Google Data

Today we’re introducing a new API that allows you to securely connect offline conversion events to your digital advertising programs, allowing you to measure the full impact of your digital spend. In addition to gaining a more comprehensive view on campaign performance, you’ll also be able to use these insights to better refine your audience lists.

Take the auto industry, for example. Consumers in the market looking to buy a new sedan might start by watching video reviews of popular models. When they’ve narrowed down a few options that fit their needs, they’re likely to search for local dealers and make calls to schedule test drives. Finally, after all of this research, they’ll make their decision and buy directly from one dealer.

If you’re a car maker trying to reach consumers in this journey, you’re probably looking at proxy metrics (i.e. lead forms, time on site, video completion rates, etc.) to measure the success of your digital campaigns, leaving you with a partial understanding of their impact. With the Conversions API you’re able to measure offline activities as well — such as calls, visits or transactions happening in the dealership — giving you a complete view of the customer journey.

Some industry-specific examples

Enabling better decisions

By considering offline actions such as store visits, call activities and in-store transactions you can gain insights that will allow you to make your ads more relevant for consumers and perform better. For example:

• Exclude existing customers from your new acquisition program and focus on retention and loyalty
• Re-market to consumers who have called your call center but didn’t purchase
• Cross-sell new products to frequent visitors of your stores

Getting started with the Conversions API

You can use one of the approved partners to securely integrate with DoubleClick. Approved partners span various use cases including CRM onboarding, call tracking and foot traffic attribution:

                               

Conversions API is now available to all DoubleClick accounts. To get started, review the technical documentation in our Help Center, talk to your sales representative or contact one of the partners directly.

Posted by Luke Hedrick
Product Manager, DoubleClick

The shift to mobile has happened. And as marketers on the frontline, you need tools that help you build mobile-first experiences at scale. AdWords Editor is here to help — and just in time for the holidays. The latest version (11.6) includes support for universal app campaigns, Gmail ad templates, and much more.

Universal app campaigns

Developers and marketers know it’s not just about driving app installs, it’s about delivering valuable actions within your apps. AdWords Editor now supports universal app campaigns (UAC), which help you find the customers that matter most to you, based on your defined business goals. With UAC, you can find valuable users for your app across Google Search, Play, YouTube, and within apps and mobile websites on the Display Network. Create and edit universal app campaigns in AdWords Editor today.

Gmail ad templates

With Gmail ads, you can reach the 1B+ Gmail users around the world. Gmail ads provide a relevant way for you to connect with them as they’re browsing promotional emails. AdWords Editor now supports Gmail image templates and Gmail single promotion templates so you can easily create, manage, and edit your Gmail ads, in bulk, alongside the rest of your ads.

Expanded text ads

As a reminder, support for expanded text ads is also available in AdWords Editor. Expanded text ads provide more ad space so you can showcase additional details about your brand, products, and services. Check out our best practices guide for tips and tricks on writing compelling ads.

Responsive ads

Responsive ads adapt to the increasingly diverse mix of content types and screen sizes across the Google Display Network. You can now create and edit responsive ads in AdWord Editor.

And more…

The latest version of AdWords Editor also includes:

• Device bid adjustments allow you to maintain the efficiency of managing a consolidated campaign that reaches consumers across devices, while giving you more control to set individual bid adjustments for each device type.
• Enhancements to advanced search, including an easier way to create filters.
• Scheduled downloads to help you stay on top of recent changes and performance statistics

Learn more about these updates in the AdWords Editor Help Center or download AdWords Editor here.

Posted by Blake Reese, Senior Product Manager, AdWords Editor

With the holiday season fast approaching, DoubleClick Search customers get an early gift: new features to make their holiday campaigns more successful.

This year, new DoubleClick Search features will save you time and help you measure campaigns more effectively.

Improved workflows for finding and creating keywords

We’ve made a few adjustments to workflows in DoubleClick Search, making the management of your campaigns more efficient and productive.

First, we’ve made editing positive and negative keywords in DoubleClick Search as simple as entering data in an online spreadsheet. Each keyword gets a row, and column headings such as “Ad group,” “Match type” and “Max CPC” let you easily adjust these important settings for each keyword.

It’s also easier now to add keywords. You can combine new the keyword experience with the search terms report available in DoubleClick Search, to find and build new keywords to include in your campaign in a matter of a few clicks. When you identify a positive or negative keyword that better matches the customer intent, you no longer have to leave the report to add it. New enhancements allow you to add new keywords to your campaigns directly from the search terms report, and more advanced filters check to see if the keywords already exist in the ad group, campaign or account.

To help you get started, we’ve added tips for using the keyword editor and how to use the search terms report to harvest keywords in the DoubleClick Search Help Center.

Greater control and flexibility for bid optimization

DoubleClick Search now supports device bid adjustments for AdWords. You can use these to set individual bid adjustments for each device type — mobile devices, computers and tablets. DoubleClick Search reports provide critical insights into performance by device type, allowing you to set these device bid adjustments to maximize performance.

While device bid adjustments enable you to optimize with greater precision, you still need to factor in other signals which impact performance, like location, day of week and audience. To optimize at scale across this wider range of contextual signals, you should take advantage of automated bidding. DoubleClick Search Smart Bidding utilizes the power of Google’s machine learning to set more informed bids and help you get the most out of your marketing budget. Bid strategies with cost per acquisition (CPA), effective revenue share (ERS) or return on ad spend (ROAS) goals can all be optimized through Smart Bidding by device, location, remarketing lists and other factors.

And, to measure bid strategies more effectively, DoubleClick Search customers have new options to customize the data that appears in bid strategy reports. You can now segment bid strategy reports and add Floodlight activity columns.

Review our Best practices for setting up Smart Bidding strategies to develop the best possible approach to bid adjustments.

Additional transparency for measuring performance

DoubleClick Search executive reports now enable you to quickly see what can be optimized by displaying the top or bottom performers. They also enable you to filter reports using predefined or custom metrics, so you can choose to only see the data you want.

For example, if you’re a retailer and want to see the top 20 keywords that lead to a purchase, you can easily do so in an executive report that looks like this:

And, so you can ensure your top performing keywords are being seen, DoubleClick Search can now report on impression share for AdWords keywords, in addition to AdWords and Bing Ads accounts, campaigns and ad groups. We’ve also added Bing Ads quality score in DoubleClick Search.

Lastly, we’re rolling out the full launch of hourly reporting later this month. Hourly reporting can provide insightful data during special sales, where conversion behaviors are less predictable. Or, you can use these reports to quickly detect outages or problems with your conversion tags.

Review account activities more effectively

With all hands on deck during this busy period, the revamped change history report makes it easier for you to see who’s changing an ad account, when they’re making changes and details about the changes they made. These reports are fast and offer powerful filters to view and download activity by user email, change type, system and entity changed. Learn who your most active users are and implement reports to better manage your team.

If you’d like to learn more about any of these new features for your upcoming holiday search campaigns, contact your DoubleClick Search account manager.

Posted by Bashar Kachachi
Product Management Lead, DoubleClick Search

Becoming a digital advertising expert takes time, and it’s important to get off to a good start. Only 50 percent of marketers say they’re confident in their knowledge of digital advertising,¹ despite the wide range of educational materials available. Sometimes “more” isn’t the same as “better.” Many advertisers start learning about AdWords in our help centers, which offer an enormous trove of product information. But you’ve told us that you want quick, bite-sized training in more interactive formats. And we heard you.

We’re pleased to announce Academy for Ads, a new digital training platform designed to help you learn how to use Google’s ad products in a mobile-first world. We built Academy for Ads to promote learning on-the-go, whether you’re on a laptop, a desktop, or a mobile device.

Grow your Google product know-how

Guided by input from our team of product experts, Academy for Ads courses cover the topics that matter most to DoubleClick and Google advertisers – from Bid Manager and AdWords basics and the essentials of campaign management to bid strategies, reporting, optimization and more ways to successfully advertise with Google. We’re adding new content all the time, including a DoubleClick Campaign Manager Learning path in just a few weeks.

Learning paths, Assessments and Achievements

We’ve organized the courses into “Learning paths” that you can walk through at your own pace. At the end of each path, take an Assessment and earn an Achievement to show that you know your stuff. Earning an Achievement for Bid Manager or Ad Exchange helps you prepare for the more advanced training in the Help Center.

A few example Learning paths:

• Digital concepts: Learn the essentials of online ads — from third-party ad-serving to real-time bidding, programmatic media buying and remarketing.
• Get started with DoubleClick Bid Manager*: Learn your way around Bid Manager, what it offers and how you can use it to manage your online marketing campaigns.
• DoubleClick Ad Exchange: Learn how real-time bidding works in an open auction sale on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. This learning path also covers the available programmatic deal types, along with the types of inventory available for mobile, video, display and television buys.

*Only accessible to DoubleClick Bid Manager clients

Academy for Ads is useful for anyone getting started with Google or DoubleClick training, and can help pave the way for the AdWords Certification program offered by Google Partners, as well as the Google Best Practices program, which offers more advanced AdWords education. DoubleClick users may also find additional training in DoubleClick’s help centers.

Get started

If you already use Google Partners, you can sign in through the Partner portal at g.co/learnwithpartners — or, you can go directly to g.co/AcademyforAds to sign up and start sampling courses and Learning paths. We’re constantly adding content, including advanced DoubleClick training. So if you like what you learn, keep coming back for more.

Posted by Tracy Bizelli
Head of Academy for Ads

^{1 6 Fundamentals to Managing Digital Marketing in 2015, TFM Insights (January 2015)}

As part of our Advertising Week announcements, we’re introducing new digital innovations to help advertisers close the loop between television and digital, online and offline, and mobile and desktop.

Consumers make purchase decisions across many different moments, and over 75% of people¹ switch from one device to another while shopping. This makes reaching consumers with the right message — in the right moment — more complex. Today we’re introducing new cross-device capabilities in DoubleClick, including cross-device remarketing, to make it easier to close the loop across screens and reach people where they are, on whatever device they’re using.

Connect moments across devices

In July 2015, we introduced the ability to measure cross-device conversions (when a consumer purchase journey starts on one device but is completed on another). These metrics are helping advertisers like American Express and Ringling Bros. better understand consumer behavior and make better decisions about allocating budgets.

The insights have proven to be useful, but we’re excited to help you put them into action. Today we are announcing that you can automatically optimize your bids based on how users are interacting with your ads and converting across devices. This capability will be available as an option for automated bidding² in DoubleClick Bid Manager, helping you to drive greater impact from cross-screen campaigns.

Re-engage with consumers across devices

As consumers make purchase decisions, they may interact with your business multiple times along the journey. For example, when they’re shopping for their next car, they might download a brochure on their laptop while at work, watch videos while commuting home and read reviews on their tablet on the couch — all before booking a test drive. As an automotive marketer, you could use remarketing to re-engage with consumers who downloaded the brochure and encourage them to book a test drive — but in the past you could only reach them on their laptop.

Today we’re announcing cross-device remarketing in DoubleClick Bid Manager, allowing you to reach consumers across all of their devices, in the moments when they’re most receptive and your ads are most relevant. Cross-device remarketing will be rolled out as a beta early next year. You can contact your DoubleClick team to learn more.

To reach people in real time across all of the moments that shape their decisions, you need a platform that makes it easier to connect with them on all of their devices. DoubleClick surfaces the right cross-device insights while also allowing you to take the right actions to reach your marketing goals.

Posted by Payam Shodjai
Product Management Director, DoubleClick

^{1 Google/IPSOS Connect, March 2016, Digital Devices Bridge the Physical World, n=2013 US online respondents 18+
2 Only accessible to DoubleClick Bid Manager accounts.}

Earlier this year, we introduced expanded text ads so advertisers can provide more information about your business right in your search ad. While many have seen great results with the new, longer ad format, some advertisers are still learning how to use it effectively.

To make sure you have ample time to test and iterate your expanded text ads for the holidays, we are giving advertisers more time to upgrade your creatives.

You now have until January 31, 2017, to make the transition to expanded text ads (instead of the original date of October 26, 2016). This means starting on January 31, 2017, you’ll no longer be able to create or edit standard text ads — you’ll only be able to create and edit text ads using the expanded text ads format. Existing standard text ads will continue to serve alongside expanded text ads.

 Expanded text ads can deliver great results, particularly for those who have invested in writing and testing new creatives. Please use this additional time to experiment with new expanded text ads of your own.

Focus on quality through testing

Over the last few months, we reviewed a lot of text ads data. It confirmed what we already know to be true: the quality of your ads matters. Extra characters don’t solve any performance problems on their own. It’s very important to be thoughtful and compelling with your additional headline and characters.

To that end, consider these best practices as you move forward with expanded text ad optimization:

• Test multiple versions of your expanded text ads. Try different approaches with the new space your ads now have. Shoot for 3-5 new ads per ad group. Advertisers who test multiple creatives see better performance.
• Focus your testing on headlines. Headlines are the most important parts of your ads, and you now have an extra line to experiment with.
• Replicate what works in standard text ads in your expanded text ads. For example, if you mention pricing or use keyword insertion in a successful standard text ad, carry those over to expanded text ads.
• Consider shorter headlines on brand terms. Sometimes “Your Company’s Name – Official Site” might be all you need. You aren’t required to use all of your available characters. Test shorter ad copy, especially on terms where someone might not need a lot of additional info.
• Leave your standard text ads running until the new versions are consistently outperforming them. An expanded text ad isn’t guaranteed to be a winner simply because you have more characters. Leave your top performing ads running, regardless of their length.
• Review your pre-existing ads for previous success with longer headlines. Consider promoting description line 1 in a standard text ad to you new headline 2, especially if that ad performed well in the past.

Making a smooth transition to expanded text ads

In addition to those tips, here are a couple of things that you should avoid:

• Don’t implement the same expanded text ad across many different ad groups. Your ads should be tailored to users’ searches.
• Don’t blindly insert a new second headline without changing the rest of the ad. Add content that is relevant to the query and fits well with the rest of the creative.
• Don’t write expanded text ads that lose their relevance to a user’s query. Remember that user query in your text.

Example query: articles about college financing

Ad not aligned to user’s query (even though it may be better written)	Ad focusing on a user’s query

• Don’t leave out specific benefits or attributes of your product that had proven to be enticing in the past. Test all of your benefits to find what works in the new format. 

Additional resources

Mobile has forever changed the way people shop. A shopper’s smartphone is there for them anytime, anywhere in countless micro-moments. The question for retailers is: are you prepared to meet these shoppers in the moments that matter most?
Learn how best in class retailers are looking to be there and be useful to shoppers no matter where they’re discovering, researching or purchasing.

Best Buy

For much of Best Buy’s 50-year history, what its customer really cared about was “Do you have the product and is it at the right price?” But today, customers want to know much more than that. They want to understand how products work together to make their lives better. For example, ‘how can I stream photos from my SLR camera onto my television?’
To reach shoppers as they’re researching, Best Buy added all of their product information into mobile buying guides. They also worked with Google to surface their local store inventory within search so that customers know exactly which products are available in-store.
Hear Greg Revelle, Best Buy’s Chief Marketing Officer, discuss how this mobile-first strategy helped Best Buy drive over one million store visits with Google last holiday season.

Williams-Sonoma Inc.

Lifestyle icon Williams-Sonoma Inc. has always been a visual brand. But the brand has had to rethink the way it tells its story. Its catalog used to be the cornerstone of its relationship with consumers, but mobile phones are increasingly the new starting point for kitchen connoisseurs (especially millennials).
In fact, the brand learned that 60% of millennials use their smartphone as a “sous-chef” for help in the kitchen, so Williams-Sonoma Inc. began creating videos to help customers’ in their most important cooking moments, such as ‘how to use a spiralizer.’
Hear how Williams-Sonoma Inc.’s Chief Marketing Officer, Felix Carbullido, has developed customer-first strategies to increase the company’s mobile sales by 70% year over year.

Swarovski

Swarovski has always been a go-to destination for holiday gift giving, but the brand learned through search data that there was a huge opportunity in connecting with consumers in more everyday moments when they’re wondering what to wear on a date or how to accessorize an outfit for work.
Since 50% of Swarovski’s site traffic comes from mobile, the brand focused on developing mobile content that’s visually rich and easy to navigate. The company’s fun and interactive Style Finder offers ideas for how to accessorize an outfit for work or that special date night. It also allows the customer to dial-up or dial-down a look, depending on her mood.
Since a large percentage of purchases still happen in-store, Swarovski uses Google’s local inventory ads to drive those inspired customers into their stores where they can try on a necklace or bracelet and complete the sale. In fact, local inventory ads are driving a 75% higher click-through rate than its standard Shopping ads.
Learn how Swarovski’s team is using mobile to inspire and draw customers in-store store.

As we head into the biggest shopping season of the year, are you ready to give your shoppers everything they’ll be looking for in their mobile micro-moments?

• Read our Shopping Micro-Moments Guide, which has more stories of how all types of retailers and brands are reaching consumers with useful information in the moments that matter.
• Then, head to our official Holiday Planning Guide for tips on how to get your product data and campaigns in tip-top shape for the holiday season.

Posted by Emily Eberhard Pereira, Head of Shopping B2B Marketing

AdWords provides powerful tools to help advertisers grow their business. For example, if you’re about to launch a new holiday campaign, you can use TrueView ads on YouTube along with banner ads on the Google Display Network to drive brand awareness and more holiday sales. To make it easier for you to track and forecast the performance of these campaigns against your advertising goals, we’re introducing campaign groups and performance targets.

Create a campaign group

You can now package AdWords campaigns (including Video, Display, Search, and Shopping campaigns) into a single campaign group. For our holiday example, set up your YouTube and Display campaigns, select “campaign groups” from the left menu, and group those two campaigns together to create a campaign group called “Holiday Launch”.

Set a performance target

Performance targets make it easier to monitor and reach your performance goals for each campaign group. Tell us how many clicks or conversions you want to receive, how much you want to spend, and what average CPC or CPA you wish to maintain. We’ll then automatically show you a single view of how your campaign group is performing against those goals, and what we think you’ll likely achieve by the end of the campaign period.

 Here’s an early success story for campaign groups and performance targets:

  “Previously I needed to export all my campaigns into a spreadsheet, group them together, and create a pivot table simply to see how they are performing. With campaign groups & performance targets, we can much more easily see how our groups are performing relative to our goals, all from within the AdWords interface.“
- Oleg Monakhov, Senior Lead Generation Manager at Wrike

Note that creating performance targets does not change how we serve your ads or optimize your campaigns. Instead, use it to evaluate whether or not your campaigns are working together toward your broader goals.

To learn more about campaign groups and performance targets, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Jon Diorio, Product Manager, AdWords

A few weeks back, Paul Muret, Google’s VP of Display, Video and Analytics, made several announcements about enhancements to the DoubleClick platform to support Programmatic Direct deals. Paul also shared that the number of Programmatic Direct deals transacted on DoubleClick Ad Exchange tripled in 2015¹ alone.

Everyone knows that programmatic is growing and is increasingly becoming the way we transact digital advertising. But what’s the deal with programmatic deals, or as we say, Programmatic Direct?

To answer that question, we dug into the data to analyze the key drivers of Programmatic Direct growth on our platforms. You can explore some of the data for yourself, with our interactive report: The State of Programmatic Direct.

Looking through Ad Exchange data from October 2014 to December 2015, one thing became incredibly clear: In every region, across every platform and publisher category, there are fascinating trends of adoption to be found.

Programmatic Direct has gone mainstream…

Depending on whom you ask, the history of programmatic exchanges can be traced back nearly a decade. However, it was only a few years ago that some of the world’s largest global spenders started making big commitments to programmatic and “programmatic” became ANA’s Marketing Word of the Year.

It hasn’t taken as long for advertisers and publishers to use programmatic technologies to transact the deals they’d traditionally buy and sell directly. In reviewing the data from DoubleClick AdExchange, we found that:

• 90+ marketers on the Ad Age Top 100 Global Marketers list made Programmatic Direct deals in 2015².
• More than half of the publishers in the US comScore top 50 list from December 2015 offered their inventory through Programmatic Direct deals³.

… On every screen

Programmatic may have been born on the desktop, but Programmatic Direct is taking off on mobile — probably not a surprise if you’re reading this article on your phone. Programmatic Direct impressions served on mobile and tablet grew 4x faster than desktop in the period surveyed⁴.

… In every region

The growth of Programmatic Direct isn’t limited to any specific country or region. So, where is it well adopted and where is it growing fast?

• Programmatic Direct impressions in Ukraine, Turkey and Spain each more than doubled in just 12 months⁵.
• Japan was the strongest adopter in APAC but Taiwan and Indonesia saw Programmatic Direct impressions grow more than 20% monthly⁶.

Stay tuned over the next few weeks as we dig through the data to share more insights. You can also explore our interactive research report to find additional trends, like how quickly Programmatic Direct impressions on mobile apps grew for game publishers in Japan. To get started, take a look at the infographic below.

Posted by Carlo Acenas
Associate Product Marketing Manager
Yamini Gupta
Sr. Product Marketing Manager ^{1 DoubleClick Ad Exchange data, year end 2014 to year end 2015.
2 DoubleClick Ad Exchange data, Oct 2014-Dec 2015. Minimum $1K spend.
3 DoubleClick Ad Exchange data, Oct 2014-Dec 2015. Cross-referenced with comScore 50 US list, December 2015.
4 DoubleClick Ad Exchange data, Oct 2014 – Dec 2015.
5 DoubleClick Ad Exchange data, Oct 2014 – Dec 2015.
6 DoubleClick Ad Exchange data, Oct 2014 – Dec 2015.}