Google Data

People often see many ads across different devices before making a purchase, booking a flight, or signing up for an account. Because of this, advertisers know that last click attribution may not always tell the full story. In 2014, we released the Attribution Modeling Tool in AdWords to share insights about how users interact with your ads. Later this month, you’ll be able to integrate the attribution model of your choice with your conversion data and bidding.

For each conversion type, use a simple drop-down menu in Conversion settings to select one of six different attribution models — last click, first click, linear, time decay, position-based, or data driven. When you pick a new model, credit will be reassigned across the conversion path for all search or shopping ad clicks on Google.com, and your conversion stats will change moving forward. You can adjust bids based on your new way of counting conversions, and if you’re using automated bidding for search ads, your bids will be optimized automatically to reflect your new model. To learn more, visit our Help Center.

For the first time, AdWords advertisers with sufficient data will also be able to select the new data driven attribution model as a public beta, which is also available in Analytics 360, Attribution 360, and DoubleClick. Unlike rules-based models, data driven attribution uses machine learning to evaluate all the converting and non-converting paths across your account and identifies the proper credit for each interaction. The model considers the number of ad interactions, order of exposure, ad creative, and many other factors to determine which keywords and clicks are the most effective at driving results.

To help advertisers succeed with attribution, we’ve created a new best practices guide: “Beyond Last-Click Attribution.” The guide will show you how to:

• Determine how important moving beyond last-click attribution is to your business 
• Choose a model that best fits your needs 
• Value early influencer keywords appropriately 
• Act on attribution 
• Evolve your approach to attribution as measurement gets better 

We hope the new functionality and guide will help you optimize your marketing campaigns and drive stronger results, and our goal is to expand beyond search soon.  

Posted by:
Joan Arensman, Product Manager
Wilfred Yeung, Product Manager

We’ve all been there. You’re trying to send an article from your phone to a friend, or you’re playing a mobile game while waiting in line for a movie, when you accidentally touch an ad on your screen. You weren’t interested in the ad — heck, you didn’t even have time to see what it was for — but now you’re hitting the back button to get back to what you were doing. Not only do accidental clicks like these annoy users, but left unaddressed, they can drive down the value of ads.

Over the last four years, we’ve introduced a series of protections across mobile web and mobile apps to prevent accidental clicks like these on ads. Today we are continuing this commitment to protecting users and advertisers by extending accidental click protections to native ad formats. Native ads were developed to help publishers and developers implement ads that complement the look and feel of their content.

Since our teams started instituting various click protections, we’ve learned quite a bit along the way. Here are two insights among many that guide our ongoing work.

Fast clicks are not real clicks 

A professional baseball player has about 680ms¹ to react and swing at a baseball thrown at 90mph. That’s fast, even for a professional who’s paying close attention to hitting the ball. We think it’s virtually impossible for someone to read, understand, and take action on an ad in that amount of time.

Not surprisingly, we found super-fast clicks on ads to provide little to no value to advertisers. That’s why we ignore fast clicks that we detect to be accidental immediately upon ad load. Rather than our ads causing surprise low quality clicks, users can continue on uninterrupted.

Edge clicks lack value 

If you’ve used a mobile device, you know fat-fingers are a reality of touchscreens: the average fingerpad is roughly 50px large when pressing down.² When we’re swiping, pinching, and poking our screens, it’s easy to accidentally touch the edge of an ad that appears unexpectedly or is placed too close to tappable controls on your screen.

When we compared the performance of clicks from the edge of ads to those coming from the interior region, we found dramatically higher conversion rates and user intentionality on clicks toward the middle of ad units. A few years ago, we started to expand these protections across mobile placements resulting in ad clicks that are more intentional.

The overall benefits of click protections 

Fast clicks and edge clicks are just two of the user interaction issues we prevent in order to deliver value to advertisers. By expanding protections like these to native ad formats on mobile, we observe conversion rates increase over 10% on average with minimal impact to long term publisher revenue. This combined with our previous efforts has greatly improved the experience with mobile ads for users and advertisers.

The protections we’ve put in place across mobile web and mobile apps prevent tens of millions of accidental clicks per day, saving users tens of thousands of hours. When we look at the effect for advertisers in mobile apps, we observe double the value per click. We work hard to ensure that the clicks advertisers are charged for are more meaningful, and we hope sharing insight on these protections helps raise awareness and guide the wider advertising ecosystem. Plus, we really love playing games on our phones too, and want to make sure that we’re only taken to an advertiser’s page when we mean to go there.

Posted by Alex Jacobson, Product Manager, Ad Traffic Quality

1. 90ft/132 ft per second = 681ms, 132 ft per second = 90mph
2. http://touchlab.mit.edu/publications/2003_009.pdf

 

Finding the right customers on Google Shopping starts with your Merchant Center product feed: it contains all the information about the products you sell to help online shoppers find just what they’re looking for. But we know that creating and maintaining a complete and compliant data feed can be challenging. To make feed management easier, we’re excited to introduce Feed Rules, a self-service tool to help you transform your existing data from your inventory management systems into the format accepted by Google Shopping. Feed Rules helps you streamline your data feed uploads, whether you’re already running Shopping campaigns or you’re just getting started.

Use Feed Rules to set up and maintain your feed in Google Shopping format 
Feed Rules allows you to perform basic transformations of your existing product data — making it easier than ever to get your data feed up and running. You can export and submit your product data in your own format, and use different rules to transform it into product attributes and values that follow the Google Shopping feed specification, directly in Merchant Center:

• Map your column headers to the attribute names supported by Google Shopping. For example, if you have an existing feed with the unsupported column header “main title”, you can set up a rule in Merchant Center to have it recognized as the supported attribute name, “title”. 
• Transform the values in your feed to values supported by Google Shopping. For example, to submit gender specifications for your products, you can transform the unsupported value “for women” in your existing feed to the supported value “female”. 
• Populate missing attribute values with a fixed value, or with different values based on conditional criteria. For example, if the “condition” attribute is missing and you’re only selling new products, you can set up a rule to have this attribute automatically set to “new”. 

Once you specify new rules for a feed, all future uploads of this feed will be processed according to those rules.

Feed rules in action: these rules transform unrecognized values for gender into values accepted for Google Shopping

 Use Feed Rules to organize your data for campaign optimization You can also use conditional rules to better organize your data:

• Implement rules for custom labels to structure your campaigns in new ways. For example, you can group products by price ranges or margins, then later bid differently on these groups. 
• Tag your products with a shipping label. For example, you can derive “heavy” from the category, label those products, and define a particular shipping cost for those items. 

As we introduce the first version of Feed Rules, we’re eager to learn about even more use cases from you. Feedback and suggestions for this feature can be entered directly from your Merchant Center account by clicking the gear icon in the top-right corner of the page and selecting “Send Feedback” to let us know what you think.

For more information about Feed Rules, check out our Help Center article, and stay tuned to the blog to learn more about feature updates and enhancements.  

Posted by Sven Herschel, Product Manager for Google Shopping

Recent research has shown that half of 18-49 year olds turn to their mobile device first to watch video. Even in the living room, many people prefer to watch on their smartphone – for the control, personalization and ease it offers. And as viewing habits change, we are working to introduce new formats adapted to these habits.

That’s why today we’re announcing Bumper ads – a new six-second video format, sold through the AdWords auction on a CPM basis. Bumper ads are ideal for driving incremental reach and frequency, especially on mobile, where “snackable videos” perform well.

Given the succinct nature of the format, we’ve seen Bumper ads work best when combined with a TrueView or Google Preferred campaign. In early tests, Bumpers drove strong lift in upper funnel metrics like recall, awareness and consideration. We also see that Bumpers work well to drive incremental reach and frequency when paired with a TrueView campaign.

Atlantic Records was an early tester of this new format, using Bumpers to launch English band Rudimental’s second album. As Fiona Byers, Senior Marketing Manager of Atlantic Records/Warner Music Group said, “TrueView and Bumpers were a really important part of the recent Rudimental campaign to tell the story of the band’s second album. Through cost-efficient bumpers we could really showcase the plethora of legendary guests featured on the record. They each gave a short sharp insight into a featured artist and individual track on the album, with TrueView providing the fuller story around the album and the band. When used in conjunction, TrueView plus Bumpers really work more effectively than either format on its own.”

As a quick and fun format, Bumpers lend themselves well to serialized content. Audi Germany cut up their longer TrueView ad to introduce their Q-series SUVs with evocative German “q” words like querpass (cross kick) and quantensprung (quantum leap). Their early adoption of the format mirrors Audi Germany’s tagline “Vorsprung durch Technik” (“advantage through technology”).

We like to think of Bumper ads as little haikus of video ads – and we’re excited to see what the creative community will do with them. You can use Bumpers beginning in May by talking to your Google sales representative, and stay tuned as we continue to roll out new ad formats that are uniquely adapted to the way people watch video now, and in the future.

Posted by Zach Lupei, Product Manager, Video Ads

Tune in live to the Google Performance Summit Keynote on Tuesday, May 24 at 9am PT / 12pm ET to hear the latest Ads and Analytics innovations.

We live in exciting times when technology seems to upend everything as we know, every few years. And nothing has changed consumer behavior and business innovation as much as the mobile phone. People are attached to their phones, tapping and swiping their way through places to go, stuff to buy, and things to do. This presents a tremendous opportunity for marketers to connect with customers in more meaningful, relevant ways. And Google is a key partner for advertisers, providing the media and tools to help you make those connections and measure the results.

To ensure we are building the right products for consumers and businesses all around the world, my team and I make it a priority to regularly visit our ads and analytics customers. Last year, we met with advertisers in India, Japan, China, the UK and Germany, and gained new insights from every country.

For example, in Europe, we learned that universal app campaigns are effective at growing installs across a broad range of app users. Now, advertisers want the ability to reach very specific audiences. In Asia, home to three of the five top smartphone markets, advertisers asked for more control and flexibility on mobile devices for both creatives and bidding. And in every country we visited, we saw customers working hard to integrate data from across their organizations and transform it into actionable insights. Marketers want better data to understand the customer journey across devices, contexts and channels.

We were all grateful for these insights and have been using them to build a whole new generation of Ads and Analytics products. We look forward to sharing many new innovations with you at the Google Performance Summit on Tuesday, May 24, 2016 at 9am PT / 12pm ET.

Until then, follow us on our +GoogleAds page for sneak previews of what’s to come.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy Senior Vice President, Ads and Commerce

Measuring the impact of online video is something of a passion for us at Google. It’s been three years since we unveiled Brand Lift for YouTube and brands have seen great success. But the last piece of the puzzle has been how does online video drive offline sales? This is particularly true for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, for which the vast majority of sales – over 90% – happen offline. Thanks to our new integration with Oracle Data Cloud – a leader in the emerging Data as a Service (DaaS) industry that measures the sales impact of digital media – we now have a solution to answer that question. Today we’re announcing the availability of sales lift studies in the US, for CPG advertisers using TrueView video ads.

The value of video 

We’ve been testing this capability for a while, and have seen promising early results: 78% of TrueView campaigns we studied on YouTube showed an increase in offline sales, with 61% driving a statistically significant lift in sales of the advertised brand.¹

To build this solution we worked with Oracle Data Cloud to develop the first in-depth application of their DLX ROI product on video formats, and we studied a range of CPG video campaigns running TrueView ads across food, health and beauty, beverage and homecare. We built this with privacy at the center, and no personal data is exchanged between the companies.

Early client successes 

One campaign we measured, Gatorade’s “We Love Sweat,” earned $13.50 sales in return for every dollar spent on TrueView (return on ad spend, or ROAS). This stunning success was due in part to persistent branding and strong creative geared specifically for driving sales. Gatorade’s campaign was also interesting because it delivered a remarkable 16% lift in sales among new buyers that had seen the video vs. new buyers that had not – according to Oracle Data Cloud a typical lift in this metric hovers around 2.5%.

Similar to Gatorade, parent company PepsiCo also saw sales lift success with their campaign for Doritos. Not only did our DLX ROI solution show that their 30-second creative drove higher lift in sales among exposed households than a 15-second version, but they saw particular targeting techniques – namely topic targeting and remarketing – drove greater sales lift compared to a demographic target.

Mars also participated in our DLX ROI test for their Pedigree pet food brand, and the sales lift studies helped them make key creative decisions. They tested a video that opened with strong branding against one that saved their branding for the end, and learned that the video with strong upfront branding drove nearly 7x greater sales lift. As Laurent Larguinat, Global Director of Mars Consumer and Market Insights said, “With this new offering, YouTube is rounding out a full funnel measurement solution for video. We’re excited to continue to see these results for all of our campaigns.”

This new sales lift offering drops the last piece into place for full funnel measurement of CPG campaigns on YouTube, and we’re excited to bring you new creative and media strategy insights that drive incremental sales as we scale these studies.

Posted by Mark Thomas, Brand Measurement Product Manager

Google provides consumers around the world with the answers they need to find, review, and buy the products they’re looking for. Last year, we announced Google Manufacturer Center, a free tool to help brand manufacturers accurately represent their products to shoppers on Google.com and other Google services. By uploading complete and accurate product data into Manufacturer Center, brands increase their chances of standing out in a crowded marketplace — and ultimately get more of their products in the hands of consumers. Today, we’ll shine a light on three manufacturers who have boosted results with Manufacturer Center, and highlight new partners that can help manufacturers maximize the tool.

We’ve seen that manufacturers who upload their authoritative product data — including product descriptions, high-resolution images, GTINs, and product variants — have helped improve the online shopping experience and increase conversions in key ways:

1. Detailed product data enables more relevant search results. Product descriptions submitted by manufacturers contain key product attributes, which allow Google to surface Shopping ads (created by retailers) for those products when users search for those attributes. GTIN identifiers enable Google to match manufacturer content to ads and information cards for the same products.
2. High quality data helps users decide what to buy. By uploading better images and detailed product information, manufacturers can improve the accuracy and completeness of how their products are represented. This helps consumers decide which product to buy.

Manufacturers can choose to either upload their product data directly to Manufacturer Center or work with an approved Google Shopping Partner that integrates with Manufacturer Center. In addition to our existing partners, we’re announcing 4 new partners: WebCollage, Channel Advisor, Informatica, and GFK Etilize. These partners are industry leaders in organizing and distributing product data.

Below, learn how three manufacturers — Bosch, JanSport, and Speakman — are using Manufacturer Center to help their shoppers make more informed buying decisions.

Bosch drills into richer product data, sees 4% conversion uplift 
Bosch, a leading power tool and accessories brand, has been an early adopter of Manufacturer Center, using the tool to upload rich product data for use in Shopping ads. Before Bosch added product data via Manufacturer Center, a user that searched for “lightweight drill” was unlikely to find the Bosch PS31BN Brushless Drill. The product description provided by Bosch, however, highlighted that the PS31BN is compact and lightweight. Even Shopping ads that don’t display product descriptions can benefit from this additional information, helping Google show the most useful ads to users. Now, when users search for “lightweight drill”, they are much more likely to find the PS31BN. As a result of uploading this more accurate, descriptive data, Bosch saw a 4% uplift in conversions across their updated products on the sites of retailers advertising Bosch products on Google.

JanSport packs in an extra 13% in conversions for back-to-school 
During the 2015 back-to-school season, JanSport, the world’s leading and largest backpack maker, used Manufacturer Center to overhaul their product images, descriptions, and details to improve how their products appear on Google. For example, JanSport updated their Big Student model backpack by including richer descriptions that highlight the product’s two large compartments, water bottle pocket, and extra large capacity. This information helped create more effective listings on Google Shopping and other Google services like Google Express, letting shoppers better understand what they’re buying. Jansport saw a 13% increase in conversions originating from Google for their backpacks with updated product data, compared to benchmark products without updates.

Speakman cleans up with an 8% increase in conversions 
Speakman, manufacturer of premium shower and bath products, was an early adopter of Manufacturer Center. They worked with Salsify, a Product Information Management partner, to send their rich product information to Manufacturer Center for use in Shopping ads. With the addition of richer and more complete data, including multiple product images and even videos of their products in action, Google was able to increase relevancy for users searching for Speakman products like their Speakman Reaction and Icon shower heads. After updating product data, Speakman saw an 8% uplift in conversions originating from Google, compared to benchmark products that were not updated.

Simply put, Manufacturer Center allows manufacturers to elevate their brands and ultimately attract more shoppers online. If you’re a brand manufacturer and are interested in getting started with Manufacturer Center, complete our interest form and we will reach out with next steps. If you already use a PIM, ask how you can get your data sent to Manufacturer Center for use across Google.

Posted by Christian Santiago, Strategic Partner Development Lead

With winter sales coming to an end and spring finally upon us, now is the perfect time to clean the clutter and ensure all of your products are live in your Shopping campaigns. Approved and ready to serve products are essential for great performance. In fact, 12% of top-clicked products for all advertisers in 2016 are currently not being advertised because they are disapproved or out of stock. Ensure that all the products in your inventory are ready to go using new product status and effective max CPC reporting.

More insights in the Products tab
Now you can easily spot the status of your best performing products with the product status column. Product status will help identify items that have stopped attracting traffic and conversions because they are disapproved, excluded or out of stock.

Let’s say you sell shoes and want to know why there’s been a 50% decrease in total conversions this month from your top performers. You can use the product status column to see if this drop was due to an inventory issue. Select “product status” from the columns drop-down, then sort the table by descending conversions.

Product-level performance data

Adjust bidding immediately for top shoes with the effective max CPC column; the effective max CPC column shows the bid you set on products within your product groups. Clicking on it takes you directly to the product group that covers this shoe.

Inventory status for Products Groups 
We’re also bringing new inventory insights in the Product groups tab. See which shoe products need to be updated in your product data and Shopping campaigns so your campaign reaches its full potential. You can use these new columns for a snapshot of inventory status:

• Products submitted: Total products in your linked Merchant Center account 
• Products approved: Total of submitted products approved by Google 
• Products active: Approved products with a bid 
• Products ready to serve: Active products that are in stock 
• % approved: Percentage of approved from total submitted products 
• % active: Percentage of approved products with a bid 
• % ready to serve: Percentage of your total products eligible for auction 

New product status columns for product groups

For example, use these snapshots if you notice a conversion drop specifically in your “running shoes” product group. If “% approved” is showing only 60% for “running shoes,” the loss in conversions could be the result of disapproved products.

Robust performance analysis 
Also, starting today, Shopping attributes like brand or product type are now available in the AdWords Report Editor. After you’ve reviewed the status of your products, you can analyze your performance by building custom tables and charts to identify trends, compare sales across brands or devices, and optimize for your goals.

Getting your products live is key to helping shoppers find exactly what they’re searching for. Find more information and tips on how to use the new product status and effective Max CPC reporting using the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Tom Beyer, Product Manager, Google Shopping

Today, people have higher expectations of ads than ever. It’s never been more important to tailor messages to the right people at the right moment as they engage in blogs, news sites and more across the web.

We’ve put together a new guide, Making the Most of Display Advertising, to help you deliver relevant ads and efficient results on the Google Display Network. The guide touches on topics such as:

• Reaching the right audience at the right moment 
• Matching the message to the moment 
• Optimizing for performance 

Check out these display advertising best practices to deliver on consumers’ expectations and drive more sales for your business.

Want to stay on top of even more Best Practices? Sign up to receive our monthly newsletter. 

Posted by Matt Lawson, Director, Performance Ads Marketing

• Discovering your opportunities abroad
• Connecting with the locals
• Setting up your account for international optimizations
• Using automation to scale your coverage

The way people shop for cars has changed. The days of going from dealership to dealership are over. People now turn to their smartphones in critical auto shopping moments to research models, find deals, and get real-time advice. In fact, 1 out of every 2 automotive searches on Google, like those for make and model, occur on smartphones¹ – up 51% year over year.² To help you reach these auto shoppers with the most relevant and useful experience in those critical micro-moments, we’ve fully rolled out Model Automotive ads, a new mobile ad format now available to all OEM automotive advertisers in the US.

Engage shoppers in your mobile showroom
Undecided auto shoppers turn to images to help narrow down their choices. Searches for “pictures of [automotive brand]” are up 37% year-over-year³ with 80% of those searches occurring on mobile.⁴ In fact, viewing images of cars and trucks is the most common mobile action when shopping for a vehicle.⁵ That’s more than any other mobile action taken when shopping for a car. Model Automotive ads recreates that showroom experience by featuring images of your cars along with additional information about each of them, like estimated MPG or advanced features, right within mobile search results.

Shoppers can swipe through high-quality images of a car’s exterior and interior, view details about performance and features, find a local dealer, or navigate directly to your website to build the car of their dreams. Brands are seeing more than a 30% average increase in engagement rate with Model Automotive ads compared to standard text ads.⁶

“Google’s Model Automotive ads provide an immediate and immersive mobile experience for our guests, and the ability to show and tell our story helps highlight the value of the Toyota brand and our vehicles. Across our core line of car models, we’ve seen a 45% increase in conversion events and a 30% decrease in CPA compared to standard text ads.” – Dionne Colvin-Lovely, Director, Traditional and New Media, Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A.



Drive shoppers to local dealerships

Since introducing AdWords 15 years ago, we’ve seen a fundamental change in the way people find what they want, when they want it. We now use multiple devices throughout the day, and watch more videos and visit more websites and apps than ever before. Today, more Google searches take place on smartphones than on computers, globally.

The days of predictable web sessions have been replaced by numerous short bursts of digital activity throughout the day, primarily on mobile. In these micro-moments, consumers expect ads to be helpful and relevant – whether that’s showing product details, directions to the nearest store, a phone number to call, or additional information about the business they’re interested in.

The innovations in AdWords that make these experiences possible have helped many businesses reach their customers in better, smarter ways. What was once a tool to help advertisers place text ads on search results has become so much more than that. As a result, we’ve seen an increase in the complexity that marketers face every day. For example, AdWords now encompasses display and video media that can be bought on YouTube and across the web. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

This rise in complexity has created the need to reimagine AdWords, and over the past year, our product teams have been thinking hard about about how we can make AdWords as relevant for the next 15 years as the first 15. From creating a single Shopping campaign to updating thousands of text ads, we needed to do this in a way that works well for all advertisers around the world, regardless of size or objective.

So we met with many of you – large and small advertisers, from power users to beginners – in order to understand what we’re doing well and where we’re falling short. The comments we received and insights we uncovered were illuminating, and they ultimately resulted in user studies, product refinement, and this important milestone.

Today I’m excited to provide an early look into the new AdWords experience and three key areas of the platform we’re deeply focused on. Each is rooted in the feedback we heard from you.

AdWords should be more about your business, and less about our product. We want everything to support the way you think about your business. From the way you express business goals to the way you measure and manage your ads, we want to make it super easy to execute and optimize campaigns based on your unique marketing objectives.

You want the data you care about at your fingertips. From the campaigns that drive the most profit to the percentage of traffic coming from mobile, we want to surface insights and help you visualize them in more actionable ways. By seeing the data most relevant to your business goals, you can spend more time optimizing campaigns and identifying opportunities.

What should be most noticeable about this new AdWords experience is the look and feel. This is Material Design, the design language that’s at the core of our favorite Google apps like Maps, Search, and Gmail. While this AdWords may look and feel different, your campaigns will run the same as they run today – with no upgrades or migrations.

Through 2016 and into 2017, we’ll continue to build out this new AdWords experience, and invite advertisers along the way to try it out and provide feedback. Invites will be sent based on a number of factors, therefore not all advertisers will be able to test the new experience right away.

We look forward to undertaking this journey with you and to delivering the tools you need to connect with consumers in meaningful and relevant ways.

Posted by Jerry Dischler, Vice President of Product Management, AdWords

An enterprise-class solution for a multi-screen world

Our lives are filled with micro-moments: intent-rich moments when we turn to the nearest device to find a store, buy a product or look for answers to all kinds of wants and needs. In these moments, today’s consumers decide what to do, where to go, and what to buy.

If you’re in marketing or analytics, you know this consumer behavior brings new opportunities to reach your customer in the right moment with the right message. At the same time, it’s harder than ever to get a complete view of the consumer journey and then make sense of it all.
That’s why we’re introducing the Google Analytics 360 Suite, a set of integrated data and marketing analytics products, designed specifically for the needs of enterprise-class marketers. It all starts with understanding consumer behavior in the moment — getting the right insights, and then making your brand useful to consumers.

“The Google Analytics 360 Suite gave us the really big ah-­ha moment. When we launched our mobile app, it provided insurance quotes. But after looking at the data, we saw people were attempting to buy insurance. So, we shifted our mobile strategy to offer ecommerce. Google gave us that insight,” said Pawan Divakarla, Analytics Leader at Progressive.

Modern measurement tools that are simple to use
Sophisticated marketers who use analytics platforms are three times more likely to outperform their peers in achieving revenue goals.¹ It’s no wonder enterprise-class marketers have been telling us they need more from their marketing analytics tools. Many toolsets can’t cope: They’re too hard to use, lack sufficient collaboration capabilities, are poorly integrated, and require hard-to-find expertise.

Several years ago, Google engineers set out to simplify marketing analytics in the same way we simplified web search with Google.com. With infrastructure that allows us to handle billions and billions of daily search queries — generating answers before users even finish typing — we set out to give enterprise marketers the same utility.

As we built the system, enterprise marketers shared what they needed with us:

• See the complete customer journey. Marketers require full visibility and context to see what’s really happening across all customer touchpoints, devices, and channels. 
• Useful insights, not just more data. Marketers need enormous computing power, data science and smart algorithms, all working together to quickly make sense of data for them. In other words, built-in intelligence to do the heavy lifting for marketers and make insights easy to see.
• Enable better sharing within your organization. Marketers seek to put insights into everyone’s hands and get the whole company on the same page — resulting in stronger cross-functional goals and smarter decision-making.
• Deliver engaging experiences to the right people. Marketers want to make their brand immediately useful to consumers. With integrations across multiple Google technologies, the suite products not only work well together, but also with other products, including AdWords, DoubleClick, and 3rd-party platforms — enabling marketers to take immediate action and drive business impact.

The Google Analytics 360 Suite is built to address these needs. Its powerful set products are unified, providing a consistent user experience and cross product data integrations, plus services. Simply put: it’s a complete measurement platform.

“Using the integrations in the Google Analytics 360 Suite, we are able to manage everything in one seamless platform,” said Khoi Truong, Director of Analytics and Media at L’Oréal Canada.

Loaded with six products, four of which are brand-new, the Google Analytics 360 Suite offers easy-to-use tools that enable sharing of data and insights throughout an organization.

• Google Audience Center 360 (beta). This powerful data management platform (DMP) helps marketers understand their customers and find more like them across channels, devices, and campaigns. It offers native integration with Google and DoubleClick, plus it’s open to third party data providers, DSPs and more.
• Google Optimize 360 (beta). This website testing and personalization product helps marketers deliver better experiences. Marketers can show consumers multiple variations of their site and then choose the version that works best for each audience.
• Google Data Studio 360 (beta). A new data analysis and visualization product that integrates data across all suite products and other data sources ― turning it into beautiful, interactive reports and dashboards. Built-in real-time collaboration and sharing is based on Google Docs technology.
• Google Tag Manager 360. Built from our industry-leading tag management product, it empowers enterprise marketers to move faster and make decisions with confidence. It offers a simplified way to gather site information (all those tiny bits of code) and powerful APIs to increase data accuracy and streamline workflows.
• Google Analytics 360, formerly known as GA Premium, will roll out exciting new capabilities throughout the next couple of months as investments continue to grow. It will serve as the measurement centerpiece by analyzing customer data from all touch-points and integrating with our ad products to drive marketing effectiveness.
• Google Attribution 360, formerly known as Adometry, has been rebuilt from the ground up to help advertisers value marketing investments and allocate budgets with confidence. Marketers can analyze performance across all channels, devices, and systems to achieve their most effective marketing mix. 

Achieve more with your Google media

The Google Analytics 360 Suite offers integrations with many third party data providers and platforms. It also plugs right into Google AdWords and DoubleClick Digital Marketing, our core ad technology. That means marketers can turn analytics into action by combining their own data from multiple sources ― website data, audience data, and customer data (e.g. CRM) and more ― and using it to make ads more relevant for people.

“The Google Analytics 360 Suite has a native integration with DoubleClick — that’s a game-changer. Now I can personalize my media based on website user behaviors, such as what they purchase,” said Khoi Truong, Director of Media and Data Optimization at L’Oreal Canada.

When will the Google Analytics 360 Suite launch?

The new products — Audience Center 360, Optimize 360, Data Studio 360,  and Tag Manager 360 — are available today in limited BETA. If you’re a Google Analytics Premium or Adometry customer, you will see the products renamed in the coming months, and we’ll let you know when you’re eligible to join the new betas.

Over the coming weeks we’ll dive into the capabilities and benefits of all the new products on the newly refreshed and renamed Google Analytics Solutions blog, and on the Google Analytics Google+ and Twitter pages. We’d love your feedback.

Posted by Paul Muret, Vice President of Analytics, Display, and Video Products, Google

When mobile users are looking for entertainment they often turn to gaming apps. In 2015, an estimated 41% of all apps downloaded were games.¹ However, while a user may be excited about downloading an app, it can soon be forgotten; studies have shown that 1 in 4 installed apps are never used.

For game developers, building a successful business has often depended on an approach of acquiring as many users as possible, then trying to keep them engaged in the game as their interest wanes. While volume is important, it’s more important to find the right kind of user, who’ll open the app and keep on playing. That’s why today, at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), we announced a host of new features in AdWords and AdMob that make it simpler for developers to reach the right users at scale.

Let users try your app before downloading from Google Search
We recently introduced Trial Run Ads on the Google Display Network which let users stream your game from a display ad for your app before they download. In the next few weeks, we’ll extend these ads to search results on Google as a beta for selected U.S. advertisers. With Search Trial Run Ads, when a user searches for a game on Google, they can click ‘Try Now’ from within a search ad and try the app before installing it, similar to streaming apps from organic results. These ads will appear to smartphone users on WiFi, and the user can play for up to 10 minutes, then download the app in full if they choose. This format drives highly-qualified users who are more likely to stay engaged with the app after install. Contact your Google representative to learn more about using this new format.

	SGN’s Search Trial Run Ad for Panda Pop

Showcase your game with portrait videos
More than 80% of video ad views in mobile apps on the Google Display Network are from devices held vertically, but often, the videos are created for landscape viewing. Over the next few weeks we’re launching Portrait Video Ads so users have a full-screen, immersive portrait video experience without having to re-orient their device. We’ve seen significant improvement in both click-through and conversion rates from game developers using Portrait Video, resulting in much lower cost per install and a larger number of downloads.

In AdWords, you’ll be able to give us a portrait video and we’ll display it full screen to the user.

Promote your app to game-lovers
Advertisers have long been able to control who sees their AdWords ads, and in the coming weeks we’ll be launching even finer options to reach high-quality users with Active User Targeting for Games. This new type of targeting for Android apps can show ads to users who have spent more than 30 minutes playing games, or who have played a Google Play Games integrated game in the last 30 days. Game developers can show their ads to game lovers, and combined with other types of targeting, such as a particular game category (e.g., Adventure), they can reach a very precise audience.

Earn money from rewarded ads with AdMob Mediation
AdMob helps app developers around the world earn through in-app advertising with best-in-class formats and smart tools to maximize revenue. Increasingly, rewarded advertising is becoming a popular form of game monetization: users are given the choice to engage with ads in exchange for in-app rewards. Today, we’re introducing a way for developers to easily monetize apps with rewarded video ads from a number of ad providers in AdMob Mediation. Supported networks and platforms include AdColony, AppLovin, Chartboost, Fyber, Upsight, and Vungle, with more being added all the time. So if you’re a developer monetizing with these providers, you can easily manage and optimize them through the AdMob interface. It’s part of our ongoing commitment to provide app developers with a first-class mediation solution, and follows our recent launch enabling SDK-less mediation.

We’re working closely with developers to innovate our ad solutions and help them build strong businesses. If you’re a game developer, come and meet with our ads teams at GDC at the Google booth between Wednesday and Friday, to discuss developing great games, growing your user base and earning more money. We’ll have a series of great talks in our booth mini-theater each day, and on Thursday morning we’ll be part of the main GDC sessions, with a discussion on user acquisition and monetization.

Posted by Sissie Hsiao, Product Management Director of Mobile Display Ads