Fab Friday is Back

After a great summer vacation, I’m back. I hope you missed me, because I missed you!



This week, there’s a couple of videos for you. First up, we have an Introduction to the Google Maps API, a webcast that I produced in collaboration with the Google I/O webinar team shortly before Google I/O. As you can tell, it has a nice, high production value. Additional plus, I got to use a teleprompter for the first time. So if you are someone who is new to the Google Maps API, or if you know someone who is, this video is a good start:







This week we also have the video of the Google Maps Developer Office Hours, part of Google Developers Live, that Paul Saxman and I did on Tuesday. We talked about the Google Places Developer Challenge and the new Symbols and Heatmap functionality built into the Google Maps API, as well as answered some questions.







And on another note, we’re getting close to 5,000 questions tagged as google-maps-api-3 on StackOverflow, and if you add in tags like google-maps-api-2, kml, and others we’re well over 5,000. I’m glad to see the SO community being so Maps friendly, with tons of great answers. So if you have any technical questions on our mapping APIs, that’s where you should head.





Posted by Mano Marks, Google Maps Developer Relations team

Attend a DFA Training in August

Make DFA Training a must on your to-do list for the rest of the summer, and visit the DFA Help Center to register for any webinars as well as our classroom offerings.

Classroom Training

DFA Fundamentals: This full-day course (10am-5pm) is for new DFA users looking to understand the fundamentals of third-party ad serving including best practices for campaign trafficking, serving ads and pulling reports.

• Chicago - August 15
• Los Angeles - August 21
• San Francisco - August 23

DFA Trafficking Lab: Get more practice trafficking campaigns. These sessions cover the basics such as assigning landing pages to creatives, updating campaigns, setting up geo-targeting and using creative rotation.

Class Prerequisite: Attendees should have taken the DFA Fundamentals class in the previous two months or have less than two months trafficking experience.

• Chicago - August 16
• Los Angeles - August 22
• San Francisco - August 24

MediaVisor Fundamentals: Learn more about planning and creating campaigns, advertisers, site placements and IOs as well as how to send RFPs.

• Los Angeles - August 22

Webinar Training

DFA for New Users - August 22
Learn the fundamentals of trafficking in DFA from creating an Advertiser through exporting Tags.

MediaVisor Fundamentals - August 21
This webinar covers the most common uses of MediaVisor including set-up, sending RFPs and IOs, and trafficking.

Be sure to check back with us on this blog for next month's training schedule. We look forward to seeing you in class.

Posted by Amanda Gangl, DFA Product Trainer

Video chat with multiple people with Hangouts in Gmail

1:1 Video chat in Gmail has been upgraded and is now powered by Google+ Hangouts. If both sides have created a Google+ profile you will get the full Hangouts experience including the ability to add up to nine other people to the conversation, screen sharing and integrated Google Docs collaboration.



Release track:

Rapid



Editions included:

Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Government and Education



For more information:

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2012/07/video-chat-with-whole-team-with.html

http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1279090



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New Learn with Google Webinars Help Make the Web Work for You

It’s almost back-to-school time, but students aren’t the only ones who are getting geared up to learn. Today, we’re announcing our next series of Learn with Google webinars, which will arm you with the tools you need to get the most out of Google’s advertising products and solutions. Over the next couple of months, 12 webinars will teach you tips and how-to’s to help make the web work for your business.

Check out the full schedule below:

• Aug 23 at 10am PDT How to Kick Start Social with Google+ (Hangout on Air)


• Aug 28 at 10am PDT Optimizing your Video Ad Campaigns


• Aug 29 at 10am PDT Google+: Enhancing Marketing and Making Social Accountable


• Sept 5 at 10am PDT Go Bigger, Faster with AdWords Editor


• Sept 6 at 10am PDT Making the Most of Recent AdWords Updates


• Sept 12 at 10am PDT Driving Cost-Effective App Downloads with AdWords


• Sept 13 at 10am PDT Go Bigger, Faster with AdWords Scripts


• Sept 18 at 10am PDT Better Together: Combining Targeting Strategies in Display


• Sept 19 at 10am PDT The Importance of Search Advertising


• Sept 20 at 10am PDT Measuring the Impact of Online Advertising on Offline Sales


• Sept 26 at 10am PDT GoMo: Mobilize your Site and Maximize your Advertising


• Sept 27 at 10am PDT Optimizing Display Campaigns: Tips, Tricks, & Tools

Visit our webinar page to register for any of the sessions and to access past webinars on-demand. We’ll be adding new webinars as they’re scheduled, so check back regularly for updates. You can also stay up-to-date on the schedule by adding our Learn with Google Webinar calendar to your own Google calendar to automatically see upcoming webinars.

Whether your goal is to engage the right customers in the moments that matter, make better decisions, or go bigger, faster, we hope that you’ll use these best practices and how-to’s to maximize the impact of digital and grow your business. We’re looking forward to having you in class at an upcoming Learn with Google webinar!



Posted by Erin Green, Marketing Coordinator

Recommending the most relevant advertisers, publishers, and links

Over the past year, we've heard from publishers and advertisers that they want a network that can help them create meaningful relationships. We've listened, and today, we've released a completely new recommendation engine that redefines how you can find and take advantage of affiliate marketing opportunities.



Publishers can find advertiser recommendations under the Advertisers > Recommended advertisers sub-tab. This is where they can find a list of available programs ranked based on relevancy and predicted performance. Each recommendation also shows why the recommendation was made, along with an estimate of earnings potential for that advertiser. We display advertiser recommendations based on the criteria below:

• Similar category: Advertisers are ranked by relevancy to your publisher category.


• Revenue potential: Advertisers are ranked primarily based on estimated payout fees.

In addition to the average advertiser EPC, each recommendation has an estimated advertiser EPC. Estimated EPC is a brand new metric designed to help publishers understand how much they could potentially earn with that advertiser.

Advertisers can now see publisher recommendations, too. Using the recommendation engine, the Publishers > Recommended publishers sub-tab shows a list of publishers that Google algorithms recommend as a good fit based on similar categories and revenue potential.

We've also brought the power of recommendations to the Links tab to help publishers find and promote the most relevant ads with the highest performance potential. Under the Links > Recommended links sub-tab, we display recommended text and banner links that Google algorithms predict may perform best for each individual publisher.

For more details, we suggest reviewing these Help Center articles:

• Recommended advertisers


• Recommended publishers


• Recommended links

Sign in to your account and try out recommendations. After you’ve taken a few minutes to review, we’d love to hear from you in our forum.



Posted by:

Ali Pasha, Product Manager

Robin Anil, Software Engineer

Next round of Google Ads Developers Live events

Interested in more Google Ads Developers Live (Office Hours) events? We know you are because attendance has been great!



We've scheduled another round of events for AdWords, AdMob, DFP and AdSense APIs. You can view the newly scheduled live events on the Google Ads Developers Live page. Please add the events you are interested in to your calendar. You can follow our schedule by subscribing to the Google Ads Developers Office Hours calendar, which is also linked on this blog’s sidebar.



Just like in previous live events, you can join these hangouts to ask us questions or provide feedback about our products. In response to your request we will be adding AdWords API sessions for the Asia Pacific region and Japan. If you are from Asia Pacific countries or Australia and couldn’t join the hangouts before due to timezone inconvenience, we hope you will find these additional sessions more convenient. The live events in Japan will be in Japanese.



Events will rotate throughout the week to accommodate more people. We are also planning to make some of these events topic-based, where we will introduce you to a new feature of our product and then answer your questions on that topic. The dates and topics for these sessions will be announced in advance in separate blog posts.

In case you haven’t joined us before, you will need 3 things to join the hangout:

• A Google+ account (sign up here)


• The Google voice and video plugin installed on your computer


• A quiet place to hangout so we can hear you

These hangouts are informal and conversational, which make them a great place to ask questions or give us feedback. If you have questions about our office hours, reach out to us on the forums.



 - Anash P. Oommen, Ads Developer Relations Team

Chart bid history in DS

With the latest DoubleClick Search (DS) release, you can now chart Max CPC as a metric in the performance summary graph. This gives you a great visual representation of a keyword’s bids over time. With one glance, you can see:

• How frequently the bid is updated. We chart intra-day bid changes, so if a bid was updated 10 times in a day, there will be 10 time markers on the graph.


• How the bid is trending over time. Are the changes gradual, drastic, increasing or decreasing, etc.


• How the bid changes have affected other metrics. The Max CPC bids can be charted at the same time as any other metric, such as Cost.


• How the Performance Bidding Suite is managing your keyword. If the keyword is in a bid strategy, you’ll get greater visibility into DS-managed bid changes.

To chart a bid history:

1. Go to a Keywords page in the UI.


2. Select one keyword in the statistics table and click Filter to selected.


3. In the upper righthand corner of the performance summary graph, select Max CPC as a metric.


4. You may also want to select a second metric like Cost, so you can see how cost correlated with your bids over time.

Learn more about charting a bid history in the Help Center.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team