Now that the winter holidays and Valentine’s Day are behind us, many retailers are gearing up for their next important sales season. Jennie Cohen from the AdWords Retail team is here to let you know about a useful resource:We’d like to invite advertisers to check out the most recent issue of the AdWords Retail Newsletter. In this issue, you’ll find a number of tips to get your AdWords campaigns ready for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and a helpfu

In our previous Optimization Tips posts, Stephanie L. offered advice on how to assess your industry and audience as well as your website and goals before beginning any optimization. We hope that these tips helped you get into an optimization mindset. Today, Stephanie provides us more tips on how to apply the information you collected through assessment to optimize the structure of your AdWords account.Deciding between campaigns and ad groupsOne o

The AdWords support team helps thousands of advertisers troubleshoot account issues each day. Below, Brittany S. shares an experience she had with an advertiser who was surprised to see that his average cost-per-click (CPC) doubled seemingly overnight.Recently, an advertiser wrote into the AdWords support team, alarmed that his average CPC had increased suddenly from $0.65 to $1.40. He had no idea what caused this spike, nor could he recall makin

Two weeks ago, Stephanie L. from the Optimization team outlined the four topics of optimization that she would cover in our “AdWords Optimization Tips” series: Assessment, Structure, Keywords, and Ad Text. In the first half of Assessment, she encouraged advertisers to assess their industry and audience before beginning an optimization. Today, she will discuss the second half of Assessment — different ways you can evaluate your website and iden

If you have a blog hosted on Blog*Spot and you’ve upgraded to the new version, there’s an easy way to backup your blog.This page lists the latest N posts from the blog:http://blogname.blogspot.com/search?max-results=NInstead of N, type the number of posts. If your blog has less than 1000 posts, you can save this page:http://blogname.blogspot.com/search?max-results=1000To download all the photos uploaded to your blog, DownThemAll comes to the rescue

Google Reader has a lot of useful keyboard shortcuts, but most of them only replace a click or two. For example, you can star an item by typing s or go to the original page by typing v.But there’s also a somewhat hidden view that can be activated only using shortcuts. If you type gu, you’ll see a list of all of the blogs you’ve subscribed to

I mentioned some time ago about YubNub, a site that wants to be the one-stop for searching on any site. If you want to search on Yahoo, you type y, followed by your query. If you want CNN articles about Bush, type [cnn bush] and search using CNN’s search engine. The idea is simple and can be extend to user-defined commands.OiHoi uses the same idea, but it adds auto-complete

If you want to have desktop icons for your favorite Google Talk contacts, there’s an easy to do it.Right-click on your desktop and select New / shortcut. Then type:gtalk:chat?jid=[Gmail-Username]@gmail.comand the name of your friend (of course, replace [Gmail-Username] with the actual username). When you click on the shortcut, Google Talk will open a new window where you can chat with your friend

Here’s a small list of tips that may help you use Google search better.1. If you’re on Google’s homepage, click on “I’m feeling lucky” if you’re searching for the site of a company or the official site of a product. “I’m feeling lucky” sends you to the first search result and saves you one click.Example: use this for [bmw], [France Telecom], but not for general terms like [used cars], [mobile phones history] because for these queries you’ll want to visit more than one page.2

Here’s a tip from Matthew H., an AdWords specialist:Sometimes it’s better not to send customers to your home page, but instead to a more specific page based on their search term. You can do this by specifying different destination URLs for individual keywords. When customers search for “blue suede shoes” and click on your ad, you can then send them directly to a page containing your entire inventory of blue suede shoes. This practice can lead to

Now you can get all Inside AdWords posts in your email inbox as soon as they appear online.Subscribe below to our mailing list (powered by Google Groups) to receive posts via email.If at any time you’d like to unsubscribe or change your membership options, just click here.This is probably a good time for us to mention that we have an ATOM feed for this blog as well. If you’d like to learn more about ATOM, hear about what our friends at Blogger ha

Recently we’ve seen quite a few emails from advertisers wondering how and why their ads were disapproved - and even more importantly - how this can be avoided in the future. Good questions!The short story is that new and edited ads are reviewed after you submit them in order to ensure that they comply with the AdWords Editorial Guidelines.It probably goes without saying that it’s a good thing to have your ads approved the very first time you subm

On this blog, we’ll be showcasing tips from the AdWords team. Our first one is from Emel, an AdWords Specialist:If your ad text includes a term from your keyword list, that term will appear in bold text when that word is in a user’s search. This can help improve the clickthrough rate of your ad, as its relevance is highlighted to the user. So the next time you’re writing a new ad, boldly experiment with using a keyword in the copy or title. Want