New Year, New Media

At the beginning of the year, most people take time to reflect on what they've accomplished in the past year and what their goals are for the next year. New Year's Resolutions are a chance to reinvent yourself and try out new experiences.

It's also a good time for businesses to reflect on their past year and what they plan on accomplishing in 2010. At Google, we overhauled the AdWords interface and released a number of enterprise-class features in Analytics.

Take the time to reflect on your 2009. Not just the quantitative accomplishments, but the risks you took and the new strategies you tried. Did you change your focus? Did you launch a new marketing plan?

Google has some tools to help you plan for and test your new strategies in 2010.

Planning for 2010:

1. Insights for Search
   Insights for Search is a great tool to plan for the seasonality of your organization. Use the "Compare by Time Ranges" functionality to see the seasonality for your top keywords. Here is an example of seasonality for the keyword phrase "donate to charity."


2. Ad Planner
   Google Ad Planner allows you to gain a better understanding of demographic and traffic trends for your website. See if you have any new customer segments that you haven't pursued in the past, and plan for engaging with them in 2010.


3. YouTube
   Start planning now for how you can take advantage of all the opportunities to engage with your target demographic via YouTube. If your organization has compelling commercials or video, post them on your own YouTube channel in order to reach the world's largest online video community. Check out our dedicated non-profit page: www.youtube.com/nonprofits.

Happy 2010!

Posted by Lee Anne Grant, Google AdWords Team