While navigating a client’s account today in Google I noticed a new feature listed in the top right hand side of the screen:

When you click this tiny icon a pop-up appears giving a brief explanation of what will happen if you install Google Gears.

So what exactly is Google Gears?  According to their website, you can expect the following from this new Google product:

• Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable database
• Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance
• Let users access information offline or provide you with content based on your geographical location
• Designed to be used on both Google and non-Google sites:
  • (Google Sites) Google Reader, Google Docs, & windows mobile version of Picasa.
  • (Non-Google Sites) Zoho and Remember the Milk

Continue with the prompts within AdWords to bring you to the Google Gears installation screen:

Once you have installed the product and your web browsers has restarted, return to Google AdWords and click that link again in the upper right hand part of the screen.  Once that’s done, you should be prompted to activate Google Gears:

When finished, you should see the the original icon which you clicked to begin this journey go from a red-slashed circle to a green-full circle.

So far, I’ve been playing around, jumping from screen to screen, and I can honestly say that the interface of AdWords is, in fact, faster!

However, this account has only a few hundred keywords and a few dozen ads… what about our client who has over 300,000 keywords and several thousand ads?  If you noticed in the bullets above, AdWords was not listed.  After logging into all of our clients’ accounts, I found that only this single AdWords account had been selected–an obviously limited beta-test release.  It would be nice to test Gears on our more robust clients, as any work done on those accounts typically require longer load times for all that data to transfer to my screen.

Keep your eyes peeled on your accounts to see if you can take advantage of this new feature.

Has anyone else seen an a positive, negative, or flat effect from using Google Gears?

Google AdWords, Google Gears

A quick tidbit of information:

Engine Ready’s very own vice president, Brian Lewis, will be a guest speaker at Online Marketing Summit, an online marketing education conference being held this week in sunny San Diego.

Brian will be moderating the PPC vs. SEO: The Ultimate Search Marketing Battle panel, which seeks to finally answer one of the industry’s biggest (and toughest) questions: which is more effective, pay per click or search engine optimization? The panel will start at 10 a.m. on the 25th, the third and final day of the conference, and the debate is sure to be pretty lively, at the very least.

Online Marketing Summit runs from February 22nd to the 25th at the Paradise Point Resort & Spa in San Diego. More information can be found at onlinemarketingsummit.com.

Finally, we’d like to send out a personal invitation to visit us if you attend OMS in San Diego–our offices are only ten minutes away.

Conferences, Engine Ready, Industry Events, OMS, Online Marketing, PPC, SEO, SES

Occasionally, AdWords likes to add in nifty new features to its interface that even the most on-the-ball search marketers never really notice until a few months later, when they suddenly ask themselves (or the entire office at large), “Has this always been here?”

Such is the story of the new Segments feature, which AdWords first implemented in November of 2009 under the Filter tab.

Now, though, it gets a tab of its very own, sandwiched between All but Deleted Keywords and the aforementioned Filter tabs. Just click on that handy dandy little Segments tab, and you can sort all your performance data by network, day, week, month, quarter, year, day of the week, click type, device, and… oh, that’s it?

I think you get the picture.

Needless to say, this is a really cool and versatile new feature, made even cooler by the fact that it saves a lot of time as well. Instead of going through and selecting one day or week or month at a time in the date range in order to view your data, you can view it all at once and, blessedly, compare numbers without having to lay a finger on Excel.

Of course, since the initial discovery and subsequent whoas, we here at Engine Ready have been putting the new Segments tab to use. So far, we’ve mostly been segmenting by week, so that we can get a really good picture of why performance increases or decreases week to week. To do this, select a month (or two or three) as your date range, then segment by week. You end up getting something that looks like this:

Each of the four weeks of data is broken down, so that you can easily take a look at the changes in cost per click, conversion rate, position, and anything else that might be affecting your account’s performance. Which makes it much simpler to answer the question: why?

Which makes it much, much simpler to go for the impossible: true optimization.

Adwords, Analytics, Google AdWords, PPC

The ability to set up an Ad Scheduling / Day-Part bidding schedule within Yahoo was long overdue – but last April it was finally delivered to its advertisers.  Months have gone by and as it did, so did the number of accounts which we audited for errors and areas for improvement; (a complementary Engine Ready service).  Eventually I started to see a pattern which may be costing numerous Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers big.

If you use Ad Scheduling in Yahoo! Please continue to read…

When you setup the daily schedule for each of your campaigns you may or may not notice the extremely grayed out text stating:  <<Display ads based on: The audience’s time zone (default) Edit>>

If you click on the <<Edit>> button you can change this default setting to: Your Account Time Zone

Think about what this setting means and how it is going to affect your traffic.

Most of the clients where I noticed this as a problem were those who valued calls or leads submitted during normal business hours (9am-5pm).  Calls before or after this time go to an answering machine, leads sit until the next shift starts.  These inbound “Hot Leads” can not sit for long before they have no value.

Take a look at this hypothetical client and situation:

* Office Location: California (PST)
* Geo-Targeting: Entire USA
* Ad Scheduling: M-F 9am-5pm

If a Yahoo! advertiser sets up their campaign’s Ad Scheduling as listed above, they will soon start to realize that they are getting leads/Calls beginning at 7am (PST) and ending 8pm (PST)

Take a look the chart below.  It shows you in green when the office is open and in red when it is not.

Your account will be active in some part of the country for an additional 5 hours outside of your 9-5 office hours.  Up to 3 hours after you close, the entire Eastern Seaboard is still seeing your ads on Yahoo.com and their partner sites.

I can not stress enough how important it is to ensure that your Ad Scheduling settings correctly.

It is interesting that Yahoo! elected to default this setting to “Audience Time Zone” as opposed to “Account Time Zone” – A power user can certainly see how you could leverage this feature and test strategies which you are unable to do in Google nor MSN, but the vast majority of advertisers will neither take advantage of this feature nor see (in the faded gray text) that it is set up to run this way.

Did Yahoo! do it this way to maxamize their advertisers spending – by showing ads during the prime time for each time zone? Who knows…

Does anyone else have comments they wish to share about this feature?

Ad Scheduling, Yahoo