When Your Ads Need a Vacation Too...

As summer approaches and vacation time looms pleasantly on the horizon, many advertisers wonder if they can pause their ads if they're gone and can't fill orders for a long-ish time. And if so, for how long? A week? A month? A year?

Well, the answers, in the order asked, are: "Yes", "For as long as you wish", "Yes", "Yes", and "Yes, but isn't that a rather long vacation!?"

It's very simple to pause your campaigns, and there is no time limit involved at all. (Although we certainly wish that you'd come back sooner rather than later, because it's nice to have your business.)

Since advertisers often ask in their emails, I'll also mention that there is no charge to either pause one's ads or to resume them after one returns from that arduous month on the beach.

Vacation. A tough job, but somebody's got to do it.

Posted by Blake, Inside AdWords crew

AdWords Update - 6/7/05

We've got a bunch of new features for you to try out this week:

• New sign-up wizard - a simplified process for you to add new campaigns or Ad Groups to your account and for new advertisers to sign up for AdWords.
  
• Updated Learning Center - participants of our Google Advertising Professionals program know that this is the place to find in-depth lessons on every aspect of AdWords. Now you'll find text-based lessons in addition to the current Flash presentations.
• Find / Edit Ad Text Tool - locate and edit your ads across multiple campaigns quickly and easily. You can find it in the 'Tools' section of your AdWords account.
  

Posted by Vivian, Inside AdWords crew

Content with Content?

Today's tip, from Chris O., an AdWords specialist, can help you keep better track of the results you're getting from AdWords ads on the content network:

If you are using your web server logs to help you track your clicks and referrers, add tracking code to your destination URLs to help you identify which clicks are coming from Google AdWords. For example:
www.yoursite.com?referrer={ifsearch:GoogleAdWordsSearch}{ifcontent:GoogleAdWordsContent}
If that sounds like an alien language to you, then we'll tell you lots more here.

Posted by Andrew, Inside AdWords crew

Where Are My Ads?

One of the questions most frequently asked of our support team goes something like this:

"Would you please tell me why I can't see my ad from the "Friendly Tapir" campaign? I think I've set everything up correctly, and I still have budget left for the day. So why is my ad not appearing?"

The most common reason that your ad may not appear every time you search for it is that your budget is lower than the recommended amount. For any given list of keywords within a campaign, the AdWords system will recommend a daily budget to you. You can use our recommendation as a guideline to set your daily budget so that your ads will appear for the greatest number of relevant searches possible. For example, if there are $100 a day worth of clicks out there for your ad and you set your budget to $75 a day, your ad will appear in about 3 out of 4 relevant searches. Since the AdWords system spreads out ad delivery throughout the day, your ad may not appear every single time you do a search with your keywords, even if you still have budget left for the day. If you want to edit your daily budget, here's how.

If your daily budget turns out not to be the issue after all, you may want to check out the Ads Diagnostic Tool. This tool provides you with a possible reason why your ad may not be appearing. It will also provide a recommendation to help you get your ad up and running, so be sure to give it a try. A little tidbit of Google trivia for those who are interested: when we were developing this tool, some people started calling it ‘WAASUP?’, which stood for ‘Why Aren’t Ads Showing UP?'

P.S. For those of you wondering what a Tapir is: when I was a kid begging for my first pet, it was the only one my dad would let me have. Let’s just say I didn’t want a pet for long…

Posted by Blake, Inside AdWords crew

Getting the Reports You Want

Today's tip comes from Tolu T., an AdWords specialist:

Would you like to see a graph of the number of clicks you received over the past month? Or how about a report the number of conversions you received during that Mother's Day promotion? The 'custom report' feature allows you to generate reports that track the parameters and date ranges you specify. You can even save these reports or have them emailed to you on a regular basis. Read more about it here.

Posted by Jon, Inside AdWords crew