Google Data » Lauren Hoover-Gordon

More Layers of Data Improve Your TV Targeting Abilities

Lauren Hoover-Gordon — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 17:45:00 +0000

Google TV Ads’ audience targeting tool brings together numerous data sources to enable advanced targeting on TV. The merging of clustering models like Nielsen's PRIZM household segments with anonymized Equifax and set-top box data allows you to target multi-dimensional audiences like women ages 18-24 who love photography. Now we’re adding yet another data set to make that experience even richer -- P$YCLE segmentation.

P$YCLE is a market segmentation system from the Nielsen Company that marketers use to understand and target households by financial behavior and wealth. P$YCLE groups households into 58 unique segments based on income-generating assets, spending habits, investment behavior, and various financial and demographic characteristics.

Sample P$YCLE segments include:

Feathered Nests – There's money tucked away in Feathered Nests, a collection of middle-aged families with high incomes and above-average investable assets. A mix of college-educated Whites and Asians, these 35- to 54-year-olds typically hold management jobs and have begun filling their retirement accounts with mutual funds, stocks, bonds, and CDs. They're also a strong credit market, often carrying jumbo mortgages and home equity lines of credit. Insurance omnivores, they own annuities, term and whole life, disability coverage, and auto insurance for their multiple cars. And they enjoy good-life pursuits, like golfing and sailing, boutique shopping for children's toys and collectibles, and tuning their high-end TVs to ice hockey matches and public broadcasting programs. For investment tips, they read a variety of business magazines.

Online Living – No segment scores higher for using Internet banking than Online Living. This group of mostly 25- to 44-year-old singles, couples, and families ranks at the top for stock trading and bill paying, as well as buying at retail websites. Many of these web-surfers live in suburban sprawl areas, own their homes and have upscale incomes, but they have only modest levels of income-producing assets and are still paying off student and personal loans.

To get started, simply select a P$YCLE segment in the Google TV Ads interface. Google will create a custom list of cable networks, dayparts, and programs that are popular with your target audience.

Finding your target audience on TV has never been easier and we’re thrilled to continue to explore the powerful ways to connect technology, data, and television.

Posted by Jody Shapiro, Product Manager for Google TV Ads

Reach Your Customers This Holiday Season With Google TV Ads

Lauren Hoover-Gordon — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 23:17:00 +0000

Even though summer is just ending, the holiday shopping season is already in full swing. According to a recent Google/OTX State of Shopping study, nearly half of the country has already started shopping for the holidays. Electronics, toys and home appliances are anticipated to be some of the top spending categories this year (see below). Using the advanced targeting and measurement tools of Google TV Ads, you can pinpoint audiences interested in these and many other products and services this holiday season.

Suppose you are an electronics retailer looking to use Google TV Ads to reach your customers. According to a new study from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), spending on electronics is up for both men and women, with men spending $969 in the past 12 months and women spending $631. Knowing that your audience skews more heavily toward men, you can use the Google TV Ads targeting tool to instantly get recommendations on networks and programs that make sense for your audience (in the example below, we have entered males aged 18-49 as a target).

In this case, the system recommends networks such as the NFL Network, the only channel dedicated entirely to the National Football League and ESPN, the top network for men over the age of 18 that earn at least $75K. It also provides a "Relevance" measure, which is an indicator of how closely the audience of that network matches your target audience (the higher the number, the more relevant the programming).

The holidays are an unpredictable time of year. You may find that you have run out of DVD players, but haven't sold a single 3D television. With the flexibility of Google TV Ads, you can change your programming with the click of a mouse, decreasing budgets for campaigns focused on DVD players, and increasing budgets for those focused on 3D TVs. Because the programming is never bundled, you can pick just the shows that make sense for your audience.

Find out more about advertising with Google TV Ads at Google.com/TVAds. Happy holidays!

Posted by David Mogensen, Product Marketing Manager for Google TV Ads

Reach Your Customers This Holiday Season With Google TV Ads

Lauren Hoover-Gordon — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 23:17:00 +0000

Find out more about advertising with Google TV Ads at Google.com/TVAds. Happy holidays!

Posted by David Mogensen, Product Marketing Manager for Google TV Ads

Check Out In-Stream Video Ads

Lauren Hoover-Gordon — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 01:28:00 +0000

If you've run television campaigns before, you know that sight, sound and motion can truly create meaningful connections between brands and customers. So we thought it would be useful to write about a complementary ad format observed by Neilsen to increase brand recall of TV ads by as much as 35%. Google enables you to extend the power of your TV campaign to audiences online by running in-stream video ads. Advertisers can run :15 or :30 second video ads on YouTube and over 90 partner sites across our network to reach engaged online video viewers. In-stream ads enable you to elevate video advertising to an interactive level by enabling click-throughs to designated landing pages. If your goal is to drive offline activity, don't worry: we've also read reports of increased offline response to premium online video advertising.

The unique value of in-stream is its ability to merge the benefits of TV ads and online advertising by providing an engaging experience that is clickable and more directly trackable. Leverage free tools like the Adwords Placement Tool or the YouTube Video Targeting Tool to find content that best reaches your defined audience and customize campaigns through geo-targeting, audience targeting, daypart limitations and enabling conversion tracking to drive and measure effective video impressions.

Sample of in-stream partner sites

Ready to get started? To learn even more about this ad format, we encourage you to view our recent webinar featuring the YouTube Video Targeting Tool which will guide you through the best ways to extend the reach of your TV campaigns through in-stream.

Posted by Andrew Stinger, Account Manager for Google TV Ads

Google TV Ads Power Users Series – Part 3 of 3

Lauren Hoover-Gordon — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 00:18:00 +0000

In our final installment of the Power Users series, we’ll cover advanced reporting and measurement capabilities of our platform. As you may know, Google TV Ads delivers precise reporting including impression counts, tuning data and cost metrics; this report type is called the ‘Played Spots Report.’ Beyond these data points, advertisers can also choose to include audience reporting metrics as well.

Our system merges aggregated demographic and psychographic information with viewership data from millions of anonymized set-top boxes to report on the audience composition for your ad airings. Audience metrics include Nielsen VPVH, household income, and category interest information amongst others. Easy to run reports detail the composition, or index for each metric whether or not you chose to target those specific metrics in your campaign. This allows you to see an overall picture of exactly who your ads reached or potentially can reach. Insider’s Tip: Selecting the audience measurement option while creating your ‘Played Spots Report’ will allow you to measure how many W25-54 are REALLY watching your ad, or how Project Runway indexes for consumers with certain interests such as photography, hiking, and over 30 others.

Another useful report type is the ‘Summary Report’ which allows you to analyze how well specific networks and programs deliver against an audience and your clearance goals. For instance, you can run a ‘Summary Report’ to find out which programs are delivering the highest VPVH for W25-54, or combine all played spots on ESPN to see how the overall HHI compares against all spots aired on Speed.

The last report and final tip we have for you, is the ‘Reach and Frequency Report.’ Insider’s Tip: Imagine how powerful it would be to understand not only the reach, but also the frequency of your TV campaigns over a given time frame. As seasoned TV buyers know, understanding how often you are reaching a given audience is as important in determining ad effectiveness as measuring reach. Are viewers motivated to visit your website or purchase from you after seeing your ad just once? Or perhaps the sales cycle is longer and repeat views are needed to move the needle. The ‘Reach and Frequency Report’ makes measuring this extremely easy, and can be viewed weekly or monthly to give you a sense of your creative penetration over the specified date range.

This brings us to the end of our Power Users series, we hope you have found these tips and tricks useful. As our product continues to develop and new product features arise, we’ll be sure to keep you posted and in the know.

Posted by Katie Mason, Account Manager for Google TV Ads

Google TV Ads Power Users Series – Part 2 of 3

Lauren Hoover-Gordon — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 22:02:00 +0000

We’re back with another installment of our power users series, where we unveil advanced features and tips that can help advertisers better manage and optimize their TV campaigns. Today, we’ll cover some newer features that are designed to give advertisers more control over where and how ads air within a given campaign. More control is always a good thing, right?

For those of you who have already run several Google TV Ads campaigns, you may have experienced certain campaigns being over-saturated on a couple of networks. Because our auction optimizes for efficiency and value, advertisers may find that their campaign delivers more frequency on a few networks rather than spreading evenly over all of your selected targets. There are now two advanced settings that allow more control over reach and frequency. Within the ‘Settings’ tab of your campaigns, select ‘I prefer my ads aired more often on the national networks’ which will direct the system to try winning spots on our largest national partners first. Note that with this setting, you are opting for a larger reach rather than frequency or efficiency.

The second advanced setting that falls into this bucket is also within the ‘Settings’ tab. Choosing ‘I prefer my ads spread more evenly across networks and times’ will attempt to optimize for reach within your targets. Rather than allowing the auction to accumulate as many of the most efficient spots as possible, this setting assumes that you would rather pay a bit more to have a larger reach across a more varied set of networks and dayparts.

Often times, advertisers want to target specific programs, but have strict daypart restrictions; a situation that was previously tricky to solve for as it required manual blocking of programs that fall within undesirable dayparts. We recently released a feature that makes this much easier and more efficient for advertisers. Just like you can select flights dates for a campaign, you can now choose to simply block specific days and times, also through the ‘Settings’ tab of any campaign. Once you’ve blocked time periods at the campaign level, you are free to target any networks and programs you wish, and our system will ensure that you never air during restricted times!

Finally, you can now block Paid Programming uniformly across an entire campaign. This may not always be the best option if Paid Programming is efficient and produces a positive ROI on your campaigns. However, if you know such content is ineffective, you can now universally block that content from any campaign within the ‘Settings’ tab.

Now that you’re armed with more controls and better targeting capabilities, we hope that you will achieve even greater success using Google TV Ads. Check back next week with our third and final installment of the Power Users series.

Posted by Katie Mason, Associate Account Manager for Google TV Ads

Google TV Ads Power Users Series – Part 1 of 3

Lauren Hoover-Gordon — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 22:03:00 +0000

As we say goodbye to the first quarter of 2010 and usher in the new season, we'd like to share our latest product developments to help advanced users make the most of their campaigns. In this first installment of our three part series, we’ll give you the scoop on using our program and audience targeting tools to build and optimize effective campaigns. Are you a Google TV Ads power user? If not, you will be by the end of this series!

If you’re familiar with Google TV Ads’ program targeting tool, you know that advertisers can conduct keyword searches to find relevant media across 98+ cable networks. For example, searching for ‘beauty’ or specific shows like ‘Seinfeld’ will produce a list of targets related to that query. Insider’s tip: Searching for a topic will not only produce a list of exact matches and broad concept targets, you’ll also see ‘related programs’ for each suggested program (as shown below). This advanced feature looks at demographic information to calculate what other programs will reach a similar audience to the shows you’ve selected.

Why is this so powerful? If you’ve identified a list of targets that are effective but want to extend the reach of your ads across similar audiences, the related programs feature will do the work for you in identifying what other targets you should consider. Our system draws from an anonymized sample of millions of set-top-boxes to aggregate viewer demographics and show you exactly where else your audience can be reached.

Similarly, our audience targeting tool helps advertisers select and target a customized TV schedule to reach their specified audience. Simply specify the audience you want to reach by selecting demographic/psychographic traits and interests that characterize your desired audience. For example, searching for ‘women aged 25-34 interested in running’ will yield a list of targets that reach this audience in the highest concentrations.

Insider’s tip: We’ve recently integrated Nielsen’s PRIZM segments into the audience targeting tool. PRIZM is a customer segmentation system which places consumers into 66 segments based on demographics, lifestyles, shopping patterns and media preferences. Now, you can identify the segments which describe your desired audience best and our system will find the media being watched by that audience in the highest concentrations. Using PRIZM segments allows you to search for media that appeals to a very multi-dimensional and specific audience.

Stay tuned for next week’s segment which will cover campaign management shortcuts and more insider tips.

Posted by Christina Duss, Senior Account Manager for Google TV Ads

SlateV.com Explores Google TV Ads

Lauren Hoover-Gordon — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 21:37:00 +0000

We always talk about how easy launching national TV campaigns is with Google. But you don't have to take our word for it. Seth Stevenson of Slate recently posted a video chronicling his experience using our platform to launch a national TV campaign advertising SlateV.com. Stevenson shows how he was able to launch targeted media from his living room, driving viewers straight to the advertised website in the ad.

Watch the video below to see exactly what happened.

Posted by Neha Mandal, Product Marketing Manager for Google TV Ads

Introducing the new Ad Creation Marketplace

Lauren Hoover-Gordon — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 23:05:00 +0000

Platforms like Google TV Ads and YouTube are making it easier for business of all sizes to connect with consumers via video. But for many businesses, creating an ad can be an expensive hurdle to advertising on national television, radio, and online video. That's why we built the Ad Creation Marketplace (ACM), a tool that connects businesses with talented production specialists who can produce a professional TV, online video or audio ad across a range of budgets starting as low as $250.

Creating high quality ads has never been easier or more affordable. While the ACM has been available for some time through Google AdWords, we've completely redesigned it to make it easier for you to browse sample work and connect with specialists who best fit your needs.

To get started, visit the ACM and specify your budget range and ad category using the filters at the top. Then browse through sample videos created by ACM vendors in the past which will give you a sense of the style and price you can expect from each vendor.

After you've found the specialist(s) you like, click the "Contact vendor" button to start a conversation and discuss terms and project details. Make sure to tell the vendor up front that you're new to TV Ads and that you want to use the Google promotional credit. Once the vendor has completed your ad, you will receive an email with the finished ad. In just a few clicks, you can put this ad on television or online through Google TV Ads and other YouTube ad formats like Promoted Videos.

To celebrate the launch of the new ACM, Google TV Ads is offering a limited time discount on any ad created through the ACM that has an initial invoice price of $300 or more. That means you can create a video ad for as little as $100! (View promotion terms and conditions here).

We hope you'll find the Ads Creation Marketplace a useful tool that makes it easier for your business to produce professional quality ads.

Posted by David Wurtz, Product Manager, Google TV Ads