Strengthen your advertising strategies with the Train & Gain challenge

[Cross-posted from Inside AdWords]

Today we’re announcing the first AdWords Train & Gain challenge.

You’ve asked us how to improve the performance of your AdWords account, so we’ve put together a series of simple steps to help you become more successful online.

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Sign up for the AdWords Train & Gain challenge starting October 4th. You'll receive a weekly list of simple steps for improving your AdWords account. Sign into your account twice a week and take the suggested actions on how to better manage your account. At the end of four weeks, you’ll be armed with many different ways to improve your AdWords account.

If you complete all the steps and answer a short questionnaire to let us know what you’ve learned, you could win an Android Phone or a trip to meet with an AdWords consultant in Sydney, Australia for you and a colleague.

Sign up for Train & Gain now

Here’s a sneak peek of the fast and easy tips you’ll get:

Improve ad text: Stand out from your competition by writing ads that highlight your most competitive features (low price, special services, free delivery, etc).

Use negative keywords: Specify which search terms you don’t want your ad to appear on. This will help you keep costs down because it prevents clicks from people looking for things you don’t offer.

Track sales and leads: See where your ad spend is working best and focus your money on the efforts that are generating business.

This challenge doesn’t take up a lot of time and it can make a big difference for your business. Learn more and see the official rules for details about the challenge, who is eligible to compete and how we’re selecting winners. Terms and conditions can be found here.

Also, if you’d like to learn more about your AdWords account, check out our brand new AdWords Small Business Center, which we announced in last week’s post. The site is a one-stop shop for small and medium businesses. It allows visitors to explore beginner, intermediate or advanced AdWords topics and connects you to the latest AdWords news and best practices.

Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

A more secure cloud for millions of Google Apps users

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Cloud computing is about making your information easily accessible from anywhere, on any device. Until today, organizations looking to secure their information beyond a password have faced costs and complexities that prevented many of them from using stronger security technologies. Today we are changing that with the introduction of a more secure sign-in capability for Google Apps accounts that significantly increases the security of the cloud: Two-step verification. For the first time, we’re making it possible for organizations large and small to use this technology in just a few clicks for free. In the coming months, we’ll also be offering this same security to our hundreds of millions of individual Google users.

Two-step verification is easy to set up, manage and use. When enabled by an administrator, it requires two means of identification to sign in to a Google Apps account, something you know: a password, and something you have: a mobile phone. It doesn’t require any special tokens or devices. After entering your password, a verification code is sent to your mobile phone via SMS or generated on an application you can install on your Android, BlackBerry or iPhone (coming soon) device. This makes it much more likely that you’re the only one accessing your data: even if someone has stolen your password, they'll need more than that to access your account. You can also indicate when you're using a computer you trust and don't want to be asked for a verification code from that machine in the future.

Two-step verification is built on an open standard designed to allow integration with other vendors’ authentication technologies in the future. We are also open sourcing our mobile authentication app so that companies can customize it as they see fit.

Two-step verification continues Google’s stream of security innovation. In early 2009, we added the ability to view password strength and set minimum password length requirements for Google Apps accounts. Later in the year we were the first to provide HTTPS encryption to millions of users, and in 2010 Google Apps was the first cloud messaging and collaboration service to gain US government security certification.

Administrators for Google Apps Premier, Education, and Government Editions can activate Two-step verification from the Admin Control Panel now, and Standard Edition customers will be able to access it in the months ahead.

Posted by Eran Feigenbaum, Director of Security, Google Apps

Google and The Globe and Mail Launch "Web Strategy" Resources for Canadian Small Businesses

According to Statistics Canada, 98 percent of Canadian businesses are considered small, and they employ close to half the country’s private sector workforce. Given that metric, it's obvious that a healthy and vibrant small business sector is essential to Canada’s economic growth.

With the proliferation of the Internet, it’s easier than ever for entrepreneurs and small business owners like you to reach new customers, promote your products, and access new markets in ways that only large corporations could manage in the past. For example, powerful and intuitive online applications such Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs can help you slash IT costs and enable your employees to collaborate more effectively.

To further this movement towards taking advantage of online resources, we're launching a partnership with The Globe and Mail to help Canadian small business owners and entrepreneurs expand their Web presence and use the Internet to boost sales and long-term growth. The Web Strategy section on The Globe and Mail website will bring together Google's knowledge of business in an online environment with The Globe and Mail’s insight into strategy and economic issues. The site will feature information and stories for small businesses, as well as provide tutorials about how to get started with Google’s many business tools, including Google Places and AdWords.


In the coming weeks, the Web Strategy page will explore topics such as how the Internet can transform the ways you reach new customers and how you operate your business. If you have suggestions or questions, we would love to hear them. Click here to use Google Moderator and start sharing your ideas with us.

Posted by Brett Willms, Canada Marketing Manager

Going Google across the 50 States: Minnesota-based allnurses.com gets rid of its email servers

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]

Editor’s note: Over the past couple months, thousands of businesses have added their Gone Google story to our community map and even more have used the Go Google cloud calculator to test drive life in the cloud. To highlight some of these companies’ Gone Google stories, we decided to talk to Google Apps customers across the United States. To learn more about other organizations that have gone Google and share your story, visit our community map.

Based in Minnesota, Brian Short is a Registered Nurse, as well as the Founder and CEO of allnurses.com, one of the largest online nursing communities with more than 430,000 members. Brian started the website as a hobby in 1995 when he was attending nursing school. He’d search online for relevant nursing information without success — it was easier to find websites on planting trees or feeding babies than reliable sources on clinical nursing.

So what started out as a website with a few links spawned into an online community and central hub of nursing information. The website now includes blogs, articles, and discussion forums across all specialities, with more than nine million global page views a month and 2,500 new posts submitted by members every day. To support this growth, Brian shares how he’s using Google Apps to remove location barriers and increase process efficiencies.

“I started out with my own internal email servers which were clunky and hard to manage. I was also dissatisfied with the accompanying email client. It would take forever to search, find, and organize all my email, and I was constantly deleting emails to avoid slowing down my machine. When I learned about Google Apps it was an easy decision to switch. I love the concept of cloud computing and being able to access all my applications through a browser.

Now, I've been using Google Apps for several years and it has helped the company tremendously. There are over 30 staff members scattered throughout the US and internationally. Google Apps allows us to communicate with ease by using instant messaging, email, shared calendars, and online documents.

I’ve also used Google forms to support marketing initiatives that increase awareness of allnurses.com. In one of the print ads, I included a URL that leads to a landing page with a form embedded in it. Educators can use the form to request pens for their nursing students. It’s a good way to engage with my audience and scale a manual process.

Not only is Google Apps a great financial decision for us, but it has helped increase our efficiency and productivity more than any other product we've used. I love how Google is always improving and upgrading its applications by listening and implementing user feedback.”

Posted by Michelle Lisowski, Google Apps Team

Making AdWords Account Management Easier

As a small business, you may find that investing in marketing can be a catch-22; while you are looking to grow your business, your time is limited and budgets are tight. While AdWords has always been about making advertising as measurable as possible, we are well aware that time is money - especially when you are a small company. So, in an effort to help you preserve your most precious asset, we wanted to share a few of tools we’ve developed as part of our effort to make account management less time-intensive.

Use the Opportunities Tab to Find Customized Account Optimization Suggestions
Incorporating data from both user search behavior and the performance of your own account, the Opportunities tab is an excellent tool for garnering suggestions that can help you to improve targeting, expand your reach or increase the effectiveness of your marketing spend. To make improving your campaigns as easy as possible, the Opportunities tab lets you review ideas and apply them directly to your account. You can also save these ideas as “pending changes” in case you want to think about them and add them later.

The ideas shown on the tab are generated by our system just for your account, so look them over carefully before you try them. Some may not fit your own needs, but some may help to improve your campaign performance.

Simplify Bid Management with Automatic Bidding
Automatic Bidding is the easiest of the AdWords bidding options. With automatic bidding, the AdWords system automatically adjusts your maximum cost-per-click (CPC) bids on your behalf. You still set your daily budget, but rather than specifying individual bids for ad groups, keywords, or placements, the AdWords system actively seeks out the most clicks possible within the budget you set.

Let Us Help You Gain More Conversions with Enhanced CPC
Enhanced CPC is an easy-to-use automatic bid management tool intended for advertisers already using conversion tracking who are looking to turbo-charge their return on investment. The tool automatically adjusts your Max CPC bid each time your ad is shown in order to maximize the likelihood of your ad will converting. As a result, your ad should receive more conversions while maintaining or reducing your overall cost-per-conversion.


To learn more about Enhanced CPC, you can visit our help center or watch a short video.

Monitor Account Changes with Ease Using Custom Alerts
You can create custom alerts in your AdWords account so you're automatically notified when certain behaviors and/or changes occur within your campaigns and ad groups. This enables you to constantly track increases or decreases in the metrics that matter to you or metrics that have reached a certain threshold you set. To learn more about this feature, please visit our help center.

For even more tips for saving time and improving AdWords performance, please visit our new Google AdWords Small Business Center.

Posted by Yael Davidowitz-neu, Sales Strategy Analyst

Broadcast your business through the TV for All Contest

[Cross-posted from Inside AdWords]

Today we’re announcing the second annual TV for All contest, where your business has the opportunity to win $25,000 in national advertising with Google TV Ads and online video partner sites, including YouTube.

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We originally launched this contest last year and received nearly 250 submissions. Three winners, including Owners.com, won free TV media through Google and successfully extended their brands across the nation.

“It’s always exciting to see what other marketers think of your work,” says George Karavaras of Owners.com about why the company entered TV for All in 2009. The best part, he says, is that “it doesn’t take a lot of time or money to create a high impact TV ad through Google’s creative network.”

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Now it’s your turn! Entering is easy: simply create a video ad for your business, upload it to YouTube and submit it to our TV for All YouTube Channel between September 15th and October 12th. If you don't have a video ad or the tools to create one, professional tools by SpotMixer will be available for free to help you make a polished ad in just minutes.

Three winners whose ads best exemplify creativity and a compelling message will receive $25K, $15K, or $10K in national TV and online video advertising using Google AdWords.

If you've never promoted your business using TV and video, the TV for All contest is your chance to get started. For more details and to enter the contest, visit www.youtube.com/tvforall.

Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

Signing up for Google Tags is Quick and Easy

We get it: as a local business owner, you’re busy. Really busy. That’s why throughout the development of Google Tags - our online advertising offering available through Google Places - we’ve been acutely aware of the need to create something simple, easy, fast and effective for you and the potential customers looking for you online.

screenshot of a business listing with a coupon tag on Google.com

You may have heard about our recent promotion inviting business owners who are new to Google Tags to take advantage of a free 30-day trial. That trial is still going on, and we’re also excited to announce that we’ve streamlined the sign-up process into three easy steps. Now, it’s even easier to set up the little yellow tag in your business listing and start attracting more local customers for your business!

If you’ve already verified your free business listing in Google Places, sign in to your Google Places dashboard to begin:

1. Click “Add a Tag” from the dashboard


2. Select one of the seven available tag types, and follow the prompts. For example, if you choose a post tag, enter a note about the the unique aspect of your business that you want to highlight in the empty box.


3. Enter your credit card information. If you’ve never tried Google Tags before and are eligible for the free trial, your first month will be free!


Business owners can typically complete the sign-up process in less than five minutes. With that speed, you can get back to all the other tasks that require your attention to keep growing your success!

We’re thrilled that thousands of local businesses have already been using Google Tags to attract and connect with local customers since it became available throughout the U.S. this summer. And if you’re a business owner that hasn’t yet claimed your listing in Google Places, learn more about that simple process, and then follow the same three-step tags process. This new sign-up flow is one the many features we’re working on to make the product even more efficient. As a reminder, Google Tags is usually offered for a $25 flat monthly fee, and does not affect the ranking of the business listings on Google.com or Google Maps. Try it out today!

Posted by Shalini Agarwal, Product Manager