Since we launched the AdWords Online Classroom in Australia in May, we’ve seen hundreds of small- and medium-business take advantage of these free tutorials to improve their knowledge of online advertising. Whether you’re interested in how to choose the best keywords for your campaigns, how to write the most effective ads, or how to use our advanced analytics and conversion products, there’s something for everyone.
We’ve added several new courses in the last couple of weeks in response to advertiser feedback.
Go beyond search: Advertisers looking to promote their business online beyond search advertising should take a look at our tutorials on mobile advertising and the Google Display Network.
As always, there’s absolutely no cost to sign up, and you can watch the tutorials at any time that it suits your diary. We’ve kept the courses bite-size, usually less than 20 minutes long, to fit with your busy schedule. All you'll need to sign-up is the email address you use to log into AdWords and your 10-digit Customer ID, which you can find at the top-right of your account.
Take this important next step to grow your business today and visit the AdWords Online Classroom.
Posted by Richard Flanagan, Google Australia AdWords
Small businesses are the celebrities of the web. It’s a little known fact, but Australians are actually searching more for builders than they are for Miranda Kerr and more for florists than they are for Julia Gillard (or at least, they were until the remarkable events of last week). That’s because Australians are spending more time online than ever before and more time online than any other media including TV. We’re increasingly going online to find out about products and businesses. According to Research International, more than 80 per cent of all Australians research products online.
These are all really compelling reasons for businesses to get online yet the majority of small businesses aren’t stepping into the spotlight like the celebrities that they are. A study from Research International showed that of the 1.6 million businesses in Australia with less than 20 employees, three quarters (74%) do not have a stand alone website and 40% do not use the Internet or email for business. With almost near saturation of Australians with access to the Internet and with the upcoming roll out of ubiquitous high speed broadband, it’s vital that businesses of all sizes are able to participate in the digital economy.
There are some shining stars. According to the Research International study, while only one in four Australian small businesses have ventured online with a website, those that market online are more likely to track the return on investment of their advertising spend and are looking to increase the proportion of their advertising spend online this year, with AdWords seeing the greatest growth. Small businesses listed the following reasons for increasing their AdWords budgets: easy to calculate return on investment, effective at reaching a large audience, suitable channel for building brand in the marketplace, and great channel to help acquire new customers.
So, if you’re a small business and you want to be found, where do you begin? The great news is that it’s easier than ever to strut your stuff on the red carpet. You don’t need a website to be found online - you can have a web presence with local business listings like Google Places. One in five searches on Google is related to location and people come to Maps to find types of businesses. They might search for cafe Fremantle or hairdresser Surry Hills. Google Places literally puts your business on the map. Anyone can list their business for free, you can provide information for your customers such as hours of operation, contact info, photos, videos, parking info, product offerings and you can manage your business listing with a personalised dashboard. We’ll even show your business in Google Search as well.
We've just released our latest online training for Australian small- and medium-sized businesses wanting to advertise online: the AdWords Online Classroom.
You can get free, hands-on online training in over a dozen AdWords topics, available for viewing at any time that suits you. To fit with the busy schedules of small business owners, we’ve kept the courses bite-size, usually just 15-20 minutes long.
We have something for everyone, so choose the selection of courses that best suits you, or follow one of our suggested series below depending on your knowledge level:
Our experience with tens of thousands of small business owners has shown that the most successful advertisers are those who invest a bit of their time to improve their knowledge of online advertising and AdWords. We hope that the AdWords Online Classroom will let more Australian businesses use AdWords to connect with customers.
All you'll need to sign up to any of these courses is your AdWords email address and ten digit account number which you can find in the top right of your AdWords account.
Over the past few weeks, we've posted four videos that suggest easy improvements you can make to your AdWords account in response to the top questions we get from Australian small- and medium-sized businesses. This week in our final video of the series, we'll provide you with some guidance for measuring the results of your advertising campaigns and see the progress that your account has made.
With AdWords, you can see how successful your advertising is by monitoring key statistics in your account such as impressions, clicks, and click-through-rate. Going one step further, you can implement our free Conversion Tracking tool to monitor which of your clicks translate into a desired action on your website, such as a sale or request for more information. Understanding these statistics will allow you to assess your results and further tweak your campaigns for even better performance.
Take a look at this video to learn how to track and understand your AdWords results in order to fine tune your advertising.
Have you have found this series of videos useful for improving your advertising and growing your business? Let us know. We love reading your feedback and will use it to help create future trainings focused on small businesses.
Posted by Posted by Rich Flanagan, Google Australia AdWords team
In our conversations with Australian small business owners, we know that having complete control over your costs is essential. Business owners must react quickly to all sorts of economic realities, such as the number of orders received or fluctuating supplier costs. With AdWords, you're in complete control of your advertising spend. In this next video of our optimization series, we highlight some tools and strategies to spend your advertising budget effectively.
For example, you can focus your budget on what gets you the best results by raising the cost-per-click bid for your most successful keywords and lowering it for less successful terms. What's more, there are simple, free tools in your AdWords account with the information you need to make these decisions. We discuss these tools - like the Traffic Estimator which estimates keyword search traffic and costs - and walk through three easy ways to make your budget work better for you in the video below.
Did you find this video useful? We love feedback, so please let us know. For more information on controlling your AdWords costs, visit the AdWords Help Centre.
Posted by Rich Flanagan, Google Australia AdWords team
By now you probably know that we've been working on a new interface for AdWords to help you save time managing your account and get even better results from your campaigns.
We've built a number of new features that make managing your campaigns faster and easier: more graphs to track your performance over time, integrated reports that provide ready access to detailed search and content network data, and faster editing to help you make changes quickly.
You've probably received an email from us letting you know that your account will be converted to the new interface in the coming weeks. Today we have two release updates to share with you: we've recently made the new interface available to everyone who uses AdWords Standard Edition, and we've begun the migration process with a small number of accounts.
In our email, we stated that you would have at least 30 days before we update your account. This 30 day period is a minimum; in fact, most advertisers will have more than 30 days before their accounts are upgraded. We're taking a gradual and deliberate approach to ensure a smooth transition, and we won't upgrade your account until we're confident that the new interface meets your advertising needs.
So, how should you prepare for the transition to the new interface? First, the single most important resource to help you get up to speed is the new interface microsite. Here you can find short videos explaining the benefits of the new interface, a before and after guide, and even a short quiz you can take to make sure you're ready for the changes.
Next, if you haven't explored the new interface yet, now is a good time; try it by signing in to your AdWords account. If you notice any issues that make it difficult to manage your campaigns in the new interface, please let us know right away by submitting feedback.
If you've already sent us feedback on the new interface, thank you! We're listening closely to your comments and are working to fix the problems you've reported. Examples of top issues we're working on are wide pages that require too much scrolling, and slow load times for some types of browsers and Internet connections.
We've already made a number of changes in response to your feedback, and this week we've released updates to the new interface that address many of the top issues we've heard. And we're not done yet; we'll continue to make ongoing improvements to the new interface over time.
For those of you who joined the beta test early, we hope you like how the new AdWords interface has improved. And for those of you just getting started, we hope you're already noticing a few of the ways the new interface can help you get more out of your AdWords campaigns.
Many Australian businesses are trying, or increasing their use of, online advertising - and search marketing in particular. We're always looking for ways to make it easier and quicker to implement and manage campaigns using AdWords.
Back in November, we asked a small group of US advertisers to start testing a new web interface for AdWords while it was still early in development. The new interface makes AdWords campaign management faster, clearer, and more intuitive. This means making it easier to find the most important keywords across your account, speeding up account navigation and editing to save you time, and making reports both more accessible and quicker to act on.
We've continued to work on the new interface for the last few months, making changes based on feedback from beta testers. Now we're excited to offer this beta to advertisers in additional countries, including Australia and New Zealand.
Here are a few of the features we're testing in the new interface:
* Performance graphs: Spot trends over time with custom graphs on every campaign management page. * Insight across ad groups: Focus on the high-impact areas of your account with new roll-up tabs on every page. You can see and edit keywords, placements or ads from all ad groups on a single tab. * In-line editing: Want to change a keyword or bid? Click on it and make changes in-line instead of loading a separate page. * Easier content network management: Improve content network performance on a new Networks tab. Look at statistics for the placements where your ads have appeared, then take action by setting unique bids or excluding placements directly from the report.
However, keep in mind that the new interface doesn't change how ads run. Bidding, ranking, Quality Score, and the rest of ad serving are no different in the new interface.
The new interface is still a work in progress, and not all features available in the previous web interface are currently supported. Beta testers can switch between old and new interfaces during the beta, so they still have access to the full range of AdWords tools and reports, if needed.
To learn more, see videos of the new interface in action, and sign up for the beta test, visit our new AdWords interface website.
For anyone who wants a simple explanation of how our AdWords auction works, check out this video from our chief economist, Hal Varian. It's a great summary of how we rank ads.
Online advertising is an increasingly important part of Australian businesses' marketing mix.
In 2008, we launched an Online Marketing Challenge to give students the chance to experiment with the medium and empower small local businesses to harness the power of the web to attract more customers.
The response to last year’s Challenge was so overwhelming that we decided to make this an annual competition. Giving students direct experience of online marketing whilst they are studying is a great way for Universities to provide students with direct practical skills they can use on graduation. Whether they find a job in marketing, accounting or retail, or set up their own business, graduates can all benefit from understanding online marketing.
The 2009 Google Online Marketing Challenge is now open. It's a global online marketing competition that is open to any higher education institution, anywhere in the world. To find out more or to register your team, visit the 2009 Challenge website.
1650 different teams across 47 different countries took part in 2008, pitting their wits against one another to further develop and maximise returns for real world local businesses' online marketing strategies.
Using free $200 vouchers to spend on Google AdWords, each student proposes and implements a campaign for their chosen local business, makes tweaks and then final recommendations at the conclusion of a three week competition period.
Full details on 2008’s winning teams and finalists can be seen here.
Last year, a team from the University of Western Australia was the global winner. We're hoping Australia can go back-to-back this year!
Recently, the 2008 Asia Pacific regional winners – from the Australian Graduate School of Management, and two regional finalists – The National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences (Taiwan) and The National Taiwan University – visited Google's headquarters in Sydney for the Regional Finalists' retreat. For many students, it was their first visit to Australia and a chance to compare approaches, discuss strategies with online marketing optimizers at Google and gain some insights prior to the 2009 Challenge.
For us at Google, it was immensely gratifying to meet these students and hear them speak of the enthusiasm and benefit they received from competing. In fact, one of our winners had to leave early for a job interview, and it was fantastic to hear that his Challenge experience is helping him in his quest to find a job!
We hope lots of Australian students from across different academic disciplines will get involved in 2009. Good luck!
Ever sat in a seminar or conference and thought how much better it would be if you could learn all of the material being presented without being physically there?
Well, we've started holding webinars for our advertisers, to provide further information and training in how to make the most of AdWords (Google’s online advertising program), which you can enjoy from the comfort of your own armchair (or, more likely, your desk).
Our first webinar, "Introduction to Optimisation" was held in June, and saw hundreds of advertisers sign up. (Optimisation refers to the ability to make changes to your keywords, ad text and account structure in order to maximise the effectiveness of your online advertising). Advertisers heard from one of our local optimisation experts who presented tips and tricks for making online advertising campaigns perform better. Two of our AdWords team members were also on hand to respond to advertiser questions via chat throughout the webinar.
If you're interested in our upcoming webinars on all sorts of advertising-related topics such as Analytics, AdWords Editor and other AdWords topics, click here for a calendar of events.
Posted by Julian Persaud, Head of Business Development
Happy new year!
As our regular blog readers will know, 2007 was an amazing year for all of us at Google Australia, with a huge raft of new products, features and local initiatives, from the launch of Google Maps Australia, to the Doodle4Google initiative, to the first ever Google election site, to the announcement of agreements with major Australian businesses such as Fairfax Digital and News Digital Media.
Already in 2008, we've been busy with a number of announcements. For those of you watching at home:
As increasing numbers of small Australian businesses, from local cafes to cosmetic dentists, are using Google AdWords, we’re thrilled to reach an agreement under which ReachLocal will become an AdWords reseller in Australia. This will help Australian SMEs participate in the digital economy.
Australian advertisers can now take advantage of the expanded Conversion Optimiser feature in AdWords. (Available to customers whose campaigns have enabled AdWords Conversion Tracking and accrued at least 200 conversions in the past 30 days).
Stay tuned to this blog - and all the other official Google blogs on the right hand side of this page - for lots more Google news in 2008.
