Today at the SMX Seattle conference , the Website Optimizer team announced the launch of the Google Website Workout contest. The idea behind the contest is simple: the team wants to help four businesses "pump up" their websites so they can realize more sales, leads, and sign-ups. Our consultants will work with the four winners to increase their websites' performance by identifying and testing which combinations of page design, copy,

Our advertisers have often asked: 'What kinds of web sites make up the Google content network ?' To help answer this question, we just re-launched the Partners page on the Google content network microsite to include a more comprehensive set of examples of where your ads can appear. After all, the content network is comprised of hundreds of thousands of web sites, from information and news sites like About.com and the New York Times, to blogs like Ask the Builder.

On Saturday, May 17th, the AdWords system will be unavailable from approximately 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. PDT due to scheduled maintenance. While you won't be able to sign in to your accounts during this time, your campaigns will continue to run as usual. AdWords system maintenance typically occurs on the second Saturday of each month during the above times - with this month being an exception to that rule, as previously noted in our April maintenance update.

In early March, we announced that we'd soon incorporate an additional factor into Quality Score , namely landing page load time - where load time is defined as the amount of time it takes for a user to see the landing page after clicking an ad. Now, we'd like to post with an update. Starting today, load time evaluations will be displayed on the Keyword Analysis page , for your review. We suggest taking some time to evaluate and understand this information because,

Did you know you can use the Search Query Performance report to refine your campaigns? Or that echoing your ad text in your landing page's headline helps create a positive user experience? Have you heard about our free campaign optimizations? Our AdWords Industry Newsletters address companies in specific verticals, but enterprising advertisers in any business can often find universal, useful advice in them. For example,

We'd like to introduce Google TV Ads , a flexible, all-digital system for easily and efficiently buying more accountable and measurable TV advertising. The program, which has been an invitation-only beta test since June 2007, is now available to all US-based advertisers. Television is a great way to reach new customers who might not be familiar with your product or service.

AdWords conversion tracking is a free AdWords tool to help you understand what happens after a user clicks on your ad. By knowing which clicks most often lead to conversions, you can spend your money most effectively - on the clicks most likely to lead to a conversion. We've recently improved conversion tracking. You can now define the actions that are most important to your business and track conversions on each of those actions independently.

In the recent past we've let you know of many opportunities to learn new things about AdWords, while also meeting some of the friendly and knowledgeable people on the AdWords team. Now, we hope you'll consider joining a number of such folks in San Francisco, as they discuss best practices for making the most of AdWords at ad:tech - a conference for digital marketing. If you don't already have a pass to this conference please visit the ad:tech site , by April 14th,

On Wednesday, March 5th from approximately 9am to 2pm PST , some web pages containing the AdWords Conversion Tracking code snippet presented visitors with a browser message indicating a Google server certificate had expired. This issue has since been fixed. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused. Please note that conversion tracking data collected during this brief period may under-report the number of actual conversions achieved. Posted by Trevor,

On March 5th, we announced the rollout of our new Benchmarking reports . These reports provide context to your Google Analytics data based on industry verticals so that you can gain more insights for your own business. As of today, users should start seeing Benchmarking industry data populate in Google Analytics. The number of verticals and the quality of the data will likely grow as more and more customers enable this feature.

As part of our desire to provide ever improving educational and help resources to all Google Analytics users, we are experimenting with providing Help Center articles authored by our Google Analytics Authorized Consultants. Our first contributors are EpikOne , the published author of this help center article and LunaMetrics , author of a series of concise and helpful explanations of POSIX Regular Expressions as they relate to Google Analytics.

Over the last year, we've released a number of new tools, which all have the same goal of giving you more transparency and control when advertising on the Google content network . We've talked about the benefits that placement performance reports , CPC bidding for placement targeting , and category exclusion each offer individually to content network campaigns, but we haven't yet discussed how these tools can be used together to improve performance.

On Saturday, February 16th, the AdWords system will be unavailable from approximately 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. PST due to scheduled maintenance. While you won't be able to sign in to your accounts during this time, your campaigns will continue to run as usual. AdWords system maintenance typically occurs on the second Saturday of each month during the above times - with this month being an exception to that rule, as previously noted in our January maintenance update .

In Part 1 of Google Analytics 101, we talked about what Google Analytics is, how it helps site owners, and how to sign up. At the end of the sign-up process, we arrived at the Analytics Settings page, which is where you administer your account and make important changes. Let's take a closer look around it )we've numbered the screenshot to make it easier to follow(.

Following on the success of our AdWords Seminars for Success program, we'll be introducing a new series of Analytics Seminars for Success starting in March. Led by Google Analytics Authorized Consultants , these full day seminars will cover the in's and out's of using Google Analytics to track and optimize your website's performance.

Ever wish you could show your ads more often to a specific group like women aged 25-34? Want to see how your ads perform with certain demographic groups and then adjust your bids accordingly? We're excited to introduce the new demographic bidding feature from AdWords. Demographic bidding helps you display your ads to specific gender and age group audiences on some sites in the Google content network,

The Conversion Optimizer is a bidding feature that allows you to set a maximum cost-per-acquisition )CPA( instead of a maximum cost-per-click )CPC(, helping you save time and maximize profits. We recently held a series of Conversion Optimizer webinars , which you can watch on YouTube. To help you get more out of your Conversion Optimizer campaigns, we've compiled a list of top tips based on the most common questions we received from our webinar attendees.

Last week, we announced that the Conversion Optimizer, a free AdWords feature for managing CPA )cost-per-acquisition( bids, was out of beta and available to more advertisers. We'd like to remind you that the Conversion Optimizer team will be giving a free online seminar tomorrow, January 15th at 10 am PST . This one hour session will cover how the Conversion Optimizer works and how you can use it to get more conversions and improve your ROI.

The Time Square ball has dropped for the 100th time and the New Year is officially underway, but before we say goodbye to 2007, we'd like to continue the annual tradition of reminiscing about our top 10 favorite blog moments of 2007. Whether you're a newcomer to the blog or an old-time fan, we think you'll find at least a few posts in this list worth reviewing again: 10. Complimentary optimizations make it easy )and free!( for you to get some expert help with your campaigns.

As 2007 wraps up, we'd like to take a moment to send you our warmest wishes for the holiday season. We'll be taking the next week off, but look for us again in January when we'll countdown our annual top 10 must-read posts from the past year. And before we go, here's this year's holiday doodle, featuring someone you may recognize along with his new friend: Have a warm and wonderful holiday! Posted by Vivian,