On June 11th, Google Shopping will complete the transition to a commercial model in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Brazil, Australia, Switzerland and the Czech Republic. When the transition is complete, free product listings will no longer appear on Google Shopping. We believe this new model, built on Product Listing Ads, will help retailers of all sizes connect the right products with customers around the world, increase clicks to their sites, and convert more shoppers into buyers.

Onward and upward
We've been pleased with the rapid adoption of Google Shopping by the global retail community. Over 1 billion products are now being promoted globally on Google Shopping, largely driven by a 300% year-on-year growth in participating sellers (including many aggregators and marketplaces). And we’ve seen 20% growth in traffic to retailers over the past year.

Global merchant success stories
We’ve heard from a variety of retailers around the world who have embraced Google Shopping and are seeing great results. Check out the highlights below:


Make the most of Google Shopping
Whether you’re just getting started with Product Listing Ads or are looking for more advanced optimization strategies, we’ve compiled our top recommendations to succeed with Google Shopping below. Read on for these quick tips and sign up for one of our upcoming Hangouts on Air in your country to learn how you can prepare for the global commercial transition.

If you’re new to Product Listing Ads

• Get started with Merchant Center, the place to upload your product data to Google 
• Once your products are in Merchant Center, create a Product Listing Ads campaign to promote your products on Google Shopping

If  you’re already using Product Listing Ads

• Use the All Products target to quickly promote your entire inventory
• Take advantage of automatic bidding for Product Listing Ads, which saves you time and resources by enabling Google to automatically adjust your CPC bids to optimize traffic
• Provide high quality data and follow our updated product feed specifications
• Promote products across devices by ensuring all of your Product Listing Ads campaigns are upgraded to enhanced campaigns

For agencies

• Join Google Engage to get the latest agency news, trainings and support from the Google Shopping team

Need additional assistance? We’re happy to help. Feel free to visit our Help Center or call one of our Shopping specialists in your country below:

• Australia - 1800 087 124
• Brazil - 0800 727 8947
• Czech Republic - 800 500 353
• France - 805 540 727
• Germany - 0800 5894933
• Italy - 800930819
• Japan - 0120-984-684
• Netherlands - 0800 2500026
• Spain - 900 814 539
• Switzerland - 0800 002539
• United Kingdom - 0800 169 0711

Posted by: Sameer Samat, Vice President of Product Management, Google Shopping

The latest version of AdWords Editor gives you more ways to make bulk changes to your enhanced campaigns. With the new version, you can:

• Set bid adjustments for placements, topics, and audiences.
• Set mobile bid adjustments at the ad group level.
• Upgrade campaigns in bulk using CSV import or the Add/update multiple campaigns tool.
• Use the new ValueTrack {ifmobile}, {ifnotmobile} parameters.

On the Keywords tab, new columns show detailed keyword performance metrics on the Display Network, enabling you to manage and optimize your Display campaigns with the same granular level of control as your Search campaigns. For example, you can adjust keyword bids depending on their performance, and fine-tune campaigns based on your specific goals.

We've also improved the performance statistics that you can download for locations, audiences, and placements.

For more details about these changes and other updates, see our AdWords Editor 10.1 release notes.

The next time you launch AdWords Editor, you'll see a prompt to upgrade to version 10.1. To learn more about upgrading, including how to keep unposted changes and comments when you upgrade, please review these instructions. You can also download version 10.1 from the AdWords Editor website.

Note: Support for previous versions of AdWords Editor will continue for four months to allow you time to upgrade. To ensure uninterrupted use of AdWords Editor, you will need to upgrade by September 16, 2013.

Posted by Darcy Lima, AdWords Editor

Have you ever wished you could apply automated bidding to part of your campaign while manually bidding on other keywords in the same campaign? Or maybe you’ve wanted to apply a single bid strategy to some keywords, but they’re in different campaigns?  Now you can with flexible bid strategies, available in the next couple weeks when you upgrade to an enhanced campaign. Flexible bid strategies let you apply multiple bidding strategies within a single campaign or across campaigns. This provides you the freedom to choose the appropriate bid strategy without being constrained by account structure.

Control and insights with new flexible bid strategies

Ramping up over the next couple weeks, flexible bid strategies can be found in the Shared library (see image below). Once you’ve created a flexible bid strategy, you can apply it to specific keywords, ad groups, and campaigns and monitor its performance.



Here’s more information about what each flexible bid strategy does and when you can use it:



Some of our bid strategies incorporate real-time details during each auction such as device, location, and other context signals to adjust your bids based on your ad’s predicted performance. This approach offers the potential for even better performance. Target CPA and Enhanced CPC use this technology today, and it will be incorporated into other bidding strategies in the future.

Customizing the new flexible bid strategies to work for you

Flexible bid strategies let you apply a bid strategy to keywords across separate campaigns, or test multiple bid strategies within a single campaign. Say, for example, you run a network security consulting business. You might have some keywords like ‘network security’ in multiple campaigns focused on generating awareness for your business. You can apply the Target search page location bidding strategy to those specific keywords regardless of where they are in your account, to keep them in top positions.  Then let’s say you have another campaign mainly aimed at lead generation with keywords like ”perimeter network security audit,” but which also has some awareness building keywords, too, like “perimeter network security best practices.” In this campaign, you can use the Target CPA bidding strategy for the lead generation ad groups and use the Target search page location bidding strategy for the awareness building keywords.

You can learn more about flexible bid strategies by visiting our help center. As with all types of automation, we recommend that you periodically monitor your bid strategies’ performance relative to your advertising goals.

In addition to new features like flexible bid strategies and support for many-per-click conversions in Conversion Optimizer, we’re working on more optimization features to help you more easily achieve your advertising goals, like return on ad spend. Let us know what you think of these new flexible bid strategies on our Ads Google+ page and stay tuned for more to come.

Posted by Andrea Cohan, Product Marketing Manager, AdWords

What’s the future of digital media and marketing? How are CMOs thinking about leveraging digital to reach and engage audiences? What marketing channels are proving most effective in building brands digitally - paid, owned or earned?

thinkDoubleClick 2013 speakers include:

• Wendy Clark, Senior Vice President, The Coca-Cola Company
• Jim Lanzone, President, CBS Interactive
• Peter Horan, President & COO, Answers
• Meredith Kopit Levien, Group Publisher & Chief, Forbes
• Randall Rothenberg, CEO, IAB
• Lorraine Twohill, Chief Marketing Officer, Google
• Michael Learmonth, Chief Editor, AdAge

We look forward to seeing you on June 4th!

Missed last year’s event? It’s not too late to catch up with the videos below.

Posted by Scott Brown, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

Behind every successful AdWords campaign are well planned out keywords and ad groups. In the past, you may have relied on tools like the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator to identify new keywords and ad groups, get traffic estimates, and choose competitive bids and budgets. Over time however, we’ve heard from you that having two tools for search campaign building was cumbersome.

We’re constantly working to simplify the process of building campaigns, and today we’re happy to announce the launch of a new tool, Keyword Planner, which combines the functionality of the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator into a smooth, integrated workflow. You can use Keyword Planner to find new keyword and ad group ideas, get performance estimates for them to find the bid and budget that are right for you, and then add them to your campaigns. You’ll also see some new features in the tool - some of which we’ll highlight below.

Find new keyword and ad group ideas
To find new keyword and ad group ideas, use Keyword Planner just like you would the Keyword Tool. You can search for ideas related to a keyword, your website, or a category. A new feature in Keyword Planner also allows you to ‘multiply’ keywords, or combine two or more keyword lists to generate new keywords. Unlike Keyword Tool, where you were only able to target countries, you'll now be able to target individual cities and regions within a country. Also, for each keyword idea you'll only get statistics that are specific to that exact term.  To decide what keyword match type to use, you'll have to add the keyword to your plan and look at performance estimates for each match type.


Add keywords and ad groups to a plan
Next, you can review your keyword and ad group ideas and add them to a plan. Think of a plan as a shopping cart of ideas that you can add to a current or new campaign. While you build your plan, you can add ideas, delete ideas, and change your bid range to see total estimated clicks and cost. When you’re done building your plan, you can click “Get estimates and review plan” to pick a specific bid and get more detailed estimates.


Get performance estimates
When you review your plan, you’ll see a graph with a range of max CPC bids and daily performance estimates for your keywords and ad groups. To see more detailed estimates, you can select a bid (and optionally, a budget as well). You can also update your targeting settings, keywords, and ad groups to further refine your estimates. For example, you can change all your keywords in an ad group to phrase or exact match to see how this could affect performance.


When you’re satisfied with your plan, you can apply it to a new or existing campaign or download it to implement later.

With the launch of this new, combined tool, we will be sunsetting the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator in about 60 days. Please view this article for an in-depth look at the differences between using Keyword Tool and Keyword Planner.  Going forward, you'll have to log in to AdWords to use Keyword Planner, which will enable you to get customized results and estimates. We hope that this integrated workflow will help you build and grow your campaigns even more efficiently. To learn more about Keyword Planner, you can also visit the AdWords Help Center.