Google Data

¹Our Mobile Planet 2013

It’s important for businesses to stay up to date about the most recent research and insights related to their industry. Unfortunately — with so many new studies and with data being updated so often — it can difficult to keep up. To make life a bit easier, we created the Databoard for Research Insights, which allows people to explore and interact with some of Google’s recent research in a unique and immersive way.

The Databoard is our response to three big challenges facing the vast majority of research released today.

1. Ease of consumption: The databoard introduces a new way of sharing data, with all of the information presented in a simple and beautiful way. Users can explore an entire study or jump straight to the topics or datapoints that they care about. The Databoard is also optimized for all devices so you can comfortably explore the research on your computer, tablet, or smartphone.
2. Shareability: Most people, when they find a compelling piece of data, want to share it! Whether its with a colleague, client, or a community on a blog or social network, compelling insights and data are meant to be shared. The databoard is designed for shareability, allowing users to share individual charts and insights or collections of data with anyone through email or social networks.
3. A cohesive story: Most research studies set out to answer a specific question, like how people use their smartphones in store, or how a specific type of consumer shops. This means that businesses need to look across multiple pieces of research to craft a comprehensive business or marketing strategy. To address this need, the Databoard allows users to curate a customized infographic out of the charts or data points you find important across multiple Google research studies. Creating an infographic is quick and easy, and you can share the finished product with your friends or colleagues.

The databoard is currently home to four research studies including The New Multi-screen World, Mobile In-store shopper research, Mobile search moments, and more. New studies will be added frequently so be sure to check back often. To get started exploring the Databoard and creating your own infographic visit google.com/think/databoard.

Posted by Adam Grunewald, Mobile Marketing Manager

Google’s Lightbox ad format — a part of the Engagement Ads family, which consists of interactive ad formats that let advertisers create and scale brand messages across the web, while only paying when a user engages with the ad — has seen a great deal of momentum since its launch in March.

Today we are announcing a brand new capability within this format – Google Catalogs in Lightbox.

Brands invest heavily in creating beautiful stories in their printed catalogs, and we want to make it easy for our users to connect with relevant, digitized versions of these catalogs around the web. With Google Catalogs in Lightbox, users can easily flip through the digital catalogs, to see the latest product selections, check product prices, and visit product pages without ever leaving the original page they were browsing. Advertisers pay on a Cost-per-Engagement (CPE) basis — meaning that they pay when a user chooses to read their catalog. And with access to metrics like page flips and product views, advertisers have more customer insight than ever before.

We have received positive feedback on this format from users, advertisers and publishers. Users have responded well to the beautiful, immersive catalog experience. Advertisers have found it easy to create online catalogs within hours, using their existing PDFs and Google Merchant Center feeds. And finally, our publisher partners that have run Lightbox formats have seen their CPMs as much as double.

One of our beta partners, Brand USA, an organization that promotes international tourism to the United States, used Google Catalogs in Lightbox to showcase an interactive US travel guide to Canadian tourists. They digitized their existing print tourism guide and achieved massive distribution of their catalog online, reaching a fifth of the Canadian population, and actively engaging 1 in 40 Canadians.

To get started, including help with digitizing your catalog, contact your account team today.

Posted by James Beser, Sr. Product Manager 

People are constantly connected, switching seamlessly between devices to shop, communicate and stay entertained. Research shows that people now use as many as three devices combinations every day including desktop computers, laptops, phones, tablets, “phablets”, web-enabled TVs, and more.

This always-on, multi-device world has dramatically changed user behavior and also presents exciting, new opportunities for online marketers. With AdWords enhanced campaigns, you can now present users with more relevant messages than ever by taking into account contextual information such as a user’s location, device, and the time of day.

Bid adjustments in enhanced campaigns are key to optimizing for these signals.  To help you master bid adjustments and drive better performance, we published a whitepaper, Bid Like a Pro: Strategies for Success in AdWords Enhanced Campaigns where you’ll find the following:

• Tips for prioritizing bid adjustments based on your business goals
• Best practices for setting bids by device, location, and time
• Suggestions for how to integrate more automation into your AdWords strategies
• Success stories highlighting advertisers’ improved results

You can download the the whitepaper here.

Tune into the webinar 7/11

To learn more about bidding and search strategies, join us on Thursday, 7/11 at 10am PDT for a webinar highlighting bid adjustment best practices and optimization techniques to get the most out of your search campaigns. Bhanu Narasimhan, Product Manager and Ting Zing, Search Solutions Manager will be hosting.  Register here.

We’d love to hear what you think of the whitepaper. Please let us know what other best practices you’d like to read about. See you all Thursday!

Posted by Andrea Cohan, Product Marketing Manager, AdWords

Want to reach potential customers online, but not sure how? We’ve got good news. Starting July 22, the AdWords Guides to Success Team will be offering Marketing 101, our first-ever massive open online course (MOOC). Register now.

The free course is for businesses who haven’t yet started advertising online or are just learning how it works. Over the course of three weeks, the class will help you understand the basics of online advertising, how it can help your business, and prepare you to start an online advertising campaign with AdWords.

Course highlights include:

• Help thinking about your potential customers and business goals, and how to translate those goals to an online advertising campaign
• Examples of businesses that can use online advertising
• Interactive office hours with AdWords experts and opportunities to connect with other students

The course will also offer videos, quizzes, a worksheet, and links to additional resources and help. Here are the details:

• What: Marketing 101, a massive open online course
• Audience: New advertisers
• When: July 22 – August 9
• Requirements: Email address and a computer

Interested? Sign up for the course here.

Posted by the AdWords Guides to Success Team

This post originally appeared on the DoubleClick Search Blog

Ah, the 4th of July: a time for day-long picnics at the park, fishing trips by the lake, night skies filled with fireworks — and of course, shopping. If you’re a search marketer focused on retail, you know that holidays like the upcoming 4th of July can be an enormous opportunity to capture additional traffic from shoppers looking for the best deals online. So while you’re planning your annual hot dog eating contest, we want to help you start a new tradition this year to win in retail, using integrated solutions from DoubleClick Search. Today, we’re offering up a few retail-ready features to make sure you kick off your holiday search campaigns with a bang:

In today’s world of constant connectivity, people are switching between multiple devices throughout the day. This multi-screen reality creates new opportunities for marketers to reach customers across devices anytime, anywhere. In February, we launched AdWords enhanced campaigns to help advertisers capture these new opportunities and manage their ad campaigns more effectively.

With less than a month until the auto-upgrade on July 22, advertisers have already upgraded more than 4.5 million campaigns. We realize that the upgrade takes some work, so we appreciate the effort that many of you have put into the process. Many industry leaders and advertisers have shared their progress, results and stories with us.  Here are just a few examples:

• M&M’S – Working with its agency partner, The DuMont Project, M&M’S brand MY M&M’S reported very strong results after upgrading to enhanced campaigns, including a 41% increase in conversion rates, 22% increase in revenue, and 31% boost in ROI for search campaigns. Across search and display, MY M&M’S reported a 15% boost in ROI. They initially thought that combining desktop and tablets into one category might negatively impact sales. But, they very quickly realized that the combination actually led to a higher ROI. The company also reduced the number of campaigns they managed from over 100 to 50 – saving five hours a week on campaign management.
• Colombo & Hurd – This small Florida-based law firm worked with its search software and agency partner, WordStream, to upgrade its campaigns. The two teams completed the upgrade – including a full update of Colombo & Hurd’s mobile, location, and time bidding strategies – in less than 30 minutes. Since upgrading to enhanced campaigns, Colombo & Hurd reported that mobile click-through rates rose by 53%, CPCs fell by 13%, and mobile conversion rates increased by three times.
• American Apparel – The retailer needed an easier, better way to reach customers wherever they are, whenever they’re searching for American Apparel items or stores. With enhanced campaigns, they used the proximity bidding feature and set mobile bid adjustments at 100% for a certain radius around their stores. Since upgrading, they’ve seen impressive results, with mobile conversions growing 2X and aggregate click-through-rate increasing by 7%. They’ve also found value in new features that are part of enhanced campaigns like upgraded sitelinks and sitelink reporting.
• Third party ad platforms – Many search engine marketing platforms and agencies have integrated with enhanced campaigns to help their clients take advantage of the powerful new features. One provider recently published a detailed guide to help advertisers with the upgrade, and shared the positive progress it was seeing across clients. They noted: “We’ve seen positive results from advertisers that have opted to migrate early. Recently, a large financial services company successfully migrated to enhanced campaigns on [our] platform and optimized to increase leads by 64% while lowering their CPL by 37% across a significant portion of their campaigns.” They also observed that in the first month after upgrading, CPCs dropped by 2%, while clicks increased by 6%.

Since the earliest days of the rollout, dozens of search marketing companies have offered advertisers advice on transitioning to enhanced campaigns. Some advice (like the help provided by many of the companies above) has been extremely valuable, while some has been more speculative. Every advertiser is different, so the important thing is to review your own metrics and iterate based on your business goals. No two accounts are alike, so it’s important to get started to see how enhanced campaigns can best work for you. The key benefits that we’ve consistently heard from industry leaders and advertisers are:

1. Better decision making made possible through improved reporting by device and location, as well as more detailed reporting on ad extension performance.
2. Time savings by reducing the number of campaigns required to manage varying user contexts.
3. Improved campaign management through features such as bid adjustments, device-specific formats and flexible bid strategies. 
4. New ways to align with your business goals and operations with the ability to schedule the specific dates, days of the week, or times of day for your extensions and sitelinks, at either the ad group or campaign levels.
5. Better ways to engage with mobile consumers using mobile-preferred creative and sitelinks, as well as proximity bidding to reach people who are nearby and on the go.

You can read about enhanced campaigns best practices and other advertiser stories on the enhanced campaigns website.

We’re learning from your feedback as we continue to improve AdWords for this new world of constant connectivity. It’s more important than ever for every business to reach customers across devices in a relevant way, and we’re hard at work building new features and improvements to help you do that successfully with AdWords.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President, Ads and Commerce

Richer information about your business can help potential customers understand why your product or service is right for them. Advertisers have long found it valuable to show positive reviews, awards, or accolades in their ads. Today, we’re bringing this capability to your search ads. With review extensions (beta), you can show accolades from reputable third parties right in your search ads.

You can submit either a direct quote or a summary of a key point from a review, as shown above.

It’s important, both for you and for users, that the reviews provided be high-quality:

• Content displayed in review extensions must come from a reputable 3rd party source, and must comply with standard AdWords policies.  
• It’s your responsibility to ensure that you’re allowed to use a specific review in your ads.  
• To protect users and other businesses from deceptive claims, we use automated and human-based systems to confirm the validity and policy compliance of all review extensions.  

Currently, review extensions are available globally in English only.  Please stay tuned for updates as we expand to other languages.  We’re looking for more advertisers to participate and soon we’ll be adding support for review extensions in the AdWords interface. If you would like to participate in the beta, please contact your AdWords representative.

Posted by Lakshmi Kumar Dabbiru, Software Engineer, AdWords

Brand Advertisers often know who they want to reach, but connecting online with the audience that matters most to their brand at scale has proven to be a challenge. To help address this, we’re excited to announce the launch of Affinity Segments in AdWords and YouTube, which have been designed with TV-style audiences in mind to help solve the problem of connecting with ideal customers online. To understand someone’s affinity, our system takes into account the types of pages a user visits, along with how often and how long they spend there, associating interest categories with each person’s browser. Optimized for reach and frequency, Affinity Segments helps advertisers reach those most likely to enjoy their brand.

Make life easier
With Affinity Segments, we make it easy by helping brand advertisers reach their ideal audience via 80 unique lifestyle segments based on Interest Categories and Demographics . Brands can now reach their target audience at scale based on their interests – such as green living, fashion, or travel – and watch engagement grow.

And it doesn’t stop there. We know that as an advertiser you’re probably used to buying audiences offline for TV, and we know how challenging buying an online audience can be. To make life even easier for you, we defined our affinity segments the same way you target your TV audiences, so you can achieve massive reach online using the same segments you use on TV.

Mazda Canada drives success using Affinity Segments
Like most advertisers out there, Mazda Canada has been on the lookout for a solution that would enable them to reach precise audiences at scale. Over the past decade, the Mazda6 has undergone a few key redesigns – 2013 marked the launch of an all-new model combining Mazda’s signature design style with SKYACTIV Technology, its cutting-edge performance and fuel-saving technology, as well as some innovative safety features including Smart City Brake Support and Rear Cross Traffic Alert. The launch of this flagship vehicle demanded an innovative marketing approach: to build awareness of these technological advancements, inform consumers of the car’s new features, and drive them to the Mazda6 website to engage directly with the brand.

They knew their target audience: male urban professionals who are typically interested in technology and up-to-date on all the latest gadgets and automotive advancements.

Mazda Canada decided to give Affinity Segments a try, selecting the “technophile” segment to connect them with their ideal tech-savvy customers, who have demonstrated an interest in technology through visits to various websites focused on new gadgets.  By targeting the technophiles segment across Google Display, Mazda reinforced the messaging and impact of its television campaign geared to the same type of audience. Mazda saw impressive results and reached 10X more users than they were able to with previous campaigns, greatly exceeding their expectations.

“Affinity Segments delivered perfectly for this campaign in allowing us to reach many users in a short period of time who we knew would have a predisposition to appreciate the Mazda6’s technology upgrades.” said Michael Tsang, Interactive Marketing Manager at Mazda Canada. As a result of their overwhelming success, Mazda Canada decided to integrate Affinity Segments into their online media mix for their other car models and as a vital component for their advertising efforts.

Connect with the people who care
Affinity Segments offer broader reach by encompassing the broad passions that reflect a user’s lifestyle rather than niche curiosities.  Our wide variety of segments let you reach your perfect audience – from hardcore gamers, to foodies, to luxury shoppers, we have a high-reach segment designed to connect you with your ideal customers. If there isn’t a segment that is a perfect fit for your brand’s needs, you can contact your account manager to create a custom segment just for you.
Consumers can also update their own interest categories through Ads Settings – which gives users control over the ads they see online.

Learn More
Just like Mazda, you too can use Affinity Segments to expand your reach across the Google Display Network and focus on engaging with individuals who match what your brand is all about – delighting customers and creating future brand advocates.

To find out how to get started with Affinity Segments today, visit our Help Center for more information.

Posted by Diya Jolly, Senior Product Manager

Last Tuesday, Rachel Witalec and Simon Rosen, Global Sales Strategy Leads, shared tips for getting more out of your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts by using them together. During the webinar, they showed why it’s important to link your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts (which is now even easier to do) and how to see Google Analytics data in AdWords as well as AdWords data in Google Analytics. They also presented a live demo of the reports and how to use them.

If you missed the webinar, you can check it out here:

Read on below for answers to some of the top questions we received during the webinar:

Why should I link my AdWords and Google Analytics accounts?
Linking your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts is an important practice to ensure the two measurement tools can work together to help you get the most from your advertising. The bottom line is that linking Analytics and AdWords gives you powerful information that can tell you where you should be spending more or less based on real ROI data. When you link accounts, the data can flow both ways – from Google Analytics to AdWords (for example, engagement metrics or remarketing lists), and from AdWords to Google Analytics (for example your AdWords cost data). In particular, you can take advantage of powerful features such as:

• The ability to dig into campaign/keyword performance by real revenue and cost in Google Analytics
• Importing goals and e-commerce transactions from Google Analytics into AdWords
• Importing Google Analytics metrics like bounce rate, time-on-site, and % new visits into AdWords
• Using Remarketing with Google Analytics to more effectively reach your customers
• Seeing AdWords data in rich reports such as Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels

We covered this topic in detail during the webinar, so watch the video above to learn more.

• How to Link AdWords & Google Analytics
• How to import Google Analytics data into AdWords
• Optimizing AdWords data in Google Analytics
• Setting up Google Analytics Goals/Ecommerce
• End-to-End Google Analytics Custom Report (requires a Google Analytics account)

Posted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager, Google Analytics

Many businesses advertise to find new customers, and optimizing advertising campaigns to reach the right people will increase marketing effectiveness and ROI. Google Analytics helps marketers achieve this by offering insights into customer behavior on an advertiser’s websites, apps, and other properties. By linking AdWords and Analytics accounts together, these rich insights from Analytics can flow into AdWords.

• Importing Analytics goals and transactions into AdWords allows marketers to define success in powerful ways, often without having to retag your site
• Site engagement stats help marketers better understand marketing performance and how to optimize
• Remarketing with Google Analytics allows marketers to reach new audiences
• Importing AdWords data into Analytics lets marketers see data across many accounts in aggregate and combined with rich site metrics

Along with a user’s query, context signals like location, time of day, and device have become increasingly important in showing people the right ads with their search results. With enhanced campaigns, it’s now easier to reach people in the moments that matter across all screens, with ads that are more relevant to a user’s intent and context. Now we’re incorporating another powerful capability to tailor your search campaigns for different audiences – remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA). With this feature, you can modify your search ads, bids, and keywords based on your visitors’ past activity on your website. As we transition out of the beta test of RLSA, announced in July 2012, we’ll be making the feature available to all advertisers using enhanced campaigns over the next few days.

Combining intent, context, and audience for better search ads 
Search ads work great because they’re relevant to the user’s intent and context. And users who have recently visited your website often find your ads to be even more relevant. RLSA brings intent, context, and audience together to let you tailor your search campaign when past site visitors are searching on Google for your brand, products, and services. Here are some ways to improve your campaign performance using RLSA.

1. Increase ad visibility for high value customers by adjusting your bids. For example, you could increase your bids by 20% for visitors who have previously researched high-end cameras while on your site when they subsequently search for ‘cameras’ on Google. And you could increase your bids by 40% for past site visitors who have previously purchased high-end equipment from your site. It’s easy to set up RLSA bid adjustments and they combine with other enhanced campaigns bid adjustments for location, device, and time.

2. Expand your reach and results with broader keywords. For example, bidding on broad keywords such as ‘gifts’ or ‘presents’ during a holiday season might not convert well enough to meet your ROI goals. But if you use RLSA to run those keywords just for repeat customers, they may convert better and allow you to grow your total sales with a profitable ROI. 

Advertiser success with RLSA
Advertisers in the beta have seen strong results with RLSA. Here are some examples:

• Tirendo, a European online tire retailer, saw a 161% conversion rate increase with RLSA, leading to a 22% overall sales increase. And the incremental conversions were efficient, with a 43% lower average cost per order than previous campaigns. Read more.
• WorldStores, a leading UK home furnishings and garden store, increased total orders 8% by using RLSA to increase bids for past site visitors. Conversion rates for this segment were 130% higher and average cost per conversion was 43% lower, even with the higher bids.

Tags and list management
RLSA shares the same site-wide Google Remarketing Tag and list management tools as remarketing on the Google Display Network (GDN). So you can start using RLSA immediately if your website is already tagged for remarketing on the GDN.

Transparency and control for users
We believe users should have transparency and be in control their ad experience. That’s why we provide adjustable Ads Settings and inform users when an ad has been influenced by a past visit to a particular advertiser’s website.

Learn more
For help getting started with RLSA, check out this article in the Help Center. You can also join us at tomorrow’s Learn with Google Webinar: Reaching the Right Audience with Remarketing on Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 1pm ET.

Posted by Rahul Lahiri, AdWords Product Manager

Many of you start each day by asking: What is driving a change in my clicks or cost? What campaigns or ad groups saw the the largest moves? Did any of my recent changes break something?

To help answer these questions, we’ve created the top movers report to show you which campaigns and ad groups have experienced the largest changes in clicks and cost, and highlight changes you made which might have contributed to those moves. Even if your overall account performance metrics appear unchanged, the top movers report will look inside your campaigns to highlight big moves that might have been easily overlooked.

How it works
To view the top movers report, click the Dimensions tab, then View: Top movers. The report compares performance for two consecutive time periods of equal length, and finds the campaigns and ad groups that experienced the largest change between the two periods. You can compare periods of 7, 14, or 28 days, or look at reports generated in the last 90 days.

The report will start by finding up to 10 of the largest moves in clicks or cost and present a summary at the top. If a top mover saw an increase, it goes into the “Top increases” category. If it’s a decrease, it goes into the “top decreases” category. When changes aren’t significant enough to be a top mover, they will roll up into “Other changes.”

The table below will give details for each top mover. When possible, we offer a “possible cause” for the move, like “bids were increased” or “new keywords were added”.

Note that “possible causes” only considers changes made to your account. It won’t tell you, for example, if your competitors have raised their bids or introduced new ads.

Top movers is our latest effort to save you time and money by helping you understand changes in performance.  For additional information about using this new report, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by David Rodriguez, Product Manager, AdWords

As we continue to expand our advertising solutions, our goal is to provide a great user experience for both advertisers and consumers. We know that advertisers are always looking for new ways to reach their customers with compelling ads that drive engagement and conversions. Today, we are excited to announce the launch of dynamic remarketing to all clients with a Google Merchant Center account. We are also currently piloting this new feature in the travel and education sectors and plan to expand availability to more sectors later this year.

Beautiful, tailored ads to reconnect with customers
Dynamic remarketing lets you automatically create beautiful, customized ads that connect with shoppers across the web, by reminding them of items they’ve seen on your site. You can build ads quickly with dozens of templates to choose from that you can customize to reflect the design elements of your brand. We have also made it easy to get started by automatically creating dynamic text and display ads for you.

Sample dynamic ads (see more here):

Advertisers have seen great results compared to their traditional remarketing campaigns:

• Sierra Trading Post, a U.S. retailer of outdoor gear and clothing, saw a 2x higher clickthrough rate and a 5x higher conversion rate
• As Europe’s premiere “heavy metal online shop,” EMP Merchandising grew conversion rates by 230% and decreased their cost of sale by 30%.

You can read more about other client successes on Think Insights.

Optimizing dynamic ads to drive performance
Dynamic remarketing delivers tailored ads across the web that combine the layouts, products, messages and offers that your customers are most likely interested in, based on what they viewed on your website. You can benefit from our:

• Auto-optimized layouts which predicts the best performing layout for each impression
• Product recommendation engine which optimizes the combination of related and popular products that show in your ads [Learn more]
• Real-time bidding algorithm which helps boost performance by calculating the optimal bid for each impression

For help on getting started reference this Help Center article.

Making it easy for advertisers
Managing campaigns more efficiently is just one of the many benefits of remarketing with Google. Last year, we introduced a site-wide remarketing tag and remarketing with Google Analytics that both made it easy to get started with your campaigns. You can also use the tag to discover new customers similar to your site visitors with Similar Audiences, which has been recently made available to all clients in AdWords.

Remarketing drives great ROI for advertisers, it can also bring publishers significant revenue lift, as studies have shown, and compelling ads for consumers. We’ve also given consumers options to exercise control over their ad experience with features like the Ads Settings and Mute this Ad.

To learn more about what remarketing with Google can do for your business, register for our upcoming Learn with Google Webinar: Reaching the Right Audience with Remarketing on Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 1pm ET.

Posted by Aitan Weinberg, Group Product Manager