Advertisers save time and uncover new keyword ideas with the Opportunities tab

[Cross-posted from Inside AdWords Blog.]

If you're a small business, time can often feel like your most valuable and most constrained resource. While youíre doing everything you need to do to keep your business up and running, important tasks like AdWords account optimization can fall to the bottom of your to-do list.

Knowing that time is a key factor for all AdWords advertisers, we created the Opportunities tab to provide you with automated and customized keyword, bid, and budget ideas. Here are two stories of advertisers who used the Opportunities tab to find new keywords quickly and easily.

Fitness Singles
Chris Mattioli founded Fitness Singles, a fitness-focused online dating website in 2003. With Chrisís dedication and some help from AdWords, he has grown his business to over one million global members today.

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Like many small business owners, Chris wanted to improve his AdWords performance, but didn't have a lot of time to work on his account. When Chris discovered the Opportunities tab, he knew it was a good fit for Fitness Singles, since it allowed him to uncover new keywords quickly and easily.

Chris scans the keyword ideas in the Opportunities tab regularly to find terms related to fitness, online dating, and singles. He's found many ideas that are similar to the keyword combinations and variations that are in his account, but that he may have accidentally overlooked. He's also found completely new relevant keywords to include in his campaigns. In one instance, Chris saw terms such as promotion code and coupon among his keyword ideas. From there, he decided to add a number of discount-based keywords to his campaigns. Chris says, "The Opportunities tab can often find new keywords that are relevant our ads and that don't currently exist in our account. It also helps you identify new keyword areas--even when you thought you had it covered."

resortsandlodges.com
Ryan Bailey, President and Co-Founder of resortsandlodges.com, describes his company as a full-service agency rather than a travel directory. "We have a rapidly growing client base of two thousand-plus and a business model that gives our clients turnkey marketing and advertising support." While part of a large company, VEMGlobal.com, resortsandlodges.com runs as a small business and keeps its operations small and scrappy.

On the site, you can 'book your spot' to save your travel information, plan your next trip, and more
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Like Fitness Singles, resortsandlodges.com uses the Opportunities tab to find new keyword ideas and save time. Ryan says, "The Opportunities tab provides high-quality keywords--and a lot of ideas we wouldnít have thought of otherwise, which is the whole point! It's great that you can easily scan through the ideas and find hidden jewels and then apply those insights for both keyword selection and site optimization."

Mollie Moore, the company's interactive marketing manager, also used the Opportunities tab to help with a website redesign project in March 2010. The previous version of resortsandlodges.com had dozens of links at the bottom of the page, and Moore was tasked with de-cluttering and limiting these links to the most important content. Looking at the number of keyword ideas associated with a particular theme as well as the traffic estimates for each keyword idea, the team learned that ìthe most effective content sections were top destinations, popular resort types, popular trips, and so forth," says Moore. "We also used ideas from the Opportunities tab to build out our meta titles, descriptions and keywords embedded in the back-end of every page on the site. Using the Opportunities tab, we can reduce guesswork in determining the most effective content."

To learn more about Fitness Singles and resortsandlodges.com and how they use the Opportunities tab, read their full case studies in the AdWords Help Center. You can learn more about the Opportunities tab in the AdWords Help Center or our YouTube video series.

Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

Flo in the Cloud

FloBot is fully operational in the cloud. I haven't done any assessment yet on whether I am making more money because of the reduced latency, as it's early days yet.

However, there was an added benefit yesterday.

My main PC is a heavy duty i7 930 quad core with RAID. Last week I had a RAID failure and I am ashamed to admit that because I was so busy with a new project, I didn't rebuild the RAID volume and chose to wing it with a solo data drive (my operating system is running on a solid state drive protected by a daily Acronis image stored on yet another drive).

Yesterday, the other drive in the RAID pair threw its arms and legs into the air. Flo was in the cloud. I had to stop some other trading I was doing locally but jumped on my laptop to get into the cloud to transfer everything there and bring things under control.

Meanwhile, I went back to the broken PC and discovered that the drive had not failed, only the RAID had failed. Seems that the super 10,000 RPM 1Tb Western Dig drives are not RAID aware and fall out of the Volume sometimes. That's what happened last week too. So I'm back up now on a single drive and the RAID is being rebuilt overnight.

Bloody hell, you have to be an expert at everything. The guy that I had build the PC should have known about RAID aware drives.

I'm glad I moved to the cloud. It changes my whole IT strategy going forward. It means that I won't buy any more heavy duty hardware to run locally any more, just run in the cloud and access the cloud using lower spec non redundant hardware. And I can access it from which ever place I'm at.

The Euro continues to be a good market. It has both volatility and enough depth to its moves. I trade it with anything from a 3 tick range bar chart to a 9 tick range bar chart. Lately, the 3 range has been pretty awesome, but is a bit fast to trade manually. With Flo triggering the entries, it's much easier. The sequence below was just part of the day.

The Austin Chamber of Commerce Welcomes Google to Central Texas

(Cross-posted from the Hotpot Blog.)

Editor’s Note: Last week we kicked off a local marketing campaign for Google Places in Austin, Texas, to spread the word about all the Google tools business owners can use to connect with customers. Here, our new friend Rebecca with the Austin Chamber of Commerce talks about why Google’s a great fit for the Austin small business community.

Several weeks ago Google called us. They were looking to work with the Austin Chamber of Commerce and Austin’s local business community for a new marketing campaign about Google Places. Google’s been taking a new approach to marketing Google Places, their business listings, and a recently launched tool to help connect customers to those businesses, Hotpot. We were thrilled to hear about their interest in Austin.

Why Austin? Our national recognition as a tech-savvy hub for business development means the city is a natural fit for Google’s initiatives. The Google Places Business Kits will be introduced to the Austin Chamber’s network of business leaders in central Texas. These kits include a sampler of marketing materials that can help businesses get more exposure, get them reviewed online, and get more customers through their door.

Business owners also will have the ability to connect with potential customers through Google’s new rating tool, Hotpot. With Hotpot, people now have the ability to rate and review local businesses and share those opinions with friends. When that person uses Google to search for local places, their search results become more personalized based on their tastes and those of their friends.

At the Chamber, we’re always working to understand the small business climate as we develop our benefit programs. One trend we’ve noticed is the convergence of social and mobile computing, along with the growth of location technology and services. Google Places and Hotpot act as a great set of tools business owners can use to take advantage of these trends.

As small business owners look to expand their market reach, online promotion plays an increasingly important role in both attracting new businesses and retaining loyal customers. Easy access to accurate information online and helpful reviews work toward business stability. Google’s partnership with businesses in our city will support and enhance the opportunities for raising a branded level of awareness to the consumer. Certainly, it will be exciting to witness what happens in the marketplace when Google, with its global reach, meets Austin, whose reputation for innovation and creativity is well-earned. We at the Chamber are forecasting exciting new developments ahead in 2011.

Posted by Rebecca Martin, SVP, Austin Chamber of Commerce

It was the Best of Times...It was the Worst of Times...

The song went something like that. Today we hear the economic crisis has passed then with the next newscast, it still is present but weakening. The economy is improving but taking a very slow upward tick. Regardless of what we hear, read or speak, we have been in one of the worst recessions ever recorded and we are probably not out of it by a long shot. But even with the improvement, it is

Learning from History

The Spanish-American George Santayana is credited with the quote:  “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

In trading, we see history repeat itself. We see the same patterns being repeated over and over. One such patter is the Euro between about 6.30am and 7.30am New York time. Looking at a 3 tick range bar I see the same trade over and over. The trade can be both short, or its mirror image - long. The last 3 or 4 days you could almost put the trade on in advance and go get coffee and make money. It doesn't mean that it will happen every day but the fact that a pattern is there makes it easier to make money.

There are patterns like this all over the place. Noticing them can add hugely to my results at the end of each year. Ching! Ching!

Another Fall of the Berlin Wall?

I hope that what we have seen unfold in the last three weeks in the Middle East has been another event similar to the fall of the Berlin Wall. I think I have spoken about the money that was made on the floor trading during that 1989/90 period.

This time seems to be a little different, as although we have an event seeking the shedding of a dictatorship in search of democracy, we do have some dark shadows hiding in the wings which create additional uncertainty.

The only reason I am blogging about this is to highlight the opportunities we have around us. We have a very uncertain international environment which we are trading in, both economically and socially. The product of this uncertainty must be a number of so called "black swan" events, things that will happen that are outside our contemplation. As this uncertainty becomes more understood, volatility shall increase and that will translate into even more opportunity for day traders. We just need to be ready to take advantage of them.

The Euro has continued to provide the milk and cream. The trades today consist of almost all of the pictures (setups) that I have been using and teaching. One of the requirements of reaching CP is to be able to make the same trade over and over. That can only be done once a picture has been identified, documented and back tested to infinity. That done, it's a matter of training your muscle memory to recognise them in the heat of battle, or to program your computer to recognise them and trigger the trade automatically. The trades today are a mixture of auto and manual.

New Baby Made Super Bowl Entrance

As Chris and Gina Tarr settled in to watch the Super Bowl on Sunday afternoon, the couple started to get nervous about what was going to transpire.

But it wasn’t the game they were most anxious about.

Instead, Gina went into labor about five hours before kickoff and the couple rushed to West Penn Hospital in Bloomfield to deliver their first child.

“It was the perfect storm,” Chris Tarr said. “The Steelers game kept me distracted so I wasn’t so stressed out. It took the edge off. If I was watching the Super Bowl and they were losing, I would’ve been upset. It made it even keel.”

The delivery doctor initially thought the baby would be born in the early morning hours Monday, but little Eli William decided to make his appearance just as the game ended.

“Almost exactly when they were handing the Packers the Lombardi Trophy,” Tarr said.

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