Google AdWords Interest categories allow advertisers to reach targeted audiences across the Google Display Network by allowing advertisers to choose from a list of categories – from Yoga & Pilates to Sports Memorabilia or Vehicle Shopping – and Google will show ads to people who are interested in those categories.

Users are targeted for interest categories based on their browsing history. So for example, when a user visits a partner website, Google analyzes the content of the page and site to show contextually relevant ads. Google then associates the interests with the user’s cookie. Google says that they may also use the websites a user visits, as well as third-party data, to infer the user’s gender, age category and other demographics. If the sites that a user visits have a majority of male visitors, Google may associate your cookie with the male demographic category. (Google does not associate sensitive interest categories such as those based on race, religion, sexual orientation, health or financial categories with a user’s cookie).

Interest category campaigns are a great way to increase visibility of your products or services because you can target a specific audience. Ads using interest categories reach users when they are visiting websites that may not be related to the interested category you are targeting. In other words, you can target someone who has been on yoga related websites while the user is on a website that is not related to yoga.

Interest category campaigns are a great way to supplement keyword or placement campaigns because you can reach users who are interested in your products or services even when they are on unrelated pages. This means you can reach a wider audience and generate more qualified traffic to your site.

A Product Listing Ad is a paid search ad that includes richer product information like a product image, price and merchant name. These ads do not require additional keywords or ad text and they appear whenever a user enters a search query relevant to a product in your Google Merchant Center account. Google will automatically show the most relevant products along with the associated image, price and product name taken from your product data feed file from your Merchant Center account.

Product Listing Ads are only shown on Google.com and some of its search partners. These ads are usually separated from standard text ads and are next to other Product Listing Ads. They are ranked based on a combination of your CPC bid, the relevance of your products to the search query as well as the historical performance of your ads. The more relevant your products are to a search query, the more likely your ads are to appear in a higher rank that your competitors.

Product Listing Ads are charged on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis and you can define your maximum CPC bid just like a regular AdWords keyword or placement. Below is a screen shot of some examples of Product Listing Ads on Google.com. 

Please note that you must have a Google Merchant Center account to use Product Listing Ads and it must be linked to your AdWords account. In addition, Google recommends that the products in your Merchant Center account are up-to-date and properly optimized.

Are you interested in increasing the number of conversions on your site as well as decreasing your cost per conversion (also known as cost per acquisition or CPA) for your Google AdWords campaigns? If so, Conversion Optimizer is the solution for your Google AdWords campaigns.

Google says that on average, campaigns that adopt Conversion Optimizer achieve a 21% increase in conversions while decreasing their CPA by 14%. 

Conversion Optimizer uses your conversion tracking history to figure out how often each type of auction leads to a conversion and based on this past performance, Conversion Optimizer creates a prediction model to guess which auctions will perform best for you in the future.  Then, it adjusts your bids on an ongoing basis so that your money is efficiently used in each auction. It will generate an ad rank by your CPA bid, quality score and predicted conversion rate.

With Conversion Optimizer, you can set a maximum CPA (the most you are willing to pay for each conversion) or a target CPA (the average amount you would like to pay for each conversion). In addition, you can set a different maximum or target CPA for each campaign. So if you have a product line that you are willing to spend additional funds on in order to get a conversion, you can bid a higher CPA for that campaign compared to a different line of products.

Please note that you must have at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days from a campaign to implement Conversion Optimizer. In addition, you can not enable ad scheduling for campaigns that are using Conversion Optimizer.