Google Data

Posted by Alberto Herrasti, Consulting Director of Digital Government Projects at SFP

Editor’s note: Our guest blogger this week is Alberto Herrasti, Consulting Director of Digital Government Projects at the Secretaría de la Función Pública (Secretary of Public Administration, SFP) from the government in Mexico. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say and discover our interactive demos.

As the Consulting Director of Digital Government Projects of SFP, I work to bring tools that make information easily accessible to Mexican citizens. We recently deployed Google Earth and Google Maps to solve a long-standing problem.

In the past, both our local population and our government workers had trouble finding official documents and records about government agencies and services because this information was distributed across various websites in a fragmented way.

Finding something as simple as the opening hours of a state-owned gas station, or the location and address of a nearby hospital would require a search across many official sites. The only alternative would be to physically visit the offices likely to have the information and spend more time waiting in long queues.

In 2010, the President’s office directed us to address this problem, and we set out to create a consolidated website (now known as mapas.gob.mx) that would serve as a central repository of geo-indexed data, allowing citizens to easily retrieve up-to-date information overlaid on the map data of Mexico.

We reached out to a number of mapping technology providers to evaluate their offerings but the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI) — Mexico’s offical mapping and statistics institution — identified Google Earth and Google Maps as our best option. We completed and launched the new site by 2012. The site integrates data from more than 70 public organizations and aims to place useful and helpful information in the hands of our local population.

Now, with the new Google Maps-integrated site, any user can find information by viewing it on a familiar, easy-to-navigate “globe”. We’ve also added a lot of useful information. The site now consolidates more than 900 maps with government-related information and covers every region of Mexico. As of 2013, more than 300 people use the site daily, and both awareness and use continues to grow rapidly. Instead of waiting in long lines or spending hours searching online, citizens can simply point their browsers to the new site and use maps to quickly find nearby resources and information.

Since we launched the tool in 2012, we’ve had more than 16,150 downloads of the geolocalized data and this tool allows government agencies to respond more effectively and efficiently. Thanks to t Google Earth and Google Maps technology which made the tool easy to build and easy to use, we’re able to better serve our citizens and respond to their needs with the right information at the right time.

Building on VP of Product Management Neal Mohan’s presentation to the Mobile Marketing Association about building cross-screen creative in HTML5, and Product Management Director Brad Bender’s keynote speech about advances in creative formats at IAB MIXX yesterday, we’re excited to announce the launch of Ready Creatives – our groundbreaking new solution to make display ad creation easier than ever. Ready Creatives consists of two powerful tools: Ready Image Ads and Ready Ad Gallery.

Display ads today need to captivate consumers with rich creative and dynamic messaging. But creating an engaging, beautiful ad takes time and effort. High quality ad creation – until now – has been a big challenge, putting it out of reach for small to medium businesses. Ready Creatives puts the power back in your hands – and makes it easier than ever before to create beautiful ads that can be consistently displayed across screens.

Instantly build IAB Standard, HTML5 compatible ads with Ready Image Ads

With one single click, take advantage of Ready Image Ads flexibility by simply adding your website URL to automatically construct display ads based on images from your website.  You can customize further by adjusting the text, font, color, images, headlines, URL and more – in a way that best tells your story. Our friendly user-interface and streamlined process enables you to build display ads in minutes, automatically creating IAB standard ads in HTML5 formats using your existing elements from your website or your own uploaded images. And these HTML5 ads can be viewed across mobile devices as well as desktops!

Beautiful ads at your fingertips in Ready Ad Gallery

Ready Creatives doesn’t just quickly cobble together the elements you want included in your ad – it helps you build campaigns that engage customers with stories they love, remember and share. Our Ready Ad Gallery features pre-built templates you can easily customize based on your campaigns goals.

Choose from the following formats and watch your display ad come to life:

• Dynamic Ads – Dynamic Ads deliver tailored creative across the web that combine the layouts, products, messages and offers that your customers are most likely interested in, based on what they viewed on your website.
• Engagement Ads – Engagement Ads captivate consumers with rich creative messages. They fit in standard display units, allowing to scale across the web, and then expand to a larger format after an innovative two-second hover delay. 
• Video Ads – Videos are as effective as TV in building awareness of your business.  Create a quick video ad in seconds that showcases your brand.
• General Purpose Ads – if you need a simple display ad, browse through our hundreds of template options and customize in our easy-to-use editing tool.

To get started using Ready Creatives today, log into your Adwords account and click on the Ads tab. For more information, visit www.google.com/think/products/ready-creatives.html.

Posted by Ashley Jiang, Product Manager, Google Display Network

Posted by Meghdutt Brahmachari, Product Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise

When it’s raining out, do people’s shopping habits change? Those are the kind of questions the team at Interactions Marketing, working with Tableau Software, think about when analyzing massive data sets on behalf of retailers. In a highly competitive market, retailers need the edge they can gain from business data – and with the analysis they can generate using Google BigQuery. By analyzing these data sets, you can find what Interactions Marketing calls “unexpected insights,” which help businesses make predictions that can improve sales. For example, they look at how external factors like the weather will affect retail sales.

Find out more about the value of Big Data and unexpected insights for retailers – and how Google BigQuery supports these analytics projects – in our Hangout On Air on Thursday, September 26, at 9 a.m. PT. Giovanni DeMeo, Vice President of Global Marketing and Analytics for Interactions Marketing; Paul Lilford, Global Director for Technology Partners at Tableau Software; and Daniel Powers, Director of Sales for Google Cloud Platform will explain how retailers can understand their businesses better and boost success:

• How can unexpected insights help retailers attract and keep customers?
• What are the pressures on retailers to glean insights from their data?
• How does cloud storage make Big Data analysis possible?
• How can you make it easier to visualize and understand your data?

If you missed our previous Hangout On Air with Speedway Motors, the world’s largest manufacturer of specialty hot-rodding and racing products, you can catch up on the recording here.

RSVP for the Interactions Marketing/Tableau Software Hangout On Air, and participate in the Q&A by posting your questions on Google+ or Twitter using the hashtag #GoneGoogle.

E-commerce continues to grow quickly with people shopping across a variety of devices, but often times there is no comparison to talking with a live person. Phone calls are still an important channel for research and purchasing, with 70% of mobile searchers reporting they click to call directly from the search results to connect with a business. In fact, Google ads drive over 40 million calls each month. As a critical component of today’s digital path to purchase, it’s important for businesses to understand how, when, and why consumers use click to call features.

Working with Ipsos Research, we surveyed 3,000 mobile searchers who had recently made purchases across different industries to understand the role that click to call – from paid or organic search results – played in the purchase process. We found that calls are not only an important channel for research and transaction, but also the presence of a phone number in search results can strongly influence the perception of a business’s brand.

Click to call is important to consumers across all verticals.

Across all seven of the verticals we researched (Travel, Restaurant, Auto, Local Services, Retail, Finance, Technology) click to call was an important feature for people looking to find information and make purchases.

• 62% of consumers searching for auto parts and services would be very likely to use click to call, and 57% would use click to call to compare pricing.
• 60% of those searching for car rental information on their phone would use click to call, and 44% would call to make a reservation.
• Within local services, 76% would use call features to schedule an appointment for professional services.
• 61% of people searching for financial services on their smartphones are likely to use click to call to make changes to their bank accounts. 

Consumers rely on calls for research and transacting.

We broke down the purchase process into its component phases – Inspiration, Research, Purchase, and Post Purchase Experience – to see when consumers are most likely to call a business. We found that calling is most important during the research and purchase phases, where 52% and 61% of mobile searchers respectively say it’s important to have the ability to call. This means that a large number of calls happen when someone is ready to buy or helps a consumer move closer in purchase consideration.

Calls originating from the search results page are valuable for businesses. 

88% of mobile searchers indicated that the length of the call is important to them, so we took a look at our our own internal data and found that almost 3 out 4 calls resulting from mobile search ads lasted longer than 30 seconds, and that calls from ads lasted on average six minutes. This suggests that the majority of calls generated by mobile search ads are not quick informational calls, but instead are more substantive research or transactional calls.

Adding click to call can also boost the effectiveness of your ad, whether it’s because users feel more confident in your business or because of the larger ad size due to the call button. On average, AdWords advertisers that implement click to call see an increase of 8% in the click through rates of their ads.

The call button influences brand perception.

The ability to call a business directly from the search results not only helps to drive purchase, but is also an important factor in brand perception. Nearly half of mobile searchers, indicated that the lack of a call option would lead them to be both frustrated with the business and more likely to turn to another brand. Additionally, 33% said that they would be less likely to refer the brand to others and would be less likely to use the brand in the future.

IMPLICATIONS

It’s clear from our findings that driving phone calls should still be a priority for businesses in every industry. Businesses can easily help mobile searchers get in touch by attaching call extensions to their mobile search ads. While the presence of the call button in organic results depends on a number of factors, you can schedule your mobile search ads and call extensions to show only at relevant times or only in specific searches. Advertisers can also view call specific reporting metrics from their call extensions to identify areas to further optimize performance.

Additionally, businesses should measure and assign value to the calls driven by their advertising. With AdWords, businesses can now measure calls as conversions, allowing them to assign value to calls that their ads drive.

To explore more of the findings from our calls research visit the Think with Google site or click here to learn how to get started with call extensions now.

Posted by Adam Grunewald, Mobile Marketing Manager

Posted by Sabrina Farmer, Senior Site Reliability Engineering Manager for Gmail

(Cross-posted on the Official Gmail Blog)

On September 23rd, many Gmail users received an unwelcome surprise: some of their messages were arriving slowly, and some of their attachments were unavailable. We’d like to start by apologizing—we realize that our users rely on Gmail to be always available and always fast, and for several hours we didn’t deliver. We have analyzed what happened, and we’ll tell you about it below. In addition, we’re taking several steps to prevent a recurrence.

The message delivery delays were triggered by a dual network failure. This is a very rare event in which two separate, redundant network paths both stop working at the same time. The two network failures were unrelated, but in combination they reduced Gmail’s capacity to deliver messages to users, and beginning at 5:54 a.m. PST messages started piling up. Google’s automated monitoring alerted the Gmail engineering team within minutes, and they began investigating immediately. Together with the networking team, the Gmail team restored some of the network capacity that was lost and worked to repurpose additional capacity, clearing much of accumulated message backlog by 1:00 p.m. PST and the remainder by shortly before 4:00 p.m. PST.

The impact on users’ Gmail experience varied widely. Most messages were unaffected—71% of messages had no delay, and of the remaining 29%, the average delivery delay was just 2.6 seconds. However, about 1.5% of messages were delayed more than two hours. Users who attempted to download large attachments on affected messages encountered errors. Throughout the event, Gmail remained otherwise available — users could log in, read messages which had been delivered, send mail, and access other features.

What’s next? Our top priority is ensuring that Gmail users get the experience they expect: fast, highly-available email, anytime they want it. We’re taking steps to ensure that there is sufficient network capacity, including backup capacity for Gmail, even in the event of a rare dual network failure. We also plan to make changes to make Gmail message delivery more resilient to a network capacity shortfall in the unlikely event that one occurs in the future. Finally, we’re updating our internal practices so that we can more quickly and effectively respond to network issues. We’ll be working on all of these improvements and more over the next few weeks—even including this event, Gmail remains well above 99.9% available, and we intend to keep it that way!

Viney, Ann, Elif and Eric

A consumer’s journey to purchase isn’t always immediate. People may search on a number of keywords, over several days and across different channels before making a purchase. Sometimes decisions span a few days, but more significant decisions, like buying a car or booking vacation travel, can take longer.

To help you have a more complete and accurate view of your customers’ path to purchase as you optimize and evaluate your ROI, we recently launched cross-account conversion tracking and the ability to import conversions in AdWords.

Today, we’re also adding the capability to customize your conversion counting window from 7 to 90 days after a click. Previously, AdWords only counted conversions occurring within 30 days after a click.

Benefits of customizing your conversion window:

• Capture more high-consideration conversions. Many advertisers sell products that customers want to research thoroughly before making a purchase — for example, a new insurance policy or an expensive laptop. Sometimes, conversions for these products may take longer than 30 days to occur. You can now ensure you measure more of these conversions and get a more complete picture of the value of your advertising.

• Measure longer term value of your customers. Some businesses have a goal to drive repeat purchases from recent customers. For these businesses, extending the conversion window means you can now measure more of these repeat purchases and gain insight into the longer term value your advertising drives.

• Discover more upper funnel keywords. By increasing the length of the conversion window, you can discover keywords that play a role much earlier in the conversion funnel, especially if the shopping cycle is long for your customers.

Customizing your conversion window

You can edit your conversion window in the ‘Conversions’ tab under Tools and Analysis (see image below):

When you click to edit your conversion window, you’ll see a link to the Search Funnels time lag report. When you view this report, you’ll see the average and a distribution of the length of time it takes your customers to complete a conversion after clicking on keywords in your account. You can use this to help you decide how long of a window to set.

For more information on how to customize your conversion window, check out this help center article.

Posted by Vishal Goenka, Product Manager, Conversions in AdWords

Our team is committed to keeping you at the bleeding edge of data. That’s why we’ve continually made the content at our annual user summit more accessible. Last year we liveblogged the event on social and published a recap of key announcements. But we’ve heard you loud and clear: you want more. So we’re excited to fulfill that request: this year, we’re extending a virtual invitation to all our users.

1. Connecting the right data to the right people.
2. Empowering every employee to analyze data 
3. How acting on insights drives organizations forward

A few months ago, we kicked off the Video in the Future content series featuring speakers like AOL’s Ran Harnevo, Meredith’s Liz Schimel, NewsCorp’s Rahul Chopra and AMC’s Kirk Linden, among others.

The next edition in this series will be from Australia, as we’ll speak with Adam Good, Director of Digital Media & Content, at Telstra.

From Telstra’s long history as a telco to now, a media empire – how is the company creating, promoting and monetizing digital video content to engage its audience? Adam will speak about Telstra’s digital video strategy in a conversation with Jason Pellegrino, Sales Director for Google Australia and New Zealand.

Join us live on September 24, 10:30AM Sydney time. RSVP here.

Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing Team

With infrastructure and services that include robust data protections for all customers, enterprises like Google are able to invest in security measures that might be challenging for businesses to attain on their own.