Read about their Ad Writing Contest and then submit your best entry as a comment to their blog post.

From their post:
"The trouble with a content strategy is that it is very difficult to create content, and very difficult to predict what content will resonate with your customers.

You could spend a lot of time creating high-quality content only to find out later that another approach would have been more profitable.

To help provide clarity to their content strategy, we are going to run some PPC ads to 'take the temperature,' in a sense, of the people who are searching..."

The results of this experiment will guide their content strategy, but I'm sure we'll end up testing a few of the winners in the rest of their paid search campaigns as well.

The winner will be announced during their next web clinic on February 1st, 2012: Online Advertising Forensics: We investigate how and why a text-based PPC ad produced 47% more conversions. Click the link to sign up for this free clinic!

1. Providing users with more intuitive functionality across Google properties (Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.), and

2. Providing advertisers with more relevant targeting options across Google properties.

The key distinction here is "across Google properties."

While the most privacy-conscious users may be concerned with the changes, for advertisers there is nothing but upside. Google's updated privacy policy opens the door to more cost-effective targeting to your most responsive traffic across Google properties and devices.

Using exact match negatives gives you the ability to exclude very general search terms while maintaining the high volume search traffic that comes with broad and phrase match.

Ask yourself if any of the following top 4 pitfalls are currently hurting your paid search performance.

This new format is referred to as a TrueView in-stream ad. Long-form YouTube videos are eligible for the TrueView in-slate ad format. With in-slate, the user is given a choice to either watch a longer commercial video ad before the primary video begins, or see regular commercial breaks during the video.

According to Google's onesheet on TrueView (pdf), in-stream ad viewers choose to watch an ad 15-45% of the time. Some advertisers have seen 3-4x higher CTR's with TrueView than with other video ad formats.

YouTube Promoted Video Ads are being renamed "TrueView in-search" and "TrueView in-display" depending on where they show.

Such a shift in video ad delivery is sure to start affecting how video ads are composed. Advertisers need to front-end-load the "interesting" parts to entice the viewer to watch. Also, given that you only pay when someone chooses to watch the video, the proportion viewers from your ideal target audience will be higher.

With "radius targeting," advertisers can select to target the area around an address, zip code or latitude/longitude coordinate, giving them extremely precise control over where their ads will be displayed. After entering a location, advertisers choose how large of a radius they want to target (from 5-100 miles) from a drop down menu. The feature, which takes only minutes to set up in the adCenter interface, increases relevancy for users and allows advertisers to be more meticulous with their ad delivery and product offerings.

There are many ways to use radius targeting to your advantage. Here are five big ones:

ROI Revolution is scouring the nation for the best and brightest web analysts, analytics solutions developers, web developers, and software engineers to join our Web Analytics Consulting Team. We have two immediate openings available for the position of Web Analytics Solutions Developer / Consultant at our offices in Raleigh, North Carolina.

If you have experience installing and supporting web analytics tools like Google Analytics, Omniture, CoreMetrics, Webtrends, Yahoo! Web Analytics, Unica, or any other major web analytics platform we cordially invite you to submit your resume to join our agency. We also strongly encourage any experienced Web developers or Software Engineers that are interested in a career in web analytics to apply.

Google Automated Reports are great, but often the downloading, filtering, and drilling down turns this bird's-eye-view into a 15-minute project. What you need is a completely customizable tool; one that automatically imports only the performance metrics you want, from the date range you set, instantly into tables with only the columns you require.

How do you get this flexibility in reporting without hiring a Web Analytics Engineer with Google API experience? Use the New Google Home Tab!

The Google Home Tab allows you to easily view your most profitable keywords, identify opportunities for growth based on your target CPA, find areas of unprofitability to optimize, and more. It's an easy way for management to identify core keywords, as well as review the trending of performance metrics.

All of these are the result of simple to set up filters that you are likely already using in your account. In fact, if you have saved any filters, they are already there!

"Generally it is not recommended to mix the same custom variable slot with different types as it can lead to strange metric calculations."

What isn't exactly clear is what happens if you do decide to mix types. Google Code provides two cases, but surely there are additional cases. To this end, I decided to test 9 total cases:

But guess what? Your competitors are making it profitable; with ease, no less.

This is why it's absolutely crucial that you have a solid strategy for advertising on the Display Network. After all, people spend 95% of their time browsing websites, not scrolling through the Google search results.

An entire book could be written on how to most efficiently launch and optimize various Display Network campaigns, but we'll focus on a few tools and strategies that will help you succeed.

It's understandable to initially focus more on the cost of branded keywords, rather than the value. Cost is a measurable, absolute number that's seen in paid search accounts and credit card statements. The value is usually less-measurable, with some shades of gray in the calculations.

Sometimes it can be tough to quantify the effect of branded exposure, especially in dollars and cents. Our experience shows that branded keywords almost always convert at pennies on the dollar, with very high profitability. That's only for the immediate, measurable traffic though. What about the long-term effects in customers' minds or residual traffic that may come later on? In my opinion, the harder-to-measure effects of "bidding on your own branded keywords" are almost always a reason to spend more on them, not less.

Here are eight reasons why bidding on branded keywords can be a good idea (and a good investment):

In your Paid Search Advertising, account growth is vital to maintaining profitability and staying ahead of your competition.

Bids, position, and ads are the lifeblood of your account. Without detailed management, you will begin to offset the increase in revenue with wasted spend and missed opportunities. But what do you do if you simply do not have the time?

That is where AdWords Automated Rules come in.

Automated Rules, released by Google in November 2010, is a tool that can help you effectively manage your account at the most granular level you need. The triggers you set up, using your own parameters, can help you quickly identify poor and strong performers, freeing up time for you to perform the analysis needed to make the right decision.

If you are advertising on the Google Display Network there is a good chance you know what a "view-through conversion" is. In case you don't, a view-through conversion (referred to as a VTC) occurs when a user views an image or rich media ad (but doesn't click on it) and later completes a conversion. Way back in 2009, Google introduced the VTC reporting feature to help better measure the value of display advertising.

Last year Google took this a step further, and released a couple of improvements to VTC reporting including a customizable view-through conversion window and de-duplication of search conversion reporting.

What these settings do
Customizable view-through conversion window Previously the VTC window was set to 30 days, meaning Google reported on the number of VTCs that occurred up to 30 days after a user saw the ad. Now, you're able to customize this time-frame.

De-duplication of search conversion reporting:
If this setting is disabled (the default) your VTC report will include conversions from users that viewed a display ad and later clicked on a search ad. Essentially, these conversions are reported twice - in the VTC report for the display network image or media rich ad and the conversion report for the search network ad.

If you enable this setting, Google will exclude from the VTC report conversions from users who have also clicked on your search ads. These conversions will only be attributed to your search ads.