May 2010

Google Adwords continues to be one of the most targeted and highly effective advertising platforms in the world. It’s been estimated that 95% of Google’s revenue comes from Adwords and that being the case, it’s not surprising they continue to innovate and release new features on a continual basis.

In 2010 so far we’ve seen some great new feature editions. Here’s a snapshot of a few that you should take note of.

Video Targeting on YouTube

Google recently introduced a new tool called the Youtube Video Targeting Tool to help advertisers target and display ads within popular videos. The idea behind this tool is that it helps you find popular videos in categories related to your products or services and then export a list of these videos. You can then upload the list into Google Adwords in order to show your ads within the video as it’s playing.

Here’s a quick 1:01 minute video explanation from Google.

Here’s a screen shot of the new tool (click to enlarge):

American Apparel’s recent YouTube campaign is an interesting example of how an advertiser might take advantage of this new feature. In this example, American Apparel’s in-video overlay ads run on videos such as the Skateboarding Dog, and other equally catchy, quirky clips.

The idea of cute puppies wearing American Apparel jumpers and hoodies displaying below cute pet videos caught on at American Apparel. The result was a cute and memorable advertising campaign that targeted viewers with ads that were visually relevant to the videos they were watching.

Upcoming Webinars

Google has recently made some new developments in display advertising, and is hosting a webinar May 20th at 11am to show off the benefits to advertisers – and how real companies are using the new developments to their advantage. Want to learn more? Sign up for the webinar here.

Local Business Ads and Location Extensions

Google is transitioning its local business ads feature and to be known as “location extension ads”. Local business ads have been used by all sorts of businesses to get under the nose of people searching in a given area. If you typed in ‘coffee shop’, for example, Google would determine your location and return a selection of coffee shops nearby. If you are a company with multiple locations, setting up and running individual ads targeted at each location quickly becomes a pain, and a waste of time. Enter Google’s location extensions.

Location extensions makes the location in your ad dynamic. This means that your business’ address and phone number will change, based on which of your locations is closest to where the customer is while searching. Local extensions has been around for awhile (Google introduced it in July 2009), but now all local business ads will be switched over to be compatible with the service. For those who don’t update their own ads, Google will automatically switch them over in coming weeks.

A New Way To Target Keywords

Several days ago, Google released a new keyword match modifier in the UK and Canada. The “+”, also known as “modified broad match”, is a way to match a given keyword to its most closely-related variants. Such variants could be alternate spellings, typos, or pluralizations/singularizations of the keyword. This is a good modifier to use if you’re targeting a campaign very specifically. This way, your ads display only for this keyword – plus similar variants that you now won’t have to brainstorm and add to your target list (especially typos – not fun or easy to brainstorm).

*click here to see a larger view of the image

Honorable Mentions

• Google Adwords for Mobiles
• New Adwords reports in Google Analytics
• iPad targeting now available

Google Adwords is an ideal channel for businesses looking quickly generate leads and sales online or who need to directly target a specific audience. It looks like it’s going to be maintaining its momentum as Google continually finds new ways to bring advertisers closer to their potential customers.

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