April 22nd, 2014 | by Rob Newton | published in Google Adwords
Welcome to the Inside AdWords livestream! Today, Jerry Dischler, Vice President of Product Management, AdWords, announces the next generation of advertising innovations. Tune in to the livestream on YouTube or watch below. We look forward to engaging i…
April 21st, 2014 | by Becky C. | published in Google DoubleClick
When half of the project timeline has to be devoted to building out all the ads to match the media buy, your brainstorming and design time gets cornered into shorter periods at the beginning of the project.
If you can build the long-tail of your ad units in half the time, you can make space at the beginning of the project for more brainstorming and design time, giving you the chance to come up with really innovative ideas.
Studio Layouts can save you 75% of your production time, because it’s easy to build out all the additional units you need to complete your campaign. Plus, because all the trafficking and reporting tags are baked in to each Layout, there are fewer areas where things can break, so your ads should go through QA much faster.
April 18th, 2014 | by Rob Newton | published in Google Adwords
To upgrade to Shopping campaigns, we encourage you to create a Shopping campaign from scratch and then customize your product groups and bids from there. That way, you can choose how granular you’d like to get and ensure all your inventory is included in your Shopping campaign.
However, if you would like to base your Shopping campaign on a regular PLA campaign, we’re introducing an option today to help you upgrade.
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After setting up your Shopping campaign, you’ll be taken to a new page to create ad groups. Here, you’ll see two options: the ability to start fresh with one ad group or create one or many ad groups based on a regular PLA campaign.
Note that some parts of a regular PLA campaigns aren’t transferable to a Shopping campaign, like product targets that use AdWords labels or groupings. If none of your PLA campaigns are transferrable, you might not see this option.
Keep in mind
With Shopping campaigns, you no longer need to create separate ad groups or product targets to track your impressions, clicks and cost. You can analyze and report on your PLA performance by product attribute or by individual items in the Dimensions tab, regardless of your campaign structure.
As a reminder, all PLA advertisers will need to upgrade to Shopping campaigns by late August 2014, at which time all remaining regular PLA campaigns will be automatically upgraded. Over the next few months, we’ll continue to share more information and tools to help you upgrade your campaigns and manage them at scale.
To learn more about Shopping campaigns and how to upgrade, here are a few resources:
Posted by Eric Tholomé, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping
April 16th, 2014 | by Rob Newton | published in Google Adwords
By understanding search data and its role before, during and beyond an event, marketers can prepare to respond to consumers’ needs and desires in new and timely ways. Think with Google looks at how these search insights can help guide a thoughtful event strategy and provides tips for marketers to get the most value from events. Read the full article.
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Check out Think with Google’s full collection of Search Insights articles for more examples of how to use search data to inform your marketing.
Posted by Think with Google
April 16th, 2014 | by Rob Newton | published in Google Adwords
Starting today, +Post ads are available to all advertisers who meet a minimum threshold of Google+ followers. We’re also piloting two new features – promoted Hangouts on Air and automatic post promotion – to help you create compelling ad experiences and make it easier to extend the reach of your social content.
Partner success
+Post ads are already helping advertisers run creative campaigns that make the entire web their social stream. For example:
For the launch of the 2014 Corolla, Toyota USA sought to drive consideration from a younger audience by promoting their Google+ content with +Post ads. For this campaign, Toyota USA saw a 50% higher engagement rate than the industry average for rich media ads.
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| Click to see the Toyota case study |
To raise awareness with their potential customers, prAna, a yoga and climbing inspired apparel company, incorporated +Post ads into their existing AdWords display campaigns. “We focused on highly targeted audiences that best reflect the interests of our core consumers, such as yoga, climbing, outdoor lifestyle etc. We chose the most hyper relevant Google+ content to promote to each targeted audience, to ensure high engagement rates,” says Karen Hardy Online Marketing Manager.
The European Parliament worked with Ogilvy Brussels to run a campaign in 11 countries encouraging European citizens to cast their votes in the upcoming EU elections. Koen Van Impe, CEO Ogilvy Brussels, found the combination of an easy to create ad, the potential reach and targeting of the Google Display Network, and the powerful ad format promising and saw engagement rates that were 50% to 100% higher, and at a lower cost-per-engagement, than previous campaigns.
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| Click to enlarge |
Promoting Hangouts on Air across the web
You can now promote your Hangout on Air with +Post ads that lets users take specific actions before, during, and after the broadcast. Users can RSVP prior to the Hangout, watch the broadcast live, and view a recording after the event.
ASOS hosted a shoppable Hangout where fans could check out styles and make purchases from a collection created in collaboration with a global activewear brand. The event was promoted live in a +Post ad, driving awareness and live tune-ins of the event on relevant web sites. In total, 71% of live viewers for the Hangout watched from a +Post ad.
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| Promoted Hangout on Air |
Automatically promote your most recent post
At any given moment, there is someone interested in your brand, but it’s challenging to make sure you reach people at every moment that matters. Now you can automatically promote your most recent Google+ post, and pay only when people engage with your content, extending the reach of your social content across the web.
Lean more about +Post ads and Google+ by visiting the Google+ for brands site.
Posted by Eran Arkin, Product Manager, Social Display Ads
April 15th, 2014 | by Rob Newton | published in Google Adwords
As we met with advertisers, both large and small, and conducted consumer research, we learned the following:
With these insights, our team of product managers and engineers went to work to build a brand new set of AdWords innovations to help businesses continue to grow while saving time and improving efficiency.
Join us for our big announcements. Our livestream is on Tuesday, April 22nd at 9am PT / 12noon ET — right here on the Inside AdWords blog. Register here.
Posted by Your Inside AdWords Team
April 9th, 2014 | by Kim | published in Google DoubleClick
Over the past several years, we’ve been working on a gradual redesign of many Google products like Search, Maps, Gmail, and AdWords — with the goal of offering a simple, streamlined user experience that helps you get tasks done quickly and efficiently.
Today, we’re rolling out this new look and feel across all our DoubleClick products — another example of how we’re continuing to unify our solutions across the platform. With this update, you’ll find that all products part of DoubleClick Digital Marketing now offer more screen real estate to our tools and reports, to help you focus on your tasks at hand. This means that you’ll experience the same, easy workflows across our products — whether you’re managing search, display, rich media, and beyond. Note that this change only affects the style of the page, and does not change any functionality of our products today.
April 8th, 2014 | by Josh Pyle | published in Google DoubleClick
Programmatic buying in DoubleClick Bid Manager keeps getting easier. We offer training for all levels, from new user training to advanced webinars. To help you learn faster and more efficiently, we’ve launched the new Bid Manager checklists along with two new optimization webinars.
Bid Manager checklists
Learn the basics of Bid Manager or master more advanced campaign management topics using the new Bid Manager checklists. These self-paced learning paths help you learn and master the product based on your role:
Regardless of your level of experience with real time bidding and DoubleClick Bid Manager, we have a learning track that’s right for you!
Join a webinar this spring
Continue your learning by joining a live training webinar this spring. See the schedule below and register through the Training page in the Bid Manager Help Center (sign-in required).
We also offer eLearning and Certification, available in Spanish, Portuguese-Brazilian, and more.
Optimization webinar series
Learn key features in DoubleClick Bid Manager so you can more effectively manage your programmatic campaigns.
Bids and budgets – 5/13
Learn tips on setting up bids, budgets, and frequency caps, and evaluating the performance to make optimizations. Register
Audience buying – 5/29
Learn to use the audience targeting feature for both third-party and first-party audience targeting. We’ll look at tools like the Audience Composition report, and provide best practices for your remarketing line items. Register
These webinars are intended for Bid Manager users who have completed Fundamentals training. If you’re a Bid Manager customer but are not yet using the tool, complete the Fundamentals eLearning.
Launch your campaign – 4/23
Now that you know the basics, it’s time to set your bid strategies. In this webinar, you’ll walk through turning a media plan into a live campaign in Bid Manager. We’ll also cover different strategies for gaining reach and increasing ROI, as well as setting up remarketing recency. RegisterCreative Approvals – 6/3
Learn more about the creative approval process and find out what you need to do if creatives aren’t approved. Register
These webinars are intended for Bid Manager users who have completed Fundamentals training. If you’re a Bid Manager customer but are not yet using the tool, complete the Fundamentals eLearning.
Watch a pre-recorded webinar
We also offer recorded webinars in our Help Center, covering an Overview for new users, topics like keyword contextual targeting, creative approvals, upgrades, and more. While you’re there, be sure to read about our latest product releases.
April 7th, 2014 | by Rob Newton | published in Google Adwords
Upgrade now for better performance
To start tapping into this opportunity, upgrade your “Search and Display Networks” campaigns to “Search Network with Display Select” today. You may be offered an option to create a ‘Display Network only’ campaign during the upgrade process. If you would like to maintain your click volume on Display, accept this option and we will automatically create a ‘Display Network only’ campaign for you. As we continue to invest in Search Network with Display Select and see strong adoption from advertisers, we will begin upgrading all ‘Search and Display Networks’ campaigns to ‘Search Network with Display Select’ campaigns starting on September 16th, 2014. Click here to upgrade.
We’re here to help
We want you to be successful with AdWords, so please visit the Help Center or Contact Us if you’d like assistance with your upgrade.
Posted by Ahmad Anvari, Product Manager, Google Display Network
April 3rd, 2014 | by Becky C. | published in Google DoubleClick
At the beginning of March, we announced a month-long campaign to revamp our DoubleClick Studio Certification program. Over the course of the month, we have released new resources to better communicate the benefits of being a Studio Certified user, and …
April 2nd, 2014 | by Rob Newton | published in Google Adwords
April 2nd, 2014 | by Rob Newton | published in Google Adwords
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Continued Retailer Success
Since we made Shopping campaigns available to all PLA advertisers, we continue to hear many examples of how it helps you manage PLAs and effectively grow your business. Here are a few:
“The benefits of Shopping campaigns can’t be overstated – the ease of setup, the transparency of data, the ability to group products into logical categories and manage to the product level make it a must. All of these contribute to our clients’ ROI almost tripling, and there’s still room to improve.” -JumpFly
“The new Shopping campaigns allowed us to achieve a much higher-level of profitability, cutting costs by 13% and increasing return on ad spend by about 22% on average. Not only that, the new campaign type trims about 2 hours of setup time.” -Exclusive Concepts
“We used the product-level data from our Shopping campaign to fine-tune our bidding strategy, focusing on the products that acquired the most traffic & lowered the ones that are less important. This helped us increase visits 25% & ROI by 16%.” -Wiggle
“Shopping campaigns effectively reduced the time spent setting up product-specific bids and optimizing in half. We can now invest even more time into each client, and the results we’ve seen have been no less than amazing. A client selling home accessories saw a 301% increase in revenue after only one month. As a result, we are now changing our agency standards within PLAs to only use Shopping campaigns.” -White Shark Media
Future of Shopping campaigns and retirement of regular PLA campaign type
Shopping campaigns offer a truly retail-centric and seamless approach to PLAs. We’re very excited by the positive feedback we’ve heard so far and will continue to build tools and features into this new campaign type to help you manage your PLAs. Thus, we’ll be retiring the regular PLA campaign type and asking all PLA advertisers to upgrade to Shopping campaigns by late August 2014, at which time all remaining PLA campaigns will be automatically upgraded. Over the next few months, we’ll share more information and release more tools to help you upgrade your campaigns and manage them at scale. We encourage you to start planning your upgrade to Shopping campaigns today to take full advantage of the new features as soon as possible.
For additional help, here are a few resources:
Posted by Eric Tholomé, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping
April 1st, 2014 | by Alexis R. Shellhammer | published in Google DoubleClick
March 26th, 2014 | by Josh Pyle | published in Google DoubleClick
Spring is in bloom in most places, trees and flowers are growing (or at least the snow is melting), and more agencies and marketers are upgrading! It’s the perfect season to learn and master DoubleClick Campaign Manager based on your role and how you use the product. We offer multiple learning options, from the basics to more advanced topics like In-Stream Video, Attribution, and more – so come check us out!
Join a DoubleClick Campaign Manager webinar
DCM Fundamentals – 4/29 and 6/10
Similar to the eLearning, this 2.5 hour webinar will teach you everything from how third-party ad serving works to the steps needed to set up Floodlight tags and traffic your first campaign. This session also touches on Remarketing. Attend this webinar if you need an introduction to the fundamentals and want to learn best practices.
DFA6 to DCM for Existing Users – 4/2, 4/16, 4/30, 5/14, 5/28, 6/11, 6/25
Learn what’s changed in DoubleClick Campaign Manager. Get a demo of the key differences compared to DFA6. Attend this webinar if you’ve been using DFA6 and want to know about functionality and workflow differences between DFA and DoubleClick Campaign Manager before you upgrade.
Campaign Trafficking Demo – 4/9, 5/7, and 6/4
Join our product trainer for a live walk through of how to create a campaign and assign campaign elements.Prerequisites: This session is a companion to the DCM Fundamentals eLearning, and assumes that attendees have taken the DCM eLearning and Certification or attended the DCM Fundamentals webinar. Before attending, you should already know how DoubleClick Campaign Manager defines a campaign, placement, ad, and creative.
Understanding In-Stream Video – 4/17
In this session, you’ll learn the basics of trafficking In-Stream Video creatives in DCM.Reporting: Report Builder – 4/3, 5/1, and 6/5
Learn how to run reports in Report Builder, and slice and dice data in the Summary tab (dashboard view). Get a demo of Reporting along with how to pull common reports, including Standard/Performance, Reach, and Floodlight.Reporting: Attribution – 5/15
In this session, you’ll learn about the attribution options available in Reporting, and uses for Multi-channel funnels, Attribution, and Modeling. This session is also helpful if you’re upgrading from DFA to DCM and want to expand your knowledge of what the Reporting tool offers.
Prerequisites: Users should have familiarity with ad trafficking in DFA6 or DoubleClick Campaign Manager before attending these sessions. If you’re not familiar with DoubleClick Campaign Manager or DFA6, attend the Fundamentals webinar session first.
DFA Fundamentals – 4/23 and 6/4
DFA Fundamentals is the first step if you’re new to third-party ad serving and DFA6. This webinar mainly focuses on the basics of ad trafficking, but also touches briefly on Floodlight tags and DFA Reporting.MediaVisor Fundamentals – 4/22 and 6/17
Learn the most common uses of MediaVisor, including how to plan and create campaigns, advertisers, and site placements. You’ll also learn how to send RFPs and IOs, as well as how to traffic placements from MediaVisor to DFA.
March 18th, 2014 | by Josh Pyle | published in Google DoubleClick
Studio Certified developers, do you want to tell the world that you can create innovative ads designed for users to connect with brands? With DoubleClick Studio’s Engagement Ads Certification, you can get certified in building ads that marry the art of brand building with the science of performance display.
Engagement Ads are tuned to user engagement – not clicks, letting brands connect with users through multiple creative formats. Ads are available on a cost-per-engagement (CPE) basis, allowing advertisers to bid and pay only for user engagement.
Watch this video:
Engagement Ads fit in standard display units, allowing them to scale across the web and then expand to a larger format after an innovative two-second hover delay. This delay eliminates nearly all accidental expansions, providing a better user experience and more accurate reporting to advertisers.
With this flexibility, the richness of a campaign using Engagement Ads depends on the story the brand wants to tell and the type of content they want to promote. Creatives can range from rich, interactive videos built in DoubleClick Studio to immersive brand experiences using HTML5, CSS3, and WebGL – all without leaving the ad format on the publisher’s website.
Check out an Engagement Ad format in action.
Engagement Ads badge certification gives you:
You also receive the benefits of the Studio Certification Program, including exclusive access to betas and product features, DoubleClick hosted events and workshops, and a badge you can use for self-promotion.
Pass the exam and get the badge to demonstrate your expertise in creating rich ads to boost user engagement. Take the Engagement Ads exam and get certified.
Note: You must be Studio Certified in Core Flash or HTML5 to take the Engagement Ads certification exam.
Not Studio Certified? No worries! Get Certified today. We have these Studio Certification badges available:
Posted by Paige Birnbaum, Program Manager, DoubleClick Studio Certification