one device to another to communicate, shop and stay entertained. They expect a great browsing experience regardless of what device they use - PC, laptop, tablet, smartphone, hybrid device, mini-tablet and television. 

Creating a great website experience for consumers across all devices can help businesses generate more engagement and increase conversions. We want to support you in finding the right strategy for your business and help answer key questions related to user experience and website creation. So, today we’re launching a new initiative on Think Insights dedicated to multi-device web strategies: www.google.com/think/multiscreen

We understand that the key to success in a multi-screen world is to deliver a great user experience across devices and specifically address user needs based on context. Our new Think Insights page offers tips for businesses on how to approach multi-device websites and outlines different implementation options. We're also providing links to helpful resources, like a testing tool to analyze your website's load speed, examples of great multi-device user experience, and a list of partners that can help you get started.

This is part of our ongoing effort to provide you with industry-leading best practices, technical guidance and third party services that can help you optimize your site across screens. To stay up-to-date on the latest content added to the site, please subscribe to our monthly Think Letter.

Posted by: Nabil Haschemie, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

Smartphones are our constant shopping companions - helping us research, compare, and even purchase products online and in stores. We’ve already seen that smartphones are key to pre-purchase activities. With 84% of mobile shoppers now using their phones to help with shopping in physical stores, smartphones are now as commonplace in stores as shopping carts and cash registers. In “Mobile In-Store Research: How in-store shoppers are using mobile devices”, with the help of M.A.R.C. Research and the Google Shopper Council, we set out to understand mobile’s role in stores and how marketers can take advantage. We found that across the board, shoppers who use mobile more actually spend more in store, so marketers should face the mobile in-store challenge head on and own the digital shelf.

Smartphones are transforming the retail experience

Now that consumers have product details, price comparisons and reviews available instantly at their fingertips, shoppers complement what they’re seeing on store shelves with what they can find on the web. This behavior isn’t just limited to high consideration purchases like appliances and electronics. In every industry we looked at, including household items, apparel, and pet care, more than 70% of smartphone shoppers use their phones in store to help with shopping. In fact, two-thirds of baby product shoppers compare prices on their phones in-store.

So what are shoppers using their smartphones for in stores? The research showed that phones were primarily used for:

• Price comparison (53%)
• Finding offers and promotions (39%)
• Finding locations of other stores (36%)
• Finding hours (35%)

Shoppers who use mobile more, spend more in store

While many businesses might assume that smartphone use in store drives shoppers to seek better prices elsewhere and order online, we found that the opposite was true. We compared the in-store purchases of moderate and frequent smartphone users and found that basket sizes of frequent mobile shoppers were 25-50% higher. For instance, while the average appliance smartphone shoppers spends $250 per shopping trip, frequent smartphone shoppers spend $350. Marketers shouldn’t shy away from the showrooming challenge, and should instead, meet it head on.

Search is often the starting point for in-store mobile activity

While many marketers assume that smartphone shoppers use shopping apps or navigate directly to brand and retail websites while in a store, we found that 82% of smartphone shoppers use mobile search to help make purchase decisions. This represents a critical moment where businesses can win or lose customers - whether they’re navigating the aisle in your store or your competitor’s. Mobile shoppers are looking for information or savings in the key decision moments, so businesses should own the digital shelf by making sure they’re present when customers are searching and that relevant information is easy to find.

Understanding how mobile changes the retail game

For businesses, this new mobile behavior doesn’t just impact your marketing efforts, it also has clear implications for the entire business - from the products you stock on shelves to the way you train employees. For instance, 1 in 3 smartphone shoppers would rather find information using their smartphone than ask a store employee. In categories like electronics and appliances, this behavior occurs for close to 50% of smartphone shoppers.

However, understanding and embracing this new retail behavior can open up new opportunities for brands to connect with customers in key consideration moments. Some stores promote their expanded inventory online or implement a price match guarantee to retain savings-hungry shoppers. Others are putting smartphones to use with QR codes that share more information about products, or apps with store maps and real-time inventory. Whatever tactics marketers choose, it’s clear that smartphones are changing the in-store experience, and that winning the key decision moments at the physical shelves means owning the digital shelves too.

Check out the full research report to learn more or register now for a webinar on Thursday, May 16 where we’ll discuss the research and how businesses can take advantage of mobile use in stores.

Posted by: Adam Grunewald, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

Bid adjustments in enhanced campaigns let you easily vary your bids depending on the user context -- like location, time, and device -- all within a single campaign. By optimizing for different contexts, you can get better results with AdWords.

Ad group mobile bid adjustment rollout begins today
Starting today and continuing over the next couple weeks, we’re rolling out ad group level mobile adjustments, as previously announced. This may be useful if you’ve been operating large scale campaigns and found that your optimal bids for some keywords require different mobile bid adjustments. The majority of advertisers will still see the most value in using the existing campaign level bid adjustments in enhanced campaigns.

Change multiple bid adjustments more easily
We’re also making it easier to change bid adjustments for several locations, dayparts and devices at the same time.

Say you want to set a bid adjustment of +10% for three cities that you’re targeting. Just tick the checkboxes next to each location, then click the “Set bid adjustment” button (see image below).

You’ll then be able to enter the +10% adjustment and apply the changes to all of the locations you’ve selected, rather than needing to enter the adjustments one at a time. This handy feature is available for making changes across multiple campaigns when you’re in the “All online campaigns” view, as well as when you’re editing a single campaign.

If you’re managing multiple campaigns and need to replicate lots of location bid adjustments or time-based bid adjustments from one campaign to another, you’ll save time by using the AdWords Editor. Available on Windows and Mac OS, AdWords Editor lets you easily copy and paste settings across campaigns, then review and post your changes.

Enhanced campaign reminders
Starting on July 22, 2013, we will begin upgrading all campaigns to enhanced campaigns.

We’d like to hear your suggestions on ways we can make managing enhanced campaigns faster and easier. Please share your ideas using this form so we can continue to improve the experience.

Posted by: Prashant Baheti, AdWords Product Manager

Today, we are kicking off an in-depth education series to help advertisers optimize bids for their AdWords campaigns in the multi-screen world using many of the new features and tools that we recently introduced. Throughout the series, we’ll cover best practices for setting bid adjustments within enhanced campaigns, including recommendations for how to set mobile, location, and time of day bid adjustments. We’ll also showcase ways to incorporate automation into the bid optimization process and share how businesses are using these solutions to meet specific objectives. We hope you will find this series useful.

Today’s post will provide best practices for prioritizing bid adjustments across location, time and device. It will also suggest ways to optimize these adjustments over time, especially as outcomes and business conditions change.

Overview

In this new multi-screen world, advertisers are seeking new ways to reach people with ads that are relevant to their context. With an enhanced campaign, you can easily reach consumers and vary bids by device, location, and time of day – all within a single campaign. Learn more about the three types of bid adjustments and what each one can do for your
business.

Stacking bid adjustments

Bid adjustments can be stacked on top of each other to optimize reach for each campaign. For example, if you operate a store in San Francisco and know that your campaign performs well on mobile devices on every day except Sunday, then you can set bid adjustments to increase bids for mobile and San Francisco; and decrease them for Sundays.

Example

Adjusted keyword bid =

Initial keyword bid $1.00 X (San Francisco 1.2) X (Sunday 0.5) X (Mobile 1.1) = $0.66

In this example, we set the location bid adjustment for San Francisco to +20%, the time bid adjustment for Sunday to -50%, and the mobile bid adjustment to +10%.  Assuming that your initial bid was $1.00, then your final bid would be $0.66, or -34% compared with your original bid.

Multiple bid adjustments, as in this example, can help you achieve a desired bidding strategy. But individual bid adjustments still apply across all dimensions.  For example, the decreased bid for Sundays applies across all devices and geographies.

Prioritizing bid adjustments

The way you manage your business operations and set overall goals are key factors that determine the order in which you set bid adjustments. We recommend setting your most important bid adjustment type first (location, device or time).  When you’re happy with your performance, you can add the second type of bid adjustments -- and eventually the third.

It’s a good idea to apply basic business sense to this process:

• If you have a store which is only open during certain hours, time will likely be the most important bid adjustment to set first.
• If you see very different advertising performance across countries, cities, states or zip codes (or if you wish to bid higher for users who are physically close to your stores), location may be the first bid adjustment to set.
• If your advertising performance varies widely between mobile and non-mobile devices, device could be your starting point for bid adjustments.

AdWords provides useful information to determine which bid adjustment type is the most important one for you. You may also have third-party tools or backend systems that can inform prioritization.  

Iterate

Over time, you should iterate on each of your bid adjustments to achieve desired outcomes as your results and business conditions change.  We recommend reviewing these adjustments on a regular basis to capture seasonal changes and to ensure that you are optimizing for ROI.

Keep in mind that better data about your advertising performance will help you optimize your bid adjustments.  Below are some tips:

• If you do not track conversions, you can optimize your bid adjustments based on clicks or impressions.
• If you do track the number of conversions (using AdWords Conversion Tracking, Google Analytics or other tools), you can set your bid adjustments based on your actual conversions and CPA.
• If you track the revenue or profit associated with each conversion (using the Ecommerce functionality of Google Analytics or other tools), you can set your bid adjustments based on the actual revenue that results from your ads.

Reminders

To use the features that we reviewed today, you’ll need to upgrade your campaigns to enhanced campaigns.  Starting on July 22, 2013, we will begin automatically upgrading all campaigns.  Learn more

Next week, we’ll dive deeper into how to customize your mobile bid adjustment for each campaign by combining your AdWords data (impressions, clicks and cost) with key stats about your business, like number of in-store visitors from your ads and their average order value.

Posted by: John Sullivan, Global Search Solutions

At Google, one of our goals is to help make the web work for you. Today we’re announcing a new series of Learn with Google webinars, which will teach you how to use digital to build brand awareness and give you the tools you need to drive sales and grow loyalty and retention. Each of our sessions gives you deep-dive educational content, across a breadth of products and marketing objectives, in a format that’s convenient for you. Every webinar is led by Google product experts and includes time for audience Q&A. Sign up to start becoming a smarter digital marketer now.

Upcoming live webinars:

May

[YouTube] Driving Direct Response with Video

[Shopping] Google Shopping 101: Google Shopping for Beginners

[Research] New Research: How US Shoppers use Smartphones in Stores

[Mobile] Driving Deeper Engagement with your App Users

[Mobile] Driving Brand Engagement with Mobile Rich Media

[Analytics] Measuring Success in a Multi-Device World

June

[Mobile] Understanding Mobile Ads Across Marketing Objectives

[Shopping] Google Shopping 201: Merchant Center Deep Dive

[YouTube] Building your Business with YouTube Video Ads

[Analytics] Metrics for the Mobile App Ecosystem

[Search] What's New & Next in AdWords

[Analytics] Unleashing the Combined Power of Google Analytics & AdWords

[Social] Growing your Business & Engaging your Audience with Google+

[Shopping] Google Shopping 301: Creating & Optimizing Product Listing Ads

[Social] Launching & Amplifying your Impact Across Social Channels

[Display] Reaching the Right Audience with Remarketing

[Research] Creating Custom Infographics with the New Google Databoard

Webinars are held Tuesdays through Thursdays at 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern.

Visit our webinar site to register for any of the live sessions and to access our large library of recorded content. You can also stay up-to-date on the schedule by adding our Learn with Google calendar to your own Google calendar to automatically see upcoming webinars.

During our last series of webinars, attendees had the chance to win a Nexus 7. Clint Wilson was our lucky winner and he’ll soon be enjoying all of the tablet’s cool features. Check out our upcoming webinars for another chance to win!

Learn with Google is a program to help businesses succeed through winning moments that matter, enabling better decisions and constantly innovating. We hope that you’ll use these best practices and how-to’s to maximize the impact of digital and grow your business. We’re looking forward to seeing you at an upcoming session!

Posted by: Erin Molnar, Marketing Coordinator, Learn with Google