Among the most common tasks that new AdWords advertisers can find daunting is simply starting a new campaign. Just in the initial campaign setup screen (before you even begin to create your actual ad groups and ads), you’re presented with 22 separate choices! We recently created a series of posts dedicated to determining the right Google AdWords settings for your campaign, but as you might have noticed, Google introduced a new look to their interface recently.

In this post, we’ll walk through a couple of subtle but important differences that have been introduced with the new interface that you can leverage when setting up a campaign.What’s New in the AdWords Campaign Settings?On the whole the new interface does improve the workflow of setting up a new campaign, introducing elements li... > Read more

We recently highlighted the different advertising options available via Twitter’s paid ads and promoted tweets platform. Another massively popular social site has also been introducing new advertising options of late: Tumblr. For many businesses, Tumblr’s currently available advertising options may not be a great fit yet, but it’s always worth understanding what’s available with a given advertising channel before you dismiss it, and by following how a popular platform with a lot of visitors evolves their ad products you’ll know when they start to offer solutions that you can get the most out of.

Currently, Tumblr offers four separate ad products:Tumblr Highlighted PostsHighlighted posts allow users to designate their own Tumblr posts to be highlighted in your followers’ dashboar... > Read more

As with any aspect of Google’s AdWords program, billing within AdWords can be somewhat complicated and confusing for newer advertisers. In this post we’ll walk through some of the different AdWords billing options and billing features available for advertisers.What Are My Billing Options for Paying for Google AdWords?To customize your billing options you can simply navigate to the Billing Preferences screen under the Billing menu:Or you may have to go to the Billing Settings screen, depending on which version of AdWords Billing your account is showing:Regardless of what your interface looks like there are several specific options for payment:Method of Pay: Postpay versus PrepayYou can set up billing either postpay or prepay.

If you use postpay billing, you’ll accrue advertising costs... > Read more

The Microsoft adCenter platform offers its own answer to AdWords Quality Score, but as with negative keywords in adCenter, Quality Scores in adCenter function somewhat differently than they do in Google AdWords.You can easily see your keyword-level Quality Scores in adCenter, similar to the way that you can drill down to the keyword level in AdWords:The way that Quality Score is calculated, however, is slightly different in adCenter.

How Quality Score Is Calculated in adCenterThe biggest difference is that adCenter Quality Score doesn’t actually impact your cost per click and ad rank, ad position, or keyword eligibility. It’s designed to be a metric that indicates how generally competitive your keyword is in the adCenter marketplace as compared to other advertisers’ keywords. The over... > Read more

This is another post in a series aimed at helping advertisers to better understand how to leverage all of the various tools in the AdWords interface to help get the most out of their campaigns. Previously we’ve offered guides to using:AdWords Ad ExtensionsAdWords Reporting via the Dimensions TabAdWords Campaign SettingsCreating & Analyzing AdWords AdsThe Google AdWords Audience TabGoogle AdWords Auto TargetsGoogle AdWords’ Left NavigationGoogle AdWords Tools & Analysis TabGoogle recently reconfigured how advertisers can manage their display campaigns, and in this post we’ll walk through the new Google AdWords display network tab.

Using the Google AdWords Display Network TabAs with most of the main tabs within AdWords (keywords, ad text, etc.) you access the display network tab... > Read more

This is the sixth post in a series that focuses on using the various tools located within the Google AdWords tools and analysis tab. Previous posts have focused on:The Google AdWords change history toolThe AdWords conversion tabGoogle Analytics Reporting within the AdWords InterfaceGoogle Website OptimizerThe Google AdWords Keyword ToolThe Google AdWords Traffic EstimatorThe Google AdWords Placement ToolIn this post we’ll walk through how to get the most out of the Google AdWords Contextual Targeting Tool.

What Is the Contextual Targeting Tool?In much the same way that the placement tool allows you to find websites that would be good targeting candidates for your display campaigns, the contextual targeting tool allows you to identify good groups of keywords to target within your disp... > Read more

This is the sixth post in a series that focuses on using the various tools located within the Google AdWords tools and analysis tab. Previous posts have focused on:The Google AdWords change history toolThe AdWords conversion tabGoogle Analytics Reporting within the AdWords InterfaceGoogle Website OptimizerThe Google AdWords Keyword ToolThe Google AdWords Traffic EstimatorIn this post we’ll walk through how to get the most out of the Google AdWords Placement Tool.

What is the Google AdWords Placement Tool?The placement tool is very similar to the search-focused AdWords keyword tool with the major exception that it’s focused on helping you locate placements to target on Google’s Display Network.How to Use the Google AdWords Placement ToolTo leverage the AdWords placement tool, you ... > Read more

There is a lot of high-quality material available on how Quality Score works and on how to analyze it – for example, we created a Quality Score toolkit with a variety of content on the subject of Quality Score, and we talk frequently about how to better understand the metric, but as with anything else the most useful information on the subject of AdWords Quality Scores is how you can actually impact yours to generate more profits for your business.

As a result, in this post we’ll walk through some specific methods you can leverage to actually improve on low Quality Scores.Identifying Why Your Quality Scores Are LowBefore you can improve your Quality Scores, you need to better understand why they’re low and which knobs to turn to improve them. There might be a few specific things that... > Read more

This is the fifth post in a series that focuses on using the various tools located within the Google AdWords tools and analysis tab. Previous posts have focused on:The change history toolThe AdWords conversion tabGoogle Analytics Reporting within the AdWords InterfaceGoogle Website OptimizerIn this post we’ll walk through how to get the most out of the Google Keyword Tool within your AdWords campaigns.

What Is the Google Keyword Tool?Google’s keyword tool is designed to give advertisers information about which keywords they can add to their campaigns. The Google Keyword Tool has some important advantages and disadvantages to understand before acting on the data.ProsIt Leverages Google’s Own Data – One of the big advantages to using Google’s keyword tool is you have access to Googl... > Read more