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The Report Center is retiring soon

Tuesday, October 26, 2010 | 8:07 AM

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Back in June we began moving AdWords reports into the Campaigns tab. Since then, we’ve copied over every key AdWords report, letting you quickly download your data from the same pages where you manage your campaigns.

In the next few weeks we’ll finish the transition and retire the Report Center entirely. From then on you’ll schedule and download all of your reports from within AdWords campaign management.

We’ve made the transition to this new style of reporting gradually, collecting feedback from advertisers and making adjustments accordingly.

For example, we heard that you had a hard time finding specific reporting options in your account. To help, we’ve added relevant FAQs to the download menus in the Campaigns tab, enabling you to find the views and metrics you’re interested in more easily.

If you’re currently downloading reports from the Campaigns tab, you’ve already adjusted to the bulk of the changes, and you’ll find that each of your scheduled reports have been copied to the Control Panel & Library. We’ll delete any old versions of scheduled reports from the Reports tab, and stop sending the emails associated with them, by early November. Shortly thereafter, we’ll remove the Report Center entirely.

To prepare for the retirement, you can compare the scheduled reports in the Reports section of your Control Panel & Library to the old versions of your scheduled reports in the Report Center, then make any necessary adjustments to make sure you’re getting the data you want, in the format you want.

If you’re looking for additional resources to guide you through the changes, you can visit the AdWords Help Center for articles on each report. We’ve also published a before and after guide to keyword reporting to give you a step-by-step tutorial to running one of the most popular AdWords reports.

Thanks again for your patience during the transition. If you have any additional feedback on AdWords reporting, please continue to send it our way.

Posted by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew

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Google URL Shortener

Thursday, September 30, 2010 | 1:05 PM

We first introduced the Google URL Shortener (goo.gl) last December as part of Google Toolbar and Feedburner. Since our initial release, we’ve integrated the technology into many other Google products including News, Blogger, Maps, Picasa Web Albums, and Moderator, but people have been asking for a direct way to use the service. Today we’re giving goo.gl its own website (http://goo.gl/, of course!). We don’t intend to overload goo.gl with features, but we do want it to be the stablest, most secure, and fastest URL shortener on the web.

There are many shorteners out there with great features, so some people may wonder whether the world really needs yet another. As we said late last year, we built goo.gl with a focus on quality. With goo.gl, every time you shorten a URL, you know it will work, it will work fast, and it will keep working. You also know that when you click a goo.gl shortened URL, you’re protected against malware, phishing and spam using the same industry-leading technology we use in search and other products. Since our initial release, we’ve continued to invest in the core quality of the service:

  • Stability: We’ve had near 100% uptime since our initial launch, and we’ve worked behind the scenes to make goo.gl even stabler and more robust.
  • Security: We’ve added automatic spam detection based on the same type of filtering technology we use in Gmail.
  • Speed: We’ve more than doubled our speed in just over nine months.

To access the new website and start taking advantage of these improvements, simply type “goo.gl” in your web browser and hit enter. There you’ll find a simple interface where you can quickly shorten a URL.

We’ve focused on making the service lean, but you will find some helpful features. If you sign-in to your Google Account, you’ll see a list of URLs you’ve shortened in the past. Click the “details” link next to any of shortened URL and you’ll find public, real-time analytics data, complete with traffic over time, top referrers, and visitor profiles. This can be a great way to better understand who’s interested in your links, how they’re finding them and when they’re reading.

We also wanted to thank the many application developers out there who took the time to build extensions and other services integrating goo.gl technology. Even without an official API, there are extensions available for browsers like Chrome (eg: goo.gl URL Shortener, Shareaholic for Google Chrome) and Firefox (eg: goo.gl lite). Before people start writing code to incorporate our new features, we wanted to let you know we do plan to release an official API for goo.gl in the future. You’ll be able to use the API to shorten URLs, expand URLs, and view analytics from directly within your own applications.

reference from: http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-url-shortener-gets-website.html

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Reach the right audience through remarketing

Now available: Reach the right audience through remarketing

Imagine you’re a travel company, and you’re trying to excite users during the holiday season about deals to tropical Caribbean destinations. Users may come to your website, browse the offers and think about booking a trip, but decide that the deal is still not cheap enough. Then, they continue to browse the web. If you later decide to offer discounted deals to the Carribean, how do you reach these users who have already expressed interest in travelling there?

To help you do this, this week we’re rolling out a new feature called remarketing. Any AdWords advertiser can use remarketing to reach users as they’re browsing the web on sites within the Google Content Network. Remarketing is a simple way to connect with users, based on their past interactions with your website.

We opened a trial of remarketing last March as part of our interest-based advertising beta. We’ve received a tremendous response from the hundreds of advertisers who’ve been using it in recent months, across all industries – including automotive, retail, local and finance. We’ve seen that remarketing has worked well for many different kinds of advertisers – whether they’re looking to boost brand awareness, or drive clicks and sales, and whether they use display or text ads. For example, if you’re a search advertiser, you can use remarketing to create an integrated campaign strategy. After driving traffic to your site with search ads, you can then remarket to those users who reach your site by showing them tailored ads on sites throughout the Google Content Network.

You can easily set up and create a remarketing campaign through the new “Audiences” tab in AdWords. A remarketing campaign allows you to take advantage of the same features and reports you can use today in AdWords – it’s just a new way to reach the best audience for your ad.

Here’s an example of how it works. Let’s say you’re a basketball team with tickets that you want to sell. You can put a piece of code on the tickets page of your website, which will let you later show relevant ticket ads (such as last minute discounts) to everyone who has visited that page, as they subsequently browse sites in the Google Content Network. In addition to your own site, you can also remarket to users who visited your YouTube brand channel or clicked your YouTube homepage ad.

You can also run a number of remarketing campaigns at the same time. For example, you could offer discount game tickets to users who’ve previously visited your tickets page, advertise VIP hospitality packages to users who clicked on your “How to get to the arena” page, and advertise a sale on team merchandise to users who previously visited your YouTube brand channel.

Remarketing is a great way for businesses to reach users who are likely to be highly receptive to their ads and special offers. It helps advertisers and websites get higher returns. For example, Intercontinental Hotels Group has used remarketing to reach potential customers who have visited one of their hotel websites:

Ad by InterContinental Hotels Group using remarketing to offer incentive to users

It also means more relevant and useful ads for users, and more opportunities for your customers to receive special offers and discounts that may be of interest to them. As we announced when we launched our beta of interest based advertising, we want to put users in control of the ads they see, so anyone can opt-out of remarketing by using the Ads Preferences Manager. Our remarketing product complies with industry standards developed by self-regulatory groups such as the NAI and IAB and IAB UK.

To get started with a remarketing campaign, check out the information we’ve put together.

reference from: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/03/now-available-reach-right-audience.html

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New for the Google Display Network: Show ads related to demographic categories

New for the Google Display Network: Show ads related to demographic categories

In March 2009, we announced a beta test of interest-based advertising, which included remarketing and interest category marketing, to help you reach people on the Google Display Network who are most likely to be interested in your products and services.

Early results show that interest-based advertising is helping deliver better ads and offers for your potential customers, more effective campaigns for you, and higher returns for website publishers. Remarketing was recently launched to everyone, and interest category marketing has continued to grow.

To help you better reach your customers, and to give users more control over which ads they see, we’re adding some new categories that will enable you to show ads that relate to demographic categories, such as age and gender. This works exactly the same way as interest category marketing works today – Google associates categories with a particular browser by looking at the types of Google Display Network sites visited and compares that information with aggregated survey data on site visitation. For example, if someone frequently visits sites that have a majority of female visitors, we may associate her browser’s cookie with the “female” demographic category. With this information, you can choose to show more ads that are relevant to women as she browses sites across the Google Display Network, exactly the same way you can currently show ads related to other categories like sports or gardening.

As with interest categories, users may view and edit demographic categories or permanently opt out of receiving interest-based ads entirely with the Ads Preferences Manager. Because the interests and inferred demographics associated with a particular browser are based on recently visited sites on the Google Display Network, and not on user data, these categories may change over time. As one of a number of companies offering ads based on inferred interests and demographics, we remain committed to providing users the highest level of control and transparency.

We’re still beta testing interest category marketing (including the new demographic categories), but will be working to help more advertisers run campaigns over time.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

reference from: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/09/new-for-google-display-network-show-ads.html

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Google Ads Preferences Manager

Google

廣告偏好設定

廣告偏好設定會影響 Google 在其他網站顯示的廣告。

讓網路為您提供更貼近個人喜好的廣告

許多網站 (如新聞網站和網誌) 與我們合作，以便向他們的訪客顯示廣告。若您希望廣告更貼近您的需求和喜好，請修改下面根據您最近造訪過的網站所列出的類別。瞭解詳情

您的喜好會與儲存在瀏覽器的廣告 Cookie 產生關聯。如果不希望我們儲存您的喜好，可以在下方選擇停用。

閱讀全文〈Google Ads Preferences Manager〉

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Google’s SEO Starter Guide

Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 11:55 AM

Webmasters often ask us at conferences or in the Webmaster Help Group, “What are some simple ways that I can improve my website’s performance in Google?” There are lots of possible answers to this question, and a wealth of search engine optimization information on the web, so much that it can be intimidating for newer webmasters or those unfamiliar with the topic. We thought it’d be useful to create a compact guide that lists some best practices that teams within Google and external webmasters alike can follow that could improve their sites’ crawlability and indexing.

Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current.

So, the next time we get the question, “I’m new to SEO, how do I improve my site?”, we can say, “Well, here’s a list of best practices that we use inside Google that you might want to check out.”

Update on July 22, 2009: The SEO Starter Guide is now available in 40 languages!

Written by Brandon Falls, Search Quality Team

reference from: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter-guide.html

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Google’s SEO Starter Guide

Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 11:55 AM

Webmasters often ask us at conferences or in the Webmaster Help Group, “What are some simple ways that I can improve my website’s performance in Google?” There are lots of possible answers to this question, and a wealth of search engine optimization information on the web, so much that it can be intimidating for newer webmasters or those unfamiliar with the topic. We thought it’d be useful to create a compact guide that lists some best practices that teams within Google and external webmasters alike can follow that could improve their sites’ crawlability and indexing.

Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current.

So, the next time we get the question, “I’m new to SEO, how do I improve my site?”, we can say, “Well, here’s a list of best practices that we use inside Google that you might want to check out.”

Update on July 22, 2009: The SEO Starter Guide is now available in 40 languages!

Written by Brandon Falls, Search Quality Team

reference from: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter-guide.html

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Gmail’s Priority Index impact Email Marketing

On August 30, 2010, Google announced that it is launching a new mailbox priority system within its Gmail email platform called “Priority Inbox”. This brings Gmail more in line with the recent launch of Hotmail’s Sweep functionality that was announced in late July. It also continues the trend by the anti-spam and ISP industry to move to a more relevancy-based reputation and filtering model. The new system is still in beta but will be available to all customers by the end of the week.

Priority Inbox provides users with even more control of the email they receive and how it is viewed in their inbox. The new Gmail inbox will be broken down into 3 basic sections:

  • Important and Unread: Contains one-to-one communications and messages that recipients interact with the most.
  • Starred: Messages that Gmail users have specifically marked as Starred and intend to come back to at a later time.
  • Everything Else: Contains messages that users have not interacted with or that are deemed less important by Gmail’s system. Gmail users can train the system manually by marking messages as “Important” or “Not Important” and/or rely on Gmail’s system to determine how to filter messages based on the users’ previous actions with those messages.  This means Gmail will be using data from user interactions with individual messages and senders to determine how Gmail recipients most likely want their emails filtered going forward.

For more information on Gmail’s Priority Inbox, please see the official Google blog announcement below:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/email-overload-try-priority-inbox.html

What does this mean for email marketers?

The industry has been pushing email marketers to drive relevancy and user engagement in their marketing programs for quite some time. This is even more critical now because the way a user perceives your email or interacts with it will directly determine how or if the user sees your messages in their inbox in the future.

Think of it as a filter for mail that is not spam, but is also not important enough to the recipient for them to take an immediate action to ensure it remains easily visible to them.

What should you do to mitigate the possible negative impact on your messaging?

It’s important to continue to follow best practices, or start now if you are not currently, because the same principles will apply to Gmail’s Priority Inbox placement that apply to good delivery and inbox penetration among all ISPs – you will simply have to be better at it. If ISPs are heavily monitoring customer interaction with your messages, then you have to work harder to engage your subscribers. Make sure you are sending email that your customers want to open and look forward to receiving.

However, there are a few important action items you should take to optimize your emails for Gmail’s new inbox priority system:

  1. Optimize your subject lines and snippet/pre-header text

    2. In addition to your subject line, Gmail displays the first few words of your message depending on the length of your subject line – about 70 characters total.  This means that your snippet text, also known as a pre-header, is just as important as your subject line in getting your subscribers’ attention because it will be the text displayed in the Gmail inbox immediately following your subject line.

  2. Incorporate unique calls to action for Gmail users.

    3. While asking subscribers to add your sending address to their contact lists is a good idea across all email platforms, it’s especially important for Gmail users, to ensure that your message reaches the inbox in the first place, let alone the Priority Inbox.  Additionally, consider Priority Inbox users’ ability to “star” messages to read at a later time, and suggest that they do so for messages that are long in nature and require more time to read.  Not only will you improve your reputation with Gmail, you’ll build more trust with your subscribers.

  3. Pay attention to keywords

    4. The Gmail algorithm will use frequently used keywords included in the copy of your emails to determine the importance of your message. For image-heavy emails, create a version that incorporates HTML text to ensure that your message is crawled properly, and be sure to add the appropriate keywords in your image alt tags to describe the images you are using.  Treat your email copy as you would a page on your website that you’re trying to optimize for search engines, and if you have someone on your team that specializes in SEO, it might be a good idea to consult with him/her when drafting your messages.

  4. Avoid “batch and blast” emails

    5. While this best practice has been encouraged for quite a long time, it is more important than ever to send the right messages to the right people at the right time.  Use advanced segmentation and lifecycle messaging tools to identify your most engaged subscribers and target them with highly relevant messaging to ensure high open rates.  You might end up sending less email, but you will improve your reputation with Gmail (and other ISPs) as a result – which will ultimately increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns and drive greater ROI.

  5. Always be optimizing

    6. This goes for all of your subscribers, but it will be increasingly important to revisit your email marketing tactics over time and make necessary changes according to your engagement metrics.  What subject lines and/or snippet text performed best?  What types of messages in general are you seeing higher engagement with? Do you see any trends that may have resulted from keyword optimization?  Be sure to segment your Gmail subscribers and keep a close eye on their level of engagement separately – you may want to create separate versions of your emails for this group depending on their behaviors.

We encourage you not to look at this as a negative change in the community or an additional hurdle for email marketing success. Instead, look at this as a great opportunity to set your brand and email marketing apart from your competitors and raise yourself to the top of your customers’ “Important” mail. If you do this successfully, this change will have nothing but positive impacts on your email marketing program because there will be less noise from fewer messages to compete for your subscribers’ limited attention span

Reference from: http://www.bluehornet.com/articles/full/gmail-priority-inbox

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Gmail’s Priority Index impact Email Marketing

On August 30, 2010, Google announced that it is launching a new mailbox priority system within its Gmail email platform called “Priority Inbox”. This brings Gmail more in line with the recent launch of Hotmail’s Sweep functionality that was announced in late July. It also continues the trend by the anti-spam and ISP industry to move to a more relevancy-based reputation and filtering model. The new system is still in beta but will be available to all customers by the end of the week.

Priority Inbox provides users with even more control of the email they receive and how it is viewed in their inbox. The new Gmail inbox will be broken down into 3 basic sections:

  • Important and Unread: Contains one-to-one communications and messages that recipients interact with the most.
  • Starred: Messages that Gmail users have specifically marked as Starred and intend to come back to at a later time.
  • Everything Else: Contains messages that users have not interacted with or that are deemed less important by Gmail’s system. Gmail users can train the system manually by marking messages as “Important” or “Not Important” and/or rely on Gmail’s system to determine how to filter messages based on the users’ previous actions with those messages.  This means Gmail will be using data from user interactions with individual messages and senders to determine how Gmail recipients most likely want their emails filtered going forward.

For more information on Gmail’s Priority Inbox, please see the official Google blog announcement below:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/email-overload-try-priority-inbox.html

What does this mean for email marketers?

The industry has been pushing email marketers to drive relevancy and user engagement in their marketing programs for quite some time. This is even more critical now because the way a user perceives your email or interacts with it will directly determine how or if the user sees your messages in their inbox in the future.

Think of it as a filter for mail that is not spam, but is also not important enough to the recipient for them to take an immediate action to ensure it remains easily visible to them.

What should you do to mitigate the possible negative impact on your messaging?

It’s important to continue to follow best practices, or start now if you are not currently, because the same principles will apply to Gmail’s Priority Inbox placement that apply to good delivery and inbox penetration among all ISPs – you will simply have to be better at it. If ISPs are heavily monitoring customer interaction with your messages, then you have to work harder to engage your subscribers. Make sure you are sending email that your customers want to open and look forward to receiving.

However, there are a few important action items you should take to optimize your emails for Gmail’s new inbox priority system:

  1. Optimize your subject lines and snippet/pre-header text

    2. In addition to your subject line, Gmail displays the first few words of your message depending on the length of your subject line – about 70 characters total.  This means that your snippet text, also known as a pre-header, is just as important as your subject line in getting your subscribers’ attention because it will be the text displayed in the Gmail inbox immediately following your subject line.

  2. Incorporate unique calls to action for Gmail users.

    3. While asking subscribers to add your sending address to their contact lists is a good idea across all email platforms, it’s especially important for Gmail users, to ensure that your message reaches the inbox in the first place, let alone the Priority Inbox.  Additionally, consider Priority Inbox users’ ability to “star” messages to read at a later time, and suggest that they do so for messages that are long in nature and require more time to read.  Not only will you improve your reputation with Gmail, you’ll build more trust with your subscribers.

  3. Pay attention to keywords

    4. The Gmail algorithm will use frequently used keywords included in the copy of your emails to determine the importance of your message. For image-heavy emails, create a version that incorporates HTML text to ensure that your message is crawled properly, and be sure to add the appropriate keywords in your image alt tags to describe the images you are using.  Treat your email copy as you would a page on your website that you’re trying to optimize for search engines, and if you have someone on your team that specializes in SEO, it might be a good idea to consult with him/her when drafting your messages.

  4. Avoid “batch and blast” emails

    5. While this best practice has been encouraged for quite a long time, it is more important than ever to send the right messages to the right people at the right time.  Use advanced segmentation and lifecycle messaging tools to identify your most engaged subscribers and target them with highly relevant messaging to ensure high open rates.  You might end up sending less email, but you will improve your reputation with Gmail (and other ISPs) as a result – which will ultimately increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns and drive greater ROI.

  5. Always be optimizing

    6. This goes for all of your subscribers, but it will be increasingly important to revisit your email marketing tactics over time and make necessary changes according to your engagement metrics.  What subject lines and/or snippet text performed best?  What types of messages in general are you seeing higher engagement with? Do you see any trends that may have resulted from keyword optimization?  Be sure to segment your Gmail subscribers and keep a close eye on their level of engagement separately – you may want to create separate versions of your emails for this group depending on their behaviors.

We encourage you not to look at this as a negative change in the community or an additional hurdle for email marketing success. Instead, look at this as a great opportunity to set your brand and email marketing apart from your competitors and raise yourself to the top of your customers’ “Important” mail. If you do this successfully, this change will have nothing but positive impacts on your email marketing program because there will be less noise from fewer messages to compete for your subscribers’ limited attention span

Reference from: http://www.bluehornet.com/articles/full/gmail-priority-inbox

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Google Analytics Code track two site

Google Analytics multiple site acculated report

If you want to track all of your sub-domain site for the overall Google Aanlytics report. see below.

Sample: The following example first uses the default tracker, and then creates and uses another tracker (arbitrarily called t2).

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-65432-1']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

_gaq.push(['t2._setAccount', 'UA-65432-2']);
_gaq.push(['t2._setDomainName', 'foo.com']);
_gaq.push(['t2._trackPageview']);
Reference from:http://code.google.com/intl/zh-TW/apis/analytics/docs/gaJS/gaJSApi_gaq.html