AdWords Ad Rotation Now Limited to 30 Days
Google has recently announced a significant change to AdWords.
Advertisements on AdWords will now be limited to thirty days. Before this announcement, advertisements could stay on a site for an indefinite amount of time. As the recent Panda and Penguin updates suggest, Google is making a strong push to get rid of spam and to encourage fresh and unique pages. It is only logical to assume that fresh advertisements would be next; fresh advertisements that reflect the fresh content on a page.
After the thirty-day period, AdWords will keep and optimize the best performing advertisements. Advertisements that are doing well are ones with high conversion percentages and ones that are receiving the most clicks.
According to the official announcement on the Google AdWords blog “Every time a creative is enable or edited, the ads in that ad group will rotate more evenly for a new period of thirty days.” Advertisements that are already on a website will automatically auto-optimize.
The new ad rotation is seen by Google as “a preference that determines which ad in your ad group should show (when you have multiple ads).” However, the new update does give advertisers some control. For instance, they can request to have their best performing advertisements appear more. They can also request that the advertisements be distributed more evenly.
AdWords users will also be able to control the settings. They will be able to choose one of the three advanced settings:
- Optimize for Clicks: this is the default setting of the rotation. This setting bases advertisements off of previously successful clickthrough rates (CTRs).
- Optimize for Conversions: Instead of relying on clicks, this setting factors in advertisements that will yield the most purchases and opt-ins.
- Rotate evenly: setting is performance-blind; it will showcase each advertisement equally.
The goals of this new update are supposed to benefit the consumer, advertisers and to optimize AdWords itself. The first goal of this change is that website readers will get to see more relevant advertisements. The second goal is that websites will get more clicks. The final goal is that it will improve the functionality of AdWords.
However, this announcement has not been met with much enthusiasm. Many advertisers do not appreciate the loss of control over the length of time that their advertisements will be available; other advertisers call the change a waste of time.
What do you think? Feel free to share your thoughts below.
Quick Tip: Microstock Illustrations with Corel Draw, Tricks and Tips
With the vector software Corel Draw you are able to draw everything you can imagine. However, if you are using it to create illustrations for the microstock agencies – there are some issues that you must take into consideration. The problem comes with the industry requirement to provide an EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) file, which is mandatory for almost all agencies. See, EPS is Adobe standard and Corel developers don’t like Adobe standards very much. And because they did a poor job with it – you will have to save your EPS 8 files from Illustrator. See how here: Quick Tip: Saving Files from Corel Draw for Microstock Agencies
What’s interesting is that even Adobe developers say that the EPS format has no future, and they prefer to concentrate their efforts on the AI and PDF file types. Nevertheless, for one reason or the other – the microstock industry loves it, and we must accept this, no matter which vector software we are using. By the way, to make things even more complicated, agencies now accept EPS 8 and EPS 10. But for now let’s concentrate on EPS 8.
How to Illustrate a Stepladder in Illustrator
What can one say about a stepladder? A stepladder may be represented as a concept that shows the development of designers skills and improvement of their creativity. Therefore it is high time to go ahead step by step in depicting the final image of this tutorial. Follow along, while creating your own striking and stunning artwork using a professional vector workflow in Adobe Illustrator.
Yahoo! Launches Online Marketing Dashboard for Small Business
Here’s something new from Yahoo: a centralized location where business owners can get quick overviews of the effectiveness of their marketing strategies.
Dubbed The Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard, it’s a one-stop-shop for small businesses to track their marketing and includes the following features:
- Reputation Tracker: This feature scans over 8000 sites across the web to see what customers are saying about a business. Since social media and social proof are fundamental to a marketing plan, the tool pays close attention to Facebook and Twitter. The tool looks at online reviews, customer ratings and mentions.
- Local Visibility: Gives a small business owner a snapshot of where and how a brand appears in search engines. This allows a business owner to correct any errors. Incorrect information can deter and confuse potential customers. The tool can also find new places to add listing information about a business.
- Site Traffic: Using tools, like Google Analytics, this feature reports the number of visits to a company’s website, the number of page views and the average time a customer spends on a website. The site traffic feature simultaneously compares data from the previous week while also providing a breakdown of the types of traffic including direct traffic, traffic generated from search engines and traffic from referring sites.
- Campaigns: Gives an overview of a brand’s email marketing, SEO and efforts through a partnership with ConstantContact and Orange Soda. The tool highlights the total conversions that occur during a one-week period. This tool also conveniently breaks down conversion distribution by campaign types. It also gives you new marketing opportunities that you may not considered before. This user-friendly feature uses pie charts, bar graphs and other graphics to guide business owners.
Best of all, the Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard is free and pretty easy to use, although some of the features are only available under the paid version. You will no longer have to waste money and time in marketing strategies that are not producing results.
It’s currently only offered to US small businesses, but fingers crossed this spreads world-wide soon. You can sign-up for the dashboard here.
Workshop: Vector Critique #13
Vectortuts+ is all about helping people turbo charge their skills, and today we have another special community post that will help our readers take their images to the next level. The best thing is, you can be part of it too! Find out more at the jump.
Quick Tip: How to Create Folded Text with Adobe Illustrator
Today we will learn how to create text that is located in different planes. One very interesting trick with the Bounding box will let us do it without using 3D modeling. Find out more at the jump!
-
-
Twitter
-
-
