A couple weeks ago, we announced the launch of Enhanced CPC, a new automatic bidding feature designed to increase your conversions and return on investment in your Max CPC campaigns.We’d like to invite you to a free webinar hosted by members of the product development team to learn more about Enhanced CPC. Specifically, we’ll discuss:How Enhanced CPC works and benefits your campaign performanceHow Enhanced CPC complements your current bidding strategy, including 3rd party bid management solutionsKey differences between Enhanced CPC and Conversion Optimizer and how to select the best ...

We’ve just added a new course to the AdWords Online Classroom about the Opportunities tab in your AdWords account.In case you’re not familiar with the Opportunities tab, it’s designed to help you discover ways to potentially improve your campaign's effectiveness by providing keywords, keyword bids, and budget ideas. These ideas are specifically catered for your account based on your campaign's past performance and may help increase your AdWords return on investment.Our newly added course will help you learn to use the Opportunities tab to its full potential. You’ll also hear ...

As of late, there has been quite a bit written about equality in the workplace for women. First an absolutely scathing article, “Equality, Suffrage, and a Fetish for Money” was posted on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce blog about how ridiculous women are being in wanting equality (read the comments – it absolutely blows my mind people like Harrytoo exist in our country). Yes, on the blog of the organization that supports small businesses (thankfully the Chamber’s COO wrote a week later stating he didn’t agree with the original post). Then, I’m going through my ...

Guest post by Mike Schaffer, social media and online marketing manager at Iostudio. Despite the incessant buzz in the marketing industry surrounding Foursquare and Facebook Places, I see four major challenges facing location-based services. For all the hype, only four percent of adults are using these services (not to mention the 84 percent of adults who have no idea what they are). Clearly, not a ton of folks are taking advantage of them, so let’s investigate the main reasons why they haven’t caught fire…yet. 1)      Fear – I’ve heard from countless people that they feel ...

Steve McKee, the founder of McKee Wallwork Cleveland, BusinessWeek advertising columnist, author of When Growth Stalls, and friend wrote recently here about branding and how the tide has shifted. He says you no longer control your company’s brand; your customers do. Think about that for a second. You no longer control your company’s brand; your customers do. It used to be that the big, Fortune 500 companies would spend millions of dollars on fancy advertising and huge global PR campaigns and years and years and years to tell their customers and prospective customers what they wanted ...

While the right text and placement of your display ad are always crucial, you should also make sure that your ad is well designed. But how exactly can you ensure that your ad stands out on a web page, looks professional and is consistent with your overall brand message? On Thursday, September 2nd, we’ll be holding a short one-off live course on effective display ad design. The session will give you a set of practical design tips including key insights on using color, font and images. The focus will be on the Display Ad Builder tool, although the tips are applicable to display design in ...

Guest post by Anna Barcelos, co-moderator of #IMCChat. Many organizations have an abundance of data. The big question is how are they using it to better communicate with customers and prospects? Additionally, some of this valuable information resides outside of marketing, making it a challenge for effective, relevant marketing and communications. From an integrated marketing communications (IMC) perspective, the best use of customer/prospect data is aggregating it into behavioral groups; for example, aggregating information on existing customers based on how, when, and how often they buy the ...

Today's post comes from the Official YouTube Blog:We’re constantly working to give advertisers control and flexibility over their YouTube campaigns. We place great value on this because ads are an extension of what a company represents as a business, and we want YouTube to be a place where that reputation and image can flourish.To that end, we’ve been rolling out features to keep advertisers in control of their campaigns. We announced one such example last week, when we launched a feature that gives select advertisers the ability to voluntarily age-restrict their videos. But there’s ...

Guest post by John Heaney of Orange Envelopes. Entrepreneurs perpetually play the role of David against their Goliath corporate competitors. And, just like their biblical counterpart, small businesses can defeat their large competitors by outmaneuvering, out-imagining, and outperforming them. In a recent scholarly analysis, “How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict,” author Ivan Arreguin-Toft analyzed battles between very large armies and small forces and concluded that during the past 200 years the smaller David-sized forces won nearly 30 percent of the time. In many ...

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Christopher Burgess in person. He is a senior security advisor at Cisco and we had a delightful debate about social media, networking online, and location-based technologies. A blog post with his advice on keeping yourself safe online is forthcoming, but today I want to talk about the discussion we had around paying employees for innovative ideas. Though I don’t have all of the details, the gist of this program is that Cisco pays $ 500 to every employee who comes up with an idea, a few thousand for those whose ideas are good, and a few thousand ...