Google Data

Automated bidding in AdWords is an invaluable tool that helps marketers save time and improve performance. Powered by Google’s machine learning, it optimizes bids at scale for each and every auction and factors in a wide range of signals to help you tailor bids to a user’s unique context. In 2015, we announced a series of new reporting features in the Shared Library to provide greater transparency into automated bidding performance. We’re now bringing bidding insights front and center to the places you spend the most time in AdWords with three new features:

• New alerts that immediately flag bidding issues 
• Bid strategy statuses that appear directly in your campaign and ad group status columns 
• Rich performance reporting for standard bid strategies set at the campaign-level

New bidding alerts help you troubleshoot issues 

New alerts are now available specific to automated bidding to help you identify and resolve issues as quickly as possible. We’ve started with alerts that flag when your conversion tracking settings are “misconfigured” and will roll out additional alert types in the future. For example, you may see the “Misconfigured” alert if you use a bid strategy like Target CPA that optimizes for conversions, but have your conversion tracking turned off or haven’t added a conversion action to your primary Conversions column.

Bidding statuses get integrated with campaign and ad group statuses 

In the coming weeks, we’re also introducing bid strategy statuses to the main campaign and ad group status columns to increase their visibility in your day-to-day workflows. For example, if you have bid limits that are preventing your bids from being fully optimized, you’ll see the “Eligible (Limited)” status right in your main status columns.

These will be the updated status types that can be applied to your automated rules and saved filters and reports:

Status	What’s changing
Eligible	No change
Eligible (Budget limited)	Renaming the current “Limited by budget” status to be more consistent with other status types
Eligible (Learning)	New status type for automated bidding
Eligible (Limited)	New status type for automated bidding
Eligible (Misconfigured)	New status type for automated bidding

 

Rich performance reporting arrives for standard bid strategies 

We’re also expanding reporting capabilities available for portfolio bid strategies to standard bid strategies set at the campaign-level. These reports are rolling out over the next few weeks, and you can access them from the “Bid strategy” dropdown menu in the Campaigns tab to track how changes in your bidding status and targets impact performance over time.

Visit the Help Center and check out our best practices to learn more about automated bidding. For more details on how auction-time bidding technology works in conversion-based bid strategies, read this full guide.  

Posted by: Jonathan Wang, Product Manager, AdWords Bidding

While most of us are busy making the most of the summer sunshine, marketers are already beginning to think about the coldest (and busiest) months of the year–the holidays. October through December are traditionally the biggest months for both travel and shopping, and this year we expect mobile to play its biggest role ever. In fact, mobile travel and shopping searches are already up nearly 30% year-over-year.

To help marketers and on-the-go shoppers alike, we’re introducing a number of new features to make travel planning and mobile shopping easier ahead of the upcoming holiday season.

Finding the Perfect Hotel and Flight for Your Trip 

Mobile is a big part of how people plan travel. Visits to mobile travel sites made up 40% of total travel web traffic in the first quarter of this year.¹ At the same time, individual travel web sessions are becoming shorter and travel mobile conversion rates have grown 10% as users are increasingly ready to book on mobile.²

To help with planning and booking travel ahead of the busy holiday season, we’re making it easier for people to find the right flight or the right hotel, in their price range, and in turn, help connect our partners with potential customers.

• Hotel Smart Filters: We’ll now give people the option to filter Hotel search results based on specific needs. For example, travelers can filter based on rating or price with one tap on their phones. We’ll make it easy to search for exactly what people want, like “Pet-friendly hotels in San Francisco under $200” to find the perfect hotel for them. This feature is available in the US and will roll out globally later this year. 

When it comes to booking their trip, 69% of leisure travelers worry that they’re not finding the best price or making the best decision. To help users feel more confident about making a booking, we’re working on making it easier for people to filter to find the right flight or the right hotel — at the right price — using our technology and real-time analysis:

• Hotel Deals: Everyone loves a good deal. When searching for a hotel, you may now see a “Deal” label calling out when a hotel’s price is lower than usual compared to historical pricing or when there are discounts to the normal rate for those dates. These deals are automatically identified by our algorithms when we see a significant reduction in price. In our early tests, we’ve seen that hotels marked as deals receive about twice as many bookings as other hotels. 
• Hotel Tips: Tips are another way we’re using real-time analysis to help users find the best hotels for their needs. Tips provide just the right information at the right moments when users are searching for hotels. We may show Tips to people when they could save money or find better availability by moving their dates slightly. For example, you may see a Tip like, “Save $105 if you stay Wed, Jul 13 – Fri, Jul 15”. We’ll be rolling Hotel Deals and Tips out globally beginning now and over the coming months. 
• Flights price tracking: To help price-conscious travelers stay on top of changing flight fares, we’re making it easier to track flight prices in Google Flights. Instead of having to continually check prices, people can now opt in to track fare changes for a date and route combination or track specific flights being considered. When prices either increase or decrease significantly, people will be notified by email and Google Now cards. This is rolling out over the course of the next few weeks in all 26 countries where Google Flights is available. 

 Helping Shoppers Discover and Explore 

We’ve always been focused on helping people find the exact product they’re searching for when they have a good sense of what they want. But over 40% of shopping related searches on Google are for broad terms like “women’s athletic clothing” or “living room furniture.” For these less defined searches, what we’ve often shown are specific product ads — say, a teal sofa — and that may not be the most useful experience for the person who isn’t sure what they want to buy.

Showcase Shopping ads help people further explore and discover what they want to buy and where they want to buy it. For example, if a shopper searches ‘summer dresses,’ ASOS, a global apparel retailer, can now showcase its collection of dresses in a visually rich experience.

To start, all merchants running Shopping Campaigns in the US, UK, and Australia will be eligible to have their products automatically appear in Showcase ads in the coming weeks. And for merchants who would like to customize how their brand and products appear, we’re experimenting with a premium version that allows merchants to curate the experience.

Making it Easier to Shop on YouTube 

People often turn to YouTube to help them research purchases. In fact, almost half of the U.S. population, 47%, says that YouTube helps them when making a decision about something to buy at least once a month.³

Last Spring, we introduced TrueView for shopping to make it easy for viewers to get more information about your products and click to buy while watching video ads. We’ve seen great results so far. The number of advertisers using the product is up 50% since January and in recent weeks, about 1/3 of them are using it every week.

To help give retailers even more control over branding, we’re introducing two new features:

• Companion banner: We’re adding a new interactive banner appearing next to the video that lets viewers scroll through products while the video is playing next to it. The banner also shows viewers the most up-to-date product information. 
• Product picker: Our new feature lets advertisers easily choose and prioritize which of their products are featured as cards in a TrueView for shopping campaign. This optional feature lets advertisers show specific products for specific campaigns, or they can still let the format dynamically feature products from their Merchant Center.

We’ll roll out these updates globally beginning now where TrueView for shopping is available. For additional resources on TrueView ads visit our best practices page.

Enabling Shopping Across Borders 

These days, shopping is truly global. To make shopping more efficient for shoppers and merchants alike, we’re currently testing a tool to perform currency conversions in Australia, Switzerland, Canada, and the UK. This feature allows you to convert the currency in your product data locally. This conversion makes your ads more understandable to users in other countries, while allowing you to continue using your existing website and landing pages without change. For example, a person shopping in the UK can see products sold by a US retailer, listed in British pounds. We’ll be rolling out currency conversions more broadly over the coming weeks.

And to get the latest consumer trends, research and advertiser strategies — from brands like Best Buy, William’s Sonoma, Swarovski, La Quinta and Booking.com — to help you with your year end campaigns, we’re releasing a new Retail Micro-Moments Guide and Travel Micro-Moments Guide.

We wish everyone a summer full of great memories, and we wish marketers success in their planning for the seasons ahead!  

Posted by Jonathan Alferness, VP, Product Management

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1. Google Analytics aggregated data, April 2016, Travel vertical, mobile devices include smartphones and tablets. US
2. Google Analytics aggregated data, Q1 2016 quarter-on-quarter, Travel vertical, US 
3. Google / Ipsos Connect, YouTube Sports Viewers Study, March 2016 (18-54 year olds onliners n=1,500)

If you think people make purchase decisions quickly, think again. Today’s consumers visit websites at least 6 times, on average, in the purchase process.¹ And for those who abandon a shopping cart, 75% say they intend on returning to a company’s website to make a purchase.²

We’ve created a new best practices guide, Tailor Your Ads with Dynamic Remarketing, to help advertisers win those crucial “ready-to-buy” moments with dynamic remarketing and relevant ads. As business data feeds are crucial to dynamic remarketing campaigns, this guide focuses on how to create and optimize your feeds. It covers topics such as:

• Setting up high-quality business data feeds 
• Providing complete product data 
• Keeping your business data feed fresh 
• Activating dynamic remarketing ads 

Check out these dynamic remarketing best practices to drive more relevant ads and improved performance.

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 crew

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1. Source: Google/Nielsen Study: Mobile Path to Purchase: Five Key Findings, November 2013 
2. Source: BI Intelligence Study: Shopping Cart Abandonment Report, March 2015.

Video consumption has gone from primetime to ‘all-the-time.’ From teens to adults, people spend as much time watching online video as they do watching TV. ¹

There have never been more opportunities for brands to connect with consumers through the power of video and YouTube. We’ve published a new guide, Press Play on TrueView Video Ads, to help you understand how to optimize TrueView ads to support your performance goals. It touches on topics such as:

• Understanding TrueView ads and how to measure success 
• Capturing attention with compelling TrueView ads 
• Reaching highly-qualified audiences with YouTube 
• Tracking and optimizing video ads 

Check out these TrueView video ads best practices to drive more leads or conversions 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

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Source: Millward Brown Study, Video Creative in a Digital World, 2015.

Three years ago we launched Google Partners to help businesses connect with online professionals and agencies. Top Partners began earning their Google Partner badge by demonstrating their business was healthy, their clients were happy, and they were up to date with the latest product knowledge.

Since then, we received a number of requests from our Partners asking for a way to further differentiate themselves. Today, we’re excited to share the addition of Google Partner specializations.

The new feature is embedded into the Google Partner badge and designed to help businesses identify the right Partner for their specific business needs.

Partners can earn specializations in 5 areas of expertise:

• Search 
• Mobile 
• Video 
• Display 
• Shopping 

To earn a specialization, badged Partners will need at least one certified individual and a history of consistent product performance.

“The changes to the Google Partner program are exciting for potential advertisers and our company,” says Neal Gann, CEO of Showroom Logic. “These new specializations show Google’s commitment to better serve their Partners and help us highlight what makes our technology and team so unique. It should also help prospective clients make a clear choice because it’s now easier for them to find top Partners that are aligned with their immediate goals.” 

Additionally, we’re introducing a new Premier Google Partner badge.

The new badge is designed to recognize Partners who manage a substantial portfolio of Google advertising campaigns and deliver great results for their customers. Premier Partners will be required to maintain additional certification requirements and will receive increased support from Google.

“Google identifying and recognizing highly experienced agencies is a great step and a distinctive honor. We are thrilled to be a part of the new designation and look forward to displaying this badge,” shares Joe Chura, CEO of Launch Digital Marketing. 

We hope these updates will help businesses find the right Partner for their needs and allow our Partners to better differentiate themselves. Learn more at the new Google Partners homepage.  

Posted by Allan Thygesen, VP Global Sales & Operations

Last year, we launched Shopping remarketing lists to help you reconnect with past visitors to your site. Now, through your existing customer data of offline and online signals, we’re making it easier for you to re-engage your loyal shoppers as they shop on Google. Today we’re announcing Customer Match for Shopping, a new opportunity to focus campaigns on your highest-value audiences – your previous purchasers, rewards members, newsletter subscribers, or local in-store shoppers.

Already available on Search, Gmail, and YouTube, we’re announcing the launch of Customer Match for Shopping ads. Customer Match for Shopping allows you to upload a list of email addresses, which can be matched to signed-in users on Google in a secure and privacy-safe way.

How it works

Customer Match can be used to increase the visibility of your brand and products to your highest value customers as they search. Say you’re a retailer that specializes in sporting goods and you have a rewards program for die-hard baseball fans. Since it’s baseball season you have a segment of customers who are likely thinking to make purchase soon. By using Customer Match, you can increase your bids for this segment. So the next time a fan searches for gear, you can meet him or her with the right product at the right time.

Customer Match for Shopping allows you to adjust bids across various segments of your known high-value customers. To start, upload a list of email addresses into AdWords, which can be securely and privately matched to signed-in users on Google. This offers the ability to create a remarketing list to reach these customers across your campaigns.

Roland Mouret puts loyal customers first

Retailers are already seeing strong results with our current Customer Match solution on Search, Gmail and YouTube. For example, Roland Mouret, a French fashion designer, recently launched their online store and used Customer Match for Search to preview their Autumn and Winter line with loyal customers. Highlighting these fashions to existing customers helped drive an 87% reduction in cost-per-action.

Customer Match for Shopping will be rolling out later this summer. You can sign up here if you’re interested in participating in the current beta.

Posted by Archana Kannan, Product Manager for Google Shopping

As marketers kick off 2017 planning, consumer preference for online video is higher than ever. Today’s study from comScore, commissioned by Google, shows that adults are 30% more likely to prefer online video platforms over TV when given a choice where to watch video content. Does your media plan reflect that kind of preference?

If online video is your audience’s priority, it should be your media plan’s priority, too. We dug into the recent study and came up with six things to keep in mind about this changing audience as you develop your 2017 plan:

1. They Prefer Online Video Platforms to TV 

The popularity of online video continues to grow. Today, when given a choice where to watch video, adults prefer online video platforms 30% more than watching on TV. Among millennials, that number jumps to 105%.

2. People Watching Long & Short-Form Video Prefer YouTube 

Among viewers that watch both long and short-form content, 81% cite a preference for YouTube, making it the #1 choice. Compare that to the next-highest choice, TV, which earned just 56% of viewer votes.

3. They Choose YouTube Over Other Online Video Providers 

YouTube also wins when compared to other online video providers. When asked to pick one online video platform, 48% of adults chose YouTube (vs. 29% for Netflix and 10% for Facebook):

4. Viewers Take Action on Video Ads, Especially on Short-Form Content 

Online video has forever changed the media landscape, with more than half of all people regularly watching short-form videos (like branded content or viral videos), and two-thirds of millennials watching short-form weekly.

That’s good news for brands: comScore’s research shows viewers are more likely to take action after watching ads on short-form content compared to traditional content (like movies and tv shows). Taking action could include sharing on social media, looking for more information about the brand advertised, recommending the brand or product, etc.

5. They Prefer YouTube for Branded Content and Videos 

Uploaded by Users. We already heard that adults who watch short and long-form content prefer YouTube, but it’s also preferred across multiple content types. For example, 74% of adults prefer YouTube for videos uploaded by users and—critically—69% prefer YouTube for videos uploaded by brands, companies, and institutions.

6. YouTube Super-users May Surprise You 

The final part of comScore’s research examined YouTube’s most passionate fans—“die hards”—and they aren’t who you might expect. Many are parents, live in a city, and 49% are women:  

Posted by:
Celie O’Neil-Hart, Product Marketing Manager, YouTube B2B
Howard Blumenstein, Product Marketing Manager, Strategy and Insights, YouTube B2B

Whether it’s for entertainment, indulging a passion, or discovering something new, more people are turning to YouTube to watch video. In fact, growth in watch time on YouTube is up at least 50% year-over-year.¹ Now, more than ever, businesses can connect with their customers through video advertising on YouTube.

But we know that creating a video ad can be challenging. To make it easier for every business— from a dog walker to a barber shop owner—to get started with advertising on YouTube, we’re launching the YouTube Director suite of products. Three products that make video ads more accessible to businesses.

Make a video ad right from your phone

With the free YouTube Director for business app (available for iPhone today in the U.S. and Canada) anyone can create a video ad for their business quickly and easily—right from their phone. No editing experience required. People like Woody Lovell Jr., owner of the The Barber Shop Club in Los Angeles, are already seeing positive results with YouTube Director.

Woody shot and edited a video ad by himself, uploaded it to YouTube, and worked with an AdWords expert to run a campaign. As a result, Woody’s business saw a significant increase in potential customers being able to remember and recognize his ad.²

We challenged five business owners—including Woody—to create a video ad in twenty minutes or less. Watch what happened and download the app to give it a try.

Get a professional to make your video ad

Ensuring that your ads are able to be seen is an important baseline for driving brand impact. That’s why we’ve been so focused on improving viewability measurement. We’ve spent the last several years investing in our Active View technology, which measures whether or not an ad was able to be seen. Active View makes viewability measurement effortless and free. Over the next few weeks, Active View will become available for all YouTube in-stream inventory, including TrueView, whether bought through Google AdWords or DoubleClick Bid Manager.

Viewability on YouTube 

As the place people choose to watch video, YouTube has an industry-leading average viewability of 93% globally¹. To help you measure the viewability of your ads, Active View now provides viewability measurement on a per-campaign-basis, so you can understand how your campaigns are performing.

Catching the WAVE to greater brand impact 

Viewability is crucial, which is why we’re excited to extend Active View to our full range of in-stream formats on YouTube. But it’s important to keep in mind that with video, viewability is an indicator of whether or not your ad was on screen – not the impact of your ad. In addition to viewability, there are several factors that drive results for brand campaigns, such as: Are your ads heard as well as seen? Is the viewer interested in seeing video and paying attention to your ad? And most importantly, for how long do they watch and listen? We take each of these factors – not viewability alone – into account when we deliver your ads. It’s Watchtime, Audibility, Viewability and Engagement together that drive the greatest impact for your brand, and YouTube alone delivers the whole package:

Watch Time: Looking at hundreds of Brand Lift studies, we saw that the longer a user watches your ad, the higher the lift in awareness and consideration²
Audibility: We tested 280 campaigns and found that among users exposed to ads that were both viewable and audible, ad recall had a lift of 43%. Among users exposed to ads that were viewable alone, ad recall was significantly lower at 31%³
Viewability: YouTube has industry-leading 93% viewability
Engagement: Looking at 89 US brands that ran Brand Lift studies, we found viewers exposed to TrueView ads are 10x more likely to engage with the brand on YouTube, such as visiting or subscribing to the brand channel, watching more from that brand, or sharing the brand video⁴

WAVE is what makes video ads on YouTube different. And we tune our video ad system to optimize for all of these factors, to ensure advertisers get the full benefit of video.

The more we can help you understand what drives impact and reach those viewers who want to hear from you, the more you can drive towards your ultimate goal of greater impact per dollar spent.  

Posted by Zach Lupei, Product Manager, Video Ads and Alec Berntson, Product Manager, Measurement

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1. Source: Google and DoubleClick advertising platforms data, April 2016
2. Source: Google August 2015 Meta Analysis: Understanding How Viewability Relates to Brand Metrics for Video Ads
3. Source: Google Brand Lift Data, 280 US campaigns, May 2015
4. Source: Google August 2015 Meta Analysis: Measuring TrueView Impact on Brand Channel Engagement

For many marketers, dealing with the technology and scale necessary to tie offline conversions back to the keywords and ads that drive them can be a difficult task. Often, they have to make important decisions based on aggregated data from different sources or no data at all, making it difficult to understand the true value of their AdWords campaigns.

That’s why we’re introducing AdWords Conversion Import for Salesforce. AdWords Conversion Import for Salesforce measures the value of your offline conversions that result from online AdWords clicks, without the need to reconcile your AdWords and customer relationship management (CRM) data manually.

How it works 

After linking your AdWords and Salesforce accounts, you can pick which important milestones, like ‘lead qualification’ or ‘deal won’, you want to track as conversions. When someone clicks your ad and visits your website, your website captures a unique Google click ID that tells your website which ad the visitor clicked on. If that visitor submits a lead form on your website, your website passes along the click ID to Salesforce, where it’s stored with the corresponding lead and any future sales opportunities.

AdWords will regularly check your Salesforce account to see if you’ve recorded any new important milestones in your sales funnel that resulted from ad clicks. If so, AdWords will count those milestones as AdWords conversions.

Peninsula, the UK’s largest team of HR, Employment Law and Health Safety experts says, “With AdWords Conversion Import for Salesforce, we now have the ability to easily see the keywords that drive qualified leads. This has allowed us to concentrate efforts in the right areas and make better use of our budget. Since we started using this feature, we’ve seen an 11% decrease in cost per lead as a result of reallocating budgets and decreasing bids on poorly performing keywords that were sitting in top positions.”

Focus on the clicks that matter 

With AdWords Conversion Import for Salesforce, you’re provided with a more comprehensive view of your sales activities, and the ability to adjust your bids and budgets to be more effective. For example, you can increase your bids on keywords that drive highly qualified leads, or pause ads that result in clicks but no opportunities. This allows you to not only utilize your existing budgets more wisely, but also optimize your ad strategy for better performance.

Learn more 

You can learn more about AdWords Conversion Import for Salesforce by visiting the AdWords Help Center. This solution is only available by invitation for the next few months, and will become available to all advertisers later this year. If you’d like to request an invitation before it becomes available to all advertisers, please contact your Google Sales rep or submit your information here.  

Posted by Jon Diorio, Product Manager, AdWords

The customer journey can be complex. Being able to identify which ads actually influenced someone’s decision can be challenging, but it’s crucial to get right.

In May, we launched the ability to update your attribution model in AdWords. It’s an update that can help you go beyond last-click measurement, the default in AdWords, and understand your customer’s journey on a much deeper level. As of today, this change has been rolled out to all AdWords accounts.

We’ve published a new guide to help you understand attribution and make the right decisions for your account. This resource offers best practices about what you need to do to go beyond last-click, covering topics such as:

• Determining if going beyond the last-click is something that you need to do 
• Choosing a model that fits with your needs 
• Acting on attribution 
• Evolving your approach to attribution as measurement gets better 

By going beyond last-click attribution for your Search ads in AdWords, you can understand your customer journey and make changes to improve your campaigns. Users take a while to make decisions; by changing your approach to attribution you can identify how your advertising affects people across all of their crucial, decision-making moments.

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

Today, we’re announcing updates to the Google Shopping Products Feed Specification. The specification is your resource for understanding what information Google needs about your products to run Shopping ads. Each year, we make updates with the goal of creating better experiences for users searching for your products online.

Some of the updates require changes to your current product data that need to be implemented by September 1st, 2016 and February 14th, 2017, respectively.

Here’s an overview of this year’s updates:

• ‘Unit Pricing’ will be made available for all markets and applicable categories to ensure consistency in the way prices are displayed. This means, going forward, if you want to display Unit Prices, use the unit_pricing related attributes and not the price attribute. Learn more.
• ‘Color’ and ‘size’ values submission will be enforced more strictly for apparel products in Germany, France, Japan, and the UK. Complete and consistent data for variant attributes provide a better shopping experience for users. This means, going forward, not providing ‘color’ and ‘size’ values for apparel products in Germany, France, Japan, and the UK, will result in item disapprovals. Learn more about ‘color’. Learn more about ‘size’. 
• ‘Gtin’ and ‘google product category’ requirements will be expanded to Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, India, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Turkey to improve product matching and overall ad performances. This means, going forward, Global Trade Item Numbers (GTINs) are required for all products with a GTIN assigned by the manufacturer. GPC is required for all products falling within the ‘Apparel & Accessories’, ‘Media’, and ‘Software’ categories. Not providing values for the ‘gtin’ or ‘gpc’ attributes will result in item disapprovals. Learn more about Google product categories. Learn more about GTINs. 
• The minimum image size requirements for non-apparel products will be increased from 32 x 32 to 100 x 100 pixels to be able to support new ad formats better. The minimum image size for apparel images will remain 250 x 250 pixels. Ads with large, high-quality images (we recommend 800 x 800 pixels or larger) have proven to be more effective and lead to better performance. This means, going forward, non-apparel images below 100 x 100 pixels and apparel images smaller than 250 x 250 pixels will result in item disapproval. Learn more. 
• The maximum feed file size will increase from 1 GB to 4 GB (Gigabyte). As before, files can either be submitted in compressed or uncompressed format. Learn more.

Below are the timelines when certain product requirements will lead to item disapprovals:

• Beginning September 1st, 2016, all of the updates, except the GTIN requirement updates, will go into full effect and any product data that doesn’t meet the requirements in the Products Feed Specification will be disapproved. 
• Since providing accurate GTIN information can take more time, the GTIN requirement updates will go into full effect later on, starting February 14th, 2017. 

As you begin making updates to your product data, we also recommend that you update the corresponding microdata on your product landing pages, which helps to ensure a strong match of information between your ads and your website. Additionally, this allows you to take advantage of advanced features such as automatic item updates, which ensure that your ads have the most accurate price and availability information.  

Posted by Angelika Rohrer and Patrik Reali, Google Shopping Team

The shift to mobile is no longer a change on the horizon. It’s here.

Every year, there are trillions of searches on Google and over half of those searches happen on mobile. And across the millions of websites using Google Analytics today, we’re seeing more than half of all web traffic now coming from smartphones and tablets.

When we asked people to describe the role smartphones play in their lives, they used phrases like “attached to my hip”, “butler” and “lifeline.” Smartphones have become the companion that people turn to in I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, I-want-to-do and I want-to-buy moments throughout the day.

To help marketers succeed in this mobile-first world, we have redesigned AdWords — from the ground-up — and re-thought everything from creatives and bidding, to workflow and measurement.

We’re also making it easier for marketers to bridge the digital and physical worlds. With location-related mobile searches growing 50% faster than all mobile searches, it’s clear that consumers are moving seamlessly between online and offline experiences. So it’s important to help marketers think this way too.

It was incredibly exciting to share new innovations with advertisers this morning at the Google Performance Summit. Below are highlights from today’s announcements. You can watch a replay of the full program here.

AdWords re-imagined for the mobile-first world

Over the last several years, we’ve discovered that accounting for mobile and designing for mobile-first are two very different things. That’s why we’ve completely transformed how we think about and build AdWords.

In order to enable advertisers and developers to drive more downloads of mobile apps — across Google properties — we built Universal App Campaigns. To date, Universal App Campaigns has delivered more than 2 billion downloads for advertisers, across Google Search, Google Play, YouTube, and the Google Display Network. And last week at Google I/O, we announced this campaign type is now available on iOS.

Today, we are announcing even broader changes to advertising with Google, from how text and display ads work, to the way advertisers optimize campaigns.

What do text ads look like in the mobile-first world? Mobile has revolutionized the canvas where ads live. Earlier this year, we removed right-hand side ads on desktop to improve the search experience and make it more consistent across devices. This paved the way for us to introduce the biggest changes to our text ads since AdWords launched fifteen years ago.

Optimized for screen sizes of the most popular smartphones, new expanded text ads in AdWords provide more ad space so you can showcase more information about your products and services before the click. Here are the key changes:

These upgrades help your ads work harder across screens, especially for the on-the-go mobile consumer that wants to know exactly what you offer before tapping into your website.

Based on early testing, some advertisers have reported increases in clickthrough rates of up to 20% compared to current text ads. We encourage you to start planning for this upgrade before it rolls out later this year.
How do display ads look in a mobile-first world? From sites to apps to videos, mobile has unlocked a universe of new spaces to reach consumers. Responsive ads for display adapt to the diverse content across the more than two million publisher sites and apps on the Google Display Network (GDN). They also unlock new native inventory so you can engage consumers with ads that match the look and feel of the content they’re browsing. Simply provide headlines, a description, an image, and a URL — and Google will automatically design these beautiful responsive ads.

We’re also extending the reach of GDN remarketing campaigns by giving you access to cross-exchange inventory, which includes more websites and apps around the world. With this inventory, European airline SAS drove about 20% more conversions at a similar CPA for its remarketing campaigns. Learn more

What does bidding look like in a mobile-first world? Marketers need more control and flexibility to optimize bids on specific devices. In the next few months, you’ll be able to set individual bid adjustments for each device type — mobile, desktop and tablet. This lets you anchor your base keyword bid to the device most valuable to your business and then set bid adjustments for each of the other devices. You will also have a wider range to adjust bids, up to +900%. With more controls, you can now optimize with greater precision while keeping things simple with a single campaign that reaches consumers across devices.

Mobile is local, bridging digital and physical worlds for marketers

Nearly one third of all mobile searches are related to location. People’s online and offline worlds are colliding — whether you’re researching restaurant ideas for dinner on Friday night or looking for a store that sells rain boots in your size.

To help advertisers reach consumers searching for physical business locations, we’re introducing new local search ads across Google.com and Google Maps. Advertisers using location extensions will be able to prominently showcase their business locations when consumers search for things like “shoe store” or “car repair near me.” Learn more

We’re also investing in more branded, customized experiences for businesses on Google Maps — geared towards helping you increase store visits. First, we’re experimenting with a variety of ad formats on Maps that make it easier for users to find businesses as they navigate the world around them. For example, Maps users may start to see promoted pins for nearby coffee shops, gas stations or lunch spots along their driving route. Local business pages are also getting a brand new look — to encourage consumers to explore your store before they even arrive, we’re adding new features like special offers and the ability to browse product inventory.

With online ads bringing more people to your storefronts, how do you measure the impact?

Welcome to the Google Performance Summit livestream! Tune in now to hear about Google’s latest mobile-first innovations, the moment they’re announced. Let us know what you think by joining the conversation at #GoogleSummit.