The top ten ways to get your business ready for the holidays

A few weeks ago, we jump-started the holiday shopping season with Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Like us, you probably browsed the shops and sites for the coolest products and best shopping deals for your holiday purchases. But if you're a business or an advertiser, you probably know that some of the biggest shopping weekends of the year are approaching — and you need to get your business ready for the rush!

If you're as geeky as we are, you're probably doing everything you can to figure out how to best use the tools available on the web to find the right customers and effectively measure the results from the money you spent on marketing.

At T-minus ten days before Christmas, its not too late to look over your holiday campaigns and we’d like to share with you our top 10 holiday tips — a quick checklist to help you make use of important data now and improve your holiday campaigns.

Consider it a gift from one geeky data whiz to another!

1. Update your wishlist:
Use the Search-based Keyword Tool to find keywords that you never thought of incorporating into your campaign for the holidays. (Here is a how-to guide for how best to use the tool: Monetize The Long Tail of Search).

2. Know what's hot this season:
Research on Insights for Search to see what the “Rising Searches” are and understand how people are searching for your brand (and your competitors!).

3. Read the wish lists:
Who could be looking for you? Type your website URL into Google Ad Planner to see who is looking for your site, broken down by demographic categories like age and gender.

4. Follow the reindeer:
Where else are they going? Use Ad Planner to find other websites that share the same demographics as yours. Putting display ads on that site might be a great way for you to target that audience!

5. Build new toys:
Create new AdWords campaigns for your holiday lines and products. Incorporate new keywords and keep in mind the trends you found on Insights for Search.

6. Train the elves:
Test your AdWords campaigns by introducing new holiday promotions. Then, test your promotions — a promotion for "30% off" might resonate better with your customers than "Buy One Get One Free."

7. Check your list twice:
Use Google Analytics to better understand where your traffic is coming from during the holiday season. Find out who's coming to your website, when they're coming and where they're coming from.

8. Map out the route:
How long are people staying on your website? Use Google Analytics to understand your purchasing cycle. Which pages have the highest bounce rate? And which pages are people leaving the quickest?

9. Test run on the sleigh:
Run experiments using Website Optimizer on the landing pages you have linked from your ads. Make sure the images are in the right place and that they're not a distraction for your customer. Play around with the size of the image and the image type.

10. Does the chimney work?:
Test different versions of your purchase page to find out what works best. Change the "purchase" button on your webpage. Pick different colors — bright versus dark colors — and vary the button sizes. Try out different text on your button. See which of these variations lead to the most clicks to conversions.

We wish you a happy, data driven holiday season.

Posted by Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist

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More insight into claimed content on YouTube

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Biz Blog)

We announced last week that we now have over 1,000 partners using our content identification and management tools to control how and where their videos are distributed on YouTube. Every major U.S. network broadcaster, movie studio and music label is using Content ID to identify user-uploaded versions of their videos, and decide whether they to want block, track or make money from them. As Content ID is proving to be an effective way for media companies to control, promote and monetize their content on our site, we're always thinking about how we can make these tools even more valuable for content owners of all kinds.

Today, we're excited to integrate Content ID with YouTube Insight. Previously, when you claimed a video with Content ID, we were only able to show you basic information (like view counts and tags) associated with the video you claimed. But now, all the statistics and data we share directly with uploaders in YouTube Insight is available to Content ID partners too, making our content management tools more useful than ever — especially for partners whose claimed user videos generate lots of views for them. For example, using Insight with claimed content, Sony Music learned that the JK Wedding Entrance Dance video is currently the music label's 8th most popular video on YouTube.

In addition to rankings, you can also learn about demographics, discovery sources and other metrics for videos that you've claimed, and then compare them to your own uploads. Do the audience demographics of a claimed video differ from those of the official version? What websites or search terms drive the most traffic to user uploaded versions of your content? We think integrating Content ID and Insight can help answer questions like these and will be very helpful as you think about distributing, marketing and making money from your content online.

If you're a Content ID partner, you can find this new information in the Reporting section of your CMS (Content Management System) account.

Posted by Martin Landers, Insight Software Engineer and Walter Lee, Content ID Product Manager

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New tools for Google Services for Websites

Earlier this year, we launched Google Services for Websites, a program that helps partners, e.g., web hoster and access providers, offer useful and powerful tools to their customers. By making services, such as Webmaster Tools, Custom Search, Site Search and AdSense, easily accessible via the hoster control panel, hosters can easily enable these services for their webmasters. The tools help website owners understand search performance, improve user retention and monetize their content — in other words, run more effective websites.

Since we launched the program, several hosting platforms have enhanced their offerings by integrating with the appropriate APIs. Webmasters can configure accounts, submit Sitemaps with Webmaster Tools, create Custom Search Boxes for their sites and monetize their content with AdSense, all with a few clicks at their hoster control panel. More partners are in the process of implementing these enhancements.

We've just added new tools to the suite:

• Web Elements allows your customers to enhance their websites with the ease of cut-and-paste. Webmasters can provide maps, real-time news, calendars, presentations, spreadsheets and YouTube videos on their sites. With the Conversation Element, websites can create more engagement with their communities. The Custom Search Element provides inline search over your own site (or others you specify) without having to write any code and various options to customize further.
• Page Speed allows webmasters to measure the performance of their websites. Snappier websites help users find things faster; the recommendations from these latency tools allow hosters and webmasters to optimize website speed. These techniques can help hosters reduce resource use and optimize network bandwidth.
• The Tips for Hosters page offers a set of tips for hosters for creating a richer website hosting platform. Hosters can improve the convenience and accessibility of tools, while at the same time saving platform costs and earning referral fees. Tips include the use of analytics tools such as Google Analytics to help webmasters understand their traffic and linguistic tools such as Google Translate to help websites reach a broader audience.

If you're a hoster and would like to participate in the Google Services for Websites program, please apply here. You'll have to integrate with the service APIs before these services can be made available to your customers, so the earlier you start that process, the better.

As always, we'd love to get feedback on how the program is working for you, and what improvements you'd like to see.

Posted by Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager

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Leave the math to us: Advertisers increase their profits using Conversion Optimizer

This post is the latest in an ongoing series on The Power of Measurement. Previous topics have covered ways to make your website as successful as possible through tools such as Analytics and Website Optimizer. – Ed.

If you're an old-school AdWords advertiser, you may remember that you originally set bids based on ad impressions (cost-per-impression, or CPM). Later, AdWords transitioned to a new model where bids were set based on ad clicks (cost-per-click, or CPC). Now, as technology has become even more advanced, we’re seeing the next phase of search engine advertising.

What if we told you that you could bid for ads simply based on conversions? (A conversion is a goal set by an advertiser, such as a website visitor purchasing a product or filling out a form.) With Conversion Optimizer, Google does all the heavy lifting and complicated analysis, letting you bid simply based on how much a conversion is worth to your business (cost-per-acquisition, or CPA). By using Conversion Optimizer, advertisers are not only seeing an increase in profits but have more time to devote to the rest of their business.

We’re excited to announce that this AdWords transformation is well underway: advertisers are already using the Conversion Optimizer to manage approximately $1 billion in spend annually.* This new shift benefits two areas Google cares deeply about: showing our users the most relevant ads and helping our advertisers increase their profits.

So how does it work? Each and every time someone types in a search query, AdWords runs a new keyword auction. Advertisers who are still bidding on a cost-per-click basis will be using the same bid in many different auctions, so sometimes their bid may be too high or too low. However, for advertisers using Conversion Optimizer, we'll automatically adjust the bid for each of these auctions so that it can hit the sweet spot more often, helping the advertiser to make more money.

For example, suppose you're advertising an online shoe store and you purchase ads using the keyword "shoes." Because your clicks come from many different types of people who have different intentions, Conversion Optimizer takes many factors into account to optimize your ad performance. If you don't ship internationally, Conversion Optimizer will learn that clicks from international users don't convert and will eliminate traffic from outside the United States. It might also learn that when customers include the word "cheap" in their query, they are particularly likely to convert because your prices are very competitive. Essentially, Google does the detective work — you tell us how much a conversion is worth and our algorithms make it happen.

As more advertisers transition to Conversion Optimizer, we look forward to showing more relevant ads and, in doing so, helping our advertisers achieve better results. Learn more about Conversion Optimizer and get started using it with your AdWords campaigns.

* Annualized figures based on Q2 sales

Posted by Andrew Silverman, Product Manager, Conversion Optimizer

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