The Conversion Optimiser is a free bid management tool that allows you to set your optimal cost-per-acquisition (CPA) values to make the most of your advertising spend and really drive profitability from AdWords. On average, campaigns using Conversion Optimiser see a 21% increase in conversions, combined with a 14% decrease in CPA, when compared to manual CPC bid management.*

*This analysis compares the performance of Conversion Optimiser campaigns with a control set of campaigns and represents the average impact of Conversion Optimiser. The actual impact will vary from campaign to campaign.

We have recently lowered the criteria to use the Conversion Optimiser from 30 to 15 conversions in a campaign within the last 30 days. This means even more AdWords advertisers can benefit from this free bid management tool.

To use the Conversion Optimiser you must also have Conversion Tracking enabled within your AdWords account or import your conversion goals from Google Analytics into AdWords. Check out our previous Conversion Room posts to find out more about these two options:

Boosting AdWords ROI with the Conversion Optimiser


Importing your Google Analytics goals into AdWords

Read our Success Stories and find out how UK Tights have used the Conversion Optimiser to reduce cost per conversion by over 50%. You can also learn more about how the Conversion Optimiser works by visiting this microsite.

Posted By Evelyn O'Keeffe, Google Team

Making your website as fast as possible could help keep visitors on your site, so any improvements you can make to the speed of your site should be good for business! Conversely, if browsing a site is slow and cumbersome, visitors may give up and shop elsewhere. Today we want to share a cool Google tool called Page Speed that can show you how to increase the speed of pages within your site. If you are not responsible for your website's code you may want to pass this information on to your webmaster.

What is Page Speed?

Page Speed is an open source Firefox/Firebug Add-on that webmasters and web developers can use to evaluate the performance of web pages and get suggestions for improvement.

How does Page Speed work?

Page Speed can carry out tests on your website's web server configuration and front-end code. The tests rate your site against a set of best practices proven to enhance web page performance. When you run Page Speed on on your site's pages you will get a set of scores for each page, as well as suggestions on how to improve performance.

How do I get Page Speed?

Access the Page Speed site here. Once you or your webmaster install the add-on you can begin testing your web pages. You can also watch this YouTube video to learn more.

Page Speed is part of a wider Google campaign to make the web faster for everyone. Check out the YouTube video below to hear about Google engineers and webmasters vision on making the web faster:





Find out more by visiting the Google Code site. If you have your own suggestions for making the web faster please let us know.

Posted By Evelyn O'Keeffe, Google Analytics Team

With search advertising, the route that a buying customer takes towards making a purchase on your website begins with their search query (your AdWords keyword). But it is the content of your ads that will determine if they ever actually reach your site. So we thought we would share the short video below which contains some of our best practices for creating winning ad texts. These will provide you with ideas to test when writing your ads, which will help to differentiate your business from the crowd and drive even more converting customers to your website!

Test the above optimisation tips by logging into your AdWords account today, and editing your ads to make your marketing messages even more compelling to your potential customers!

For more information, visit our content on ad text optimisation in the AdWords Help Centre.

Did you like the video? We'd love to hear your feedback. Let us know.

Posted By David O'Donovan, Google AdWords Team

We wanted to share this how-to guide with you as we think it is a great resource for anyone involved in online marketing. How to convert clicks into profits, is a step by step manual for working with 5 Google products that can help you increase your online profitablility: Insights for Search, Conversion Tracking, Conversion Optimiser, Google Analytics and Website Optimiser.

Whether you are new to one or all of these products, or an experienced user, you will find tips and best practices to help you track your online results and drive competitive improvements. Equip yourself with the tools and the resources to identify areas of improvements on your website and start seeing the impact you can have on your bottom line.

Download a pdf version of the how-to guide now and drive conversions for your business, no matter what the economic climate.

Did you like the how-to guide? We'd love to hear your feedback. Let us know

Posted By Ruth Brennan, Google AdWords Team

Today we wanted to remind you of the range of free Google training available online. We're highlighting some upcoming webinars and online resources that could help you understand and improve your website conversions.

Google Webinars

The Google AdWords team run regular webinars on a variety of topics which you can attend for free. Some webinars are live, and others are recorded so you can access them on demand. The English language webinar calendar can be found here. (Webinars are also offered in other languages, find out more here).

Below we have highlighted just some of the topics we thought would be of interest to Conversion Room readers...

Conversion Optimiser
August 19th 2009 3pm - 4pm British Summer Time (GMT +1)

Join the product team for an overview of how Conversion Optimiser works and learn how you can get more conversions at a lower cost per conversion from your AdWords search and content campaigns.
Register now

Tracking your AdWords Return on Investment
September 9th 3pm - 4pm British Summer Time (GMT +1)

This webinar will show you how to better convert online clicks into profit for your business using AdWords Conversion Tracking and Google Analytics. We will show you how to get started with these tools in order to anaylse your return-on-investment and make informed decisions in your AdWords account.
Register now

Websites That Work: 10 ways to convert visitors into buyers
September 16th 3pm - 4pm British Summer Time (GMT +1)

This webinar will explore the common website design pitfalls and techniques to avoid them. It will also show how leading companies have used free Google analytics and testing tools to dramatically improve conversion performance.
Register now

You can also access on demand webinars, check out the recorded sessions below:

Google Analytics I: Getting started & tracking conversions

Google Analytics II: Managing your Google Analytics account set up for best results

Google Analytics III: Report navigation & analysis of AdWords data

Website Optimiser - Test & enhance your website

Google Analytics Learning Modules

A few months back we announced the launch of the Google Analytics IQ, an individual qualification you can take to show your proficiency in Google Analytics. You can improve your knowledge of Google Analytics for free by following our online tutorials within the Conversion University.

If you want to go on and take the exam you can do so by visiting this page.

We'll continue to keep you updated regularly about Google webinars and trainings on the Conversion Room. In the meantime we hope you find these free resources useful!

Posted by Evelyn O'Keeffe, Google Analytics Team.

When you run an experiment with Website Optimiser, you're testing new content to see whether it improves your conversion rate. We can often find big winners, but, of course, some of our variations are going to be losers in that they perform significantly worse than our original content.

While you've been able to disable poor performing variations on your own for some time now, you needed to sign in, check your reports, and manually prune away the losers. No longer! Today, Website Optimiser adds a new feature: auto-disabling.

With auto-disabling, Website Optimiser will automatically prune poor performing variations for you. This keeps overall conversion rate high while testing. Additionally, by removing poor variations automatically, your traffic is focused on only the variations that have a chance at winning, which means experiments should complete faster. Lastly, we think auto-disabling gives you more freedom to try really big changes. If that crazy variation just doesn't work out, it'll be disabled. And if you've been anxious about running a test, you should be able to relax knowing that a losing variation won't hurt your overall conversion rate.

Auto-disabling is available for any Website Optimiser experiment with more than two variations (i.e. you can't use it for an A/B test, but you could for an A/B/C test). You can enable it from the experiment settings page. You can read more about setting up auto-disabling in this Help Center article.

Posted By Edward Jackson, Google Analytics Team

Today we are really excited to unveil a network of conversion experts in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands, who are ready to help you grow your business by increasing your conversions and driving greater return on investment from your online spend. Our Google Conversion Professionals use web analytics and testing best practices to turn more of your website visitors into paying customers. Google conversion tools, such as Google Analytics and Website Optimiser, are free to use but if you lack the time and resources to really focus on the insights these products provide then a Google Conversion Professional could be the answer.

Google Conversion Professionals are Google accredited specialists that examine your marketing effectiveness, website usability, and product / service offering, in order to find areas of improvement. Learn more about how these elements of your business impact your overall profitability by visiting our new site.

Google Conversion Professional services include:

• Full implementation of analytics and site optimisation tools
• Improvement of marketing effectiveness
• Website enhancement through analysis and testing
• Help tailoring product & service proposition for maximum results

Check out this video to hear our experts sharing their advice on improving conversions...

How do I contact a Google Conversion Professional?

Visit our brand new conversion focused website today to learn more about our experts and find a professional to work with today:

www.google.co.uk/gcp

In the coming weeks we will feature cases studies showing how major brands have increased conversions by addressing issues with their marketing effectiveness, website usability or by adapting their product/service offering. We'll also feature guest posts from our new Google Conversion Professionals. Sign up for our site feed or subscription service to ensure you don't miss out.

Posted By Evelyn O'Keeffe, Google Analytics Team