Inside AdWords

Supercharge your call-only ads with ad extensions

Thursday, September 21, 2017

call-only adsad extensions

Introducing ad extensions for call-only ads

Location extensions - highlight information about your nearby business locations for customers who want to visit your store in person.

Callout extensions - promote unique offers and benefits, such as 24-hour call center service.

Structured snippets - provide more specific details about your products and services using predefined headers like “Destinations” and “ Types”. For example, a rental car company might list various car classes like sedans, hybrids and SUVs.

“Calls help us effectively engage an increasingly mobile-first audience. They also drive better conversion rates compared to mobile text ads that take customers to our site. With new ad extensions for call-only ads, we hope to improve our CTR and call volume by taking up more real estate in search results, and showing customers additional relevant information like different car classes and ancillary product options.”- Jeremy Venlet, Director- Digital Operations and Performance, Hertz

“Choosing the right partner for commercial door repair is an important decision for any business, which is why we offer extensive service and support over the phone to help guide our customers to book on-site appointments with our expertly trained technicians. Partnering with our digital agency, YPM, Inc. we've made call-only campaigns a big part of our digital strategy since phone calls are so important to our business. Making ad extensions available with call-only ads is huge step forward because they'll allow us to go beyond the standard description text in ad copy to showcase our unique value propositions, such as prompt and efficient service, and a proven track record of delivering results for our customers.”- Stacey Muto, Marketing Director, Vortex Industries, Inc.

“DexYP partners with hundreds of thousands of local businesses to sustain and grow their customer base through online marketing channels. For many of these clients, driving leads and sales from phone calls is their top performance goal. For those that utilize Search Engine Marketing, call-only campaigns have been instrumental to helping these businesses generate more calls from mobile search, where more and more consumers are looking to connect with local businesses each year. We're incredibly excited to further improve our clients’ campaigns by adding new ad extensions. For example, the enhancement with location extensions will help further promote businesses who can assist customers over the phone, or at a nearby store location. Providing more relevant details in call-only ads will help them stand out more in search results and give users more reasons to call.”- Brandon Hulme, Sr. Product Manager, SEM Products and Platforms, DexYPHelp Centerbest practicesPosted by Manas Mittal, Product Manager, Mobile Search Ads

Ring in the holidays with new Merchant Center tools

Tuesday, September 19, 2017

Add or override product data with supplemental feedssupplemental feeds

Add holiday custom labels or promotion ids to products in your primary feed through a supplemental feed

Replace attribute values in your primary feed with new values from your supplemental feed

Take your products global with a single multi-country feedavailable in 37 countriessame languageFeed Rules

"The new feed management features in Merchant Center are an amazing solution. With the ability to create multi-country feeds, we easily launched Shopping campaigns in 6 more markets across 2 continents that now represent 29% of our traffic coming from Search in those countries. Our expansion would have been slower and more costly without this feature."- Martin Zirfas, Performance Marketing Executive Modify your product data from the Content API with Feed RulesFeed Rules

Apply custom labels based on other values

Complete shipping values based on product weight values

Append strong brand values to the beginning of product title values

Drive more clicks with OpportunitiesOpportunities

Keep your entire team informed of your Merchant Center account

Ready to get started?new feeds experienceOpportunitieslog inPosted by Raphael Leiteritz, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping

Get a panoramic view of your data with dashboards

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

That's why over the next several weeks, we’re rolling out dashboards: a single place in AdWords^* where you can bring together your most important reports and unearth insights about your business.

Create a customized view of your data Monitor performance in one place Collaborate and share with your team Create your first dashboardReportsDashboards+ Dashboardguided tourAdWords Help CenterPosted by Jon Diorio, Group Product Manager, AdWords
^*Dasbhoards are available in both the previous and new AdWords experience.

Universal App Campaigns: Steer Performance with Creative Assets

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

announced1
steer performance using goals Supply a healthy mix of creative assets Returning to our mobile game example: say you’re launching a new mobile game and trying to find everyone who wants to install your app. You’ve picked the campaign objective “Install volume” and set a target cost-per-install (CPI). You want UAC to be able to create the best ad for any context, so you follow these best practices. For example, you remember that people hold their phones differently at times, so you include images in both landscape and portrait modes. You also upload videos of different duration and varying sizes (landscape, portrait, and square). Get insights from the Creative Asset ReportCampaignsAd Assets

Creative Asset Report for UAC

Example: After running your campaign for a couple of days, you review your campaign’s Creative Asset Report. You notice the video assets in landscape mode that show a cinematic trailer for your game have been labeled as “Best.” You conclude that the trailer is getting people excited to download and try your game. Optimize your asset mix using the Creative Asset Report Continuing with our example: Based on what you've learned from the report, you decide to replace any assets that have been rated as “Low” with even more thrilling cinematic video assets. You also notice that some of your assets still have the label “Learning.” You wait until there’s more data before taking action on those.best practices guidePosted by Sissie Hsiao, Director of Product Management, Mobile Advertising1. Google Internal Data, July 2017

Speed up your search text ads with AMP landing pages

Thursday, September 07, 2017

1AMP Projectintroduced

Create a faster mobile ad experience with AMP landing pages

Get your mobile landing pages readylanding page experienceTo get started, check out the AdWords Developer's Guide for AMP and learn how to create AMP landing pages. Better landing page experiences drive better results

“With AMP, we were able to improve mobile performance, achieve impressive results and double our conversion rates. AMP really moved the needle for Greenweez.” - Simon Le Fur, CEO, Greenweez

“AMP plus AdWords equals better conversion rates. These results also prove that even if your mobile site loads in four seconds, there’s scope for improvement. We’re absolutely confident about the benefits of AMP. We’re now building more and more AMP pages for most of our large and enterprise clients across all markets.”- Leif Grenevall, CEO, Adtraction Visits

“We've seen some good early results with AMP including improvements in engagement metrics, such as bounce rate, pages per session, and conversion rate. It’s clear that AMP’s faster loading times are driving a better user experience.” - Mike Carmody, Director of Paid Search, Saatva Mattress Learn more"Landing Pages” pageensureAdWords Help CenterPosted by Jon Diorio, Group Product Manager, AdWords1. SOASTA, The State of Online Retail Performance, April 2017

Reach more customers with Shopping ads in new countries

Thursday, September 07, 2017

Whether it’s Diwali, Back to School, Christmas or Boxing Day, shoppers go online to purchase gifts globally. Here's how you can capture the attention of global shoppers with Shopping ads.

Here's how you can capture the attention of global shoppers with Shopping ads (based on 2017 dates)

Show Shopping ads everywhere you sell

This year, Shopping ads expanded to Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Ireland, New Zealand, Malaysia, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, Taiwan, the Philippines, United Arab Emirates and is now available in more than 30 countries. Use Shopping ads to reach new global customers, promote the products you sell and find better qualified leads by putting product images, price, and business name in front of people searching globally on Google.

Quickly expand your Shopping Campaigns to multilingual countries

We know one of the hardest challenges to expanding internationally is preparing your Shopping ads for a new language. But, did you know that you can submit your feeds in English in more than 21 countries? You can quickly expand to english speaking countries and to countries that support multiple languages, such as: Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Norway, Sweden and Taiwan.

Let us handle the currency conversion

Additionally, if you sell and ship products to multiple countries, but your website doesn’t have different product pages for each country’s currency, Google will automatically display your product prices in the local currency.

Get Started

Ready to start an export campaign? To start promoting your products internationally, learn more here.

Posted by Aaron Berger, Product Manager Google Shopping

New reporting to show how often your Shopping ad is in the top spot

Thursday, August 31, 2017

The holiday season is right around the corner - are your Shopping campaigns prepared to maximize increased shopping traffic? To help you get a head start identifying product data gaps and measuring your competitiveness in Shopping campaigns, we’re rolling out product status reporting and absolute top impression share.

Recover potentially lost Shopping traffic

If your Shopping campaign includes products not eligible to serve, that means disapprovals could be affecting the number of shopping results you show up on. See how many of your products are ready to serve by adding product status reporting to reporting charts in the ‘product’ and ‘product groups’ page. For example, a dip in ‘products ready to serve’ means your products are no longer eligible to participate in the auction.

Historical performance using Shopping product status

A new diagnostics report in the products page helps identify your aggregate product status, like products ‘ready to serve’ or ‘disapproved.’ Add performance columns like Clicks and Conversions to the report to prioritize where product updates can make the biggest impact to lost traffic. Click on each product status to see more details on how to fix the issues immediately. Alternatively, you can also view a full list of affected products directly in AdWords from the report. Develop a routine cadence to go through your Shopping campaigns and identify the top performing products not eligible for auction as products details frequently change, especially with the peak holiday season coming up.

Use the products tab (1) and diagnostics report(2) to see product status (3)

New metric shows how often your Shopping ad is in the top spot

Now that your products are eligible to serve, it’s time get them in front of shoppers. The left-most ad on mobile Shopping results get up to 3X more engagement from shoppers¹; impressions in this position are called “absolute top” impressions. To see the percentage of time you’re showing in this top position, use absolute top impression share (Search abs. top IS column in AdWords).

Absolute top impression share is the number of “absolute top” impressions you received in Shopping results over the total times you could’ve been in the top impression.

For instance if you showed up as the “absolute top” in 8 search results but were eligible for 20 results, then your absolute top impression share would be 40%. If you have a high absolute top impression share, it means your products often appear at the top position in Google Shopping results. “Absolute top” impressions include ads from the Shopping carousel on Google search results and is available for both Shopping ads and Local Inventory ads.

The “absolute top” impression in mobile Search results

You can use this metric to optimize seasonal campaigns and get in front of more shoppers. Let’s say you sell kitchenware and plan to have a holiday sale on pots and pans. Separate out the sale products into their own product group. Monitor it for two days and adjust bids upwards if you need to make your ads more prominent. Also review absolute top impression share by device at the ad group level. You can optimize an underperforming device audience by increasing the bid modifier. Ad quality is the other factor in growing your absolute top impression share; include high quality images, relevant product titles, and the correct GTINs across your inventory to improve the quality.

To monitor your impact in key categories, you also can combine absolute top impression share with other competitive metrics such as click share. By increasing both metrics, you’re claiming more of shoppers’ attention.

The diagnostics report and absolute top impression share are available starting today in the new Adwords experience².

To learn more about how to use absolute top impression share and other metrics to prepare for the holidays, visit our Help Center.

Posted by Thomas Houit, Product Manager, Google Shopping

1. Source: Google internal data, Q4 2016 on US mobile Shopping carousel
2. The new AdWords experience is rolling out to all advertisers throughout 2017. Once you have access, you can switch back and forth between the new and previous experiences.

Introducing a better, simpler ad rotation

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

we’re simplifying ad rotation to two settings: “optimize” and “rotate indefinitely.”

Optimize for your best adsSmart Bidding Simplifying even rotationAdWords Help Centerbest practices guidePosted by Sylvanus Bent, Product Manager, AdWords

Go beyond the click with the “Landing pages” page

Thursday, August 24, 2017

12 The “Landing pages” pageintroducednew AdWords experience*mobile-friendly

Sort “Clicks” in descending order to identify landing pages you may want to fix

“An ad click is just the start of the customer's journey. Everything after that―the speed, mobile-friendliness, ease of use―is paramount to the success of our campaigns. So naturally we're incredibly excited to see this landing page data in AdWords.”― Nicole Jennings, Senior VP of Paid Digital Media, PMX Agency

“It’s amazing how quickly we can now identify landing page issues and propose the right fixes. When we can get web teams to prioritize changes that improve both organic and paid search performance, it's a big win for everyone.”― Zach Morrison, President of Elite SEM Mobile-friendly Click RateGoogle's Mobile-Friendly Test Test for mobile friendliness

Google's Mobile-Friendly Test

Learn moreAdWords Help CenterAccelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)Posted by Jon Diorio, Group Product Manager, AdWords1-2. Google / Ipsos Connect, Rising Consumer Expectations in the Micro-Moment, U.S., Dec. 2016 n=1,516 US online smartphone users, A18+
* The new AdWords experience is rolling out to all advertisers throughout 2017. Once you have access, you can switch back and forth between the new and previous experiences.

Universal App Campaigns: Steer Performance with Goals

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

announced

UAC ad in the Google Play store

best practices Pick the right goal for your campaign Example: Say you’re a mobile game developer who’s about to launch a new app. You want as many users to install your app as possible for a target cost-per-install (CPI). Say you expect 1 out of 10 people who install your game to buy a $20 upgrade in the first 30 days. You can afford to pay up to $2 per install (or $20 ÷ 10 installs). Pick the campaign objective “Install volume” and set your target cost-per-install (CPI) to $2.

Reach different types of users with different campaigns Example: After launching your game, you decide you’d like more users who are likely going to buy something, like a $20 upgrade you offer. This doesn’t mean that you’d like to stop finding other types of users. You may still want to find people who will install and engage, but not necessarily pay. You create a separate campaign alongside your first one. You set this second campaign’s objective to be “In-app actions.” You calculate your target cost-per-action (CPA) of to be $20, equal to the value of the upgrade.

Setting campaign bidding objectives

Then, you decrease the target CPI and lower the budget for the first campaign focused on “Install volume.” This signals to AdWords that you’re more interested in users who are likely to complete an in-app action. Use budgets to find the right mix of users Continuing the example: Say it’s been a couple of months and you’ve added a social feature and new levels to your game. You want to get this update to as many new users as you can.You adjust the target CPI and budget UP for the campaign that’s focused on “Install Volume.” At the same time, you adjust the budget DOWN for the campaign that’s focused on “In-app actions.” You’re signaling to AdWords yet another change in direction.

“Zynga now operates 100% of AdWords spend through UAC, however we did not get here overnight as it was a long process of testing and learning to understand how to make UAC work for us at scale. We are now able to scale up games profitably and increase operational efficiencies across all aspects of our user acquisition efforts by leveraging UAC machine learning.”- Tyson Nguyen, Senior Manager User Acquisition

“Performance is at the core of our business and Universal App Campaigns out-performed manual campaign management, allowing us to achieve efficiency at scale.”- Jonna Onselius, Mobile Marketing Manager

“As the largest online bus booking platform in the world, increasing bus booking transactions is crucial for our business to stay competitive. UAC helped us achieve this by maximizing transactions at a minimal cost and adapting faster to changing market dynamics when compared to standard app install campaigns.”- Rajiv Kondal, Director, Performance Marketing

“Using relevant ad placements in the Google Play Store, Universal App Campaigns have accelerated our new user growth and expansion into new markets.”- Richard Fenning, Digital Marketing Specialistbest practices guidePosted by Sissie Hsiao, Director of Product Management, Mobile Advertising