Inside AdWords: March 2016

A new guide to entering international markets with AdWords - Google Best Practices

Thursday, March 31, 2016

It’s possible to connect across the globe in an instant. Expanding your business to new countries unlocks new opportunities and challenges for your AdWords account.

We’ve published a new guide to help advertisers go global. This resource offers best practices on exporting your AdWords advertising to new countries, covering topics such as:

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

By understanding how you can prime your AdWords campaigns for new markets, you can expand your account effectively and take your business worldwide.

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

Posted by Matt Lawson, Director, Performance Ads Marketing

Rev up the car shopping experience with Automotive ads

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

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 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 recreate 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

Even as the majority of the car shopping process moves online, the visit to a dealership remains a crucial step in the journey. In the past year, search interest for “car dealerships near me” has doubled,⁷ with interest in dealer phone numbers up nearly 80% year over year.⁸ Dealer Automotive ads capture this growing opportunity by featuring the location, directions, and a click-to-call button of nearby dealerships at the top of mobile search results.

To help shoppers navigate from the mobile showroom to a test drive at their local dealership, we’ve built Automotive ads to work seamlessly together. Auto shoppers who start their search with a car model can easily tap on the “Dealers” button in the Model Automotive ad to get directions to or call local dealerships. For example, if someone taps on the Model Automotive ads “Dealers” button after searching for “2016 Toyota Prius,” Google will automatically show Dealer Automotive ads for Toyota dealerships near their location.

"Our goal is to make the car buying process better. Dealer Automotive ads lets us do this by giving shoppers the option to find the closest dealer, get directions, or call them for more information. Results to-date have been incredible. This format is driving 30% higher CTRs and has increased website visitors from intent-based dealership queries by 40%." - Chris Vessey, Director, Digital Media Solutions at Dealer.com

Learn more
Dealer Automotive ads are available to franchise and authorized dealerships in the US. You can learn more about Model Automotive ads or Dealer Automotive ads by reaching out to your AdWords account team.

Posted by Bhanu Narasimhan, Director of Product Management, AdWords

¹ Google internal data, United States, February 2016
² Google internal data, United States, April 2014 vs. April 2015
³ Google Trends, United States, September 2015 vs. September 2014
⁴ Google internal data, United States, September 2015
⁵ Mllward Brown Digital/Google Vehicle Shopper Path to Purchase Study, September 2013
⁶ Google internal data, United States, March 2016
⁷ Google Trends, United States, July 2015 vs. July 2014
⁸ Google Trends, United States, August 2015 vs. August 2014

Redesigning AdWords for marketing in a mobile-first world

Monday, March 28, 2016

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.

At the end of the day, you need simple yet powerful tools that help you do more in less time. You should be able to complete your most important tasks, like managing ad extensions and building reports, all in one place. With less clutter and more intuitive workflows, you can quickly make the changes that move your business forward.

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

Introducing the Google Analytics 360 Suite

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

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.

This is just the beginning of our ongoing innovation in enterprise marketing analytics -- we can’t wait to share more. In the meantime, visit our website for more details or hear from directly from our customers below.

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 Twitter pages. We’d love your feedback.

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

¹Source: Forrester Research, Inc. Discover How Marketing Analytics Increases Business Results

New ad formats and targeting to find, keep and monetize high-quality gamers

Monday, March 14, 2016

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 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 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 main GDC sessions, with a discussion on user acquisition and monetization.

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

¹App Annie, Mobile App Forecast, Feb 2016

Designing for Mobile Micro-Moments

Thursday, March 10, 2016

Mobile has shaped the way users interact with businesses and brands alike. Nowadays, businesses cannot simply replicate their desktop strategy on mobile; they need to re-think how to build mobile experiences that are useful for clients in their moments of need - those I-want-to-buy moments throughout the day.

To help app and mobile site developers learn what comprises a best-in-class mobile experience, we’re launching a new mobile design hub on Think with Google: Designing for Mobile Micro-Moments. The new hub features in-depth research on exactly what people expect from a mobile experience.

Learn what makes a best in class mobile experience

We partnered with AnswerLab to run user studies with more than 100 people, where we tested user's behavior on more than 100 different apps and mobile sites to uncover what led to a seamless experience and what design experiences were problematic or caused frustration to users. The results are two new sets of UX principles with specific recommendations to help you improve your mobile experience and drive conversions:

Start building better mobile sites and apps today

After you’ve identified how to improve your mobile experience, you can find tools and resources to start making improvements. Here are just a few of the resources that are available on the hub:

For mobile sites, consider using the latest technologies to create an Accelerated Mobile Page. This dramatically improves the performance of the mobile web and allows rich content to load instantaneously for a speedy, delightful experience.
Research shows that the bounce rate can be as high as 58% for web pages that take nearly ten seconds to load.¹ Check Pagespeed Insights to gauge your mobile site’s speed.
Building a native app? Take advantage of Google API and Services to simplify development, grow and engage your user base, and earn money.
Improve the look and feel of your mobile site and app with Material Design.

Learn More

Visit the Designing for Mobile Micro-Moments hub on Think with Google to view the studies and get additional resources to start developing and marketing great mobile sites and apps.

Posted by Jenny Gove, UX Research Lead, Google

¹“Case study: Mobile pages that are 1 second faster experience up to 27% increase in conversion rate” https://www.soasta.com/blog/mobile-web-performance-monitoring-conversion-rate/

Increase customer activation and retention with easy app engagement

Monday, March 07, 2016

We've all downloaded useful apps with the intention of using them, but with many things fighting for our attention it’s easy to forget about the ones that we’ve downloaded. For app marketers, being able to reconnect with app users in those relevant moments is extremely powerful, and with our latest launch of bulk IDFA/advertising ID upload in AdWords, we’ve made it easier than ever.

Being present in context when a consumer needs you is crucial. For example, 91% of smartphone users reach for their phone to get ideas while doing a task - and that’s when you want your app to surface. To adapt to this shift, apps today are investing beyond the install and moving to engage their customers with smart retention strategies.

Introducing bulk IDFA/advertising ID upload
With this in mind, today we’re launching bulk IDFA/advertising ID upload across Android and iOS. Simply put, it’s a tool that allows a developer to upload their own list of existing app users that they’d like to engage further on their app. For example, say a retail app wants to get purchasers from their holiday sale to check out their new spring discounts. They can pull a segment of their app users’ IDs from their own analytics tools and upload them to AdWords. They can then run engagement campaigns across apps on the Google Display Network while targeting a group of potentially high-value users. The targeted campaign can incentivize users by providing a special discount on their retail app purchase and reduce friction by opening a specific section of the app upon ad click.

Reach users across screens and platforms
You can also use this feature if you have both a site and a mobile app. If your site has had success targeting an audience who've shown interest in, for example, board games on your site, use your app analytics tools to create this segment of app users, and upload to target those users in AdWords. This helps you get in touch with users during those crucial micro-moments across platforms. Bulk IDFA/advertising ID upload is now available via AdWords and runs on the Google Display Network. Learn about app engagement.

We understand that app engagement is important to lifetime value and are continually building and improving upon products that help reach those growth goals.

Posted by Tom Price, Product Manager, Display

Finding your audience with Google display and video ads

Tuesday, March 01, 2016

People constantly move between devices throughout the day — reading breaking news on their smartphone, watching a viral video on their tablet, or researching a beach vacation on their laptop. This creates a challenge for marketers: how do you find the right person at the right moment? Google’s audience solutions help marketers reach people based on the things that matter to them using insights from millions of websites and apps on the Google Display Network and billions of daily video views on YouTube. Whether you’re a business looking to build your brand or drive sales, we can help you deliver relevant messages to people at each stage of the path to purchase. Here’s how businesses can find the right audience with Google display and video ads:

Demographics - Reach customers within demographic groups you choose — including age, gender, and parental status. For example, a brand running a promotion for back-to-school backpacks can reach moms 25-34 years old.
Affinity audiences - Drive brand awareness and engagement by reaching people who have interests relevant to your brand. For example, a sportswear brand can reach outdoor enthusiasts to announce its new line of hiking apparel.
Custom affinity audiences - Drive consideration with an audience tailored precisely for your business. For example, a company that produces a soccer video game can reach fans of specific soccer clubs.
In-market audiences - Drive qualified traffic by reaching customers actively researching and intending to make a purchase. For example, a consumer electronics manufacturer can reach customers actively shopping for cameras.

Each month, AdWords advertisers worldwide run hundreds of thousands of campaigns using these audience solutions. Ford New Zealand, one of these advertisers, used Google’s audiences to drive more car shoppers to its website. Ford wanted to reach auto enthusiasts and raise brand awareness for its vehicles, so it used affinity audiences. The automaker also wanted to reach individuals actively researching and considering the purchase of a new vehicle, so it used in-market audiences. By using these solutions as well as dynamic remarketing, Ford drove a 60% increase in site visitors and tripled the amount of time spent on its site.

"Google’s audiences let us reach customers at each stage of the path to purchase, which helped us drive more qualified customers to our website and increase leads,” said Ford New Zealand's general manager of marketing, Cameron Thomas. Read more here.

Marketers can achieve results like these because of three things unique to Google:

1. Deep consumer insights based on many touchpoints
Google’s audiences are built using data from millions of websites and apps — including properties like YouTube that reach over a billion users. This gives us a wide range of contexts — reading hotel reviews, browsing homes on a real estate app, watching car videos, and more — to understand what people care about. Users can control their experience so they’re more likely to see useful, relevant ads.

2. Ability to distinguish between people’s passions and purchase intent
We classify the millions of websites and apps on the GDN using machine learning, separating those that indicate “passion” from those that indicate “intent.” This enables you to connect with customers at the right stage of the path to purchase based on the types of websites and apps people visit. For example, if you’re an electronics brand looking to drive awareness, you may want to reach people who browse electronics blogs and videos to satisfy their passion for gadgets. But if your goal is to drive sales, you may want to reach people who are researching high-definition televisions on price comparison websites.

3. Real-time data that’s always fresh
AdWords updates audiences in real-time, adding new information each time an ad is shown and removing information that no longer reflects people’s current interests. This is important for your ads’ performance, since a person who shops for a plane ticket today may no longer need one tomorrow. Or a person who is an aspiring chef this winter may find a new all-consuming passion for the outdoors in the spring.

To help even more marketers reach their audiences, we’ve also made these solutions available globally on YouTube and Google’s audiences help you reach the right people at the right moment across millions of websites and apps.

Posted by Jon Krafcik and Max Maxwell, Product Managers, AdWords

Inside AdWords

We've moved!

A new guide to entering international markets with AdWords - Google Best Practices

Rev up the car shopping experience with Automotive ads

Redesigning AdWords for marketing in a mobile-first world

Introducing the Google Analytics 360 Suite

New ad formats and targeting to find, keep and monetize high-quality gamers

Designing for Mobile Micro-Moments

Increase customer activation and retention with easy app engagement

Finding your audience with Google display and video ads

Google Best Practices

Best Practices Newsletter

Achieve Your Marketing Goals

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