For more than ten years, AdWords has been at the forefront of the advertising world. From text ads to video ads, we’ve been constantly innovating and redefining the advertising ecosystem. Starting today, you can be one of the first to experience the next generation of advertising: Google Blimp Ads.

Imagine this: a baseball stadium, packed with thousands of fans. A home run flies through the air, and as the crowd looks up, they see your ad, bigger than ever, hand-painted on the side of a majestic blimp. Blimp Ads can make this a reality.

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With your text ads on our brand new fleet of gBlimps, you can reach an even wider audience and capitalize on many new targeting options, including blimp height and location. You can even target special events like football games, outdoor concerts, meteor showers, and more. The possibilities are endless!

Over the past few months, we’ve privately tested Blimp Ads and found that they performed even better than expected. Now you have the opportunity to boost your ad performance by participating in our free public beta testing program.

Check out our product site to learn more and sign up now. Join us as we continue to push the boundaries of advertising.

Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

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Many of you have used the Opportunities tab to find keyword, bid, and budget ideas for your account. With each optimization idea, we provide estimates for how these ideas may affect your impressions, clicks, and cost. Now you can test these optimization ideas on your own campaigns when you run experiments in the Opportunities tab.

This new feature uses AdWords Campaign Experiments to run experiments on the keyword and bid ideas in your Opportunities tab. Experiments run on 50% of your AdWords traffic for thirty days, during which time you’ll have the chance to compare your original campaign setup with your test setup. You can decide at any time whether you want to apply your experiment settings to 100% of your traffic. If you take no action after thirty days, your experimental changes will be applied to your campaign automatically.

The ability to run experiments in the Opportunities tab has already launched in some English-language accounts and will be available to all English-language accounts over the next few days.

Start an experiment in just a few clicks:

1. Select keyword or bid ideas you want to test.
2. Select the checkbox for “Evaluate this idea for up to 30 days.”
3. Click “Apply now.”

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Keyword experiment setup in the Opportunities tab

Monitor your experiment performance:

When your experiment is running, you’ll be able to monitor your experiment performance from the Ideas page of the Opportunities tab.

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Monitoring experiment performance in the Opportunities tab

You’ll also be able to view performance statistics for individual keywords and bids on the Keywords tab when you segment by “Experiment.”

For those of you who have wanted to try ACE but didn’t know what to test, this should help get you started. This is also a great feature for those of you who want to see a positive performance improvement before making changes to all of your traffic.

No matter how your new keywords and bids perform relative to your original setup, you’ll leave your experiment with more knowledge than you had previously, which means every experiment is a good experiment.

Posted by Lisa Shieh, Inside AdWords crew

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Word of mouth is powerful. When you have a choice to make, it’s common to turn to the people you trust. But what about word of click? How can getting a suggestion from a friend or co-worker when you need it be as simple as having a hallway conversation — or even simpler?

We want to make it easy for Google users to get recommendations from the people they trust right when they’re searching. That’s why we’re introducing the +1 button. With a single click, the +1 button lets signed-in Google users recommend the content they like on the web to their friends and contacts right when it’s most useful — on Google search.

+1 is a simple idea. Let’s use a hypothetical Brian as an example. When Brian signs into his Google account and sees one of your ads or organic search results on Google, he can +1 it and recommend your page to the world.

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The next time Brian’s friend Mary is signed in and searching on Google and your page appears, she might see a personalized annotation letting her know that Brian +1’d it. So Brian’s +1 helps Mary decide that your site is worth checking out.

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We expect that personalized annotations will help users know when your ads and organic search results are relevant to them, increasing the chances that they’ll end up on your site. You don’t have to make adjustments to your advertising strategy based on +1 buttons, and the way we calculate Quality Score isn’t changing (though +1s will be one of many signals we use to calculate organic search ranking). Think of +1 buttons as an enhancement that can help already successful search campaigns perform even better.

At first the +1 button will appear for English searches only on Google.com, but we’re working to add more languages in the future. You don’t have to make any changes to your campaigns for +1s to help you — over the coming weeks, we’ll add +1 buttons to ads and search results on Google.com.

But the +1 button isn’t just for search pages. We’re working on a +1 button that you can put on your pages too, making it easy for people to recommend your content on Google search without leaving your site. If you want to be notified when the +1 button is available for your website, you can sign up for email updates at our +1 webmaster site.

The +1 button is the next step in our effort to find relevance through relationships on the web. We’re excited about using +1s to make search, and your search campaigns, more personal, relevant and compelling. And we hope you’re excited too!

To learn more about the +1 button and how it affects your search ads, visit Google Ad Innovations.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

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