Image ads are a great way to raise the profile of your business on relevant websites on the Google Content Network.
The holiday season is on the way and online businesses and retailers are looking for ways to make the most out of the upcoming opportunity. To help you reach more of your potential customers and take advantage of this opportunity, you can now create festive themed, animated image ads with Display Ad Builder for free within your AdWords account.
To access the Display Ad Builder, follow these simple steps:
Select the campaign and the ad group in which you would like to build your image ads
On the 'Ad Variations' tab, click on the 'New Ad' button, then select the 'Display Ad Builder' option.
All you have to do to create your own image ads is select a design template from within your account. You write your own message just like with your text ads, change the fonts and colours if needed, and upload an image that represents your business - our tool does the rest.
As well as these seasonal specific themes you can also choose from over 150 different templates to find a format that suits your message and business.
Based on your choice, Display Ad Builder will generate up to 6 image ad versions with the standard sizes (120 x 600; 160 x 600; 468 x 60; 300 x 250; 728 x 90; 336 x 280 pixels) for you. Now your own animated image ads are ready to show on the Content Network. To make sure you're opted in into the Content Network, in you AdWords account go to the 'Campaign settings' page and look for the section called 'Networks, devices, and extensions'.
To learn more about creating and running display ads, please visit the Display Ads 101 tutorial.
If you are using Conversion Tracking, you could also check out the new View Through Conversion Tracking reports. With View Through Conversion reports you can see when a user looked at your image ad, did not immediately click, but later came back to your site and reached the conversion page.
Log into your AdWords account today to get started!
Last week, our colleagues in the US posted on some changes which have been made to the AdWords interface. If you use AdWords Conversion Tracking, you may have already noticed that the interface for this tool has been redesigned so that it's easier for you to troubleshoot issues and monitor your results. If you are not already using Conversion Tracking, it's now easier than ever to implement! We wanted to discuss these changes on the Conversion Room too, just in case you missed them.
There are now 3 easy-to-use tabs - Conversions, Webpages, and Code - that help you manage your conversion data. Let's take a closer look at each of them:
Conversions: This is where you see information about the conversion actions you're tracking.
The "Tracking Status" column lets you know whether a conversion action is tracking properly. It shows you if a conversion has ever been recorded, if it has recently stopped recording, or if it's working just fine.
The "Value" column shows the accumulated value of the conversions you've received based on the value you've assigned to each action.
Webpages: Here, you'll see which pages on your site are getting conversions. You can also see a breakdown of the number of conversions per page on your site. This is useful for troubleshooting, as you can make sure conversions are coming from the pages you expect and identify pages that are not reporting conversion activity.
Code: This is where you get the tracking code for each conversion action. You can also change the value of an action, which helps you calculate ROI.
Custom Alerts*: You can now create custom alerts to monitor shifts in conversion volume, conversion rate, and cost per conversion. By setting alerts for your conversion data, you can make sure that you're quickly notified about fluctuations in your key metrics.
*Please note that we're still working to bring custom alerts to all linked accounts for My Client Center (MCC) users. In the meantime, you can still set custom alerts for your individual accounts if you're able to log into them directly.
Once you have set up Conversion Tracking you may then become eligible to use Conversion Optimiser. This is a free AdWords feature which uses Conversion Tracking data to get you more conversions at a lower cost-per-acquisition. You can find more Conversion Room blog posts on Conversion Optimser here.
We hope you enjoy the new Conversion Tracking interface!
Want to use Google Analytics data to improve your website and marketing?
Ready to boost your ROI and drive more business to your site?
Whether you're new to online marketing or a seasoned veteran, Seminars for Success can help you meet your goals. Led by independent and unbiased industry professionals, these full-day, in-person seminars will help you learn how to make the most out of the time and money you invest in AdWords, Analytics and Website Optimiser.
Sign up now for any seminar and we'll also give you a £50 credit to spend on AdWords advertising. Find out more about this free advertising credit, and how to register, by visiting our website today:
We recently released the Make Your Website Work e-book to show common pitfalls of website design and show steps that can be taken to improve your website conversions. Today we'd like to delve further into the checkout process on websites, and give some suggestions on areas to test and ways to improve your conversion path.
Many e-commerce websites suffer from low conversion rates. We have compiled a list of e-commerce checkout tips that you may like to test on your own site.
Think about testing the following...
Product Images and Location
As a rule of thumb, the more expensive an online purchase is, the more detailed your product shots and information should be.
Place product images above the page fold (don't require users to scroll your pages).
Be creative. Make effective use of existing technologies (ajax, flash, video etc..)
Example above demonstrates that when a user mouses over part of the product image they can see the texture of the jacket in close detail.This is known as a "javascript image zoom" effect.
Buy Buttons
Also known as 'add to cart' buttons, these are possibly the most important call to action on your website.
Colour / Contrast - Eye catching use a different colour to the rest of your page.
Text - Make it large and easy to read (no fancy typography).
Icons - Icons aid usability (+ Add to Cart)
Position - Users expect to find your 'add to cart' button on the right hand side of your product image.
Make them BIGGER* - Large buttons grab attention, but also accommodate more users.
Long product descriptions? Try using 2 add to cart buttons (1 above the fold, 1 below)
*Large buttons accommodate users who may have poor motor movement. See Fitts Law.
Checkout Without Registration
Don't require customers to register before checkout.
Forms should only ask for essential information.
Tell customers why you need information. Especially personal details.
Form above clearly displays that you can login if you are a member already or checkout without registering.
Yes we ask for your email address, but here's why.
Progress Indicators
One of the most overlooked elements on many E-commerce websites is a progress indicator. This is the online equivalent of the shopping centre "You are here!". It also instantly answers:
Where am I?
How many more steps till I finish?
What can I expect next?
Do I get a chance to review my order?
You can easily see where you are in relation to completion of the task.
Forms Should Be Easy
So many forms on E-commerce websites are difficult to use and don't provide meaningful feedback to users. Believe it or not you can make forms a fun, rewarding customer experience.
The outcome can be amazing as your customers know exactly what information they need to provide to complete the purchase.
Here are some other form tipsyou could test
Provide clear labelling free from industry jargon / terms
Use a checkbox / radio button to reveal optional additional info you may require.
Eg: Different billing address / shipping address.
Avoid popup errors. Instead use inline errors that highlight the problem area.
Don't reset form data if an error occurs or the customer doesn't fill out the form the way you expect them to. Customers don't like repeating themselves. Allow them to correct their error but preserve already entered details.
Answer Customer Questions
There are often many unanswered questions a customer has before they complete a transaction. How well does your website answer the following?
Can I return this item within x amount of days?
Can I review my order before I confirm the purchase?
Can I easily contact support or customer service if something goes wrong?
If I hit the next button, will I be billed?
If I hit the next button, will I be able to make a revision still?
What is the total price with shipping to my address?
How many days before I get my item delivered?
Is this site secure, can I trust you with my credit card details?
What payment types other than credit card do you accept?
If I'm only making a booking, how much is due now and how much is due later?
What is your privacy policy?
Useful tip: If you don't want to include all the text necessary to answer questions like those above, link to relevant sections of your site that explain the details or show(+) / hide(-) the content with javascript or similar technology.
This example shows a javascript 'accordian' interface where clicking on the question, hides / shows the relevant answer. Great for use in compact spaces so it won't clutter your interface and it's user intuitive.
Permission Marketing
Many E-commerce websites ask for customers to opt-in to special promotional emails before checkout, but have you ever tested removing this step from your conversion process?
You can always politely ask them to sign up to your newsletter:
After checkout (on your receipt page)
Via email order confirmation (mail out)
After the item has been posted to the customer
Another popular question on E-commerce checkout pages is 'Where did you hear about us?'
If you are not already, you should start using Google Analytics to help you identify the best conversion sources on your website, thus eliminating the need to ask the customer how they found you. Not to mention that some users don't know the difference between a 'search engine' and a 'browser'. So you may find the data you collect from asking this question is not that useful anyway.
You can always test to see if removing this question improves your conversion rate using Google Website Optimiser
Trust Indicators
Trust indicators are badges, qualifications, affiliations or security assurances that can help customers feel at ease on your website. Some common trust indicators are:
Secure payment gateway badges
Brand names you sell
Places you have been seen or mentioned in the media (eg: As Seen on TV)
Money back guarantee
Industry standards / rating / qualification
Demonstrating your site is secure (highlight the secure symbol)
Where you place your trust indicators will depend on the context of your trust indicator itself.
For example: credit card payments, any secure payment gateway certificate or seal should be placed in close context to your credit card details form.
The padlock in the bottom of a users browser is a trust indicator, but you may sometimes want to point it out as this graphic does.
Certain payment gateway providers will give you trust indicators to work with. Google checkout provides several.
Test and Confirm
Still not sure if the tips above will help improve your checkout conversion rates?
Google Analytics is not the only product to announce some cool new features this week. The Website Optimiser team have also been busy introducing an Experiment APIand a new reporting feature called over time charts. As you'll know from previous posts, Website Optimiser allows you to test page variations on your site to find out which content and design drives the most sales and leads for you. Read about new features below, and visit our resources to learn more.
Over time charts
If you've recently looked at your Website Optimiser reports you may have noticed something different. This week we launched another new feature designed to help you better understand the performance of your variations: over time charts.
With over time charts you can see the cumulative conversion rate of each combination over the life of an experiment. This can give you a better understanding of how your site is performing. The new charts are available for all Website Optimiser experiments, and you'll find them on the reports page.
Website Optimiser Experiment Management API
The Experiment Management API allows for the creation and management of experiments outside of the Website Optimiser interface. Creating and launching a Website Optimiser experiment involves a series of steps. Depending on the design of your website, the content you want to test, and how technical you are, these steps can be easy and quick or potentially difficult.
One of the most important steps in creating an experiment is adding the Website Optimiser tags to the test pages. This step can be problematic if your website uses a content management system or a third party shopping cart since it can be difficult to directly access the code for these pages.
With the Website optimiser Experiment Management API, these platforms can integrate Website Optimiser directly into their services. This week two platforms have launched their integrations: CrownPeak and Blast Advanced Media's Motivity CMS.
Both integrations allow you to create and launch Website Optimiser experiments without touching your website's code. Many other platforms are working on integrating with Website Optimiser, and we're excited about helping more businesses increase their conversion rates through website testing.
We also have set up a special Google Group for the Website Optimiser Experiment Management API. It's a place where you can discuss implementations and get questions answered. Visit the group here.
If you'd like to learn more about using the Website Optimiser API, we've got a number of resources for you. First and foremost is the Website Optimiser API site on Google Code. There you'll find complete documentation on the API and our Getting Started guide. Free webinar Hear about the new API from an expert, sign up for our free webinar run by the Google Website Optimiser team on Wednesday, 28th October at 5pm GMT (10AM PDT). Register here.
To learn more about Website Optimiser you can read our previous posts on the Conversion Room:
Yesterday our colleagues in the US announced a range of new features for Google Analytics. Just in case you missed their announcement, we wanted to highlight these new features on the Conversion Room too.
Each feature will offer you increased flexibility to customise and adapt Google Analytics for your business. We are also really excited about Analytics Intelligence - but you can find out more about this later in the post!
Check out the overview of each new feature below, written by Dai Pham from our US Google Analytics team in yesterday's announcement on analytics.blogspot.com.
Powerful.
Power users have asked us to add even more data manipulation and analysis features to Google Analytics. We've been listening, and are adding the latest power features to expand Google Analytics enterprise-class capabilities.
• Engagement Goals...and more of them! Two new goal types allow you to measure user engagement and branding success on your site. The new goal types allow you to set thresholds for Time on Site and Pages per Visit. Furthermore, you can now define up to 20 goals per profile. Watch this short video on goals to learn more.
• Expanded Mobile Reporting: Google Analytics now tracks mobile websites and mobile apps so you can measure your mobile marketing efforts more effectively. If you're optimising content for mobile users and have created a mobile website, Google Analytics can track traffic to your mobile website from all web-enabled devices, whether or not the device runs JavaScript. This is made possible by adding a server side code snippet to your mobile website which will become available to all accounts in the coming weeks. (download snippet instructions). We will be supporting PHP, Perl, JSP and ASPX sites in this release. Of course, you can still track visits to your normal website coming from high-end, Javascript-enabled phones.
iPhone and Android mobile application developers can now also track how users engage with apps, just as with tracking engagement on a website. What's more, for apps on Android devices, usage can be tied back to ad campaigns: from ad to marketplace to download to engagement. Take a look at the SDKs (software development kits) and technical documentation on mobile apps tracking to get started. And coming soon, you'll be able to see breakdown data on mobile devices and operators in the new Mobile reports in the Visitors section!
• Advanced Analysis Features: Advanced Table Filtering feature is being added to the arsenal of power tools that you can use to perform advanced data analysis. Earlier this year, we announced Pivoting and Secondary Dimensions. Using Secondary Dimensions, you could, for example, see revenue metrics for city + keyword combinations. So, you could see how much revenue your site received from visitors in London who searched for "bean bag". You could then "pivot" by source and see revenue by search engine for each of these city+keyword combinations. Here's a quick tutorial video.
Now we're adding Advanced Table Filtering. This allows you to filter the rows in a table based on different metric conditions. Watch this video to see an example of how you could filter thousands of keywords to identify just the keywords with a bounce rate less than 30%, and that referred at least 25 visits.
Together, these three power features let you perform in-depth, on-the-fly analysis without having to export your data to spreadsheet tools.
• Unique Visitor Metric: Now when you create a Custom Report, you can select Unique Visitors as a metric against any dimensions in Google Analytics. This allows marketers to see how many actual visitors (unique cookies) make up any user-defined segment.
Flexible.
Every enterprise has unique web analytics tracking and reporting needs. Today, we're enhancing two of the tools that organisations use to adapt and customise Google Analytics. We're adding multiple customised variables to the tracking API and making it easy to share Custom reports and Advanced Segments.
• Multiple Customised Variables: Multiple Customised Variables provide you the power and flexibility to customise Google Analytics and collect the unique site data most important to your business. If you've used the _setVar() function, the concept of customised variables will be familiar, but we've taken it a step further and added visitor, session and page-level scoping. You can use customised variables to classify any number of interactions and behaviours on your site. For example, you can now define and track visitors according to visitor attributes (e.g. member vs. non-member), session attributes (e.g. logged in or not logged in) and by page-level attributes (e.g. viewed Sports section). This incredibly powerful customisation capability makes Google Analytics even more flexible and able to meet the needs of the most demanding enterprises. Multiple customised variables will become available to all accounts in the coming weeks but you can start learning more about them now.
• Sharing Segments and Custom Report Templates: You may have recently noticed in your accounts the ability to administer and share Custom Reports and Advanced Segments, features that we announced earlier this year. Have a Custom Report that you created just for the Sales Team? Simply share the URL link for that report to anyone who has an Analytics account, and a pre-formatted Sales report template will be imported automatically. You can also now select the profiles with which you want to share or hide your Advanced Segments and Custom Reports.
Intelligent.
Wouldn't it be great if Google Analytics could tell you what to pay attention to? Starting today, it can!
• Analytics Intelligence: We're launching the initial phase of an algorithmic-driven Intelligence engine to Google Analytics. Analytics Intelligence will provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods. For instance, Intelligence could call out a 300% surge in visits from YouTube referrals last Tuesday, or let you know that bounce rates of visitors from Manchester dropped by 70% two weeks ago.
Instead of you having to monitor reports and comb through data, Analytics Intelligence alerts you to the most significant information to pay attention to, saving you time and surfacing traffic insights that could affect your business. Now, you can spend your time actually taking action, instead of trying to figure out what needs to be done.
• Customised Alerts make it possible for you to tell Google Analytics what to watch for. You can set daily, weekly and monthly triggers on different dimensions & metrics, and be notified by email or directly in the user interface when the changes actually occur.
Watch this video on Analytics Intelligence and then keep an eye out for the feature to appear in your account in the coming weeks!
We hope you're looking forward to trying out these new features in your account. We will focus on some of these features in more detail on the Conversion Room in our upcoming posts, showing examples of how and when to use each feature. In the meantime, let us know what you think of our Powerful, Flexible and Intelligent new features - leave a comment or send a mail.
There are lots of different ways to learn more about Google AdWords, Google Analytics and Website Optimiser (in addition to visiting the Conversion Room!)
If you'd like to listen to an expert explain practical ways to get better results from your advertising or find out how to get the most from Google analysis tools, check out the resources below....
Google AdWords webinars:
Webinars are online trainings you can access from your computer. You can find full details of all our UK webinars here. If you would like to sign up for webinars in another language you can check out what is available here.
We've picked out some upcoming webinars that you may find interesting:
Conversion Optimiser Learn how you can get more conversions at a lower cost per conversion from your AdWords search and content campaigns. 11/11/09 3pm Register now
Make your website work:10 ways to turn visitors into buyers Explore the common website design pitfalls and techniques to avoid them. 18/11/09 3pm Register now
Tracking your AdWords return on investment Learn how to better convert online clicks into profit for your business using AdWords Conversion Tracking and Google Analytics. 02/12/09 3pm Register now
Trainings:
Seminars for Success are in depth trainings run by Google accredited organisations. You can find some upcoming Google Analytics sessions being held in Glasgow by visiting this website. You can also see where other seminars are taking place around the world.
Events:
Google will be hosting AdWords and Google Analytics sessions at the eCommerce Expo, London, October 20th and 21st. Find out more about these sessions here and register for the event for free.
We hope you can make it to some of these trainings. If you do, let us know what you think - leave a comment below or send an email.
