AdWords myths: understanding the AdWords auction

Over the past few weeks, we’ve covered a few common areas of confusion related to AdWords, including billing and spending, and keywords. This week, we’d like to wrap up this blog series by offering some helpful info on the AdWords auction.

If you have questions about how the AdWords auction works, a great place to start is with this introductory video from Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist.

Introduction to the Google Ad Auction

One of the most important factors in deciding your ad’s position within the auction is its Quality Score. To learn more about how Quality Score is defined, and how to improve it, you can visit the Search Ads Quality Getting Started Guide.

Finally, remember that if you’d like to understand how bidding can affect your ad's performance in the auction, you can use the bid simulator. It will provide you with click, cost, and impression data estimating how your ad could have performed over the last seven days had you used a different bid.

These resources should give you more insight into how the AdWords auction works.

This concludes our AdWords Myths series. We hope it’s helped clarify a few things you may have been wondering about AdWords.

Back to Basics: Fast Segments with Analytics Intelligence

Did you know that there’s a quick way to create advanced segments from automatic alerts? This is one of those “I can’t believe how powerful this is and yet so easy to do” features. Let me illustrate with an example from the Google Store site. A few months ago, on February 5, the Google Store received a surge of traffic from TechCrunch.com. We would not have noticed this extra traffic were it not for Analytics Intelligence. In the following screenshot, you can see that the store ordinarily receives between 0 and 221 visits from TechCrunch, but on this day, it received 1,918 visits.

What happened was that TechCrunch ran an article about Google scarves that were being sold in the store. But, here’s the tip I want to share with you. First, you can graph just the

relevant traffic simply by clicking the button on the alert.

And, you can create an advanced segment just by clicking the Create Segment link at the far right of the alert.

Now you can compare this traffic side by side with overall site traffic or with traffic from other segments. Check out this video to see how this works and to learn more automatic alert tips.

Back to Basics: Keyword/Landing Page Combinations

Via Google Blog: A friend of mine recently created several new landing pages that she hoped would attract traffic. She wanted to see at a glance whether people who searched on her top keywords were seeing the new pages. While she knew that she could use the Top Landing Pages report to analyze each individual landing page, she wanted to see keyword/landing page combinations in a single report.

There’s an easy way to do this. Go to the Keywords report under Traffic Sources. Look over to the right above the table and you’ll see Views: followed by a set of buttons. Click the Pivot view (5th button from the left). Now, look to the left, above the table, and you’ll see a Pivot by dropdown menu. Select Landing Page from this menu.

Voilà! The keywords will be listed down the side and landing pages will be listed across the top. You can now see how many visits you received for each keyword/landing page combination.

You can see up to five landing pages listed across the top of the report. You can scroll horizontally (across the landing pages) using the arrow buttons at the top right of the table.

The pivot view is also really useful for seeing at a glance how many visits you get from each keyword and search engine combination. To do this, you’d use the same Keywords report and pivot by Source.

Introducing the Google Small Business Blog

In recent Small Business series on the Official Google Blog, a handful of real-life entrepreneurs have shared their experiences building companies from scratch and embracing Internet tools that have taken their businesses to the next level. We’ve received fantastic feedback about these posts, and realized that there’s a healthy appetite among small- and medium-sized business owners who want to know all about the latest web tools and tricks. Fortunately, we have lots more to share with you, too!

That’s why we’re introducing the Google Small Business Blog, a central hub that brings together all the information about our products, features and projects of specific interest to the small business community. Rather than having to sleuth around in many different locations for details about templates for creating video ads on YouTube, tips for your employees using Gmail or how to respond to the business reviews on your Place Page, you can find all of this helpful information right here in one place.

Of course, we’ll continue to post relevant news about individual services such asAdWords, Apps, Google Places and YouTube on their respective “home” blogs, but feel free to visit or subscribe to this Google Small Business Blog to get everything relating to your small business needs. We’re starting small today, but who knows what tomorrow will have in store!