Google Data » Katie Miller

See the full Impact of Unclicked Display and Video Ad Impressions using Google Analytics

Katie Miller — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Originally posted on the Google Analytics blog

Every customer journey is different — a customer may see your display or video ads, receive an email, and then click through to your site from a search ad or organic search listing. Often, viewing display ads can attract your clients’ interest in your product and brand even if no click occurs. Traditionally, measurement technology separated out impressions or “view throughs” from clicks, but this separation missed out on valuable data on the impact of display advertising.

Thanks to our integration with the Google Display Network (GDN), Google Analytics can now break down the separation between clicks and impressions and give a more complete view of the customer journey. When a user views display ads on the GDN, or video ads on YouTube, and later visits your website and converts, these interactions with your brand can now be captured in Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels reporting.

GDN Impression Reporting is now available through limited whitelist. You can sign-up through this form to participate. Please note that we cannot guarantee access, but we will do our best to provide this feature to as many users as possible. Please also note that this data will only surface in the Multi-channel Funnels reports in Google Analytics. For more information on how to enable the feature in GA please see our help center article.

Read on below for more tips on how to make the most of this new feature.

How does Display fit on the conversion path?
By enabling GDN Impression Reporting in Google Analytics, you can learn how your display impressions assist your conversions.

In the Multi-Channel Funnels Overview Report you will see two additional conversion metrics. Impression Assisted Conversions shows how many of your conversion paths were touched by a display impression. Rich Media Assisted Conversions shows how many of your conversions had a rich media interaction on the path to conversion. Rich media interactions are user interaction with YouTube or rich media ad formats, such as ad expansion, video control (such as play, pause, and resume), or switching a video ad to full screen.

With the new Interaction Type selector you can now immediately filter your reports based how your users interacted with your marketing.

Select Impression to see conversion paths from customers who saw your GDN display ads but did not click on them.
Add Direct to the mix, to see who saw an ad and then visited your site directly to convert on a relevant transaction or Goal.
If you want to focus on Rich Media interactions, you can select this interaction type to see how your users convert after interacting with your rich media and YouTube ads.

How do I quantify the impact of display on the conversion path?
In the Multi-Channel Funnels Top Conversion Path report you can see two new path elements, which indicate the presence of a display interaction. The “eye” symbol indicates a pure display impression from a non-interactive display image. This means a user has been exposed to your display ad on the journey to conversion, without clicking on it. The “movie” symbol indicates a user has interacted with one of your Rich Media ads, such as a YouTube video ad.

Now you can see how many conversion paths, and how much associated value, has been driven through paths which benefited from a display impression or rich media interactions. To better quantify your brand targeted display efforts, consider breaking out these campaigns using custom channel grouping.

Assigning partial credit to valuable display interaction touchpoints
You can use the custom model builder from the Attribution Modeling tool to assign partial credit to these display events. Consider giving these events on the user’s conversion path more credit, and compare this against your baseline model.

We also added a new set of dimensions to help you define valuable custom segments for your analysis. Want to see how many users are watching your TrueView video ads fully? Just create a custom segment using one of our new dimensions, TrueView. The full list of new dimensions is:

Above the Fold: This dimension uses the Google Active View measurement solution. The value is “Yes” if the ad was in the visible area of the screen when the page was loaded.
Video Played Percent: The value can be “>=25%”, “>=50%”, “>=75%”, and “100%”, allowing you to see how much of a video ad was watched.
TrueView: If a user has watched more than 30 seconds of an ad, or watched the ad completely, this will have a value of “Yes.” This is a payable event.

Enabling GDN Impression Reporting in Google Analytics
Once we have whitelisted your account, please ensure you have successfully linked your AdWords account to your Google Analytics account. Linking accounts takes just a few moments. Under ‘Data Sources’ > ‘AdWords’ you can then see an entry for each linked AdWords account. In the row there is a toggle switch named ‘GDN Impression Reports’, which turns the display impression data from the Google Display Network On and Off. Data is recorded from the time the switch is turned On.

We hope these new tools will help you understand the full impact of your display campaigns through Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution. Sign up today for GDN Impression Reporting in Google Analytics.

Posted by Stefan F. Schnabl, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Give your sitelinks additional detail in enhanced campaigns

Katie Miller — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:00:00 +0000

Ads that provide detail and precision can help people make more informed decisions. Sitelinks help people find information deeper in your site so they can get to where they want to go faster. In February 2012, we improved sitelinks by using text from other ads in your account or My Client Center to create sitelinks with additional detail. Today, we’re going one step further by enabling you to nominate specific text for your sitelink descriptions from within your AdWords account. This will allow you to control the descriptions that display when this sitelink format shows.

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In our testing, users have reported that sitelinks with additional detail were more useful and relevant, and clickthrough rates were significantly higher than the same ad with traditional 2- and 3-line sitelinks.

The new sitelink format with additional detail is available only in enhanced campaigns. Enhanced campaigns enable you to reach people with the right ads in the right context - location, time of day and device type - without setting up and managing numerous campaigns. All campaigns will be upgraded to enhanced campaigns on July 22nd.

After upgrading to enhanced campaigns, you will have the option of adding extra text to your sitelinks - simply fill out both lines of the "Description" field when creating a new sitelink or editing an existing sitelink.

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Note that your ads won't always show sitelinks, and when they do, the format that appears could vary.

The core guidelines for sitelinks remain the same with these improvements:

Sitelinks cannot violate the duplicate sitelink URL policy
Sitelink text cannot use keyword insertion
Sitelink text cannot be the same as other sitelinks in the same ad group/campaign or the main ad that’s serving
In addition to this 4 sitelink view, there is also a 2 sitelink variation

To learn more about sitelinks with additional detail, check out the sitelinks article in the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Conrad Wai, Product Manager, Ad Formats

AdSense: Celebrating 10 years of shared success

Katie Miller — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:01:00 +0000

Originally posted on the official Google blog

Ten years ago we launched AdSense to help publishers earn money by placing relevant ads on their websites. I can still remember the excitement and anticipation as AdSense went live that first day. Our small team huddled together in a cramped conference room, and right away we saw that publishers were as excited about AdSense as we were.

Fast-forward 10 years, and AdSense has become a core part of Google’s advertising business. The AdSense community has grown to include more than 2 million publishers, and last year alone, publishers earned more than $7 billion from AdSense. AdSense is a community that thrives because of all the content creators we are so fortunate to partner with. Their stories inspire us to do our part to make AdSense great.

On this occasion, it’s especially inspiring to hear the stories of partners who have been with us since the very beginning—like a retiree in New Zealand who was able to pursue her dream of writing about her garden, a tech support expert in Colorado who can spend more time with his kids, and a theme park reviewer who now sends employees around the world to test and review rides—all thanks to money earned from AdSense.

As part of our 10th anniversary celebration, we hope you’ll tune into our live Hangout on Air today at 10 a.m. PDT (5 p.m. GMT) on the AdSense Google+ page. I look forward to joining several of our partners to share stories from the early days of AdSense, talk about how we’ve all grown since then, and discuss the future for publishers and online advertising. And if you want even more 10th anniversary celebration, just visit our AdSense 10th anniversary page at any time.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, SVP, Ads and Commerce

Enhanced campaigns: What happens on July 22, 2013

Katie Miller — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 18:00:00 +0000

This week, we published some of the reasons advertisers have already upgraded more than 3 million legacy campaigns to enhanced campaigns. If you have already upgraded all of your campaigns, then you are all set! If you still have some legacy campaigns in your account, this post will cover what will happen to campaigns that are auto upgraded starting on July 22, 2013.

Default upgrade path
We strongly encourage everyone to upgrade before July 22, 2013 so your campaigns are set up as you'd like. If you don't, then the AdWords system will upgrade them using the following default settings.

Campaigns will be configured, like all new AdWords campaigns, to reach customers across all devices. Upgraded campaigns require a mobile bid adjustment setting, which influences your bids, ad position, and click volume on mobile devices. The table below shows how the mobile bid adjustment will be set depending on the devices targeted by a legacy campaign. Of course, you're free to change your default mobile bid adjustment and all other campaign settings after a campaign is automatically upgraded.

Legacy campaign device targeting	Default mobile bid adjustment
Any campaign that targets computers	Set based on bids from similar advertisers
Campaigns targeting tablets only	Set based on bids from similar advertisers
Campaigns targeting mobile devices only	+0% (same bids across all devices)
Campaigns targeting tablets and mobile devices only	+0% (same bids across all devices)

Special cases
What we've described above covers the vast majority of legacy campaigns. But there are some special cases with different default upgrade settings, like a legacy campaign that runs ads on the Google Display Network and uses device-specific targeting. Details on these special cases are in the AdWords Help Center.

Upgrade quickly and easily today
If you're upgrading one or multiple campaigns, we recommend that you use the AdWords upgrade center. It's quick and takes you step-by-step through the process. Learn more or visit the upgrade center now.

We're here to help
We want you to be successful with AdWords, so please contact us if you’d like any assistance with the upgrade to enhanced campaigns. For more details, tips and resources on succeeding with enhanced campaigns, please check out our help center articles and enhanced campaigns website.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President of Engineering

Unleashing the Combined Power of Google Analytics and AdWords: Webinar Next Tuesday, 6/18

Katie Miller — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 17:45:00 +0000

In many ways, Google Analytics and AdWords were made for each other. AdWords helps advertisers reach an audience and reports on advertising performance, and Google Analytics can tell you what actions your users take when they actually get to your site. You may have a high clickthrough rate (CTR) in AdWords, but what if you could see that 70% of those users left immediately after arriving on your landing page? While understanding the conversion rate of AdWords ads is critical, it’s also important to understand what happened to the users that did not convert or complete the action you wanted them to. For example, did users ‘bounce’ after landing on your site or did they view a few other pages and then leave? How much time did they spend on your site? Which keywords drive the majority of your Ecommerce revenue?

Thanks to built-in Google product integrations that provide unique insights into your data, you can view reporting and data in Google Analytics that directly relates back to your advertising in AdWords. Understanding how to use both of them together will help you refine your AdWords campaigns and improve the performance of your business.

Next Tuesday, join Rachel Witalec and Simon Rosen, Global Sales Strategy Leads, for a detailed look at how to use Google Analytics and AdWords together. In this webinar, we'll show you why it's important to link your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts, how to see both Google Analytics data in AdWords and AdWords data in Google Analytics, and walk through a live demo of the reports and how to use them. You'll learn how to make your marketing more effective by analyzing Google Analytics data, such as bounce rate, pages per visit, conversion rate, and Ecommerce revenue in conjunction with AdWords factors, such as keyword performance, ad copy, ad groups, and more. The webinar will also include a live Q&A section.

Date: Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Time: 10am PDT / 1pm EDT/ 6pm GMT
Duration: 1 hr
Level: 101 / Beginner
Register: Register here

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Google Analytics team

New ways to see how you stack up against the competition with Auction insights

Katie Miller — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 23:13:00 +0000

The Auction insights report gives you valuable insight into how your ad performance compares with that of other advertisers. For example, based on the impressions you’re eligible for, you can see how often your competitors’ ads are appearing above yours or whether one of your competitors has a higher impression share than you on an important keyword.

Before today, you could only get this data one keyword at a time - making it hard to see the bigger picture of where you stand relative to your top competitors. Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ve added some exciting new functionality to the Auction insights report that will make it easier for you to get a bird’s eye view of your competitive landscape.

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Now, in addition to running an Auction insights report on a single keyword you can also run a report on any of the following scenarios:

Groups of keywords. For example, you may want to run a report on all keywords that contain a certain brand term, or that have the same label. Simply filter your keyword list, select the keywords you want to include, and run an Auction insights report on the selected terms to see how your performance on those terms compares to that of your top competitors.
Individual or multiple ad groups. You’ve probably already arranged your keywords into meaningful groupings within ad groups. For example, if you sell men’s wear, you may have an ad group for “Father’s Day gifts” with keywords all about Father’s Day. Now, from the ad groups tab, you can select one or more ad groups to run an Auction insights report. This will show you how your performance on all eligible keywords within those ad groups compares to advertisers who most commonly compete with you on those terms.
Individual or multiple campaigns. Sometimes you may be interested in a high level picture of who’s competing with you across a wide range of topics. In those instances, you can select one or more campaigns from the campaigns tab, and run an Auction insights report there to see how the competitive landscape looks at that high level.

We hope that these new features provide you additional insights to help you optimize your campaigns more efficiently. We are rolling this feature out today and you should expect to see it in your account within the next few hours.

For more information on how to run an Auction insights report, how to interpret your data, or create a filter, visit the AdWords Help Center. You can also join us for our Hangout on Air Tuesday, June 25th at 10:00 AM PST/1:00 PM EST where we will cover a few of the great things you can do with the new functionality in this report.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Product Manager, AdWords

Get a Head Start with Enhanced Campaigns: Why to Upgrade Now

Katie Miller — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 19:57:00 +0000

Enhanced campaigns offer an array of new features to drive better performance and efficiency. With more than three million campaigns already upgraded, we’ve heard many great examples of advertisers finding new pockets of revenue and reaching new customers with enhanced campaigns – all while saving time. As the the auto-upgrade approaches on July 22, we’re introducing some new features in the Upgrade Center today to make the process of upgrading even easier. Upgrade today to start realizing the benefits right away.

5 reasons to upgrade now
By upgrading now and becoming a pro with the new features before the auto-upgrade, you can get a head start on driving better performance – and a jump start on the competition. Here are some of our advertisers’ top reasons for upgrading:

Discover local opportunities: Use the location bid adjustment to easily and effectively engage with users based on location and proximity. This allows you to find and optimize for pockets of revenue you may not have even known existed.

After upgrading to enhanced campaigns and leveraging geo bid adjustments, Peter Hughes, Manager of SEM at Constant Contact stated, “Suddenly, we realized that California has a great cluster of small and medium sized businesses. Cool - we’ve already geo-targeted that. But guess what? Who knew that North Dakota had such a great ROI. In the old, legacy world, I never would have figured it out because it did not fit into my selective scaling model.”

Expose the true power of mobile: Implement a mobile bid adjustment to make sure you’re driving the right value for on-the-go consumers while gaining better insight into the results mobile can drive for you.

American Apparel upgraded early to reach customers across all screens. They started by setting mobile bid adjustments at 100% and saw impressive results. Since the upgrade, mobile conversions have grown 2X and aggregate click-through-rate has increased 7%. Sean Singleton, Marketing Manager, stated, “We are going from trial to fine-tuning the way we execute our multi-device marketing strategy. With enhanced campaigns, it’s very easy to test and iterate so we are quickly establishing internal best practices in terms of how to best run enhanced campaigns.”

Drive more leads through calls: Use call extensions and measure calls as conversions to drive cost-efficient leads while providing a better ad experience for your customers.

Woodbridge, a financial investment firm, took advantage of upgraded call extensions and new reporting features, increasing the volume of calls from smartphones from 20% to 57%, with overall smartphone leads almost doubling. In addition, conversion rates from both desktop and mobile devices increased by 6%.

Reach new audiences on the Google Display Network with powerful bidding: Drive impression share to a specific audience using custom display bids across characteristics like demographics, interest categories or topics.

Stathis Konstantinidis, who runs Global Marketing at Westwing, said, “With the upgrade to enhanced campaigns we have greater insight into how our converting audience looks on adgroup level. This is very important to us as we have quite a distinct idea of our target group. We can use this information in order to push the impression share of our ads within the converting audience and decrease the impressions within the less performing audience for driving conversions & decreasing the CPLs.”

Manage campaigns in less time: Dive into enhanced campaigns to see how the powerful features work together to streamline your workflow and get you to happy hour sooner.

Dutch shoe retailer, Schuurman Schoenen, reduced its total number of campaigns by 60% and dramatically cut its marketing team’s workload. “I used to spend twice as much time to maintain and fine-tune campaigns,” says Kayo Klein Obbink, Schuurman Schoenen’s online marketer.

Improvements to the upgrade center
In April, we announced the enhanced campaigns upgrade center to help you transition from legacy campaigns to enhanced campaigns. We’re introducing some additional features, rolling out over the next week, that will make upgrading even easier and give you greater control over the merging process:

Increased flexibility when copying keywords: When merging campaigns, have increased control over how keywords are copied (or not copied) from the mobile to the desktop campaign.
Automatic labelling of newly copied keywords: When keywords, ads, or ad groups are copied or merged, they will be labelled as having been modified by the upgrade center.
Uninterrupted keyword level tracking: When you have two matching campaigns with different mobile and desktop keyword-level destination URLs, they will be merged automatically. The mobile URL will show on mobile phones and the desktop URL will show on non-mobile.
... and coming soon: Bulk upload functionality: Ad extensions and ad groups will soon be exportable to AdWords Editor.

We hope that the Upgrade Center and other resources we’ve shared will give you the tools you need to ease the transition to enhanced campaigns.

Don’t wait to upgrade
We will begin automatically upgrading all legacy campaigns on July 22nd, 2013. Please continue to share your feedback with us as you are going through the upgrade process.

Posted by Andy Miller, Head of Mobile Search Solutions

Quantifying Movie Magic with Google Search

Katie Miller — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 16:00:00 +0000

It’s a typical Friday night quandary—you want to see a movie, but the question is, what movie should you watch? The decision to see a specific film actually involves quite a bit of research, and as moviegoers are increasingly turning to search to learn more about various titles, we have been able to identify general search patterns that give us insight into awareness and intent levels. In ‘Quantifying Movie Magic with Google Search,’ we examine how Google search and paid ad click patterns can predict box office revenue, and what digital engagement can tell us about the moviegoer decision-making process.

We took a look at 99 of the top box office hits in 2012, and drew these key findings about the way people search for movies:

The decision to see a movie is a very highly-considered research process. On average, moviegoers consult 13 sources before they make a decision.* And people are now searching more than before - while overall new movie releases were down last year, searches in the movie category on Google are up 56% from 2011 to 2012, signaling an increase in digital engagement and appetite for more information.
Trailer-related search trends four weeks out from a movie release provide strong predictive power for opening weekend box office revenue. Interestingly, while we see more search volume in weeks closer to the release week, the Google and YouTube search patterns four weeks out from the release have the strongest link to moviegoer intent. At four weeks out, trailer search volume on Google coupled with both the franchise status of the movie and seasonality can predict opening weekend box office revenue with 94% accuracy.
Opening weekend prediction modeling shows high correlation between search volume / paid click volume and box office revenue. In the seven day window prior to a film’s release date, if a film receives 250,000 search queries more than a similar film, the film with more queries is likely to perform up to $4.3M better during opening weekend. When looking at search ad click volume, if a film has 20,000 more paid clicks than a similar film, it is expected to bring in up to $7.5M more during opening weekend.
Moviegoers search differently for big movie releases. During slower box office weeks, we see more searches on generic terms (such as "new movies" or “movie tickets”), whereas during the week of a tentpole movie release we see more searches on movie titles (such as "The Hunger Games" or "Avengers"). For tentpole film releases, marketers have the ability to capture more interest by advertising on title-related search terms, whereas for non-tentpole releases it is important to advertise on more generic terms.
48% of moviegoers decide what film to watch the day they purchase their ticket, so it’s important to have a continued search presence through opening weekend and beyond.*

By understanding how and when moviegoers search for information, movie marketers have the opportunity to adjust their strategies to further engage, and more importantly, convince moviegoers to choose their film. To learn more, download the full whitepaper from Think with Google.

Posted by Andrea Chen, Principal Industry Analyst, Media and Entertainment

*Source: Google Social Research Study, December 2012

New Image Extensions Enable You to “Show” and “Tell” with Search Ads

Katie Miller — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 16:06:00 +0000

Advertisers understand that sometimes it's easier to 'show' rather than 'tell' when promoting a business. As search ads continue to evolve, we want to make it easier for you to do both. Today we're announcing the beta launch of image extensions, which will allow you to add new visual elements to your search ads. We’ve added many extensions to search ads to help you be more relevant to users. Image extensions enable you to more accurately convey the body style of a car, the cut of a pair of jeans, or a particular shade of eyeshadow, making your ads richer and more informative so they stand out in a crowded marketplace.

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As the web evolves, Google users expect richer and more diverse content. More than one in six searches on Google today provide results with visual content. Image extensions will show in some cases when we determine that a search is likely for visual content. For example, it is more likely that your image extensions will show for a query like luxury car designs than locations of nearby car dealerships.

You can choose the images that you want displayed with your search ads and send them to us for review. You must have the necessary rights to the the images you wish to display with your ads. We encourage you to submit your images as we continue to experiment with and improve our visual ad formats.

Image extensions are currently running in English globally. If you are interested in participating in the image extensions beta, contact your account manager or fill out this form.

Posted by Awaneesh Verma, Product Manager, Ad Formats

Optimizing Dynamic Search Ads

Katie Miller — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 17:06:00 +0000

Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) is a valuable product to help advertisers keep their AdWords campaigns effective and relevant. DSA maintains a fresh index of your inventory using Google’s organic web crawling technology to help ensure ads are generated based on the most recent content on your website.

Since we’ve opened up the product to all advertisers last October, thousands of advertisers have successfully used DSA to target their websites. On average, they’re getting a 5-10% increase in clicks and conversions and positive ROI. Just like keyword based campaigns, DSA works best when it’s properly set-up and optimized. In this post, we'll cover some tips and best practices for optimizing Dynamic Search Ads.

Start off with broad targets
Dynamic Search Ads helps advertisers target long-tail queries without having to create and manage a long list of keywords. To realize the true benefit of DSA, target your whole website or large portions of your website to help identify segments of traffic never targeted before.

Qoo10, an e-Commerce leader in Asia, used this technique and immediately benefitted from DSA’s ability to “fill the gaps” between their existing keyword coverage and what they sell online. As Muhd Fitri Khamis, Qoo10’s Marketing Executive, notes: “If you start off with targeting a few pages rather than the whole domain, the results may not be as compelling.” Today, Qoo10’s DSA campaign accounts for 10% of sales coming from AdWords campaigns and the CTR of their DSA campaign is 33% higher than other campaigns.
Use negative targets
Especially in the early stages of your DSA campaign, you should use the search terms and categories report to exclude searches and parts of your web site that you don't want to advertise or that underperform. A good starting set of negative targets are any keywords you have paused or deleted in the recent past as well as any pages unrelated to selling products such as customer help pages and general FAQ’s.

You can learn more about how to set-up exclusions to block certain pages of your website as well as how to add negative keywords in this Help Center article.

Group highly related pages and products of similar values together
Similar to keywords and ad groups, group highly related pages or products with similar economic values within the same target to increase ad relevance and ROI. For example, you might group your beach vacation rentals together in one target and group your ski lodge rentals together in another target. You also might want to bundle high-priced, high-margin products separately from low-priced, low-margin products. For example, group high-end electronics separately from accessories.

You can do this by creating more narrow targets as explained in our FAQ’s. This approach will help create more targeted ads for users and help increase ROI by setting different bids for products of different economic values.

Use conversion optimizer or target CPA
Dynamic Search Ads is best coupled with CPA based bidding. CPA based bidding helps give you a more automated approach to bid management and by clearly defining your ROI goals, you can ensure that you will continue to hit your CPA goals even as you expand your campaign reach and as the content on your website changes.

This combination worked extremely well for Soft32.com, a large software download company, who successfully combined DSA with Conversion Optimizer to automatically set-up campaigns targeting thousands of their landing pages - all while keeping within their target CPA. Founder & CEO Lucian Todea said the company was able to take advantage of the power of the long tail, and within just a couple of months had seen DSA deliver a 15% increase in conversions.

Don’t set it and forget it
As your website structure and content changes, please make sure your DSA campaign is kept up-to-date to reflect your latest changes. Remember also to regularly check your search terms and categories report to raise bids on high performing pages and add poor performing pages and queries as negative targets.

For step-by-step directions on setting up a Dynamic Search Ads campaign, please visit the AdWords Help Center. You can also view a recorded webinar to learn more about Dynamic Search Ads.

Posted by Jen Huang, AdWords Product Manager

Sign Up for June Learn with Google Webinars

Katie Miller — Fri, 31 May 2013 16:59:00 +0000

Last month, we announced our new series of Learn with Google webinars to help make the web work for you. If you’ve missed some since then, be sure to register for any (or all!) of our 10 sessions coming up in June. Each webinar gives you deep-dive educational content, across a breadth of products and marketing objectives, in a format that’s convenient for you.

Upcoming June webinars:

[Shopping] Google Shopping 201: Maximizing Profits
[YouTube] Building your Business with YouTube Video Ads
[Analytics] Metrics for the Mobile App Ecosystem
[Search] What's New & Next in AdWords
[Analytics] Unleashing the Combined Power of Google Analytics & AdWords
[Social] Growing your Business & Engaging your Audience with Google+
[Shopping] Google Shopping 301: Creating & Optimizing Product Listing Ads
[Social] Launching & Amplifying your Impact Across Social Channels
[Display] Reaching the Right Audience with Remarketing
[Research] Creating Custom Infographics with the New Google Databoard
Webinars are held Tuesdays through Thursdays at 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern.

Every event is led by Google product experts and includes time for live Q&A.

Visit our webinar site to register for any of the live sessions and to access our large library of recorded content. You can also stay up-to-date on the schedule by adding our Learn with Google calendar to your own Google calendar to automatically see upcoming webinars.

Learn with Google is a program to help businesses succeed through winning moments that matter, enabling better decisions and constantly innovating. 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 seeing you at an upcoming session!

Posted by Erin Molhar, Marketing Coordinator, Learn with Google

Bidding Best Practices (Part 5): Implement Bid Automation for Better Performance and Time Savings

Katie Miller — Thu, 30 May 2013 16:06:00 +0000

Today’s post about using automated bidding within enhanced campaigns is the fifth in our bidding best practices series. The previous blog posts covered calculating mobile, location and time bid adjustments.

We launched bid adjustments for device, location and time of day to help you control your bids without duplicating campaigns as part of enhanced campaigns. We’ve heard from many advertisers that these tools help them improve results and efficiency. However, for some advertisers - particularly those with large programs and accounts - managing campaigns at scale can still be time-intensive and complex.

Since bidding is fundamentally important to your success with AdWords, we've developed a set of automation tools to help improve your performance and save you time.

Benefits of AdWords bid automation
For almost any advertiser, using the right automated bidding solution can drive better results and improved efficiency. Here are some key benefits to using AdWords automated bid strategies in enhanced campaigns.

Save time by optimizing keyword bids for your goal at scale. Automated tools dynamically change bids to meet your advertising goals across your keywords -- whether it’s 100 or 1 million keywords -- saving you time and effort.
Create and manage campaigns independently from bidding strategy. New flexible bid strategies let you apply multiple bidding strategies within a single campaign or across campaigns. This provides you the freedom to optimize towards multiple advertising goals in the same campaign or across campaigns without being constrained by account structure. Read more about these below.
Improve performance with auction-time bidding. Two flexible bid strategies, Target CPA and Enhanced CPC, use a combination of real-time performance signals including location, device, partner site and operating system to set specific bids at every auction. With auction-time bidding, these automated tools automatically calculate bid adjustments for you.
Optimize over time to continuously improve results. Our automated tools adapt to performance changes over time, saving you the effort of manually evaluating performance reports and continuously changing bids to keep up with performance fluctuations.
Easy to try. AdWords bid automation tools are free to use and available to all advertisers right in the AdWords interface.

When to use bid automation
In this section, we’ll provide guidance on when to use each of Google’s automated bid strategies within enhanced campaigns.

Target CPA (the flexible bid strategies version of Conversion Optimizer) is our most powerful bid automation tool. This bid strategy sets an optimum bid for every auction by predicting the likelihood of a conversion. It uses real-time inputs such as location, time, device, and network placement. Apply this strategy to ad groups or campaigns if your main goal is to maximize conversion volume while maintaining a target CPA. Target CPA will automatically set and optimize your bid adjustments for you, however, a -100% mobile bid adjustment will keep your ads from appearing on mobile devices.

Enhanced CPC can improve performance by adding automation on top of your manual bids. This automated bid strategy will refine your manual bids using the same real-time conversion prediction technology as Target CPA. You can still apply bid adjustments with this automated strategy if you know that device, location or time of day affects your conversion value in ways that are not measured in the conversion tracker. For example, if you want to use automation, but know that your mobile clicks drive value beyond online conversions, such as store visits, you can enable Enhanced CPC in combination with a bid adjustment for mobile to account for the difference in expected value per click.

The last two flexible bid strategies apply bid automation and work with existing manual bid adjustments. If your goal is getting the most clicks within a target spend, you can implement the Maximize Clicks bid strategy. Alternatively, if you’re more interested in visibility with top position impressions, you can try the Target Search Page location strategy. Read more about these strategies here.

If you’ve implemented one of the four flexible bid strategies, you can monitor your performance in the Shared Library and adjust if necessary.

While it might take some time to refine your automated bid strategy, the benefits of bid automation will improve your performance while saving you time and effort. To read more about automation and bidding adjustments, check out our Help Center.

Posted by Andrea Cohan, Product Marketing Manager, AdWords

Bidding Best Practices (Part 4): Setting your bid adjustment for time

Katie Miller — Wed, 29 May 2013 20:36:00 +0000

Today’s post will provide guidance on using time bid adjustments. It is the fourth post in a bidding best practices series. Previous posts covered optimization strategies for setting location and mobile bid adjustments as well as prioritization.

In our constantly connected world, people are searching on multiple devices throughout the day for places to go, things to buy, and ways to stay entertained. People often use similar search results in different ways depending on the time of day that they search. For example, if someone is searching for “Hawaii vacations” during the workday, she may just be doing research for an upcoming trip. When she returns home and conducts the same search in the evening, she may be more likely to have all the info she needs to book the flights and hotels.

With this constant connectivity, search marketers can now receive web traffic from across the globe and around the clock. Most businesses can still identify peak days and times when they see better ROI and lower costs. At other times, customer activity might be slower and some businesses may wish to drive additional visits even if the cost is a bit higher.

If your business sees regular cycles of customer behavior and AdWords performance during the week, then using the time bid adjustment feature in AdWords enhanced campaigns may make sense for you. This feature can help you improve results by allowing you to increase or decrease bids by day of the week or time of day.

Getting started with time bid adjustments
Before making any adjustments, it’s important to choose the right level of granularity for analysis. For example, will you adjust bids by day of the week, eight hour increments, or down to the hour? While you may be tempted to optimize down to the hour, it’s important to ensure that you have sufficient data to make decisions for each time period. A general rule would be to have 1,000 clicks and 30 conversions for each time period you’re looking to optimize.

Calculating your time bid adjustments
Once you decide that using time bid adjustments are right for your business, compare the performance of your ads at varying times to your overall performance goal. This will allow you to easily determine the right bid adjustment for each time period.

If you are setting a goal using a cost per action target, your bid adjustment can be calculated as follows:

Time bid adjustment = 100%* (( Campaign Goal ÷ Actual Performance) - 1)

For example, let’s say you are an online retailer who sees better traffic and performance on weekdays as opposed to weekends. You would like to target a $30 cost per acquisition overall, but you are experiencing a $25 cost per acquisition on weekdays and a $40 cost per acquisition on weekends. To meet your performance goal and maximize efficiency you can use a time bid adjustment. Simply adjust your bids on weekdays by +20%, and on weekends by -25%. This allows you to optimize for your goal by bidding more aggressively on weekdays when conversions are more cost effective, and less aggressively on weekends when performance is lower.

Test and Learn
Constant iteration is a key part of the optimization process. To ensure you are optimized over time, check the performance for each time adjustment regularly on the Time subtab in your campaign settings. Raise your bid adjustment where your performance exceeds your goal and lower your bid adjustment where your performance falls short of your goal. This will allow you to optimize your bids and adjust to changing consumer behavior.

Tips
You should also take this opportunity to study your internal data to understand when you have peak activity in terms of conversion rates, order size, and overall volume. If you have a physical store or run a call center, you may consider using those hours of operation as guideposts for setting your time bid adjustment. Studying the volume of activity during the times you are open can give you a good sense of when you may wish to raise or lower your bids. For example, if your call center is closed during the night, you may wish to decrease bids during this time to avoid sending customers to unsupported lines. By the same token, if you operate a physical store and see lulls in traffic during certain hours, you may wish to increase bids during this time and run ads with promotional offers to drive more people to your business.

Reminders
Time bid adjustments are a key part of enhanced campaigns. To use time bid adjustments alongside location and mobile bid adjustments, you’ll need to upgrade your campaigns. Starting on July 22, 2013, we will begin automatically upgrading all campaigns to enhanced campaigns.

Later this week, we’ll dive deeper into ways you can use tools like flexible bid strategies to automate your bid settings based on specific business goals like cost per acquisition.

Posted by Ting Zhang, Global Search Solutions

Easily make changes to your ads and ad groups at scale

Katie Miller — Wed, 29 May 2013 14:30:00 +0000

The ability to make changes to your AdWords account in bulk enables you to spend more time optimizing your campaigns to grow your business, and less time on repetitive tasks. Just last month, we launched keyword bulk uploads to help you add, edit and remove keywords at scale. Today, we are happy to announce bulk uploads for ads and ad groups.

Imagine you download a report from the Ads tab and want to test different creatives in ad groups that are underperforming. You might also want to turn off certain ad groups, or change the budget for others. Instead of toggling back and forth between AdWords and your spreadsheets, you can now download reports from the Ads and Ad Groups tabs, make changes directly in your spreadsheet, and upload them directly to your account.

Uploading changes to your ads and ad groups is simple. Just like with keywords, when you download a report you will be prompted to make the report “editable.”

Click here to enlarge

After making your changes, you can save your changes in CSV, TSV and Excel formats. To upload this file, click “Reports and uploads” on the left navigation panel, and then select the “Uploads” tab. You will see a new column here titled “Upload type,” shown below.

Click here to enlarge

You can only upload one report type at a time; for example, if you want to make bulk changes to both your keywords and your ad creatives, you would have to do this by editing and uploading two separate reports.

As with keyword bulk uploads, there is no way to cancel or automatically reverse your changes once a report has been submitted. Please remember to save a copy of your original downloaded report if you need to know what your settings were before you made changes and submitted a bulk upload. You can also view your change history and reverse any unintended changes manually.

To learn more about bulk uploads for ads and ad groups, visit the bulk uploads article in our Help Center or discuss in our AdWords Community.

Posted by Prashant Baheti, Product Manager, AdWords

Explore the Future of Digital Marketing with DoubleClick and Industry Executives on June 4th

Katie Miller — Tue, 28 May 2013 17:00:00 +0000

On Tuesday, June 4th DoubleClick will host its annual digital leadership summit, thinkDoubleClick, with provocative conversations about the future of digital marketing and media, and you’re invited to join via live stream by registering here!

Hear executives from advertising, agencies and publishers discuss some of the big questions in digital such as:

How do creatives leverage, but not be overwhelmed by, technology to deliver next-generation consumer experiences?
What unique experiences are publishers developing that add value to consumers and advertisers alike?
How do CMOs best use social with other marketing channels to build strong brands?

The full agenda for the thinkDoubleClick event is listed below. You can join in the conversation on June 4 by using the #thinkDCLK hash and commenting during the live stream.

Register here for the thinkDoubleClick summit
June 4, 2013
9 am - 12:15 PDT

9:00 - 9:30 am	Connecting Digital, Accelerating Growth Neal Mohan, VP Display Advertising, Google
9:30 - 10:00 am	The Coca-Cola Company's Liquid & Linked Marketing: How a 127-year-old company is pivoting for success in a real-time, socially-connected world The Coca-Cola Company sells over 500 brands in 207 countries, with over 700,000 System associates and 1.8B+ servings of their beverages everyday. Hear insights and lessons learned on how the world's most valuable brand is remaining relevant by becoming more connected, transparent and nimble in real-time. Wendy Clark, Senior Vice President, Integrated Marketing Communications and Capabilities, Coca-Cola
10:00 - 10:35 am	Advertisers Must be Inventors This year, Volkswagen and Deutsch LA partnered with Google to work on a brief to re-imagine how to build a stronger, bigger community around its brand. In today’s connected world, telling stories alone isn’t enough; we need to create tangible value and utility to bring the brand’s promise to life. In this session the creative team from Deutsch LA will be talking about the process for developing more rewarding and shareable experience. Winston Binch, Partner/Chief, Digital Creative Officer, Deutsch LA David Kim, Group Creative Director, Deutsch LA
10:35 - 11:15 am	Time to Rethink the Marketing Mix? Emerging trends in digital marketing -- including new ad formats, the rise of social media, and proliferation of channels -- are creating new challenges and opportunities for brand marketers. What are the key trends marketers should be concerned about -- and how should they respond? AdAge deputy editor Michael Learmonth poses the hard questions in an executive dialogue on what’s next for brand marketing. Fireside chat with: Michael Learmonth, Deputy Managing Editor, Advertising Age Lorraine Twohill, VP, Global Marketing, Google Jonathan Nelson, CEO, Omnicom Digital
11:15 am - 12: 15 pm	New and Native: Extending the Conversation Technology has had a profound impact on the media industry. This disruption, though, has brought along significant opportunities for creative publishers to thrive. In this session we’re bringing in three executives to show how they’ve leveraged the digital revolution to deliver more engaging content and differentiated solutions to advertisers. Randall Rothenberg, President & CEO, Interactive Advertising Bureau (provocateur) Jim Lanzone, President, CBS Interactive Peter Horan, President & Chief Operating Officer, Answers Meredith Kopit Levien, Group Publisher & Chief Revenue Officer, Forbes Media

We look forward to seeing you on June 4th at thinkDoubleClick.

Posted by Rob Newton, Inside AdWords Crew

Webinar Next Thursday 5/30: Measuring Success in a Multi-Device World

Katie Miller — Thu, 23 May 2013 19:00:00 +0000

The digital journey has grown more complex, giving customers the option to move seamlessly across media and devices. This shift in technology can make it challenging to get a complete picture of customers’ interactions. As a marketer, your success depends on gaining visibility into your customers’ preferences and behaviors.

Next Thursday, join Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager for Google Analytics, for a detailed look at effective measurement for today's multi-device world. We will discuss strategies and best practices for measuring customer behavior, and we’ll look at how Google Analytics and other Google tools can help you measure and respond to the evolving customer journey.

The webinar will include live Q&A.

Date: Thursday, May 30, 2013
Time: 10am PST / 1pm EST/ 6PM GMT
Duration: 1 hr
Level: 100 / Beginner
Register: Register here

Posted by the Google Analytics team

Bidding Best Practices (Part 3) – Calculating mobile bid adjustments

Katie Miller — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:09:00 +0000

Today’s post about calculating mobile bid adjustments is the third in a bidding best practices series. The previous post covered improving your results with location bid adjustments.

People are now constantly connected and switching seamlessly between devices. In fact, more than 38% of our daily media interactions occur on mobile¹. This presents advertisers with new opportunities to reach customers anytime, anyplace, on any device. At Google, we want to help you capitalize on these opportunities and develop new strategies for your business to win on mobile.

Mobile bid adjustments in AdWords enhanced campaigns give advertisers the power to optimize bids across devices — all from a single campaign. In today’s post, we’ll help you understand how to calculate a mobile bid adjustment that accounts for the total conversion value your mobile ads drive for your business.

Review your current desktop and mobile performance
Before calculating your mobile bid adjustment, you can run an AdWords report to review your current desktop and mobile performance. While online conversions, app downloads, and calls are easy to track in AdWords, other conversions such as in-store visits may be harder to attribute directly to your ads. For those conversions, you may need to estimate their value. The closer you can estimate the value of these conversions, the more optimized your bid will be on mobile.

Calculate your mobile bid adjustment
The key to optimizing your mobile bid adjustment is to identify the ratio of mobile vs desktop (and tablet) conversion value. This is calculated by dividing your value per click on mobile by your value per click on desktop.

We’ll illustrate this calculation using the table below. Let’s say this data belongs to a national retailer with mobile and desktop websites as well as physical stores. In the past month, this retailer saw 10,000 clicks from her mobile ads and 10,000 clicks from her desktop and tablet ads. Her mobile ads drove $900 of revenue from phone calls to her stores, $5,000 from online sales and $5,000 from in-store visits for a total of $10,900. During this same month, her desktop and tablet ads drove $100 of revenue from calls, $10,000 from online sales, and $2,000 from in-store visits for a total of $12,100.

Click to enlarge image

With this information, the retailer calculates the value per click (for mobile and desktop) by dividing the total value (i.e., the total revenue from all conversion types) by the total number of clicks, respectively. In this case, the mobile value per click is $1.09 and the desktop value per click is $1.21.

The retailer’s mobile bid adjustment is the ratio of these two values: she divides the value per click on mobile by the value per click on desktop and then subtracts 1. In this case we have (1.09/1.21) - 1, or a -10% mobile bid adjustment that can be entered into AdWords.

Iterate and test
As with all online marketing techniques, mobile bid adjustments aren’t something you should just “set and forget.” Frequent iteration and testing will help you account for changes in seasonality or business operations. Due to varying screen sizes on mobile, we also recommend that you keep a close eye on your mobile impression share so that your ads show in the top positions.

Learn more
To learn more about mobile bid adjustments, visit the AdWords Help Center or watch this recording of this hangout on air, “Enhanced Campaigns: Optimizing Mobile Strategy.”

To use mobile bid adjustments, you’ll need to upgrade your campaigns to enhanced campaigns. Starting on July 22, 2013, we will begin automatically upgrading all campaigns.

Next week, we’ll dive deeper into ways you can use tools like conversion optimizer and eCPC to automate your bid settings based on specific business goals like ROI.

Posted by Andy Miller, Head of Mobile Search Solutions

¹http://www.google.com/think/research-studies/the-new-multi-screen-world-study.html

The new Display Benchmarks Tool: put context around your display campaigns

Katie Miller — Wed, 22 May 2013 21:30:00 +0000

Imagine: you’ve built a beautiful digital marketing campaign and it’s finally live. You get your reports back with a list of data points and while the numbers seem good, it’s pretty hard to understand them without any reference points. That’s the crutch: data doesn’t take on meaning when it’s just floating around in the ether; you need to build context around your data and anchor it to other relevant data points to better understand what your own numbers mean.

Industry benchmarks -- reference points aggregated from ad campaigns across the industry -- give you these comparisons. And today, for the first time, we’re launching the Display Benchmarks Tool, an easy-to-use webpage that lets you pull benchmarks to help you make better decisions about your campaigns.

Click here to enlarge

Whether you're after comparisons by country, industry vertical, ad size or ad format, our tool offers up-to-date benchmarks across 10 key display metrics, such as interaction rate and time, expansion rate and video completions. Here’s a quick demo of how to pull the benchmarks.

We've been playing around with the tool and identified some interesting trends around user engagement in our industry. Here's a bit of what we've seen:

Trend #1 User choice leads to more engagement: People want to choose how and when they consume content online. We’re starting to see new ad formats, such as the TrueView and Engagement formats, that let people choose whether to watch or skip an ad. Our benchmark data shows that people are increasingly choosing to interact with these ads. Video completion rates are the highest we’ve ever seen, with people completing 60% of the videos that they watch.

Trend #2: Richer ads lead to more engagement: Longer interaction also stems from more beautiful and compelling ads, which advertisers are increasingly incorporating in their campaigns. Interactive video ads, such as this one from Cadillac, allow advertisers to layer information about their brands on top of their video commercials. Dual-channel ads, such as this Skyfall ad, let viewers turn their mobile phones and tablets into controllers that dictate what happens within the content on their desktop. These ads represent the new creative formats that are closing the gap between advertising and awesome content. And we’re seeing the results: since last summer, people are interacting with rich media ads ~50-60% more frequently and spending ~20% more time interacting.

Click here to enlarge

Trend #3: Optimize your campaigns for engagement: Advertisers used to rely solely on click-through rates and reach/frequency reports to measure their campaigns. Now, these new rich media formats provide a better set of metrics, which help advertisers understand what’s best for users and optimize their campaigns. For example, from the benchmarks tool we’ve learned that interaction rates correlate strongly with larger ad area - the bigger the ad, the more frequently people will interact with it. Similarly, we’ve learned that rich media expanding formats are better for getting people to interact frequently, while in-page formats are better for getting people to interact for longer amounts of time. These types of insights are instrumental in making improvements to an advertiser’s campaign.

These findings confirm what we've heard from our partners -- as ads become more engaging and relevant to users, their performance improves. If you’re still hungry for more data, don’t worry -- next Tuesday, we’ll be kicking off a “Data Insights Blog Series,” where we’ll deep-dive into one trend a week and explain how the insights apply to your campaigns.

As you check out the tool for yourself, let us know if you find any nuggets you think we’ve missed. We just might feature your insight in one of our blog posts.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing, DoubleClick

Enhanced campaign upgrade tools now generally available for DoubleClick Search

Katie Miller — Wed, 22 May 2013 17:21:00 +0000

(Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Search blog)

Last month, the DoubleClick Search team introduced the beta release of dedicated tools to help advertisers seamlessly upgrade to enhanced campaigns. Today, we’re excited to announce that these tools are available to all DoubleClick Search customers globally. Read on for details around the newly available features, what's coming, and how customers are seeing success in upgrading to enhanced campaigns with DoubleClick Search.

Easily upgrade to enhanced campaigns
With this release, advertisers can save time when upgrading to enhanced campaigns with custom solutions that will:

Identify similar campaigns that target different devices within your DoubleClick Search account
Create reports to quickly merge and upload these similar campaigns into one enhanced campaign
Provide the AdWords-suggested mobile bid adjustment in DoubleClick Search for more control and precision over bids in an enhanced campaign

Learn about these features and more in the enhanced campaigns upgrade guide.

Upcoming features
This is the second of several feature rollouts we have planned for enhanced campaigns. Over the next few weeks, the DoubleClick Search team will be introducing advanced features to prepare advertisers for a constantly connected world, including support for ad group mobile bid adjustments and granular device-segmented reports.

What we’re hearing so far
With the goal of simplifying search managing, we’re continuing to invest in solutions that will help marketers run effective search campaigns across devices, as well as across channels -- and our clients are seeing the benefits.

Keith Wilson, VP of Agency Products at The Search Agency, notes: "Recent enhancements in DoubleClick Search support for enhanced campaigns has been a wind on our backs for transitioning clients to enhanced campaigns. The overall functionality within DoubleClick Search is evolving rapidly, and that enables our teams to keep pace with the changes in the paid search space with the right tools.”

After performing initial upgrades using DoubleClick Search tools, Samridhi Chawla,
Senior Account Manager at Acuvue, said: "Our accounts look cleaner after upgrading to enhanced campaigns. The DoubleClick Search team has done a great job in making the transition smooth, and we're already seeing positive results."

Hear more about our enhanced campaigns vision from our clients and product experts:

To learn more about how clients have been using our enhanced campaigns upgrade tools, we’ll be at SMX Advanced in June, where Eric Papczun, US President of Performics, will share his company's plans, successes, and best practices on upgrades through using search platforms like DoubleClick Search. Register here, and stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog to learn more about our support of enhanced campaigns features.

Posted by Kim Doan, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search

Bidding Best Practices (Part 2): Improving Results with Location Bid Adjustments

Katie Miller — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:00:00 +0000

Today’s post about improving results with location bid adjustments is the second in a bidding best practices series. The series began with prioritizing and iterating on your bid adjustments.

Your advertising performance almost always varies by location, no matter what kind of business you run. The good news is that if you optimize your bids for different locations, you can increase your sales and ROI.

Optimizing bids for better performance by location
With enhanced campaigns, it’s now now much easier to boost bids in locations where your performance is stronger and reduce bids where performance is weaker. Before enhanced campaigns, you’d have to set up and manage an identical campaign for every location where you wanted unique bids. Since this was hard, the most common approach to location optimization has been to cut out underperforming locations using targeting exclusions. But in the long run, this approach can limit your growth and reduce your business competitiveness. So we recommend using bid adjustments rather than location exclusions.

Calculating location bid adjustments
Start by downloading a location performance report. Here’s how, using the AdWords interface:

Set the date range to the past 30 days (longer if your campaign is on the smaller side).
Click on the “Location details” button and select “What triggered your ad.”
Click the View button and select Region.
Click Download.

To maximize orders or leads at a particular CPA or ROI level, a common best practice for setting bid adjustments is to equalize your target metrics across all locations. As a math formula, it looks like this:

Location bid adjustment = 100% * ( ( Campaign goal ÷ Actual performance ) - 1 )

Here’s an example from a campaign with a cost-per-action goal.

Example of calculating your location bid adjustment

Location	Conversions	Cost	CPA	CPA Goal	Location bid adjustment
Florida	100	$800	$8	$10	100% * [(10÷8) - 1] = +25%
New York	120	$1080	$9	$10	100% * [(10÷9) - 1] = +11%
Ohio	70	$1050	$15	$10	100% * [(10÷15) - 1] = -33%
Pennsylvania	85	$850	$10	$10	100% * [(10÷10) - 1] = 0%

You can implement your bid adjustments in the AdWords interface (directions) or using the AdWords Editor (directions).

Businesses with local stores or service areas
Closer customers are often more likely to buy from you and less costly to serve. So if your business has local stores or service areas, you should consider optimizing your bids based on customer proximity. For example, you can easily set one location target for customers within 2 miles of your business locations, and a second target for customers within 20 miles of your business locations (directions). Then use the approach described above to calculate your optimum bid adjustment for your two location extension targets.

Tips and reminders

Maintain a broad location target to cover your entire potential market. Targeting too narrowly can limit your reach, clicks and conversions.
It’s OK to set overlapping location targets with bid adjustments. We’ll only apply the most specific location bid adjustment. For example, say you have a +10% bid adjustment for Canada and a +20% bid adjustment for Montreal. When someone searches in Montreal, your bid will be increased by 20%. And you’ll see distinct performance stats for Montreal and all of Canada except Montreal on the Locations subtab on the campaign Settings main tab.
Be careful when you don’t have much data. Otherwise your calculated bid adjustments could end up being too high or too low, and you could end up with worse results instead of better. If you don’t have statistical expertise on hand, we recommend not adjusting bids in locations with fewer than 1000 clicks or 30 conversions, as a general rule of thumb. Lengthening the date range for your reports to the past 90 days or more can help.
Periodically check performance and increment your bid adjustments. From time to time, check your performance for each location target on the Locations subtab. Incrementally raise your bid adjustment where your performance is above your goal, and lower your bid adjustment where your performance is below your goal. This will allow you to optimize your bids over time and adjust to changing consumer behavior.

Posted by John Sullivan, Global Search Solutions

Connect, Click and Convert Around the World with Google Shopping

Katie Miller — Tue, 21 May 2013 19:10:00 +0000

On June 11th, Google Shopping will complete the transition to a commercial model in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Brazil, Australia, Switzerland and the Czech Republic. When the transition is complete, free product listings will no longer appear on Google Shopping. We believe this new model, built on Product Listing Ads, will help retailers of all sizes connect the right products with customers around the world, increase clicks to their sites, and convert more shoppers into buyers.

Onward and upward
We've been pleased with the rapid adoption of Google Shopping by the global retail community. Over 1 billion products are now being promoted globally on Google Shopping, largely driven by a 300% year-on-year growth in participating sellers (including many aggregators and marketplaces). And we’ve seen 20% growth in traffic to retailers over the past year.

Global merchant success stories
We’ve heard from a variety of retailers around the world who have embraced Google Shopping and are seeing great results. Check out the highlights below:

France	eSearchVision helped Vertbaudet, a retailer specializing in children’s apparel and decor, launch a Product Listing Ads campaign that accounted for 7% of sales from their website in the Autumn-Winter 2012 season.
Japan	Enigmo runs a social shopping site offering domestic customers brand items from sellers outside of Japan. After they optimized their data on Google Shopping and created a Product Listing Ads campaign, Enigmo succeeded in increasing the number of new customer sign-ups.
Netherlands	TuinFlora.com is a family-owned business that exports flower bulbs, seeds and plants across Europe and the US. They promoted their products on Google Shopping for their top export markets and saw their conversion rates increase by 20%.
United Kingdom	Forward3D helped New Look, a leading fashion retailer for men, women and teens in the UK, experiment with Product Listing Ads to increase reach and improve engagement beyond standard text ads. They used Merchant Center labels to categorize the catalogue by price bracket, balancing CPAs and ROI more effectively. As a result, New Look saw a 24% increase in revenue week over week, 68% overall revenue growth and 40% improved ROI. Equimedia helped WHSmith.co.uk, a retailer of books, stationery, and more, promote their products on Google Shopping. Product Listing Ads represent 6% of total PPC spend but generate 10% of the revenue, producing a total ROI that is 59% better than standard text ads.
Germany	Hurra.com helped bonprix, a leading fashion retailer, complement standard text ads with Product Listing Ads, achieving a 50% higher click-through-rate and 30% higher conversion rate at the same cost-per-click.

Make the most of Google Shopping
Whether you’re just getting started with Product Listing Ads or are looking for more advanced optimization strategies, we’ve compiled our top recommendations to succeed with Google Shopping below. Read on for these quick tips and sign up for one of our upcoming Hangouts on Air in your country to learn how you can prepare for the global commercial transition.

If you’re new to Product Listing Ads

Get started with Merchant Center, the place to upload your product data to Google
Once your products are in Merchant Center, create a Product Listing Ads campaign to promote your products on Google Shopping

If you’re already using Product Listing Ads

Use the All Products target to quickly promote your entire inventory
Take advantage of automatic bidding for Product Listing Ads, which saves you time and resources by enabling Google to automatically adjust your CPC bids to optimize traffic
Provide high quality data and follow our updated product feed specifications
Promote products across devices by ensuring all of your Product Listing Ads campaigns are upgraded to enhanced campaigns

For agencies

Join Google Engage to get the latest agency news, trainings and support from the Google Shopping team

Need additional assistance? We’re happy to help. Feel free to visit our Help Center or call one of our Shopping specialists in your country below:

Australia - 1800 087 124
Brazil - 0800 727 8947
Czech Republic - 800 500 353
France - 805 540 727
Germany - 0800 5894933
Italy - 800930819
Japan - 0120-984-684
Netherlands - 0800 2500026
Spain - 900 814 539
Switzerland - 0800 002539
United Kingdom - 0800 169 0711

Posted by: Sameer Samat, Vice President of Product Management, Google Shopping

AdWords Editor updates: More enhanced campaign features and improved performance reporting

Katie Miller — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:00:00 +0000

The latest version of AdWords Editor gives you more ways to make bulk changes to your enhanced campaigns. With the new version, you can:

Set bid adjustments for placements, topics, and audiences.
Set mobile bid adjustments at the ad group level.
Upgrade campaigns in bulk using CSV import or the Add/update multiple campaigns tool.
Use the new ValueTrack {ifmobile}, {ifnotmobile} parameters.

On the Keywords tab, new columns show detailed keyword performance metrics on the Display Network, enabling you to manage and optimize your Display campaigns with the same granular level of control as your Search campaigns. For example, you can adjust keyword bids depending on their performance, and fine-tune campaigns based on your specific goals.

We've also improved the performance statistics that you can download for locations, audiences, and placements.

For more details about these changes and other updates, see our AdWords Editor 10.1 release notes.

The next time you launch AdWords Editor, you'll see a prompt to upgrade to version 10.1. To learn more about upgrading, including how to keep unposted changes and comments when you upgrade, please review these instructions. You can also download version 10.1 from the AdWords Editor website.

Note: Support for previous versions of AdWords Editor will continue for four months to allow you time to upgrade. To ensure uninterrupted use of AdWords Editor, you will need to upgrade by September 16, 2013.

Posted by Darcy Lima, AdWords Editor

New Flexible Bid Strategies Available In Enhanced Campaigns

Katie Miller — Mon, 20 May 2013 20:00:00 +0000

Have you ever wished you could apply automated bidding to part of your campaign while manually bidding on other keywords in the same campaign? Or maybe you’ve wanted to apply a single bid strategy to some keywords, but they’re in different campaigns? Now you can with flexible bid strategies, available in the next couple weeks when you upgrade to an enhanced campaign. Flexible bid strategies let you apply multiple bidding strategies within a single campaign or across campaigns. This provides you the freedom to choose the appropriate bid strategy without being constrained by account structure.

Control and insights with new flexible bid strategies

Ramping up over the next couple weeks, flexible bid strategies can be found in the Shared library (see image below). Once you’ve created a flexible bid strategy, you can apply it to specific keywords, ad groups, and campaigns and monitor its performance.

Here’s more information about what each flexible bid strategy does and when you can use it:

Flexible bid strategy	What it does	When to use it
Target search page location (new bid strategy)	Automatically tries to get your ads to the top of the page, or onto the first page of search results	+ When you want more visibility on the first page of Google Search results or in the top positions
Maximize clicks (flexible version of Automatic Bidding)	Automatically sets bids to get you the most clicks, within a target spend amount that you choose	+ When site visits are your primary goal + When you want to maximize traffic on long tail terms and keep to a certain spend
Target CPA (flexible version of Conversion Optimizer)	Automatically sets bids to get you as many conversions as possible while reaching your target average CPA goal	+ When you want to get the most conversions at your target CPA
Enhanced CPC (flexible version of Enhanced CPC)	Automatically adjusts your manual bid up or down based on each click’s likelihood to result in a conversion	+ When conversions are the main objective, but you also want control over keyword bids

Some of our bid strategies incorporate real-time details during each auction such as device, location, and other context signals to adjust your bids based on your ad’s predicted performance. This approach offers the potential for even better performance. Target CPA and Enhanced CPC use this technology today, and it will be incorporated into other bidding strategies in the future.

Customizing the new flexible bid strategies to work for you

Flexible bid strategies let you apply a bid strategy to keywords across separate campaigns, or test multiple bid strategies within a single campaign. Say, for example, you run a network security consulting business. You might have some keywords like ‘network security’ in multiple campaigns focused on generating awareness for your business. You can apply the Target search page location bidding strategy to those specific keywords regardless of where they are in your account, to keep them in top positions. Then let’s say you have another campaign mainly aimed at lead generation with keywords like ”perimeter network security audit,” but which also has some awareness building keywords, too, like “perimeter network security best practices.” In this campaign, you can use the Target CPA bidding strategy for the lead generation ad groups and use the Target search page location bidding strategy for the awareness building keywords.

You can learn more about flexible bid strategies by visiting our help center. As with all types of automation, we recommend that you periodically monitor your bid strategies’ performance relative to your advertising goals.

In addition to new features like flexible bid strategies and support for many-per-click conversions in Conversion Optimizer, we’re working on more optimization features to help you more easily achieve your advertising goals, like return on ad spend. Let us know what you think of these new flexible bid strategies on our Ads Google+ page and stay tuned for more to come.

Posted by Andrea Cohan, Product Marketing Manager, AdWords

Explore the future of digital marketing June 4th

Katie Miller — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:00:00 +0000

What’s the future of digital media and marketing? How are CMOs thinking about leveraging digital to reach and engage audiences? What marketing channels are proving most effective in building brands digitally - paid, owned or earned?

These are some of the questions executives from across the digital marketing ecosystem will address at thinkDoubleClick, Google’s annual discussion on the state of digital.

Register now to join the event livestream on June 4th, 9:00 AM - Noon Pacific. Registration enables you to participate in the conversation, and ask speakers and panelists your questions with #thinkDCLK.

thinkDoubleClick 2013 speakers include:
Wendy Clark, Senior Vice President, The Coca-Cola Company
Jim Lanzone, President, CBS Interactive
Peter Horan, President & COO, Answers
Meredith Kopit Levien, Group Publisher & Chief, Forbes
Randall Rothenberg, CEO, IAB
Lorraine Twohill, Chief Marketing Officer, Google
Michael Learmonth, Chief Editor, AdAge

We look forward to seeing you on June 4th!

Missed last year’s event? It’s not too late to catch up with the videos below.

Posted by Scott Brown, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

Introducing Keyword Planner: combining the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator into One

Katie Miller — Mon, 20 May 2013 14:45:00 +0000

Behind every successful AdWords campaign are well planned out keywords and ad groups. In the past, you may have relied on tools like the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator to identify new keywords and ad groups, get traffic estimates, and choose competitive bids and budgets. Over time however, we’ve heard from you that having two tools for search campaign building was cumbersome.

We’re constantly working to simplify the process of building campaigns, and today we’re happy to announce the launch of a new tool, Keyword Planner, which combines the functionality of the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator into a smooth, integrated workflow. You can use Keyword Planner to find new keyword and ad group ideas, get performance estimates for them to find the bid and budget that are right for you, and then add them to your campaigns. You’ll also see some new features in the tool - some of which we’ll highlight below.

Find new keyword and ad group ideas
To find new keyword and ad group ideas, use Keyword Planner just like you would the Keyword Tool. You can search for ideas related to a keyword, your website, or a category. A new feature in Keyword Planner also allows you to ‘multiply’ keywords, or combine two or more keyword lists to generate new keywords. Unlike Keyword Tool, where you were only able to target countries, you'll now be able to target individual cities and regions within a country. Also, for each keyword idea you'll only get statistics that are specific to that exact term. To decide what keyword match type to use, you'll have to add the keyword to your plan and look at performance estimates for each match type.

Add keywords and ad groups to a plan
Next, you can review your keyword and ad group ideas and add them to a plan. Think of a plan as a shopping cart of ideas that you can add to a current or new campaign. While you build your plan, you can add ideas, delete ideas, and change your bid range to see total estimated clicks and cost. When you’re done building your plan, you can click “Get estimates and review plan” to pick a specific bid and get more detailed estimates.

Get performance estimates
When you review your plan, you’ll see a graph with a range of max CPC bids and daily performance estimates for your keywords and ad groups. To see more detailed estimates, you can select a bid (and optionally, a budget as well). You can also update your targeting settings, keywords, and ad groups to further refine your estimates. For example, you can change all your keywords in an ad group to phrase or exact match to see how this could affect performance.

When you’re satisfied with your plan, you can apply it to a new or existing campaign or download it to implement later.

With the launch of this new, combined tool, we will be sunsetting the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator in about 60 days. Please view this article for an in-depth look at the differences between using Keyword Tool and Keyword Planner. Going forward, you'll have to log in to AdWords to use Keyword Planner, which will enable you to get customized results and estimates. We hope that this integrated workflow will help you build and grow your campaigns even more efficiently. To learn more about Keyword Planner, you can also visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Deepti Bhatnagar, Product Manager, AdWords

Reach local customers searching on Google Maps

Katie Miller — Fri, 17 May 2013 21:23:00 +0000

Whether they are searching for a rental car near their office or a bakery close to a relative’s house, people expect fast, relevant and useful results from Google Maps. Great local commercial listings have always added useful information to Google Maps and helped businesses connect with consumers.

Ads in the new Google Maps
This past Wednesday at I/O, Google’s annual platform developers event, we provided a glimpse of the future of Google Maps. The new Google Maps instantly draws immersive, uniquely tailored maps for each person that adapt with every click and search to highlight the things that matter most.

We’re testing new ways to show ads in the new Google Maps:

Search ads with location extensions can appear directly on the map and just below the search box
Search ads without location extensions can appear just below the search box

Ads can appear just below the search box and directly on the map

Just like in the current version of Google Maps, the best way to have your ads seen by potential customers in the new Google Maps is to run search ads with location extensions. You’ll also need ensure you’re including search partners in your campaign network settings to appear on Google Maps.

Posted by Nabil Naghdy, Google Maps Product Manager

Upcoming Learn with Google webinar: Driving Deeper Engagement with your App Users

Katie Miller — Thu, 16 May 2013 18:00:00 +0000

With over 85 billion app downloads across the Google Play and Apple App stores, advertisers need to know how to promote their apps as efficiently as possible. They need to understand what channels drive the most engaged users and find ways to increase user engagement within their apps. With AdWords, advertisers can accomplish these goals by attributing app downloads to the right channels, measuring in-app activity, optimizing media spend towards the most valuable channels and reaching existing users with targeted messages.

Join Google on Tuesday, May 21st (10am PT/1pm ET) for a webinar about how you can drive deeper engagement with your app users. The webinar will walk you through Google’s basic app promotion tools and introduce new features.

We look forward to seeing you on May 21st!

Posted by Cameron Grace, Display Product Launch Lead

A fresh look for AdWords Express

Katie Miller — Thu, 16 May 2013 16:56:00 +0000

Today, when you log into AdWords Express, you’ll notice a brand new look. We’ve listened to your feedback and worked with a lot of small businesses to streamline the AdWords Express experience. It’s part of our ongoing efforts to make Google products more beautiful and efficient.

Clearer stats and reporting graphs
Small business owners have told us that they’re busy and that they don’t want to spend time looking for the information they need. We redesigned the dashboard to show you at a glance how many views, clicks and calls your ad has generated. There’s a simple pie chart for tracking your monthly spending, and you can also compare results over time with the new performance graph.

A faster, simpler signup
We’ve made some significant improvements to the signup experience. Now there are just 3 steps to start advertising: select your audience, create your ad, and select your budget. Getting your ad set up shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.

Real-time ad previews
With the new real-time ad preview box, you can now see your ad created right as you type. Just hover over the icons to preview all the ad formats that are available based on the text you provide. Try it out by creating an ad at google.com/adwords/express.

We’re constantly working to improve the AdWords Express user experience to make it easier for small businesses to get their ads online. Keep the feedback coming!

Posted by Cinthya Mohr and the AdWords Express User Experience Team

Meet the Mobile Champs: Introducing a new series of video interviews with mobile thought leaders

Katie Miller — Tue, 14 May 2013 15:49:00 +0000

What is top of mind for mobile leaders in the agency community? How are agencies helping their clients win with mobile? In an effort to better understand the challenges that agencies face when it comes to mobile, and to strengthen our efforts to help them tackle and overcome these challenges, we decided to bring together a group of mobile evangelists from the agency world. At a recent event in New York City, we asked a few of these mobile leaders what excites them - and what challenges them - about mobile today. Today, we are excited to share these interviews with you on Think Insights, Google’s hub for marketing insights and inspiration for advertisers and agencies.

One of the topics that we found to be top of mind for everyone is the challenge of mobile measurement in a multi-screen world. "We need to get beyond the old metrics of the Internet, television and print, and define what the new metrics are for mobile engagement," shared Jeffery Hinz, Managing Partner & US Digital Director at MediaCom. Zach Morrison, VP & Director of SEM at Elite SEM, outlines the so-called "holy grail" of understanding consumer behavior across multiple devices to see the full customer journey. As Morrison says, "The first thing people do in the morning is wake up and grab their phones and the last thing they do at night is do something on their tablet - I think the next biggest thing is tying it all together."

We also spoke with our mobile champs about topics ranging from brand building strategies to showrooming to where they think mobile is headed next. Be sure to check out the full interviews on Think Insights. We hope you will find what these mobile thought leaders had to say as interesting and thought-provoking as we did.

Posted by: Samantha Podos Nowak, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

New on Think Insights: Building websites in a multi-device world

Katie Miller — Mon, 13 May 2013 17:59:00 +0000

People are constantly connected and moving from one device to another to communicate, shop and stay entertained. They expect a great browsing experience regardless of what device they use - PC, laptop, tablet, smartphone, hybrid device, mini-tablet and television.

Creating a great website experience for consumers across all devices can help businesses generate more engagement and increase conversions. We want to support you in finding the right strategy for your business and help answer key questions related to user experience and website creation. So, today we’re launching a new initiative on Think Insights dedicated to multi-device web strategies: www.google.com/think/multiscreen

We understand that the key to success in a multi-screen world is to deliver a great user experience across devices and specifically address user needs based on context. Our new Think Insights page offers tips for businesses on how to approach multi-device websites and outlines different implementation options. We're also providing links to helpful resources, like a testing tool to analyze your website's load speed, examples of great multi-device user experience, and a list of partners that can help you get started.

This is part of our ongoing effort to provide you with industry-leading best practices, technical guidance and third party services that can help you optimize your site across screens. To stay up-to-date on the latest content added to the site, please subscribe to our monthly Think Letter.

Posted by Nabil Haschemie, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

Important Changes to AdWords Terms & Conditions In Some Countries

Katie Miller — Fri, 10 May 2013 04:47:00 +0000

The following changes apply to customers in all countries and territories in the Asia Pacific region, except China, Korea, Taiwan, and India

If you’re using AdWords, you’ve agreed to our Terms and Conditions. These are important so we have a common understanding in basic areas like policy, cancellation, payment, dispute resolution and liability.

With the advancements in our ad platforms and global growth, we need to make a few changes to keep up. So today we’re rolling out a new set of Terms and Conditions to many AdWords customers throughout the Asia Pacific region (full list).

What’s New
One of the main changes you’ll notice in the updated terms is that they accommodate new advertising products and services. For example, we now offer third-party ad serving in some situations, so you’ll see provisions about how we resolve ad serving disputes. Other changes include updated links to our policies and better consistency among our advertising terms globally.

Important Action Needed
You’ll have 45 days to review and accept the new AdWords Terms and Conditions. If you don’t accept them within 45 days, your ad serving may be paused until you’ve reviewed and agreed to them.

To review and accept the new AdWords Terms and Conditions, just sign in to your account at https://adwords.google.com. You’ll automatically be taken to a page with the updated terms and conditions. Then click to indicate your acceptance.

Not seeing the new terms when you sign into your account?
Don’t worry! If you’re not seeing the new terms when you sign into your account, there’s nothing more for you to do right now. Because we’re updating the new terms on a rolling basis, you may be scheduled for a later time. Or your terms may already have been accepted by someone you’ve authorized to act on your behalf (for example, an advertising agency, or someone you’ve authorized to be financially responsible for your accounts).

More Information
We encourage you to read through the updated terms carefully. For more information about this change to our Terms and Conditions, including a complete list of countries and territories where these changes apply, please visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Inside AdWords Crew

Understanding smartphone use in stores: Shoppers who use mobile more, spend more in store

Katie Miller — Thu, 09 May 2013 14:22:00 +0000

Smartphones are our constant shopping companions - helping us research, compare, and even purchase products online and in stores. We’ve already seen that smartphones are key to pre-purchase activities. With 84% of mobile shoppers now using their phones to help with shopping in physical stores, smartphones are now as commonplace in stores as shopping carts and cash registers. In “Mobile In-Store Research: How in-store shoppers are using mobile devices”, with the help of M.A.R.C. Research and the Google Shopper Council, we set out to understand mobile’s role in stores and how marketers can take advantage. We found that across the board, shoppers who use mobile more actually spend more in store, so marketers should face the mobile in-store challenge head on and own the digital shelf.

Smartphones are transforming the retail experience
Now that consumers have product details, price comparisons and reviews available instantly at their fingertips, shoppers complement what they’re seeing on store shelves with what they can find on the web. This behavior isn’t just limited to high consideration purchases like appliances and electronics. In every industry we looked at, including household items, apparel, and pet care, more than 70% of smartphone shoppers use their phones in store to help with shopping. In fact, two-thirds of baby product shoppers compare prices on their phones in-store.

So what are shoppers using their smartphones for in stores? The research showed that phones were primarily used for:
Price comparison (53%)
Finding offers and promotions (39%)
Finding locations of other stores (36%)
Finding hours (35%)

Shoppers who use mobile more, spend more in store
While many businesses might assume that smartphone use in store drives shoppers to seek better prices elsewhere and order online, we found that the opposite was true. We compared the in-store purchases of moderate and frequent smartphone users and found that basket sizes of frequent mobile shoppers were 25-50% higher. For instance, while the average appliance smartphone shoppers spends $250 per shopping trip, frequent smartphone shoppers spend $350. Marketers shouldn’t shy away from the showrooming challenge, and should instead, meet it head on.

Search is often the starting point for in-store mobile activity
While many marketers assume that smartphone shoppers use shopping apps or navigate directly to brand and retail websites while in a store, we found that 82% of smartphone shoppers use mobile search to help make purchase decisions. This represents a critical moment where businesses can win or lose customers - whether they’re navigating the aisle in your store or your competitor’s. Mobile shoppers are looking for information or savings in the key decision moments, so businesses should own the digital shelf by making sure they’re present when customers are searching and that relevant information is easy to find.

Understanding how mobile changes the retail game
For businesses, this new mobile behavior doesn’t just impact your marketing efforts, it also has clear implications for the entire business - from the products you stock on shelves to the way you train employees. For instance, 1 in 3 smartphone shoppers would rather find information using their smartphone than ask a store employee. In categories like electronics and appliances, this behavior occurs for close to 50% of smartphone shoppers.

However, understanding and embracing this new retail behavior can open up new opportunities for brands to connect with customers in key consideration moments. Some stores promote their expanded inventory online or implement a price match guarantee to retain savings-hungry shoppers. Others are putting smartphones to use with QR codes that share more information about products, or apps with store maps and real-time inventory. Whatever tactics marketers choose, it’s clear that smartphones are changing the in-store experience, and that winning the key decision moments at the physical shelves means owning the digital shelves too.

Check out the full research report to learn more or register now for a webinar on Thursday, May 16 where we’ll discuss the research and how businesses can take advantage of mobile use in stores.

Posted by Adam Grunewald, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

Making it easier to manage bid adjustments in enhanced campaigns

Katie Miller — Wed, 08 May 2013 17:46:00 +0000

Bid adjustments in enhanced campaigns let you easily vary your bids depending on the user context -- like location, time, and device -- all within a single campaign. By optimizing for different contexts, you can get better results with AdWords.

Ad group mobile bid adjustment rollout begins today
Starting today and continuing over the next couple weeks, we’re rolling out ad group level mobile adjustments, as previously announced. This may be useful if you’ve been operating large scale campaigns and found that your optimal bids for some keywords require different mobile bid adjustments. The majority of advertisers will still see the most value in using the existing campaign level bid adjustments in enhanced campaigns.

Change multiple bid adjustments more easily
We’re also making it easier to change bid adjustments for several locations, dayparts and devices at the same time.

Say you want to set a bid adjustment of +10% for three cities that you’re targeting. Just tick the checkboxes next to each location, then click the “Set bid adjustment” button (see image below).

You’ll then be able to enter the +10% adjustment and apply the changes to all of the locations you’ve selected, rather than needing to enter the adjustments one at a time. This handy feature is available for making changes across multiple campaigns when you’re in the “All online campaigns” view, as well as when you’re editing a single campaign.

If you’re managing multiple campaigns and need to replicate lots of location bid adjustments or time-based bid adjustments from one campaign to another, you’ll save time by using the AdWords Editor. Available on Windows and Mac OS, AdWords Editor lets you easily copy and paste settings across campaigns, then review and post your changes.

Enhanced campaign reminders
Starting on July 22, 2013, we will begin upgrading all campaigns to enhanced campaigns.

We’d like to hear your suggestions on ways we can make managing enhanced campaigns faster and easier. Please share your ideas using this form so we can continue to improve the experience.

Posted by Prashant Baheti, AdWords Product Manager

Updated Google Shopping feed specification

Katie Miller — Wed, 08 May 2013 15:00:00 +0000

Last year, we announced the rollout of the new Google Shopping commercial model built on Product Listing Ads both in the United States and globally. We believe these changes, and the improved user experience, will create new opportunities for merchants and help retailers of all sizes attract more customers to their stores.

The quality of data provided by merchants is critical for achieving these goals. Therefore, we're announcing some changes to the Google Shopping Feed Specification:

We are improving our support for merchant-defined multipacks. For example, many consumer products like toothpaste are sold in custom multipacks. The feed specification now clarifies how such products should be submitted.
We are moving towards a world with high-resolution displays. Therefore, we are also starting to recommend higher-quality images with at least 800 pixels in height and width to give users a better visual representation of advertised products.
Some products like custom goods, vintage items, or collectibles don't have unique product identifiers. For such products we are now introducing the 'identifier exists' attribute. Additionally, we have updated our requirements on unique product identifiers.
We have updated our guidance for the description and color attributes to make them more precise and actionable.
We now provide dedicated support for energy efficiency labels and unit pricing for merchants targeting countries in the European Union and Switzerland.
Merchants promoting non-family safe items on family-safe websites can now tag individual items as non-family safe.

Some of these changes won't be visible to Google Shopping users immediately. We want to give merchants enough time for preparation and adoption. We encourage merchants to use the test feeds feature or the feed debugger to ensure that their updated feeds can be processed correctly.

Merchants can review the new feed specifications and a summary of attribute requirements to help prepare for these changes. They should always make sure to comply with legal requirements while participating in the Google Shopping program.

Enforcement of new Google Shopping Feed SpecificationsFor accounts that are currently exempted from requiring unique product identifiers, Google Shopping will start enforcing these new requirements for unique product identifiers on July 15th, 2013 in the US, and September 16th, 2013 in all other target countries. Enforcement for all other accounts will start July 15th, 2013 for the US, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, and September 16th, 2013 for all other target countries. Non-compliant items might then be disapproved and disappear from Google Shopping.

Account level exemptions for unique product identifiers won’t be supported after the above mentioned dates – the 'identifier exists' attribute should be used instead.

Posted by Angelika Rohrer, Program Manager, Google Shopping

Bidding Best Practices (Part 1 of 6) – Prioritizing and Iterating on Your Bid Adjustments

Katie Miller — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:00:00 +0000

Today, we are kicking off an in-depth education series to help advertisers optimize bids for their AdWords campaigns in the multi-screen world using many of the new features and tools that we recently introduced. Throughout the series, we’ll cover best practices for setting bid adjustments within enhanced campaigns, including recommendations for how to set mobile, location, and time of day bid adjustments. We’ll also showcase ways to incorporate automation into the bid optimization process and share how businesses are using these solutions to meet specific objectives. We hope you will find this series useful.

Today’s post will provide best practices for prioritizing bid adjustments across location, time and device. It will also suggest ways to optimize these adjustments over time, especially as outcomes and business conditions change.

Overview

In this new multi-screen world, advertisers are seeking new ways to reach people with ads that are relevant to their context. With an enhanced campaign, you can easily reach consumers and vary bids by device, location, and time of day – all within a single campaign. Learn more about the three types of bid adjustments and what each one can do for your business.

Stacking bid adjustments

Bid adjustments can be stacked on top of each other to optimize reach for each campaign. For example, if you operate a store in San Francisco and know that your campaign performs well on mobile devices on every day except Sunday, then you can set bid adjustments to increase bids for mobile and San Francisco; and decrease them for Sundays.

Example:

Adjusted keyword bid =
Initial keyword bid $1.00 X (San Francisco 1.2) X (Sunday 0.5) X (Mobile 1.1) = $0.66

In this example, we set the location bid adjustment for San Francisco to +20%, the time bid adjustment for Sunday to -50%, and the mobile bid adjustment to +10%. Assuming that your initial bid was $1.00, then your final bid would be $0.66, or -34% compared with your original bid.

Multiple bid adjustments, as in this example, can help you achieve a desired bidding strategy. But individual bid adjustments still apply across all dimensions. For example, the decreased bid for Sundays applies across all devices and geographies.

Prioritizing bid adjustments

The way you manage your business operations and set overall goals are key factors that determine the order in which you set bid adjustments. We recommend setting your most important bid adjustment type first (location, device or time). When you’re happy with your performance, you can add the second type of bid adjustments -- and eventually the third.

It’s a good idea to apply basic business sense to this process:

If you have a store which is only open during certain hours, time will likely be the most important bid adjustment to set first.
If you see very different advertising performance across countries, cities, states or zip codes (or if you wish to bid higher for users who are physically close to your stores), location may be the first bid adjustment to set.
If your advertising performance varies widely between mobile and non-mobile devices, device could be your starting point for bid adjustments.

AdWords provides useful information to determine which bid adjustment type is the most important one for you. You may also have third-party tools or backend systems that can inform prioritization.

Iterate

Over time, you should iterate on each of your bid adjustments to achieve desired outcomes as your results and business conditions change. We recommend reviewing these adjustments on a regular basis to capture seasonal changes and to ensure that you are optimizing for ROI.

Keep in mind that better data about your advertising performance will help you optimize your bid adjustments. Below are some tips:

If you do not track conversions, you can optimize your bid adjustments based on clicks or impressions.
If you do track the number of conversions (using AdWords Conversion Tracking, Google Analytics or other tools), you can set your bid adjustments based on your actual conversions and CPA.
If you track the revenue or profit associated with each conversion (using the Ecommerce functionality of Google Analytics or other tools), you can set your bid adjustments based on the actual revenue that results from your ads.

Reminders

To use the features that we reviewed today, you’ll need to upgrade your campaigns to enhanced campaigns. Starting on July 22, 2013, we will begin automatically upgrading all campaigns. Learn more.

Next week, we’ll dive deeper into how to customize your mobile bid adjustment for each campaign by combining your AdWords data (impressions, clicks and cost) with key stats about your business, like number of in-store visitors from your ads and their average order value.

Posted by John Sullivan, Global Search Solutions

Announcing: Hangout on Air on Ad Disapprovals and Review Process

Katie Miller — Mon, 06 May 2013 23:32:00 +0000

Ads are at the lifeblood of any AdWords campaign — they share what’s unique about your business and drive users to action. But since we only want our users to see high-quality ads, disapproved ads are prevented from ever showing.

Some of the most common disapproval reasons can be fixed with just a quick edit to the ad:
(1) Destination URL (Invalid HTTP Response Code, Broken Link)
(2) Display URL (Inaccurate Display URL, One Display URL Domain Per Ad Group)
(3) Editorial Standards (Capitalization, Punctuation & Symbols)

To understand how you can avoid these common disapproval reasons or fix your ads if they’re disapproved, tune in to the Google Ads G+ page Hangout on Air with AdWords Specialists on Thursday, May 9. The Hangout on Air will be live both 11am GMT and 11am PDT, so advertisers around the globe can tune in.

To join the Hangouts, just sign into Google+ and add the Google Ads +Page to your circles. Then, on Thursday, navigate to your Stream where you’ll be able to view our Hangout live with just one click. See you there!

Posted by Charvi Singh and Saarini Bagga, Ads Review Operations

Simpler account structure for applicable accounts created before June 2012

Katie Miller — Mon, 06 May 2013 19:08:00 +0000

Last June, we simplified the process of setting up and managing your AdWords campaigns, allowing you to select a campaign type that best fits your needs. All campaigns created before we added these options were defaulted to “All features.” If you are not utilizing any of the advanced features in AdWords, we will migrate your campaign type to “Standard”, which provides a simpler AdWords experience. Note that this change, if appropriate, will happen only for campaigns which are classified “Search Network only” or “Search and Display networks.”

What’s happening?

In the next few weeks, if you have campaigns that only use the features exposed by “Standard” campaigns, we will be migrating them to the “Standard” type. This does not affect how your campaigns serve at all, but it will greatly simplify the set of features that you see when you are using AdWords to manage these campaigns. If you want to change your campaign types back to “All Features,” the migration is easily reversible. Simply go into your campaign settings, and under “Type” you can choose the campaign type you feel best suits your needs.

For more information on choosing a campaign type that is right for you, visit our help center.

Posted by Prashant Baheti, Product Manager, AdWords

New Learn with Google Webinars to Help you Become a Smarter Digital Marketer

Katie Miller — Thu, 02 May 2013 16:54:00 +0000

At Google, one of our goals is to help make the web work for you. Today we’re announcing a new series of Learn with Google webinars, which will teach you how to use digital to build brand awareness and give you the tools you need to drive sales and grow loyalty and retention. Each of our sessions gives you deep-dive educational content, across a breadth of products and marketing objectives, in a format that’s convenient for you. Every webinar is led by Google product experts and includes time for audience Q&A. Sign up to start becoming a smarter digital marketer now.

Upcoming live webinars:

May
[YouTube] Driving Direct Response with Video
[Shopping] Google Shopping 101: Google Shopping for Beginners
[Research] New Research: How US Shoppers use Smartphones in Stores
[Mobile] Driving Deeper Engagement with your App Users
[Mobile] Driving Brand Engagement with Mobile Rich Media
[Analytics] Measuring Success in a Multi-Device World

June
[Mobile] Understanding Mobile Ads Across Marketing Objectives
[Shopping] Google Shopping 201: Merchant Center Deep Dive
[YouTube] Building your Business with YouTube Video Ads
[Analytics] Metrics for the Mobile App Ecosystem
[Search] What's New & Next in AdWords
[Analytics] Unleashing the Combined Power of Google Analytics & AdWords
[Social] Growing your Business & Engaging your Audience with Google+
[Shopping] Google Shopping 301: Creating & Optimizing Product Listing Ads
[Social] Launching & Amplifying your Impact Across Social Channels
[Display] Reaching the Right Audience with Remarketing
[Research] Creating Custom Infographics with the New Google Databoard

Webinars are held Tuesdays through Thursdays at 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern.

Visit our webinar site to register for any of the live sessions and to access our large library of recorded content. You can also stay up-to-date on the schedule by adding our Learn with Google calendar to your own Google calendar to automatically see upcoming webinars.

During our last series of webinars, attendees had the chance to win a Nexus 7. Clint Wilson was our lucky winner and he’ll soon be enjoying all of the tablet’s cool features. Check out our upcoming webinars for another chance to win!

Learn with Google is a program to help businesses succeed through winning moments that matter, enabling better decisions and constantly innovating. 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 seeing you at an upcoming session!

Posted by Erin Molnar, Marketing Coordinator, Learn with Google

AdWords spreadsheet edit feature to be sunset May 30

Katie Miller — Wed, 01 May 2013 16:00:00 +0000

When we created the spreadsheet edit feature in 2009, we wanted to make it easier for you to make bulk changes in your campaigns. Since that time, we have released bulk editing to help you make large-scale changes across your AdWords account, and keyword bulk uploads to help you add, edit and remove keywords at scale. Bulk editing and keyword bulk uploads cover all the capabilities of spreadsheet edit while being more powerful and scalable. In light of this, we are sunsetting spreadsheet edit on May 30.

If you are accustomed to using spreadsheet edit, then based on what you want to achieve, you can do one of two things:

You can click the “Edit” drop down and choose the type of bulk edit you want to make. Bulk edits on your keywords will allow you to:

Search and replace text in the keyword or destination URL
Append text to the keyword or destination URL
Set new bids, including increasing to first page or top of page CPC
Increase or decrease bids
Change keyword match types
Add/remove labels

You can use keyword bulk uploads. On the same page where you’ve always been able to download keyword reports, click the box that says “Editable.” This will download a special, editable version of the keyword performance report that you can modify and then upload.

For more information about using these features in place of the spreadsheet edit feature, read the bulk edits article and the keyword bulk uploads article in our help center.

Posted by Prashant Baheti, Product Manager, AdWords

The Importance of Being Seen: Viewability and Brands

Katie Miller — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 13:00:00 +0000

Brand marketers since the “Mad Men” era have often sought insight to a simple question: ‘Was my ad seen?’ The answer was that your ad was published, your commercial ran, your online impression served on a web page, but it was impossible to say with certainty whether an ad was viewed or not. Thanks to leaps forward in digital technology and the hard work of many in the industry, it's now possible to measure whether an ad is viewable onscreen. Given this progress, it's not a matter of if this becomes the standard, but when.

We support a viewable impressions standard and have been partnering with the industry to push this forward. Today we've reached an important milestone on this journey - Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation for our viewability measurement solution, Active View, which we introduced last year.

"We are very pleased that Google has achieved accreditation for its Active View product" said George Ivie, CEO and Executive Director of the Media Rating Council. "Viewable impressions are an important foundational improvement in digital measurement and an important step toward comparability with other electronic media."

Active View complements our other investments in making digital an effective medium for brand marketers and their awareness-building campaigns, like Lightbox ads and TrueView in AdMob and games. These efforts appear to be paying off for brand advertisers: we saw a 65 percent increase last quarter alone in the number of brand advertisers using our brand formats and buying tools.

The Active View Roadmap

Viewability has the power to transform the industry: improving the value of marketers’ spend, and of publishers’ sites. We’ve also designed this metric to be actionable, not just for after-the-fact reporting. Based on Active View, advertisers can buy reservable inventory on the Google Display Network (GDN), paying only for impressions that meet the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s proposed viewability standard - at least 50% on screen for one second or longer.

Effective metrics also serve as a universal currency, building an understanding between marketers and content creators about the best way to reach an audience, and the value of an ad on a page. This is why we’ll be building Active View into our products both for advertisers and publishers. In addition to its use on the GDN, Active View reporting will be available in DoubleClick for Advertisers and DoubleClick for Publishers in 2013. Long term, we see this becoming the new standard for how impressions are bought, sold and measured, replacing the “served impressions” metric we have today.

While many intuitively suspected that increased viewability would directly translate into better campaign performance, we now have data to back that up. On our network, we compared ads by the number of seconds they appeared on screen and found:

Users are more likely to click on viewable ads -- up to 21 times more.
Viewability can help publishers discover “gold below the fold,” with CTR doubling, on average, for below-the-fold inventory. On average, we’ve found that CTR is comparable for viewable above-the-fold and viewable below-the-fold inventory.
The longer users view an ad, the bigger the boost for click-through rates (we saw up to a 125% increase when an ad was viewed for more than 20 seconds).

Figure 1. Comparison of CTR for viewable v. non-viewable ads, shown for all ads (left panel) and BTF inventory only (right panel) (100% = the average CTR of the specified dataset).

Figure 2. CTR by viewable time, detail.
*Data source for all figures: Google Display Network 2% sample from February 2013; Brand rank of 0.3 or greater; display ads only; viewable = 50% onscreen. In all figures, 100% on the y-axis denotes the average CTR across all ad queries in the specified dataset.

Google’s MRC accreditation, which currently applies to the Google Display Network and DoubleClick for Advertisers, was based on a thorough assessment of a number of factors, including the detection process, quality control and delivery standards.

With this accreditation, we are one step closer to making a viewable standard a reality for our partners. With better measurement, we think it's possible to unlock a new golden age of creation across the web, where users can enjoy great content, brands can connect with their customers and content creators can accelerate their growth.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Display Advertising

The Customer Journey to Online Purchase

Katie Miller — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 17:56:00 +0000

Savvy marketers understand that you don’t always seal the deal with a single message, image, or advertisement. A user may see a display ad, click on a link from a friend, or do a search before buying something from your website — and all of these interactions can play a role in the final sale. It’s important to understand the entire customer journey so you can measure all of the elements that contribute to your campaigns, attribute the right value to them, and adjust your marketing budgets where appropriate.

That’s the philosophy behind Google Analytics tools like Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution Modeling. Tens of thousands of our largest advertisers are gaining valuable insights from Multi-Channel Funnels every month, and we’ve collected these insights using aggregate statistics to develop a benchmarking tool — The Customer Journey to Online Purchase. This interactive tool lets you explore typical online buying behavior and see how different marketing interactions affect business success.

The tool draws on Ecommerce and Multi-Channel Funnels data from over 36,000 Google Analytics clients that authorized sharing, including millions of purchases across 11 industries in 7 countries. Purchase paths in this tool are each based on interactions with a single ecommerce advertiser.

You’ll find benchmark data for:

how different marketing channels (such as display, search, email, and your own website) help move users towards purchases. For example, some marketing channels play an “assist” role during the earlier stages of the marketing funnel, whereas some play a “last interaction” role just before a sale.
how long it takes for customers to make a purchase online (from the first time they interact with your marketing to the moment they actually buy something), and how the length of this journey affects average order values.

Channel Roles in the Customer Journey
The data shows that every industry is different — the path to purchase for hotel rooms in Japan is not necessarily the same as the path as for an online supermarket in Canada.

A few findings stand out, in particular:

As you might expect, customers typically click on display ads early in their purchase journeys, but in some industries, such as US travel and auto, display clicks tend to occur closer to the purchase decision.
Across industries and countries, paid search has a fairly even assist-to-last interaction ratio, implying that this channel can act both in the earlier and later stages of the customer journey.

Advanced tip:

Once you’ve explored the benchmarks, look deeper into your own marketing data with the Multi-Channel Funnel reports, and consider defining your channels and campaigns to separate out categories that are specific to your business needs.

Purchase values and the length of the journey
We also see interesting patterns emerge when examining the length of the customer journey. While the majority of purchases take place within a single day or a single step (i.e., a single interaction with one marketing channel), longer paths tend to correlate with higher average order values.

For example,

in US Tech, online purchases that take more than 28 days are worth about 3.5 times more than purchases that occur immediately. And while 61% of tech purchases take place on that first day, only 53% of revenue comes from single-day purchases.
in Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), on the other hand, most purchases (82%) are quick, likely because these are smaller and simpler purchases that don’t require much research.
in Edu / Gov, 41% of revenue comes from multi-day purchases, but 60% of revenue comes from multi-step purchases — suggesting that even when customers make decisions in a relatively short time period, they often have multiple marketing interactions before purchasing.

Advanced tip:

In Multi-Channel Funnels or the Attribution Modeling Tool, you can adjust the lookback window to reflect the typical length of the purchase path in your industry. For example, if your business tends to have shorter paths, you can zoom in on paths that take 5 days or less:

Putting the benchmarks to work
For marketers, it’s always a crucial challenge to design campaigns that deliver the right message at the right moment in a customer’s journey to purchase. We hope these benchmarks will provide useful insights about the journey and help you put your business into context. In particular, take a look at the final infographic, the “Benchmarks Dashboard,” to get a quick overview of your industry. Then, when you view your own data in the Multi-Channel Funnels reports in Google Analytics, you’ll gain a better understanding of where different channels impact your conversions and what your typical path looks like, so you can adjust your budgeting and marketing programs accordingly.

Try The Customer Journey to Online Purchase today on Google’s new Think Insights website.

Happy analyzing!

Posted by Paul Muret, Director of Engineering, Google Analytics

Easier planning, better reporting: New tools for display ads

Katie Miller — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 23:58:00 +0000

Great ad campaigns have always required two things: knowing your audience, and using that knowledge to reach them in smart ways.

Today we're thrilled to announce new innovations that will help display advertisers with both parts of that equation. They are the Google Display Planner and two new reports: Demographic Performance and Placement Performance.

First, meet the Google Display Planner, a free research and planning tool that delivers targeting ideas and estimates to help you build better display campaigns. Based on data you enter, the tool suggests places to run your ads on the Google Display Network along with key related details: impression and cookie ranges for our inventory, age and gender breakdowns, and historical cost-per-click (CPC) information. These features can help you:

Find new inventory. Display Planner finds and suggests thousands of websites, mobile applications and video channels for your ads across the online world.
Generate targeting ideas. Are you trying to reach golfers, or new parents? Just describe their interests, websites you know they visit and products they buy. Display Planner will use that data to suggest good keywords and other targeting ideas.
Turn data into insights. What is the total opportunity for your Google Display Network campaign and what can you expect in return? Display Planner tells you, with estimates and historical data to back it up.

click for larger image

Display Planner is part of AdWords, so with one click you can add your plan directly to your account, or download to share it. Display Planner will be available in the Tools & Analysis menu, and will be rolling out to the US over the course of this week, and globally in the next few weeks. You can learn more in our Help Center.

Now for the other half of the equation: knowing your audience. Our two new reports will help you understand how your ads perform across different customer segments and websites.

Demographic Performance Reports show how different demographic segments, gender and age buckets, respond to your messages by showing the impression, click and conversion rates for each group - a marketer's dream! Armed with these new insights you can quickly tailor your ads to be more relevant for your audience, and modify your targeting and bidding settings for better performing campaigns.

New Age Reports in Display Network Tab

click for larger image

New Placement Performance Reports combine automatic and managed placements in one report, so you can see quickly how your ads perform on different websites and adjust your targeting and bidding accordingly and with ease. These new reports will be available globally in the next few weeks in the Display Network Tab.

The beauty of digital is real-time information and real-time action. We hope these new features will give you more insights, better ways to act on them, and an easier and more efficient way for you to buy display ads.

Posted by Christian Oestlien, Director of Product Management, Google Display Network

Upgrade to enhanced campaigns more easily with the new AdWords upgrade center

Katie Miller — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 16:03:00 +0000

Enhanced campaigns help you reach people with the right ads based on their context - including location, time of day and device - without having to set up and manage several separate campaigns. For most advertisers, upgrading is a simple 3-step process. Already, advertisers have upgraded more than 1.5 million campaigns and seen strong results.

New upgrade center

Today we're introducing the upgrade center to make upgrading easier for advertisers with lots of campaigns. With the upgrade center, you can upgrade several campaigns at a time and merge campaigns together with just a few clicks. As the upgrade center rolls out to all accounts over the next few weeks, you can access it from the left-hand nav bar on the Campaigns tab.

Upgrade center entry point

There are two basic ways to use the upgrade center.

1. Bulk upgrade

This option provides a fast way to upgrade multiple campaigns that don’t need to be merged. Rather than upgrade campaigns one at a time, you can select several campaigns, choose a mobile bid adjustment, view traffic estimates, and upgrade with fewer clicks.

2. Merge and upgrade

If you have search-only or search+display campaigns that have similar keywords and location targets, the upgrade center automatically identifies them as candidates to merge. You’ll then be able to preview and adjust the proposed campaign settings, ad groups, and extensions for the merged campaign. By default, ad groups and budgets will be combined. Other campaign level settings and extensions in the Primary campaign will override those in the Secondary campaign.

Table view of merged campaign settings

After creating new enhanced campaigns, we recommend upgrading your extensions for more control, flexibility and relevance. You may also want to add back any important keywords, negatives, extensions, or location targets from your Secondary campaign which were left behind in the merge.

We recommend upgrading display-only campaigns rather than merging them together. The upgrade tool doesn't support the ability to merge image ads, audience targeting criteria, and other display-specific campaign elements.

There’s also an advanced mode in the upgrade center, which provides a view of all of the campaigns in your account, providing more flexibility and less guidance if you’ve already developed a strategy for how to merge and upgrade.

Reminders
Starting on July 22, 2013, we will begin upgrading all campaigns to enhanced campaigns. As you’re upgrading to enhanced campaigns, please continue to share your feedback using our feedback form.

To learn more about strategies for upgrading to enhanced campaigns and the upgrade center, please join us today at 10:00 a.m. PDT at our Learn with Google webinar.

Posted by Neil Inala, Product Manager, AdWords

Enhanced campaigns improvements for Google+ and mobile apps

Katie Miller — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:04:00 +0000

People are constantly connected and are moving between devices throughout the day to shop, connect and stay entertained. This creates great opportunities for advertisers to use context – like location, time of day, and device – to show the right ad and bid more efficiently. In February, we launched enhanced campaigns to help you reach people with ads based on their context as well as their intent. Since then, advertisers have already upgraded over 1.5 million campaigns and have shared many success stories.

We’ve also continued to build new features on the enhanced campaigns foundation. Today, we are introducing two additions.

Enhanced campaigns and social annotations

People are looking for relevant information, and sometimes the most helpful signals are recommendations from people who know a brand or business well. Social annotations in AdWords show endorsements from people following your Google+ page on your search ads. Many businesses such as Red Bull, National Geographic and H&M are using social annotations as part of their broader Google+ strategy. On average, search ads with social annotations have a 5-10% higher click-through rate.

Starting today, enhanced campaigns will include social annotations when they can improve ad performance, without additional edits to campaign settings. All you need is a Google+ page with a significant number of followers and a linked website that matches the URL in your search ads. Learn more about how this works.

Social annotations on AdWords work hand-in-hand with your Google+ page to build community, conversation and engagement with your business on Google. Learn more about getting your business started on Google+.

Enhanced campaigns for mobile app advertisers

Apps have become a significant part of people’s everyday mobile experiences. In fact, US consumers spend an average of 127 minutes per day using mobile apps¹. Advertisers can now reach app users, with ads in apps, based on people’s context like location, time of day and device, with enhanced campaigns. For example, if a certain mobile app has the most usage on Saturday evenings, you can increase your bid adjustments for mobile and this time of day to reach these users. You can also adjust bids across the key display signals like demographics, interests, topics and remarketing at the ad group level. All of these powerful bidding tools will enable you to reach the right people with the right ads.

Upgrading strategies webinar tomorrow

After upgrading, you’ll be able to start using all of the new features in enhanced campaigns. Join us tomorrow, Tuesday, April 23, 2013 at 10am PDT, for a Learn with Google webinar about upgrade strategies (sign up here).

Feedback

We really value your feedback to help us make AdWords even better. Please continue to share your thoughts using this form so we can continue to improve the product.

Posted by Christian Oestlien, Director of Product Management, Google Display Network

¹"Time Spent with Mobile Apps Rivals TV emarketer. December 11, 2012."

A healthy advertising ecosystem

Katie Miller — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 17:49:00 +0000

Online advertising helps to support the services we all enjoy and enables businesses to grow. The vast majority of our online publishers are terrific partners we love working with. But, as always in life, there are a few bad apples.

So, we invest a lot of time and effort in keeping them off our systems.

1. Policies

Our publisher partners are required to adhere to strict policies, which we regularly update to deal with new issues. These policies cover how how ads are displayed and how end users view them, as well as what site content is prohibited. We also work to make sure publishers are treated fairly and know the rules.

2. Automated Technology

Our main line of defense against these bad apples is technology — which enables us to monitor the clicks and impressions we receive, and also to scan both our partners’ sites and downloadable software. These tools operate at the click- and page-levels, so we can pick up bad content and bad practices (like artificial traffic) at a very granular level.

3. Human Review

We have hundreds of employees around the world who review web pages, test our partners’ downloadable software, and prevent ads from showing on sites that violate our policies. Depending on the severity and persistence of the offense, they may stop ad serving on that page or site, or across the publisher’s entire account.

4. Advertiser Transparency and Controls

We believe that marketers should have transparency into where their ads are being placed, and control over where their ads appear. Our clients regularly get reports that show what their ads looked like in the context of a given page. We offer tools such as DoubleClick Ad Verification and Active View, which enable marketers to check whether their ad was served and seen. We also offer granular control, such as the ability to buy various pre-vetted packages of inventory on high-quality sites, and tools to exclude particular sites or categories. This transparency gives advertisers the power to have their ads appear on the websites that are most appropriate for them.

Trends and recent developments

The numbers show we continue to make good headway. We have doubled the rate at which we review publisher inventory — enabling us to deal with bad sites and practices more quickly. In 2012, we found 17% fewer bad actors than in the previous year — even though we increased enforcement and tightened our policies.

Advertisers are recognizing that we offer a high-quality environment for their ads; this helps to support great experiences for everyone.

To illustrate one ongoing effort, I want to highlight our recent changes in the area of downloadable software.

Downloadable software, such as toolbars that operate in your browser, offers a wide variety of services to users. Our Software Principles have long guided our approach.

In recent years there have been increased reports of software applications that:

Unexpectedly change your default browser, search engine or homepage;
Clutter up your browser and screen, or interfere with your web browsing experience — for example unexpectedly inserting ads into your browser;
Make it very difficult to remove downloaded software from your device or to restore your defaults;
Load additional unwanted software applications to your device; and
Access personal information or infect your machine with malware.

For example, in the last 90 days, we have seen over 100,000 complaints about software that changed users’ browser settings or about toolbars that they couldn’t uninstall. We want to avoid these kinds of bad user experiences. So we recently updated our policies and enforcement to ensure that software accessing our services complies with the following rules. It must:

Be pre-approved by Google;
Offer one-click, complete uninstall;
Provide clear, full disclosure and transparency to people about what is being installed and what changes are being made to their devices;
Install itself on only one browser per download;
Be bundled with and distributed by only reputable parties who comply with our policies.

It’s simple — we don’t want our programs or services abused in ways that can harm users. We believe that our ongoing efforts to fight abuse will ensure our advertising ecosystem continues to work in the best interests of users, publishers and advertisers.

Posted by Vinay Rao, Ad Traffic & Publisher Quality Operations

Ad group mobile bid adjustments available soon in enhanced campaigns

Katie Miller — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 16:02:00 +0000

People are constantly connected and moving between devices to communicate, shop and stay entertained. Their context – like location, time of day, and device – is an increasingly important signal for advertisers. In February, we launched enhanced campaigns to help you reach people with ads based on their context as well as their intent, all from a single campaign. In just a few short months since launch, we are already hearing enhanced campaigns success stories from businesses of all sizes.

Ad group mobile bid adjustments
To provide more control and precision over bids in an enhanced campaign, advertisers will soon be able to set a mobile bid adjustment at the ad group level. This functionality will be available to all advertisers in mid-May. We think this may be useful if you’ve been operating large scale campaigns and found that your optimal bids for some keywords would require significantly different mobile bid adjustments within an enhanced campaign.

Example: A nationwide retail chain currently uses mobile-only campaigns to optimize bids for several hundred thousand keywords. They’ve found that 95% of their keywords in mobile-only campaigns have bids that are 10% lower than in the equivalent desktop campaigns. The remaining 5% of their keywords have very different bid ratios (ranging from 40% lower to 100% higher) based on differences in performance and competition on mobile and desktop. By using the new ad group bid adjustments for mobile, this retailer can better maintain their desired bids and ROI on different devices as they upgrade to enhanced campaigns.

The majority of advertisers will still see the most value in using the existing campaign level bid adjustments in enhanced campaigns, so we recommend that you upgrade now to access all the new features. Upgrading takes an easy 3 steps for most advertisers [video]:

Click the “Get started” button when you log into adwords.google.com
Select a mobile bid adjustment
Click “Complete upgrade”

Upcoming dates
We’ll share more details and tips here on the AdWords blog when ad group level mobile bid adjustments are generally available in mid-May. API access for this feature will be available in early May and announced on the developer blog.

We will begin automatically upgrading all AdWords campaigns to enhanced campaigns starting on July 22, 2013.

Feedback
Thank you for your feedback on enhanced campaigns. Please continue to share your thoughts with us using this form so we can continue to improve the product.

Posted by Bhanu Narasimhan, Group Product Manager

4 days left for Google Shopping promotional credit

Katie Miller — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:00:00 +0000

In December, we announced a promotional credit for all eligible merchants in Australia, Japan, Brazil, Czech Republic, Spain, Italy, France, Netherlands, U.K., Germany and Switzerland who create a Product Listing Ad campaign promoting all the products in their Merchant Center account before April 12, 2013. This credit is designed to help international merchants transition to Google Shopping's new commercial model, built on Product Listing Ads. This transition will be complete in June 2013.

With only 4 days left until the April 12th deadline, we encourage merchants in the countries below to learn more about the promotional credit and apply before it’s too late!

$100 AUD Australia	R$120 Brazil	1000 Kč Czech Republic
€ 75 France	€ 75 Germany	€ 75 Italy
7,500 JPY Japan	€ 75 Netherlands	€ 75 Spain
100 CHF Switzerland	￡75 United Kingdom

In addition to the promotional credit above, eligible merchants with a Product Listing Ad campaign promoting all products will receive a monthly credit for 10% of their total Product Listing Ad spend up to to June 30, 2013.

To get help setting up your Product Listing Ads, please visit this quick guide, email us through this form or call one of our specialists at your country’s number below.

Google Shopping global phone support:
Australia - 1800 087 124
Brazil - 0800 727 8947
Czech Republic - 800 500 353
France - 805 540 727
Germany - 0800 5894933
Italy - 800930819
Netherlands - 0800 2500026
Spain - 900 814 539
Switzerland - 0800 002539
United Kingdom - 0800 169 0711

You can also join Google Engage for Agencies on April 10, 9:00AM PST/12:00PM EST to learn how you can help your clients use this beautifully simple experience to better promote their products and attract more customers.

We'll share an overview of Google Shopping, insights into new features, and optimization tips and best practices.

RSVP for the Hangout on Air here.

Posted by Erica Sievert, Product Marketing Manager, Google Shopping

Succeeding with enhanced campaigns

Katie Miller — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:00:00 +0000

About two months ago, we launched enhanced campaigns to help you more simply and smartly manage your campaigns in today’s multi-device world. Recently we’ve been hearing some great stories about ways that advertisers have improved their performance and saved time with enhanced campaigns. While every advertiser’s business and potential gains may be unique, here are a few examples that highlight actual strategies and results achieved so far with enhanced campaigns.

E-travel has improved CTR and conversion rate with context-optimized ads, mobile app downloads, and upgraded sitelinks.

E-Travel is one of the leading online travel agents in Greece, Cyprus and Russia, and has presence in other markets in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. After upgrading to enhanced campaigns, CEO Anil Valbh reported, “We can now show our ads according to people's context like location or time of day [... and] count app downloads as conversions in AdWords reports, which is very important for us because so many of our new customer leads come from our mobile app. These features along with the upgraded sitelinks helped us boost clickthrough rate by 43% and conversion rate by 88%."

American Apparel has doubled its volume of phone leads with enhanced campaigns, improving return on ad spend.

American Apparel, a multi-channel fashion retailer, upgraded all its campaigns to take advantage of new features like upgraded call extensions and sitelinks. By extending call extensions across all device types, and counting calls over 10 seconds in duration as a conversion, American Apparel has seen their conversion volume from phone calls double. Return on spend has improved significantly.

A luxury online shopping brand has grown sales by 20% by tapping into secondary markets, thanks to the ease of optimizing bids in multiple locations in a single enhanced campaign.

A luxury online shopping destination had been focusing its search engine marketing efforts on optimizing bids in location-specific campaigns aimed at primary markets like New York City and Los Angeles. Since upgrading to enhanced campaigns, the company started using location bid adjustments to test and expand its AdWords presence in new geographies, including affluent areas of Delaware, South Carolina, and New Mexico. Already, the company has grown total conversion volume by 20% while achieving target return on ad spend.

Hotwire’s SEM analysts are saving 5-10 hours per week with more efficient campaign management.

Hotwire.com, a leading discount travel website upgraded all of their paid search accounts to Enhanced Campaigns, both domestic and international, within the first month. Clay Schulenburg, Director of Search Engine Marketing at Hotwire shared that upgrading to Enhanced Campaigns really helped his team manage AdWords more efficiently because all the key adjustments for location, time of day and device are now managed in a single campaign: “Time saved per SEM analyst is somewhere in the range of 5 – 10 hours per work week that can now be reallocated to either new strategic SEM initiatives or more granular account/campaign optimizations.”

Get started in 3 steps
If you’re among the 95% of advertisers whose legacy campaigns are currently run across all device types, you can upgrade in just three steps to take advantage of enhanced campaigns:

Click the “Get started” button when you log into the AdWords interface
Select a mobile bid adjustment
Click “Complete upgrade”

Here's a short video illustration.

If you have questions about upgrading to enhanced campaigns, please contact AdWords support, ask for advice from your fellow advertisers in our AdWords community, or check out our comprehensive upgrade guide (.pdf download).

Share your results and feedback
Once you’ve started using enhanced campaigns, please let us know about your results and any suggested improvements using our feedback form.

Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Group Product Manager

ValueTrack parameters for enhanced campaigns are live: manage your keyword level URLs by device

Katie Miller — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 15:53:00 +0000

Recently, based largely on your feedback, we announced the launch of new ValueTrack features to help advertisers using keyword level URLs achieve specific conversion and ROI goals. These features are now live and ready for you to apply to your campaigns. To recap:

We’re changing the existing parameter {ifmobile:[value]}. Previously, the ifmobile parameter would insert [value] when a user clicked your ad on either a tablet or a mobile device. Now, it will only trigger from an ad click on a mobile device.
We’ve added a new parameter, {ifnotmobile:[value]}, where you can replace [value] with text that will then show up in your URL when the user clicks on your ad from a computer or tablet.

These features will help you achieve your conversion and ROI goals, and make the upgrade to enhanced campaigns easier by:

Directing users to a device-specific landing page at the keyword level.
Aligning performance reporting with device groupings used in enhanced campaigns.

For more information about our new ValueTrack features, please check out our Google AdWords Enhanced Campaign Upgrade Guide - The URL Supplement.

Posted by Karen Yao, Senior Product Manager, AdWords

Large-scale keyword changes made easy with keyword bulk uploads

Katie Miller — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 17:54:00 +0000

With our launch of bulk editing back in November, large-scale changes across your entire AdWords account became much easier. Today, we are launching keyword bulk uploads to help you add, edit and remove keywords at scale.

Have you ever downloaded a keyword report and wished you could make changes to your account directly, without having to upload the report into another tool or go back into the AdWords UI and search for the same keywords you already have in front of you? Now you can. Right in your downloaded keyword reports, you can add, delete, edit, pause, and unpause keywords, and then upload these changes directly into your AdWords account.

This feature not only saves you time, but it also provides a new level of flexibility and automation by allowing you to use standard spreadsheet functions and logic to manage your keywords. Here’s an example. Imagine you want to create exact match versions of all your broad match keywords, and you want to set their MaxCPC bids to be 20% higher than their broad match counterparts. You can quickly do this by copying the broad match rows, changing the match type column value, and creating a basic formula to multiply the existing bids by 1.20. Then, you simply upload the entire sheet and AdWords will apply your changes.

Here’s a quick look at how it works:

On the same page where you’ve always been able to download keyword reports, click the box that says “Editable.” This will download a special, editable version of the keyword performance report that you can modify and then upload. In order to get the hang of this feature, check out the keyword bulk uploads article in the AdWords Help Center for some basic instructions.

Once you’ve finished making your edits, you are ready to save your changes and upload your report. You can save your changes in CSV, TSV and Excel formats. To upload this file, click “Reports and uploads” on the left navigation window, and then click the “Uploads” tab.

It’s important to know that once a bulk upload is submitted, there is no way to cancel or automatically reverse your changes. Therefore, we recommend that you always save a copy of your original downloaded report in case you ever need to see what your settings were before you made changes and submitted a bulk upload. You can also view your change history and reverse any unintended changes manually.

For more information on keyword bulk uploads, visit the keyword bulk uploads article or discuss in our AdWords Community.

Posted by Jon Diorio, Senior Product Manager, AdWords

The Full Value of Mobile: New calculator and resources to estimate mobile’s value for your business in the new, multi-screen world

Katie Miller — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 13:02:00 +0000

We live in a world of constant connectivity, where mobility is bridging the digital and physical worlds. With smartphones in hand, people are taking a variety of online and offline actions, like calling a business, downloading an app, looking for directions to a store, or starting research that leads to a purchase on another device. We’re working hard to account for these new paths to purchase in AdWords, like the recent addition of calls as conversions to AdWords reporting. Still, with more work to be done to improve measurement tools, most marketers still account only for sales happening on a mobile site and aren’t seeing the full picture. Today we’re introducing the Full Value of Mobile initiative to help marketers begin this discussion and better understand mobile’s impact online and offline.

This new consumer behavior is now the norm, with a recent study showing that nearly three of ten mobile searches result in visiting a store, calling a business, or making a purchase online. Some smart marketers are already investing in understanding how mobile drives sales through these new customer paths. For example, adidas, in partnership with their agency iProspect, felt that mobile was converting in ways beyond their mobile website, so they created a simple yet powerful attribution model to understand how mobile is driving customers into stores. As a result, adidas found that each click on their store locator button was worth $3.20, which has changed the way they view their digital investment. See their full case study here.

While savvy marketers like adidas are already defining the full value of mobile, most marketers have struggled to get started. To help marketers better understand mobile attribution, we’re launching the Full Value of Mobile initiative, which includes:

A calculator tool
Videos that illustrate each mobile conversion path
Case studies highlighting successful mobile strategies
Tips for measurement

The Full Value of Mobile Calculator provides simple equations and benchmarks to help you estimate of the value that mobile drives for your business through calls, apps, in-store, mobile site and cross-device. In about 30 minutes, you can follow the step-by-step wizard to upload data from AdWords and your mobile website, and make some key assumptions to create your Full Value of Mobile estimate. Through the exercise, you’ll see the total value, value per click, and ROI that mobile is driving for your business across all mobile customer paths, not just your mobile website. You’ll also see how cost-effective your mobile CPAs are.

We hope the Full Value of Mobile Calculator helps marketers begin to investigate mobile’s impact online and offline, whether they use it as a directional estimate of mobile’s value or to spark ideas on how to build deeper and more customized models. To learn more about the Full Value of Mobile and how to use the calculator, please join us for a webinar on March 28 at 1pm EDT. You can sign up here.

Mobility has forever changed the way consumers live and shop, giving rise to these new customer paths as the lines between digital and physical experiences blur. Understanding what each of these mobile pathways means for your business is a critical piece of the larger attribution challenge that every marketer needs to meet head-on. This requires thinking about the full customer journey and acknowledging the interplay between various devices, channels and media influences along the way. Only then can marketers give credit where it’s due – both between and within channels. In other words, rethinking conversion paths is not only key to unlocking the full value of mobile, but also to unlocking the full value of digital.

Posted by Johanna Werther, Head of Mobile Ads Marketing

DoubleClick Search at SMX West: Search marketing is now faster, smarter, better

Katie Miller — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 20:00:00 +0000

(Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Search blog)

Last week on March 11 and 12, our DoubleClick Search team spent two demo-packed days on the floor at the Search Marketing Expo - West, to connect with those of you who manage some of the largest search campaigns.

We set up an interactive lounge featuring demos, videos, games and product experts -- allowing us to show you how we help you go faster, make smarter decisions, and get better results to solve the most complex and demanding digital marketing challenges. Today, we wanted to share some of the topics we covered and the insights we heard from attendees. To kick off the discussion, we’re sharing a DoubleClick Search overview video, which we debuted at SMX West -- with more details that follow.

Go faster with tools for automation
Many of you told us you’re looking for ways to go faster with tools that streamline and automate your workflow across large search campaigns. Especially for marketers with large product inventory, staying on top of changing products, promotions, and seasonal trends can be cumbersome. At SMX West, we demoed inventory-aware campaigns, which integrates with your Google Merchant Center Feeds to automatically update search campaigns, based on your physical inventory. We got great feedback on the seamless workflow that cuts out repetition.

Make smarter decisions with all your data in one place
We also heard your growing need to measure digital marketing holistically -- within search, as well as across channels. So, on the SMX floor, we highlighted the different ways DoubleClick Search powers your business with the insights you need:

Integration of Google Analytics metrics (beta), which incorporates statistics including bounce rate, page views, transactions, and revenue from Google Analytics, to get a clear picture of how search influences customer interaction on your website.
Fast and accurate cross-channel reporting thanks to native integration with the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, to enable faster decision making, without reconciling reports or worrying about potential data drop-off from reporting on disparate tools.
Enhanced campaigns support, which makes it easier for you to promote marketing messages across varying user contexts like location, time of day and device type, within a single campaign. In addition to basic support, we’ll soon help you take advantage of enhanced campaigns in unique and powerful ways, through bulk tools, custom-tailored mobile bid adjustments, and consultative services offered only by DoubleClick Search.

Get better results with tools that drive performance
As a performance marketer, you know it’s ultimately all about results. Over the past few months, we’ve focused on enhancing our Performance Bidding Suite for automated bidding -- understanding that smart bidding technology is the engine that drives campaign performance. At SMX West, we demoed our intuitive bidding UI, which lets you easily express flexible goals that align with your business objectives, and highlighted how fresh data, smart algorithms, fast operations, regular software updates, and the right transparency and controls help you achieve those goals.

To extend the conversation, DoubleClick Search will be at SES New York next week, and we look forward to another great opportunity to show you how we can help make search marketing faster, smarter, and better. We hope to see you there!

SES New York: Google solutions for a constantly connected world

Katie Miller — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 20:02:00 +0000

SES New York is coming up next week, and we hope you’ll join us in the Big Apple!

During day 1 of SES New York, we'll be on the expo floor with a custom-built Google classroom. Join us for a full day of learning about the latest solutions from AdWords, Mobile, Google Display Network, and DoubleClick Search to help you win in a constantly connected world.

Where: SES NY Expo Hall, 5th Floor Marriott Marquee
When: Day 1 - Tuesday, March 26th
Sessions:

10:30-11:30am Reaching customers whenever, wherever, across any device. Surojit Chatterjee, Lead Product Manager for enhanced campaigns
11:45-12:45pm Understanding the Full Value of Mobile. Brendon Kraham, Director, Global Mobile Solutions
2:00-3:00pm Engaging with your audience in a multi-screen world. Speaker TBD
3:30-4:30pm Using DoubleClick Search to manage campaigns across channels and devices. Anthony Chavez, Product Manager for DoubleClick Search

Don’t have a pass yet? Don’t worry! Expo Only passes are free and get you access to our Google classroom. You can also use the code NYGOOGLE which is redeemable for up to $700.00 off a full conference pass!

Posted By Derrick Djang, Product Marketing Manager, AdWords

Enhanced Campaigns for Display: Powerful Bidding Tools for a Multi-Device World

Katie Miller — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 19:43:00 +0000

Last month we announced enhanced campaigns to help advertisers more simply and scalably reach their customers in a multi-screen world. Today, we’ll look more closely at how enhanced campaigns work with your display campaigns.

Why Enhanced Campaigns For Display
In this constantly connected world, our customers are accessing information across multiple devices, and might look at 10 different sources - online reviews, newspaper and magazine articles, recommendations from friends and more - before making a purchase. Display advertising captures these signals and is an important part of connecting with consumers in this multi-screen world. But determining the best way to reach the right person with the right ad is more complex than ever. Enhanced campaigns for display help you reach people with the right ads, based on people’s context like their location, time of day and device type -- all from a single campaign.

Key Features
Search and display use very different signals. In search, we use keywords to capture users’ intent. For instance, a travel booking website knows that a user searching for ‘Rome Vacation Packages’ is looking for a vacation in Rome. In Display campaigns, advertisers use a variety of other signals to reach their target customers with the right ad. In this example, a travel website may use:

Interest Categories: to reach customers interested in “Rome”
Demographics: to reach people 35-44, who have historically spent 3x the average
Topic Targeting: to reach people browsing travel websites
Remarketing: to reach customers who booked a vacation with them last year

In today’s constantly connected world, someone's intent and the actions they're looking to take may differ depending on their context, signals such as time of day, location and device:

Time of day: Travelers typically book between 9am and 6pm
Location: “People in the US” who may convert more often than people in Italy
Device: Mobile users tend to browse on their smartphones, then book on their desktop

With enhanced campaigns, instead of having to create multiple campaigns, this travel website can easily manage all of this in one place. In a single campaign they can adjust bids across these various signals to reach the right people with the right ads.

Learn More
More tips on how to use enhanced campaigns for display are available in the AdWords Help Center. To learn more on how you can take advantage of Enhanced Campaigns for Display, register for our upcoming webinar this Thursday March 21st, at 10am PST.

Posted by Christian Oestlien, Product Management Director for the Google Display Network

New ValueTrack parameters for enhanced campaigns: managing keyword level URLs by device

Katie Miller — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 18:59:00 +0000

In a multi-screen world, it’s increasingly important for advertisers to show relevant ads based on a user’s context: location, time of day, and device. We launched enhanced campaigns to help advertisers take full advantage of user context, maximizing the effectiveness of their ad campaigns.

We’ve been listening to your feedback, and in the next few weeks we’ll be launching new ValueTrack features for advertisers using keyword level URLs. These features will help advertisers achieve specific conversion and ROI goals, and make the upgrade to enhanced campaigns easier by:

Directing users to a device-specific landing page at the keyword level.
Enabling measurement of the effectiveness of campaigns by device.

What’s new

We’ve added a new parameter, {ifnotmobile:[value]}, where you can replace [value] with text that will then show up in your URL when the user clicks on your ad from a computer or tablet. We’re also changing the existing ValueTrack parameter {ifmobile:[value]}. This parameter will now insert the specified value into the URL only if the user clicks from a mobile device.

In this post, we will discuss using the ifmobile and ifnotmobile parameters to direct users to a device-specific landing page. We will also discuss performance tracking by device, and how the ifmobile and ifnotmobile parameters differ from the existing device parameter.

Example 1: Redirecting users to device-specific landing pages

Responsive web design is often a good fit for advertisers who provide device-optimized experiences to their users. If you must specify different landing pages depending on device, you have two options. If the landing page varies by creative, you can simply create mobile-optimized ads by setting the device preference to “Mobile.” If the device-specific landing page varies for each keyword, then you can use the ifmobile and ifnotmobile parameters in the keyword-level destination URL. It is important to remember that if you are using the ifmobile parameter today, it will no longer insert a value into the URL for tablet clicks. The new parameter ifnotmobile will now insert a value into the URL for tablet and desktop/laptop.

Let’s say you want to send mobile users to "m.example.com/widgets," and desktop and tablet users to "www.example.com/widgets" for the keyword “widgets.” In this scenario you could set the destination URL for this keyword to:

{ifmobile:m.example.com/widgets}{ifnotmobile:www.example.com/widgets}

Example 2: Tracking performance by device

If you want to track performance by device, the existing device parameter will work for most cases. Using device inserts an “m”, “t”, or “c” into the destination URL, depending on whether the user clicked from a mobile device, tablet, or desktop/laptop computer. If your tracking system requires different internal ids for the same keyword on different devices, then you may need to use the ifmobile and ifnotmobile parameters.

For the keyword “widgets”, let’s say you have assigned an internal keyword id of “df32” for desktops and tablets and “df33” for mobile devices. You can set the keyword-level destination URL to:

www.example.com/widgets?kwid={ifnotmobile:df32}{ifmobile:df33}

Then, if the user clicks from a desktop or tablet, the landing page is:

www.example.com/widgets?kwid=df32

and for a mobile click:

www.example.com/widgets?kwid=df33

Success in action

Advertisers are upgrading to enhanced campaigns and seeing strong results. VivaStreet in France, the 4th largest free classified website in the world, upgraded all of their campaigns within the two weeks after launch. When they upgraded, they increased their mobile bid adjustment to 125% and saw overall conversions increase by 34%. After seeing the positive results, VivaStreet went on to increase their mobile bid adjustment to 140%. By using ValueTrack parameters, you can also direct users to device-specific content and measure the effect it has on conversions.

We appreciate the feedback we have received on enhanced campaigns and encourage you to continue helping us understand how to make a great product. Please join us on March 21st at 10:00AM PST (1:00PM EST) for the latest in our enhanced campaigns webinar series, EC 205, covering enhanced campaigns and the Google Display Network.

Posted by Karen Yao, Senior Product Manager, AdWords

The brand revolution is underway

Katie Miller — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 16:29:00 +0000

As we’ve said before, we’ve entered the next wave of digital marketing, as major brands like L’Oreal, Audi and Kay Jewelers embrace digital media and make it a core part of their marketing strategy. We’ve seen a 65 percent increase in the last quarter alone in the number of brand advertisers using our brand formats and buying tools.

This influx of brand investment is translating into meaningful results for digital publishers.

We looked at the 50 top publishers that enable brand-friendly ad formats on their sites. Over the past three months we found that, on average, they experienced a CPM increase of 2x or more when running these engagement-driven ads, such as our Lightbox ad, which expands to a full page only after a user has deliberately engaged with the ad. "We've seen CPM increases of more than 3X, and our advertisers love the large canvas and pay for engagement model," says Rich Dredge, Answers.com's Chief Revenue Officer.
We’ve seen an overall increase in higher CPMs across our exchange -- in the U.S., CPMs over $5 have increased 24% year-over-year while those over $10 have increased 23% year-over-year. Brand spend is a critical piece of these increases.

Fueling brand adoption

To continue this momentum, we’ve been investing in a suite of brand solutions over the past year to help these advertisers make the most of what digital marketing has to offer:

New Ways to Buy -- Last year, we introduced Active View, offering for the first time the ability to not only measure whether ads are viewable, but actually buy based on it. Brands are able to “reserve” a guaranteed number of impressions on brand-friendly sites across the web -- and they pay only for impressions that are viewed.

Over the past year, the number of advertisers using the reserve option has increased fourfold.
Nearly two-thirds of those are Ad Age top 100 brands.

New Ways to Engage -- Last year, we introduced a new family of brand-friendly, engagement-focused ad formats. Engagement formats are already showing terrific early returns. For example, L’ORÉAL PARiS was one of the first brands to run a campaign using engagement ads. They ran an expandable ad in Germany as part of their “Beauty Minute” campaign and found that 30% of those who expanded the ad watched the entire 30-second embedded video.

New Ways to Measure -- We’re committed to providing meaningful metrics for brands, measurement that goes beyond just clicks and conversions. Earlier this week, we introduced Brand Lift in AdWords, which will enable marketers to run surveys along with their ad campaigns, to determine how their ads helped their marketing objectives (i.e., whether their ads helped build awareness, increased favorability towards their brand, etc.). Brand Lift complements our other investments in brand measurement, like ActiveView and Active GRP.

Digital media represents an amazing opportunity for both brands and publishers, bringing together sight, sound, motion, interactivity and measurement in ways we’ve never seen before.

Over the coming year, we’ll be continuing to invest in our products and systems that will help brands thrive in the digital space, as well as help publishers capitalize on the shift...so stay tuned for more to come.

Posted by Neal Mohan

Think Insights: Marketer data, information and inspiration just got a new address

Katie Miller — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 16:40:00 +0000

Today marks the debut of the new Think Insights, Google’s hub for marketing insights and inspiration for advertisers and agencies. On google.com/think, you can learn about the latest research in digital marketing, be inspired by creative brand campaigns, and find useful products and tools. You’ll also find industry-leading case studies and Google’s latest research, strategic perspectives, interviews with innovators and experts and more—all to help you make the most of the web.

Every week, we’ll feature content that spans industries and interests. Here’s a snapshot of our top stories:

In Understanding the Full Value of Mobile, learn how sporting goods industry leader adidas worked with digital performance agency iProspect to understand how mobile drives value beyond mobile commerce, particularly in-store sales. The campaign proved that mobile brought a 680% incremental increase in ROI.
The Hyundai Elantra: Driveway Decision Maker campaign lets you watch your favorite Hyundai model drive right to your driveway, using a combination of Google Maps Street View, projection mapping and real-time 3D animation.
YouTube Ads Leaderboard shows which YouTube ads most moved audiences this month, through a winning combination of savvy promotion and smart creative strategy; a new list is featured each month.

In our Perspectives section, we tap our own experts—as well as heads of industry, digital visionaries and Wharton professors—to lend their insights and analyses on the topics that matter most to marketers. The Product & Tools section contains information about our products and advertising platforms, as well as Planning Tools like the Brand Impressions tool and the popular Real-Time Insights finder.

We built google.com/think to help you do it all—stay up-to-date on the latest in digital marketing, arm yourself with data to support your business cases and create inspiring campaigns. Explore the site now, and if you like what you discover, don't forget to subscribe to our Think Letter for a monthly round-up of our most popular content.

Authored by Lisa Gevelber, VP, Americas Marketing

Mobile’s immediacy effect: Half of mobile search conversions happen in one hour

Katie Miller — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:30:00 +0000

In this era of mobility, our smartphones are always with us, keeping us connected anytime and anywhere. With this constant connectivity, we’ve come to expect information (literally) right at our fingertips just a search away - whether it’s locating the nearest sushi restaurant or booking flights for your upcoming trip. In “Mobile Search Moments: Understanding How Mobile Drives Conversions”, we set out to understand when and why people turn to mobile search, the actions they take as a result, and how marketers can capitalize on every mobile search moment. We found that there’s an immediacy effect of mobile search, with more than half of the resulting conversions (going into a store, calling a business, or making a purchase) happening within just one hour.

Working with Nielsen, we also wanted to push the standard of mobile research. It’s traditionally been difficult to quantify mobile’s full impact on driving conversions, particularly since consumer surveys are often constrained to broad recall questions. Instead, we asked participants to log their mobile searches over two weeks in a diary smartphone app - logging more than 6,000 mobile searches in total. We followed up to ask them what actions resulted from those searches, helping us draw more precise, measurable connections between mobile searches and the conversions that they drive online and offline.

click to expand

Here are the highlights of the research:

Mobile search is both always-on and on-the-go
Mobile has traditionally been considered an out-and-about or on-the-go context, used on the bus or while in a store. While that’s certainly true, the research showed that mobile’s role is also much more than that. People turn to mobile devices throughout the day to find information because of its speed and convenience, with 77% of mobile searches happening at home or at work. What does this mean for marketers? Mobile is always-on for consumers, so marketers should make sure their mobile search strategies are reaching people in these different customer contexts.

Mobile searchers take a variety of actions... and they act quickly
We also found that three of four mobile searches trigger additional actions. These range from open-ended actions like additional research (36%) or a website visit (25%), to more concrete conversions like a store visit (17%), a purchase (17%), or a phone call (7%). On average, each mobile search triggers nearly two actions, so in order to understand the full value of mobile, marketers must evaluate the different ways that their customers convert, both online and offline, and measure accordingly.

Most interestingly, not only do mobile searchers take action - they act fast. In fact, 55% of conversions from mobile searches happen within one hour. We see this immediacy effect with mobile because not only are people potentially closer in physical proximity to a purchase, but they’re also closer to the crucial decision moments. Forty-five percent of mobile searches are conducted to help make a decision, and that number jumps to two-thirds when happening in a store. And when people use mobile search to help make a decision, they’re more likely to convert. So it’s important for marketers to be present during those searches, while also creating ads and experiences that are relevant to this immediacy.

Context is key to mobile searches
The research also showed that the types of searches people conduct on mobile are strongly tied to their specific context, like location and time of day. For instance, shopping searches are twice as likely to be done in-store. Mobile searches made in stores are a key opportunity for marketers to reach someone who’s looking to take action. And since searchers are also 55% more likely to notice ads when they’re in a store, there’s a huge opportunity for marketers to capitalize on these mobile-led moments.

Mobility continues to change the way that we search, explore and shop, and as consumer behavior comes further into focus, there are clear opportunities for marketers to take advantage. Check out all of our findings by downloading the full report here.

Posted by: Ben Chung, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

Reach smartphone users around the world with Google Shopping

Katie Miller — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:33:00 +0000

People today are constantly connected, presenting a tremendous opportunity for retailers to deliver the right products to them across devices anytime, anywhere. We recently announced the release of enhanced campaigns to help advertisers reach customers in a multi-screen world. Today we’re pleased to announce that Product Listing Ads are now eligible to appear on smartphones globally, extending the shopping experience already available on desktops and tablets. When a user enters a shopping-related search, a commercial format that displays products in a single unit may appear above organic search results. This ad unit is labeled as ‘Sponsored’ and displays rich product images, prices, retailers and more. This mobile shopping experience will be available in all markets currently serving Product Listing Ads.

Below are a couple of examples of what a shopper might see when searching for a product from their phone.

In the image on the left, a user searching for a plaid tie may see an ad unit displaying three options. He can click any of them to learn more and buy, or click ‘Shop on Google’ to continue browsing on Google Shopping, as shown in the image on the right. From there, the user can look at an even wider variety of options from different retailers. He can review and compare images, prices, reviews, shipping options and other information. Perhaps he’ll narrow his search down to plaid ties over $45, or filter to see just the selections available nearby. Finally, once the user has honed in on the perfect choice, he can easily complete his purchase on the retailer’s site.

Ensure your products are eligible to display in this new unit for smartphones

If you’ve already upgraded your Product Listing Ads to enhanced campaigns and made appropriate bid adjustments, your products will automatically be eligible to display in the new unit for smartphones.
If you haven’t yet upgraded your Product Listing Ads to enhanced campaigns, we recommend you upgrade to increase coverage of your products and easily manage bids across devices, locations, and time of day - all from a single campaign.

Learn more in our upcoming mobile shopping webinar

Google Shopping and Enhanced Campaigns

February 14, 2013 at 10 a.m PT (1 p.m. ET)

During this webinar, attendees will learn about how Google Shopping and Product Listing Ads work in concert with features that are part of enhanced campaigns. We will also discuss the latest Google Shopping user experience on smartphones and cover new multi-screen opportunities for retail advertisers.

Posted by Erica Sievert, Product Marketing Manager, Google Shopping

Announcing a new Hangout on Air series: enhanced campaigns

Katie Miller — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 19:15:00 +0000

Enhanced campaigns have arrived, featuring bid adjustments, updates to ad extensions, and more options for location and device targeting. We’re here to equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to continue your success as you upgrade and migrate your campaigns.

Over the next seven weeks, Google specialists will host live Hangouts on Air to provide insight into the following topics on enhanced campaigns:

March 13th at 11 AM PDT: Overview & Bid Adjustments

March 27th at 11 AM PDT: Campaign Management & Strategies for Upgrading

April 10th at 11 AM PDT: Location Targeting & Ad Extension Updates

April 24th at 11 AM PDT: Smarter Mobile Ads

To join the Hangouts, just sign into Google+ and add the Google Ads +Page to your circles. Then, on Wednesday, navigate to your Stream where you’ll be able to view our Hangout live with just one click. See you there!

Posted by Courtney Pannell & Kaylyn Frazier, AdWords Support