Recent research shows that 70% of mobile searchers have called a business directly from search results and that over 40 million calls from Google ads are made each month to advertisers around the world. It’s clear that calls are important to businesses -- and we want to help you measure them in AdWords.

We announced on October 1st that phone calls would soon be added as an important conversion type as part of AdWords. Starting today, phone calls from mobile click-to-call ads will be added to the regular Conversion columns, which enable them to be used with automated bidding solutions like Conversion Optimizer. These mobile call conversions are available in countries where Google forwarding numbers are available.¹  In addition, calls made by customers from your mobile and desktop ads will be counted in your “Estimated Total Conversions,” a new column you can use to measure the full value you're getting from AdWords.

Calls as conversions are counted based on the aggregate number of calls generated by your ads and the duration of the phone calls. This is the same type of reporting that we have been providing on calls for several years.

Success with calls as conversions in AdWords

Businesses using AdWords have found that adding  phone numbers to their ads is an important way to connect with customers and drive incremental sales. Learn more.

Room & Board, a home furnishings retailer, uses call extensions and call conversions to track interest in their brand:

”Since we have implemented call extensions, we have seen nearly 30% of our total conversions come from phone calls. We want our customers to connect with us in the way they prefer. Call extensions and call conversions give us that ability and allow us to measure results at the same time."

Improve your performance with automated bidding

Previously, calls were counted in their own column called “Phone Call Conversions.” Now, call conversions from mobile ads are counted in the regular Conversion columns, so you can use free automated bidding tools like Target CPA to improve performance and save time.

Understand the full value of your advertising

Online ads can help drive conversions beyond a purchase made directly on your website. Adding calls to the Estimated Total Conversions column gives you a more holistic view of how your keywords drive those conversions, so you can set bids and budgets that more fully reflect the value you're getting from AdWords.

For a more in-depth product walkthrough of Estimated Total Conversions, calls as conversions, and a review of best practices, join us for a webinar tomorrow, November 13th at 10am PT. You can sign up here.

Posted by Anurag Agrawal, Product Manager, Calls

We’re excited to share our fall series of Learn with Google webinars. These web events will demonstrate how to use digital marketing to build brand awareness and give you the tools you need to drive sales. This season we’re focusing on Search and Display, two fundamental building blocks for digital marketing. We will be introducing new tools, as well as providing tips for existing ones. Every webinar is led by Google product experts and includes time for live Q&A. Sign up to start becoming a smarter digital marketer today.

Upcoming webinars:

October
17 [Wallet] Maximize mobile conversions with Google Wallet Instant Buy
22 [Search] Automate your AdWords bids to achieve your Target ROAS (return on ad spend) Goal
23 [Shopping] Google Shopping - Mobile/Local
29 [Mobile] Driving More Revenue from App Installs

November
7 [Display] A Creative Approach to Engage with Your Customers Online
13 [Search] Measuring Conversions Across Devices
14 [Display] Three Strategies to Increase Customer Engagement with Your Brand
19 [Mobile] Building Multi-Screen Websites
21 [Search] Increase Relevancy with New Ad Formats and Extensions

December
3 [Search] Using Your Cross-Device Conversion Data
11 [Search] Improving Search Ad Relevance with Creative Optimizations

Webinars are held Tuesdays through Thursdays at 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern

Visit our webinar site to register for any of the live sessions and to access our large library of recorded content. You can also stay up-to-date on the schedule by adding our Learn with Google calendar to your own Google calendar to automatically see upcoming webinars.

Learn with Google is a program to help businesses succeed through winning moments that matter, enabling better decisions and constantly innovating. We hope that you’ll use these best practices and how-to’s to maximize the impact of digital and grow your business. We’re looking forward to seeing you at an upcoming session!

Posted by Matt Ludwig, Marketing Coordinator, Learn with Google

Looking to broaden your knowledge base to make the web work for you? Learn with Google just added new webinars to our schedule this month, so be sure to register and join us. These upcoming September webinars focus on display advertising for several different experience levels.

Upcoming September webinars:

[Display] Looking to the Future with Affinity Segments
[Display] Planning Display Campaigns with the New Display Planner in AdWords
[Display/Mobile] Getting Started with Mobile Remarketing

Webinars are held Tuesdays through Thursdays at 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern.

Every event is led by Google product experts and includes a live Q&A.

Visit our webinar site to register for any of the live sessions and to access our large library of recorded content. You can also stay up-to-date on the schedule by adding our Learn with Google calendar to your own Google calendar to automatically see upcoming webinars.

Learn with Google is a program to help businesses succeed through winning moments that matter, enabling better decisions and constantly innovating. We hope that you’ll use these best practices and how-to’s to maximize the impact of digital and grow your business. We’re looking forward to seeing you at an upcoming session!

Posted by Matt Ludwig, Marketing Coordinator, Learn with Google

People are constantly connected, switching seamlessly between devices to shop, communicate and stay entertained. Research shows that people now use as many as three devices combinations every day including desktop computers, laptops, phones, tablets, "phablets", web-enabled TVs, and more.

This always-on, multi-device world has dramatically changed user behavior and also presents exciting, new opportunities for online marketers. With AdWords enhanced campaigns, you can now present users with more relevant messages than ever by taking into account contextual information such as a user’s location, device, and the time of day.

Bid adjustments in enhanced campaigns are key to optimizing for these signals.  To help you master bid adjustments and drive better performance, we published a whitepaper, Bid Like a Pro: Strategies for Success in AdWords Enhanced Campaigns where you’ll find the following:

• Tips for prioritizing bid adjustments based on your business goals
• Best practices for setting bids by device, location, and time
• Suggestions for how to integrate more automation into your AdWords strategies
• Success stories highlighting advertisers’ improved results

You can download the the whitepaper here.

Tune into the webinar 7/11

To learn more about bidding and search strategies, join us on Thursday, 7/11 at 10am PDT for a webinar highlighting bid adjustment best practices and optimization techniques to get the most out of your search campaigns. Bhanu Narasimhan, Product Manager and Ting Zhang, Search Solutions Manager will be hosting.  Register here.

We’d love to hear what you think of the whitepaper. Please let us know what other best practices you’d like to read about. See you all Thursday!

Posted by Andrea Cohan, Product Marketing Manager, AdWords

In many ways, Google Analytics and AdWords were made for each other. AdWords helps advertisers reach an audience and reports on advertising performance, and Google Analytics can tell you what actions your users take when they actually get to your site. You may have a high clickthrough rate (CTR) in AdWords, but what if you could see that 70% of those users left immediately after arriving on your landing page? While understanding the conversion rate of AdWords ads is critical, it’s also important to understand what happened to the users that did not convert or complete the action you wanted them to. For example, did users ‘bounce’ after landing on your site or did they view a few other pages and then leave? How much time did they spend on your site? Which keywords drive the majority of your Ecommerce revenue?

Thanks to built-in Google product integrations that provide unique insights into your data, you can view reporting and data in Google Analytics that directly relates back to your advertising in AdWords. Understanding how to use both of them together will help you refine your AdWords campaigns and improve the performance of your business.


Next Tuesday, join Rachel Witalec and Simon Rosen, Global Sales Strategy Leads, for a detailed look at how to use Google Analytics and AdWords together. In this webinar, we'll show you why it's important to link your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts, how to see both Google Analytics data in AdWords and AdWords data in Google Analytics, and walk through a live demo of the reports and how to use them. You'll learn how to make your marketing more effective by analyzing Google Analytics data, such as bounce rate, pages per visit, conversion rate, and Ecommerce revenue in conjunction with AdWords factors, such as keyword performance, ad copy, ad groups, and more. The webinar will also include a live Q&A section.

Date: Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Time: 10am PDT / 1pm EDT/ 6pm GMT
Duration: 1 hr
Level: 101 / Beginner
Register: Register here

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Google Analytics team

This Thursday, please join us as we continue our enhanced campaigns webinar series.  In Enhanced Campaigns 202, you will learn about how sitelinks, and call extensions have been improved with enhanced campaigns to work in a multi-device world.

You can read up on enhanced campaigns and keep up with future announcements on the Inside AdWords blog.

Posted by Mark Martel, the Google Ads team

Last week we announced enhanced campaigns, which let you more easily adjust your ads and bids depending on your customers’ location, device, and time of day - all within a single campaign.

We’ll be hosting several Learn with Google webinars about enhanced campaigns over the next few weeks. This Thursday, February 14 at 10am PST, Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President of Engineering, and Jason Spero, Global Sales Director, will provide an overview of enhanced campaigns and Q&A. Please sign up here to attend.

Also look for more information and details about enhanced campaigns over the next few weeks here on our blog.

Posted by Mark Martel, the Google Ads team

The Google+ platform provides a fresh canvas to build and strengthen your digital brand while tying into all the marketing you already do with Google. From launching a new product using Google+ pages to engaging with your community of enthusiasts over Hangouts, join our Learn with Google webinar this Thursday for a look at ways your company can build its brand using social. Sign up on our webinar page to attend: Building a Digital Brand with Google+ (Thurs, Dec 6, 10am PT / 1pm ET)

After the Hangout, we’ll host a live Q&A with members of the Google+ team to answer questions about building a brand with Google+. RSVP on the Google+ Event page and add your questions as comments on that page.

With more than 100 monthly million active Google+ users, the time is now to focus on building your digital brand presence via the platform. Google+ has seen a wealth of brands engaging with users in creative, interactive ways. Brands created more than 1 million Google+ pages in just the last few months. For instance:

• H&M -- The retail clothing company, with more than 2 million Google+ followers, uses tailored content, images and video to bring its fashions to life on the platform. They’ve utilized Ripples to identify their trendsetters and saw a 22% boost in clickthrough rate after implementing social extensions in AdWords.
  
• Cadbury -- The chocolate maker has built a following of nearly 3 million users with a combination of creative posts, Hangouts on Air and even the launch of their Dairy Milk Bubbly bar. They’ve also installed the Google+ badge on the company’s web homepage, making it easy as chocolate to follow the brand.

Like the ideas here? Log on Thursday to learn more about how to create, capture and sustain demand for your brand using Google+. And if you’re going to miss this while you’re at SMX Social in Las Vegas, check back at the webinars page later for a recording.  

Posted by Becky Bowman, Inside AdWords team

It’s almost back-to-school time, but students aren’t the only ones who are getting geared up to learn. Today, we’re announcing our next series of Learn with Google webinars, which will arm you with the tools you need to get the most out of Google’s advertising products and solutions. Over the next couple of months, 13 webinars will teach you tips and how-to’s to help make the web work for your business.

Join us as we kick things off this Thursday, August 9th with a webinar on multi-channel attribution and check out the full schedule below:

• Aug 9 at 9am PDT Multi-Channel Funnels: Attribution Across Channels
• Aug 23 at 10am PDT How to Kick Start Social with Google+ (Hangout on Air)
• Aug 28 at 10am PDT Optimizing your Video Ad Campaigns
• Aug 29 at 10am PDT Google+: Enhancing Marketing and Making Social Accountable
• Sept 5 at 10am PDT Go Bigger, Faster with AdWords Editor
• Sept 6 at 10am PDT Making the Most of Recent AdWords Updates
• Sept 12 at 10am PDT Driving Cost-Effective App Downloads with AdWords
• Sept 13 at 10am PDT Go Bigger, Faster with AdWords Scripts
• Sept 18 at 10am PDT Better Together: Combining Targeting Strategies in Display
• Sept 19 at 10am PDT The Importance of Search Advertising
• Sept 20 at 10am PDT Measuring the Impact of Online Advertising on Offline Sales
• Sept 26 at 10am PDT GoMo: Mobilize your Site and Maximize your Advertising
• Sept 27 at 10am PDT Optimizing Display Campaigns: Tips, Tricks, & Tools

Visit our webinar page to register for any of the sessions and to access past webinars on-demand. We’ll be adding new webinars as they’re scheduled, so check back regularly for updates. You can also stay up-to-date on the schedule by adding our Learn with Google Webinar calendar to your own Google calendar to automatically see upcoming webinars.

Whether your goal is to engage the right customers in the moments that matter, make better decisions, or go bigger, faster, we hope that you’ll use these best practices and how-to’s to maximize the impact of digital and grow your business. We’re looking forward to having you in class at an upcoming Learn with Google webinar!

Posted by Erin Green, Marketing Coordinator

What great content does YouTube have to offer? How can you easily find it? Please join us for this installment of the Just Add YouTube webinar series.  We will share the masses of quality content YouTube has and will show how you can advertise against it.  Hosted by the UK Webinar team, but anyone can register!  

See the upcoming webinars, as well as previous recordings, at google.co.uk/ads/webinars

Register Now!

What: Learn with Google Webinar: Great Content Discovery on YouTube
When: Tuesday July 31st, 3PM GMT (UK time) 

78% of online video viewing in the UK is on YouTube, which makes it an excellent platform for VOD. But what are the best ways to maximize it and make it work for your business?

We will cover how to run your TV ad on YouTube in two easy ways - running it on YouTube Homepage to deliver incremental reach and using TrueView InStream formats to deliver scale and engagement. We will also explain how to effectively add YouTube to your TV schedule. This webinar is specifically designed for a TV savvy audience who values the importance of reach and frequency to ensure maximum impact of VOD campaigns.

You can also view the upcoming webinars, as well as previous recordings, on google.co.uk/ads/webinars

We hope you can join us!

Register Now
https://googleemea.connectsolutions.com/vodonyoutube/event/registration.html

Editor's note (Monday, May 7th, 2012, 11:41 am PST): We have updated the date of the Display webinar mentioned below to June 19th.


Display advertising has undergone a bit of a fairytale-like transformation over the past several years, from the medium of “Click Here!” banner ads, to one that can be smart and sexy and help bring big ideas (even those from advertising’s past) to life. Now that display has had its “Cinderella moment,” we figured the “carriage” could use an upgrade as well. So today, we’re unveiling some changes designed to simplify the way you buy and run display through AdWords.

Display’s New Home in AdWords

For nine years, AdWords customers have been buying display campaigns through an interface designed for search. This is like trying to run in glass slippers -- it might work, but it’d be a lot more effective with the right running shoes. So we’re giving display its own tab within AdWords. Rolling out over the next few weeks, the new Display Network Tab is an interface built from the ground up to run display campaigns, and will enable you to bid, target and optimize display campaigns all from a single place. Click the image below to see the different Display Network Tab targeting options.

Display Network Tab

click to view larger image

A Revved-Up Contextual Engine

The contextual engine, which matches ads to pages based on keywords, is at the heart of display-buying through AdWords. We’ve been hard at work behind-the-scenes to give this engine its biggest enhancement ever, the ability to combine the reach of display with the precision of search, using Next-Gen Keyword Contextual Targeting. This means that you can fine-tune the performance of your contextual campaigns down to individual keyword level, which will help you take the performance of your marketing campaign to a completely new level. It’s now easier for you to extend search campaigns to display and more efficient to run the two types of campaigns together.

For example, let’s say you’re running display campaigns for a Travel Agency who offers a vacation packages in several Caribbean islands. In the past, you would have created themed ad groups targeting vacations to Turks and Caicos and the Caribbean. Now, with this new keyword level transparency you might realize that the keyword “Turks and Caicos vacations” is 4 times more profitable than the keyword “caribbean vacations”. You can optimize your campaigns to aggressively target these high performing keywords, and be more conservative on “caribbean vacations”.

Giving a Visual Edge

And like the writers of the best fairytales know, sometimes pictures communicate better than words (or numbers). Along with the new Display Network Tab and contextual engine, we’re introducing a way to visualize the reach of your campaigns, and see how that reach is impacted by combining multiple targeting types, such as keywords, placements, topics, interests or remarketing.

These changes are some of our biggest steps to date towards bringing together the science of search advertising with the art of display. We hope they give you some powerful new tools to connect with their customers and deliver engaging and relevant display ads.

Learn More

We’re rolling out the new Display Network Tab to all advertisers in the upcoming coming weeks.

For more information on what’s new on the Display Network Tab visit our help center article.

Please join Google in our upcoming webinar on June 19th to learn more about optimizing your targeting strategies for campaigns using the Next-Gen Keyword Contextual Targeting. Check out our new webinar page to register.

Watch Brad Bender, Director of Product Management for Display talk about the new Display Network Tab and the Next-Gen Keyword Contextual Targeting.