The Inn Blog Reviews

For most, the holiday season is about giving; for some, though, it's unfortunately about taking - through scams, identity theft and more. With the holidays approaching, many of you are beginning to update your ads and content for a busy marketing season. Are you also checking that your systems are updated with the latest security patches? Do you know who has access to your account(s)? Is your account information/passwords strong and secure? As part of our holiday campaign countdown series, we're pleased to bring you a webinar on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11amPST highlighting account security best practices and tips to keep your campaigns running smoothly during this busy time. In this training, we'll cover common security techniques, review ways to identify suspicious internet behavior and suggestions on the best ways to protect your computer and your personal information. Additionally, learn about an existing Google feature that allows you to better manage your account and thus improve your account security. Date & Time: Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11amPST / 1pmCST / 2pmEST Register here Posted by Nina Hoang, Account Security Team

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Upcoming webinar - Google Account Security: Tips & Best Practices

The latest enhancements to Google Ad Planner and DoubleClick's DART for Advertisers (DFA) bring new ways to help streamline your online display advertising workflow. With the newly launched DFA Analytics beta and beta integration of Google Ad Planner into the DFA platform, you'll now have a singular, seamless portal for planning, executing, and measuring campaigns -- with just one login. This unified set of tools, all accessible through the DFA platform, bring more efficiency to the campaign management process, saving valuable time and resources. Beyond access enhancements, both DFA Analytics and Ad Planner also provide you with more data and more ways to analyze it. We've summarized the changes to each product for quick reference below, but be sure to check out the official DoubleClick and Ad Planner blog posts for full details. The new DFA Analytics beta helps you: Gain insights quickly. Interactive reports mean easier navigation through your accounts and data. You can model data in charts and graphs, as well as drill up and down through criteria such as advertiser, campaign, or targeting settings. Get your reports faster. Reports update frequently - every few hours - and the new user interface enables you to access your data quickly. Use new types of reports. Pull geographic delivery data. Additional reports show delivery data by bandwidth, browser, and operating system. And Ad Planner's new capabilities now enable you to: View subdomain data. See data including traffic estimates and demographics for the largest ten subdomains of any top-level domain. Once you identify subdomains to add, you can do so easily in Ad Planner. See available ad placements while researching sites. You'll also be able to search for ad placements alongside domains on the "Search by audience" tab and see traffic and demographic estimates for each placement Visualize audience data easily. Quickly compare reach and relevancy of sites you select with a new interactive graph. Access more granular publisher data. With publishers now able to opt-in their Analytics data, you'll receive more accurate and specific information about their sites. Use Ad Planner within DoubleClick DFA. Log in to your DoubleClick DFA account to access Ad Planner and have one tool for campaign planning, trafficking, and measurement. (Note: This feature is rolling out to all users over the next couple weeks) If you haven't yet tried Ad Planner, give it a go at www.google.com/adplanner . And for more information on DART for Advertisers, visit DoubleClick.com and fill out an inquiry form . Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

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Google Ad Planner and DFA updates provide more data, more ways

You may remember that earlier this fall we announced the launch of Place Pages for Google Maps, which are web pages for every place in the world. Interested users can find relevant information, photos, directions, and reviews for their favorite places. Users will also see contextually targeted ads, and with the inclusion of Place Pages in Placement Performance reports , you'll now have insight into whether your clients' ads appeared on a Place Page and how they performed. With this update, you can more closely monitor and optimize your clients' campaigns. While placement targeting is not available for Google Maps, you can increase the likelihood of appearing on Place Pages by increasing bids on high-performing keywords or by creating ad groups with highly specific keywords to target Place Pages relevant to your clients' products or businesses. Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

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Place Pages now in Placement Performance reports

You may have read about the recent launch of the Google Website Optimizer Experiment Management API, which allows you to run Website Optimizer experiments without touching a website's code. If you're interested in learning more about the API, please join the Website Optimizer engineers for a webinar on October 28th at 10AM PDT. You'll learn how the API works and CrownPeak and Blast Advanced Media's Motivity CMS will demonstrate how they've integrated Website Optimizer into their platforms. Register for the webinar here , and we hope you can attend. Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Website Optimizer Team

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Google Website Optimizer API webinar

There are a lot of metrics that matter to your clients when evaluating performance, but one of the most important figures for your clients' success is conversions. Our Google teammates in the UK have started a blog called the Conversion Room that focuses on how to use Google tools to measure and increase the number of conversions your clients receive. Occasionally, some of the information may be UK-focused, but you'll find the overwhelming majority of tips and tools to be applicable no matter where you're located, such as how to use the Search Based Keyword Tool to find high-converting keywords . We hope you find the Conversion Room blog useful. Bookmark it, follow it with Friend Connect, or subscribe via RSS, and get hands-on with your conversion knowledge. Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

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It's all about the conversions

Google Analytics just stepped out with a host of new features today, enhancing the product to further meet the needs of a range of businesses. There are eight new features, and we've selected two of our favorites as a sneak peek: New engagement goals: You can now set goals for Time On Site and Pages Per Visit to help measure user engagement and branding success on your client's site. In addition, you can now define up to 20 goals per profile. Analytics Intelligence: Everyone wants more data, but evaluating it all can be a battle. Analytics Intelligence aims to help ease the process, with automatic alerts to significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics. You'll be able to identify sudden, uncharacteristic changes in traffic patterns so that you can diagnose the issue and react more quickly. Read all about the new features in the Google Analytics Blog post , and check out the associated videos on the Google Analytics YouTube Channel . Posted by Agency Ad Solutions Blog Team

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Google Analytics new features announced

As we've previously said , one of our aims is to improve display advertising on the web and, as a result, grow the display advertising pie for everyone. Three simple principles guide our approach: simplify the system for buying and selling display ads; deliver better performance that advertisers and agencies can measure; open up the ecosystem by making it accessible to more participants. One question on the mind of every advertiser and agency is: how can I better measure the impact of my display ad campaign? We hear you. A growing number of advertisers and agencies are running display ad campaigns across the Google Content Network, so we're investing substantially in creating better measurement tools for our clients. At the moment, an advertiser can measure how many clicks its display ads achieve, measure conversions that result from those clicks, compare results with industry benchmark data , and use View-through conversion reporting to measure visits to its website from users who saw its display ad in the past. Today, we're pleased to announce the launch of a brand new tool to measure the impact of your display ads - Google Campaign Insights. As of today, Google Campaign Insights is available for larger display ad campaigns across the Google Content Network in the US and UK. Over time, we hope to roll it out more widely to assist even more advertisers and agencies in different parts of the world. Google Campaign Insights is a unique measurement tool that can give reliable data about how a campaign has raised brand awareness, or active user interest, in a particular product or service. It looks beyond the traditional measures of clicks and conversions to calculate the incremental lift in both online search activity and website visits that result from a display ad campaign. How does this all work? In short, we use the same expertise we use to improve our own services -- our ability to analyze large quantities of data. Google Campaign Insights compares two anonymized and aggregated data sets: a large group of users (many thousands, minimum) who saw a particular ad, with an equivalent, large group that did not see the ad. It then measures whether there is any significant difference in searches and visits to the advertiser's website between the two groups. Doing this, Google Campaign Insights can determine the incremental change that is directly attributable to the display ad campaign. With this insight, advertisers can establish how well their display ad campaign is working. ( Click for full size image ) ( Click for full size image ) Google Campaign Insights provides highly reliable results to marketers because of the statistical methodology our computer algorithms use to combine and analyze large volumes of data from several sources -- the advertiser's own campaign information, ad serving logs and sampled data from Google Toolbar installs that have opted in to enhanced features. All of the results reported to advertisers are anonymized and aggregated over thousands of users. Advertisers or agencies who run wide-scale display ad campaigns on the Google Content Network and who want to take Google Campaign Insights for a spin should check with their Google representative. We're excited about the contribution that Google Campaign Insights can make to our clients' campaigns on the Google Content Network and to display advertising generally. Posted by Paul Todd, Product Management Director [Note: This post has been reprinted from the Inside AdWords Blog ]

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Google Campaign Insights: Better measurement for display advertising