This winter we will be offering Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer Seminars for Success in 11 cities in the US, UK, Ireland and Australia. If you're new to Seminars for Success, here's a little background.

Analytics Seminars (we offer introductory and advanced sessions) will help you better use the insights found in your Analytics report by covering topics such as setup tips, best practices, and analysis techniques. The Website Optimizer Seminar will show you how to turn more of your website's visitors into customers by teaching you how to use Google Website Optimizer to run landing page experiments.

Seminar leaders, who are independent search marketing professionals certified as Google Analytics Authorized Consultants, will use in-depth course materials, hands-on exercises and valuable tips from their years of managing Analytics accounts as well as managing landing pages to teach you how to achieve your goals.

The next sessions will be in the following cities:

• Los Angeles, CA - January 27-29, 2010
• London, UK - January 28-29, 2010 (Analytics only)
• Orlando, FL - February 10-11, 2010 (Analytics only)

A complete schedule, as well as registration information, is available here.

Posted by Eva Woo, Product Marketing Manager

What makes up the ideal creative for your client?

We'll walk you through how you can answer this question using AdWords reporting and the Display Ad Builder, a tool that allows you to quickly and easily customize display ads and to run measurable experiments. Experimentation is not new to advertising, although the theories and ideas that inspired campaigns have evolved over time.

For example, in the early 20th century, the prevailing sentiment in the ad industry was that information made a creative effective. The car ad below sums up the thinking of the time:

National Motor Vehicle, Inc. advertisement (1907) retrieved on 21.1.2010 from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:National-advertisement_1907.jpg

Theories eventually emerged suggesting that consumers weren't always need-oriented, but advertisers were baffled by how to measure seemingly subjective behavior. Mid century a study was released that put data to consumer responses. It showed that three factors - the size of the ad, the size of the illustration and the numbers of colors - together could help explain some of the readership difference between a magazine's ads.

Today, you can find out the the factors that trigger the strongest response by using the data in Ad Performance Reports in AdWords, which provide relevant statistics for ad variations, such as text ads, image ads, video ads, and local business ads, and run experiments with Display Ad Builder. Here are two creatives developed with Display Ad Builder for a hypothetical online travel company:

Ad creatives developed internally using Display Ad Builder: Image 1 & Image 2

When creating the ads, populate the "Ad Name" field in Display Ad Builder with the ad's elements. We'll call the first "day_scene_cta" and the second "night_people_question." Launch the ads on even rotation to ensure a good sample. Then you can construct a chart like the one below from your Ad Performance Report by adding up the clicks and impressions for each ad component:

Sample data set from internal account independent of example creatives.

In this example, the effectiveness measure is clickthrough rate (CTR), but this can be substituted for conversion rate or cost-per-acquisition (CPA). The chart shows the elements of the ad that had the greatest impact on CTR, benchmarked against the performance of the whole ad group.

You can tweak the reporting to show the impact of relationships as well. Do people prefer images of scenery or people at night? With a well-designed ad experiment, you can use basic data-mining principles to find these results. However you choose to experiment, continue to measure your results so you can find the best creative.

Posted by Eddie Higgins, Agency Team

In November, the Enterprise Search team launched Google Commerce Search, a new website search option for online retailers. We've heard from partners and agencies who wanted a closer look at the technical side of this new product, so are offering a live online seminar with the team that developed this new tool.

On Monday, February 1st at 10:00 am PST, join us for a new webinar, Google Commerce Search 'Under the Hood' - A Technical Overview.

Google's product managers and engineers will take the audience on a "behind the scenes" tour designed specifically for agencies and implementation partners that work with online retailers. In addition to technical answers and resources to help you evaluate and implement Google Commerce Search, the webinar will cover the main features including Google-quality search, speed, and customization options.

Register here.

Posted by Anna Bishop, Google Enterprise Search team

The New Year festivities have come and gone, and it's now time to return to the daily grind. To add a little color to the January doldroms, we're pleased to share the newly redesigned Google for Advertisers - the central destination for advertisers and their agency partners to understand what it is Google does for advertising.

So what has changed? One big change is the homepage where we now illustrate how Google's tools work together to support the entire value chain of marketing, from insights to creative to media to measurement and optimization. We've been calling these areas of focus the "marketing cycle" and we hope it's a clear and lasting way to help advertisers and agencies make sense of how everything they're working on fits with everything we're working on.

Beyond the new homepage, we added fresh content like our video overview of the Google Content Network and ways to stay up-to-date through twitter, trainings and quick videos. Because we work with partners from around the globe, we're working hard to translate the site into additional languages and create locally-relevant content in other parts of the world. To kick off this effort, we're pleased to introduce our first localized site - Google for Advertisers UK.

To check out the new sites, please visit Google.com/advertisers or Google.co.uk/advertisers. Happy New Year!

Posted by Oliver Deighton, Business Marketing

To kick off the New Year, we're pleased to bring you the next installment in the Think[Industry] webinar series; this webinar will highlight new Google and Compete research on the role the online channel plays in cruise bookers' shopping processes.

On Tuesday, January 19, 2010, Google and Compete will present results from their study into how shoppers research and book cruises, as well as when and how cruisers use search as part of their online travel research, using in-depth online behavioral analysis and data from a recent survey of online cruise shoppers.

The webinar will cover:

• Which offline and online resources shoppers use in their cruise research process
• How much online content cruise shoppers consume before booking
• How search impacts likelihood to book
• How queries evolve as shoppers move closer to booking
• How search engine usage intensifies when shoppers are ready to book

Date: Tuesday, January 19th at 10amPST / 12pmCST / 1pmEST
Register here

Posted by Veronica San Luis, Travel Marketing Manager