You can access the report center by clicking the "Reporting" tab found at the top of the AdWords user interface and selecting reports.

Once the next screen loads you will find reports ranging from individual keyword performance to ad performance - even discovering the exact search queries that are being made on Google.com that then show your ad and delivered a visitor to your site.

There are 11 reports in all.

At the very least, we recommend running an Account Performance report for the past few months at a week-by-week basis to spot major trends.

Questions you should ask yourself:
Are their ads more compelling? Do they have a sale going on or a new product that is a better version of yours? Does their headline standout more? If you want your company to be able to compete online, regular competitive research is essential.

Benefits of regular competitive research:

• You'll be happily surprised when you see your traffic and sales increasing, if you regularly pay attention to these details to set yourself apart.


• You may also be surprised how little most of your competitors update their own ad text---this will give you the advantage.


• Plus, you will immediately notice when new competitors enter your market---something a company should always know.

According to TechCrunch, big enough to encroach on Yahoo's position of "third largest Web property in the world", trailing none other than Google (#1) & Microsoft (#2).

In the U.S., Facebook already has the second highest number of unique visitors per month - surpassing Yahoo for the first time in January. Compete.com also reports that of all time spent online in January, 11.6% was on Facebook, compared to less than 5% on Yahoo and Google each.

What does this mean to you?

Well, I don't have the answer to that question, but I can tell you what it now means to some of our clients for whom we've recently started advertising on Facebook --> more qualified customer leads + a desirable cost = more $$$ for them.

The following story is about a lead generation client (Client A, for anonymity), but Facebook would certainly be worth testing if you're in an e-commerce space too.

Now that State Popularity has joined the GARE family, it's a great time to download the latest version of the Report Enhancer. Here are the steps:

1. Get Firefox
2. Get Greasemonkey
3. Get the GARE

In addition to the new metric, I've also been able to improve the way additional metrics are added to tables, including better sorting and handling of advanced segments and compare to past.

So how is State Popularity calculated anyway? I'm glad you asked!

Despite all this, there are now over 1.25 billion Internet users around the globe, so the sky is the limit for online retailers who can do a good job of catering to their target market's needs.

If you're already selling products on the Net, then you are probably well aware that credibility is KING with consumers in the information age. People (whether consciously or unconsciously) are constantly looking for little security checkpoints in a site that tell them "Not to worry...your money is safe being spent here."

How can you be sure that your visitors feel safe buying from your site? That's a multiple answer question, but some of the lowest hanging fruit in terms of establishing your online checkout credibility is using common identifiers that people can recognize, like PayPal, VeriSign, and especially a trustworthy checkout process like Google Checkout.

According to Google, Insights for Search is a tool where users "can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames, and properties."

To use this tool, you need to visit www.google.com/insights/search/.

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Join fellow Google Analytics peers in learning how to use and implement Analytics this spring in Atlanta, Georgia, April 14-15.

Wednesday, April 14th, the Introduction & User Training day is designed for the beginner in Google Analytics and is primarily for non-technical users such as marketers and analysts. It is designed to give a broad and solid introduction to the reporting features of Google Analytics. A large part of the day focuses on the reports available and how to use them. The intent is to present reports, explain what they mean and how they might be used with a site. While covering the reports, the various tools (the calendar, different chart views, tabs, etc.) are explained in context.

Thursday, April 15th, the Advanced Technical Implementation day is primarily for the technical user who installs and configures Google Analytics. Familiarity with JavaScript, HTML, and cookie management is assumed.

Location: Courtyard Atlanta Vinings, 2857 Paces Ferry Road SE, Atlanta, GA 30339

Cost: $499 each day or $898 for both days (a savings of $100 for attending both days!). For attending a session you'll receive a $50 AdWords credit (so you'd receive $100 in AdWords credit for attending both sessions; limit 2 per company).

Agenda: Instruction begins each day at 9am (with registration at 8:45am to get your training materials, the seat of your choice and coffee!) and goes until 5pm with a one hour break at noon for lunch on your own. Both sessions feature multiple question and answer sessions. These seminars are officially sponsored by Google, so you can trust that you are receiving the most accurate and up-to-date information on the best practices for Google Analytics.

See what previous attendees had to say about the in-person seminars:

Unlike the User Defined variable, the Custom Variables allow you to determine the scope of the visitor engagement. Basically that means in addition to setting just a visitor level segment, you can also set session level segments, which will persist while the visitor is active on the site, and page level segments, which correspond to pageviews and events on the site. This allows you to get much more detailed with the information you're gathering and storing in the custom variable. For example, you could separate different sections of the site by using the page level scope, or you could track if a visitor has completed a particular action during their session with the session level scope.

Why has this tool been granted such a prominent position in the new interface, alongside such heavy hitting account management tools as Google Analytics, Conversion Tracker and the Report Center? Well, sure it's a reporting tool like the others, but it's unique ability to track changes to your account, coupled with its performance metric graphs and visual timeline overlay make it a key weapon in any AdWords account manager's arsenal. It's placement under the Reporting tab is a testament to its usefulness.

While managing any AdWords account, it is common to make tens or even hundreds of changes to your account in one sitting in an effort to optimize traffic for better return on investment. Periodic tweaking of your account is essential to long-term growth and greater ROI. However, these changes are only beneficial to you if you can account for which ones resulted in performance improvements, and which ones didn't. In fact, it is the accountability of PPC optimization that affords us confidence in the power of split testing to boost profits.

And so, AdWords has given account managers the "My Change History" tool which records all changes made to an account for 2 years prior to a given date, then categorizes those changes for easy access.

Here is a 5 step plan to give your PPC accounts a (much needed) winter makeover:

1. Read Blog Articles For New Keyword Ideas: Read your industry blogs to keep up with the latest buzz words. Reading the latest and greatest articles may help you think of new ways people will be searching for your products. Setting up a Google blog reader to follow blogs from your industry can help make this task much more time efficient.

There are two different types of budget delivery standard and accelerated.

Standard Delivery: Selecting this option can potentially limit the number of times your ads show throughout the course of the day. This option designates the campaign to spend the daily budget allocated steadily throughout each day.

Accelerated Delivery: Selecting this option guarantees that your ad will show as much as possible throughout the course of each day except in the event that the budget you allocated for that campaign is depleted before day's end.

As an AdWords advertiser you must decide which of the two settings is a better fit for you and your overall account budget.

To switch between Standard Delivery and Accelerated Delivery, follow these steps:

It is important to remember that there are a few strategies and tips you pretty much always need to implement as you are writing and testing ads. I"ve come up with an "ad recipe" that I keep on my desk to ensure all necessary elements are included in the new ads I write.

I"ll break down each ingredient:

With PPC advertising, the best use of ad copy is not just to attract prospects, but sometimes to filter out searchers who are unlikely to become your customers.

Since you pay for each click to your site, when a click-happy searcher pops into your site just to browse or to do a little price comparison, you're probably wasting some of your precious ad spend.

One way to effectively ward off some of these searchers is by including the price of your product or service in your ad. You obviously can't eliminate clicks from these users entirely - if they want to click through, they're going to. But adding the price makes them less likely on average to want to click.

For searchers who sincerely think they might be interested in your product or service, your price acts as a great filter, keeping out prospects that don't want to pay or can't afford your price point. And if the searcher has zero interest in spending money, your price makes it loud-and-clear that they won't be getting any freebies by clicking your ad.

We've updated our Urchin 6 Demonstration webinar to include examples of Urchin's CPC integration (AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing), tracking and reporting for the next presentation on Tuesday, January 12th at 2:00pm ET.

During this 35-40 minute webinar we'll be reviewing a few of Urchin's signature features along with pricing and upgrade information. The webinar will be conducted online and over the phone for your convenience (this is a live event, no recordings will be available). The presentation will be followed by Q&A, so don't miss out on the chance to bring your Urchin 6 product questions to the experts!

The updates we'll be going over include:

The Cost Per Click (CPC) Data Import Manager allows you to create CPC Sources. It enables automatic extraction of CPC Campaign Data from AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM). The CPC Sources can be linked to existing profiles and this will enable automatic inclusion of the CPC Data into Urchin reports.

Once the data has been imported, Urchin has the following features to manage your CPC campaigns:

• The Keyword Generation Tool allows you to generate and manage keywords and to see their performance information.
  
• Direct links to AdWords allow you to navigate directly from Urchin to the appropriate screen in your AdWords account.
  
• The Urchin Tag Manager inserts a dynamic keyword insertion tag {keyword} in ad destination URLs. This feature simplifies the URL tagging experience and allows you to seamlessly import AdWords cost data into Urchin.
  
• A CPC Structure group of reports has been added under the Advertisement Optimization section.
  

To wrap up the year we've ranked our top 7 PPC blog posts of 2009:

1. The One vs. Many-Per-Click Breakdown --Turn to this article for a breakdown of the One Vs. Many-Per-Click conversion change that happened in Google AdWords this past year. Since conversions are a reflection of your bottom line, understanding this change is crucial!

2. Top 5 Free PPC Tools --There are tons of FREE PPC tools on the web. Some of them are great, some are alright, and some are just OK. Here are ROI we've had experience with almost all of them, and have compiled a list of the top 5 for you to reference.