WebProNews

Google Does Some AdWords Experimenting

Google has been messing around with AdWords ads on search results a bit this week. Earlier this week, you may have started noticing that the ads have been pushed into the left, making for results pages feeling a bit more compact. Presumably, the move was to inspire more clicks. The sponsored results are now closer to the organic results, and may be noticed by searchers a little more. The growing adoption of wider screens may also play a role.

Google Talks Future of Search Advertising

Google AdWords Business Product Management Director Nicholas Fox gave a keynote speech at Search Engine Strategies. He talked about where the search industry is going, and where it's been. On the history of AdWords, he says Google quickly realized that banner ads didn't make sense with search, sow they tried the text ad, and it has worked pretty well. Google is now running over a billion text ad auctions a day.

Search Ads Convert Better with Display

eZanga is a company that prides itself on providing online advertisers with local, regional, and national advertising with high ROI. The company has now launched display advertising with search. CEO Rich Kahn tells WebProNews about the significance of this, and talks about why things are looking bright for online advertising, and specifically display advertising.

Google Lets You Simulate AdWords Performance

Google launched an interesting new feature to the AdWords interface that lets you see what could have been if you had bid differently. The feature, called the Bid Simulator, shows you the potential impact of your bid on your advertising results. "While it can't predict the future, the bid simulator allows you to explore what could have happened if you had set different keyword-level bids," says Dan Friedman of Google's Inside AdWords crew.

New Local Ad Strategy for AdWords

Today Google announced a new AdWords feature called location extensions. The feature allows advertisers to add dynamic addresses to their ads. "If you're a business owner, you can set up extensions by linking an AdWords campaign to your Local Business Center (LBC) account," explains Emel Mutlu of Google's Inside AdWords Crew. "If you're not the primary business owner of the locations you're advertising, you can manually enter addresses directly into AdWords."

Using Google's Conversion Optimizer

Google announced that Conversion Optimizer is now available for more campaigns. Now any campaign with at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days will be able to use it. Conversions can be tracked through AdWords Conversion Tracking or as linked Google Analytics Goals.

LookSmart Intros Tool for Serving Best-Performing Ads

LookSmart announced a new tool called SmartRotation today. It is a cost-per-action (CPA) driven tool that automatically serves the best-performing ad creative in an ad group based on conversion data from a tracking pixel.

Google Aims to Help Advertisers Improve Conversions

There have been a couple of videos recently highlighted on Google company blogs that AdWords advertisers should pay attention to if their conversions are not where they want them to be. These videos deal with landing pages and ad copy.

Ads Convert Better on Bing Than on Live Search?

Online marketing firm the Search Agency says that based on analysis of its own accounts, Microsoft search ads appear to be performing better since Bing launched.  The firm looked at the final three weeks of Live Search's existence, and the first three of Bing's.

Yahoo Talks Details of New Display Ads

As reported earlier, Yahoo! has launched a new self-serve display advertising solution called Yahoo! My Display Ads. A Yahoo spokesperson was kind enough to answer a few questions about the service for WebProNews. Chris Crum: Are there templates that support video and rich media?