Google is out to make life easier for small and large advertisers. Those of us who have been around Adwords for a few years have known that it needed some re-organizing. Google is finally putting the final pieces together in that regard. The Report Center, which has become redundant with Google moving reports to the Campaign tab, will retire in the next “few weeks.” Here is how Google put it:

If you’re currently downloading reports from the Campaigns tab, you’ve already adjusted to the bulk of the changes, and you’ll find that each of your scheduled reports have been copied to the Control Panel & Library. We’ll delete any old versions of scheduled reports from the Reports tab, and stop sending the emails associated with them, by early November. Shortly thereafter, we’ll remove the Report Center entirely. (more…)

Credit: stock.xchng

You can’t expect to be successful with your Adwords campaigns without spending some time testing everything possible. In order to test your campaigns, you need to keep track of things: where your visitors are coming from and which keywords of what type are responsible for your conversions. Thanks to Adwords new enhancement, you have now even more data on your campaigns to sink your teeth into:

Starting now, your destination URL can include the {matchtype} and {network} parameters. Here’s a quick example of how you might use these parameters:

Let’s say you have a keyword-targeted campaign running on Google search, search partners, and the Google Display Network. If your website is www.yoursite.com, you can use the new and existing ValueTrack parameters in your AdWords campaign to set the destination URL to: http://www.yoursite.com/?keyword={keyword}&matchtype={matchtype}&source={network}.

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Those of you who have been around Adwords for quite some time probably know the challenges of keeping your CTRs high to avoid Google slapping your campaigns. Google Adwords may be expensive for a lot of business, but Google does reward campaigns that have more relevant ads and get more clicks. I have seen many creative ways used by marketers to increase their CTR (the guys behind Rich Jerk have pulled off some amazing lines0. It turns out Google SiteLinks already provide advertisers with a chance to get better results using Adwords.

If you are unlucky, you Sitelinks show up at the top with your sharing the top spots with 2 other ads. The best case scenario is to have the top spot all to yourself (which is most likely the case with branded terms so it’s not about luck after all).

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Google will remain a big player in the paid advertising space for years to come. But if you are a small business owner, investing all your money on Google ads may not be a wise decision. After all, there are plenty of companies that have lots of money to burn and don’t mind making life difficult for other players in their space. Facebook Ads is not as popular as Google Adwords and is quite a different animal. Nevertheless, Facebook is taking in a ton of traffic and has the tools for small businesses and startups to reach out to more people and get them to interact with their ads and brands.

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