03 Nov 2008
Update on Improvements to Ads Quality
We're pleased to let you know that the improvements to Ads Quality that we announced last week have recently launched. As we explained last week, these improvements better evaluate the precise quality of your ads and improve the way we determine which ads show in the yellow region above the search …

28 Oct 2008
Clicks, conversions, and Christmas 2008
One of our favorite and most useful posts from last year was an in-depth look at cost-per-click behavior during the 2006 holiday season by none other than Google's Chief Economist, Hal Varian. In the post Hal explained how CPC's and CPA's (cost-per-actions) vary over time to affect advertisers' ROI …

20 Oct 2008
Quick tip: Increase traffic with the Impression Share report
Recently, the AdWords Help Forum started posting weekly tips to help advertisers improve their campaigns. This got us thinking... why not share the love with our blog readers? In this spirit, we'll periodically share some of these tips and tricks with you, covering everything from new tools to …

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Today, at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, CA, the Website Optimizer team announced the launch of several highly requested product updates. For those unfamiliar with Website Optimizer, it's Google's free content testing and optimization tool. It allows you to test different variations of your site content to determine what will be most effective at getting you the results you want from your site. Website Optimizer's offering has now expanded to include: Experiment Pruning : This new feature allows you to disable one or more combinations from taking part in your Website Optimizer experiments. Pruning can help you achieve faster, more meaningful results by allowing you to remove poorly performing or illogical combinations. This is especially helpful in cases where your experiment may have too many combinations relative to the amount of traffic it receives. A/B Offline Validation : If your test or goal pages aren't accessible to Website Optimizer then no worries. You'll now be able to just upload a copy of your tagged page and Website Optimizer will make sure that everything is tagged properly. More Intuitive Reporting: We've enhanced our reports to more clearly show how your combinations are performing, and to better indicate when we've found one or more high-confidence winning combinations. This will help prevent you from drawing false conclusions from results or from ending experiments prematurely. (Click the image for a full-size version) If you're unfamiliar with Website Optimizer, we've developed some great new videos for you. These include a new product tour , A/B experiment demo , and multivariate experiment demo . You'll see how quick and easy it is to create Website Optimizer tests in just minutes. You can always find these and all of our other tutorials on the videos page of the Website Optimizer microsite. We hope you'll enjoy these updates. Remember, you can always find out the latest product news and industry insights straight from the Website Optimizer team by visiting the Website Optimizer blog . Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Inside AdWords crew