Inside AdWords: September 2014

Measuring more value with estimated cross-device conversions, now available for display

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

It’s been a year since we launched Estimated Total Conversions, which included cross-device conversions for search ads. Advertisers from around the world, both large and small, have used these insights to see a more complete and accurate picture of how their online advertising drives conversions.

Jeremy Hull, director of bought media at search agency iProspect, noted that his search team uncovered 22% more conversions that began with a mobile click when using Estimated Total Conversions on Adwords. “We use these insights to help our customers make more informed bidding and budget decisions -- mainly in the area of investing more in online mobile ads.”

Starting today, estimated cross-device conversions for display ads will start to roll out to all advertisers to help you measure the full value of your ads on the Google Display Network. Here’s how it works: say someone’s browsing bicycle reviews on her phone, and clicks on a Display Network ad that takes her to a bike shop’s website. Later, when she gets home, she pulls up the shop’s site on her computer to buy the red cruiser she’s been eyeing. This is an example of a cross-device conversion from a display ad that advertisers can now measure.

You’ll find estimated cross-device conversions and estimated total conversions in the Campaigns tab of AdWords:

Measuring your customers’ mobile paths to conversion

Your customers’ paths to purchase are increasingly complex. In fact, 9 in 10 consumers start an activity on one device and finish it on another.¹ With the rise of mobile phones, customers may interact with your ad to learn more about a product and then call your business, download your app, or finish their purchase on a different device.

Estimated cross-device conversions now help advertisers measure more activities from mobile, leading to better return on investment. These insights are more important than ever as consumers are increasingly researching products on-the-go, and typically click on display ads early in their purchase journey.²

Customers finding success with Estimated Total Conversions

Advertisers are making important business decisions based on the insights that they’ve gained from these new measurement tools.

LendingTree has used the estimated cross-device conversion metric to measure 6% more conversions from their mobile display campaigns on AdWords. Mike Doll, head of programmatic marketing at LendingTree, says that this new metric “can provide valuable new insights into how users interact with our ads and where they ultimately convert.” The online loan marketplace is currently exploring ways to use these new insights to guide decisions on mobile budgets and bids.

The national furniture company, La-Z-Boy is working alongside their agency, RPA, to better attribute mobile clicks with the conversions they drove by using cross-device conversions data. Matt Targett, Director of Interactive and Product Marketing at La-Z-Boy, noted that "now that we know that our mobile display campaigns are driving 15% more conversions than we've previously measured, we're excited to dive deeper into our mobile ads, bids and budgets to ensure mobile clicks drive even more conversions in the future.”

Join us for a Hangout on Air

Learn more about how businesses are using insights from Estimated Total Conversions to make important marketing decisions about budget allocation and bid management. Join us for a live Hangout on Air with industry leaders on Wednesday, November 12th at 11:30am PT. RSVP here.

Posted by Levent Besik, Product Manager, Google Display Network

¹ Industry Multi-Screen Study, Google/Ipsos, 2013
² The Customer Journey to Online Purchase, Google, April 2013

Keep price and availability fresh with automatic item updates

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

We know you’re busy preparing great deals for the fast-approaching holiday season. When shoppers find these deals on Product Listing Ads (PLAs), they will expect the price and availability to match your website. Any changes to this information on your website will need to be reflected on Google Shopping as quickly as possible. To help you with this, we’re announcing automatic item updates.

If you enable automatic item updates, we will update product price and availability shown on PLAs if we notice a difference between your product data and your website’s microdata instead of disapproving your ads. These item updates will persist until you make an update to your product data. Merchants who have participated in the beta have seen a 50% reduction in price-related item disapprovals.

You can follow these steps to get started with automatic item updates:

Implement schema.org microdata on your website. Learn more about implementing microdata.
Enable automatic item updates by visiting the automatic item updates tab in the settings section of your Merchant Center account.

Automatic item updates work in conjunction with a good feed rather than replacing it. Accurate and frequent data feed updates are still critical to ensure great results for shoppers. If many of your products are updated several times per day, we suggest using the Content API in addition to setting up automatic item updates.

To keep your items live during this holiday, you should always make sure to comply with our Google Shopping policies while participating in Google Shopping. For more help with data and policy requirements, please visit the Merchant Center Help Center.

Posted by Hannah Schlesinger and Tom Beyer, Google Shopping Team

Building the next generation of display ads for a multi-screen world

Monday, September 29, 2014

It’s true that mobile devices offer a new canvas for advertisers to connect with consumers, but painting on this canvas has not always been easy. Many marketers started out by shrinking down their existing display ads for mobile, but this didn’t always make for a great consumer experience. They also discovered that frequently their existing display ads were not able to run on mobile devices or on mobile browsers. But now, a new generation of display ads is changing how advertisers engage with consumers on mobile devices.

Today, we’re excited to announce that over the coming months we will launch several mobile display ad formats and tools across the Google Display Network, the AdMob Network and DoubleClick that will make it easier for advertisers to build successful ads that work across screens.

Display ads built for mobile
The new display ad formats that will be rolling out in the coming months are designed specifically for mobile environments:

Big brand ads, built for mobile and resized for every screen: Mobile lightbox Engagement Ads use your existing brand assets to automatically create engaging rich media ads in HTML5 that run seamlessly across devices and screens. The ads will dynamically resize to fit any ad size, making them quick-to-create, and you only pay when users engage. We built a demo of this new format for Kate Spade's 2013 holiday campaign. These will soon be available in the AdWords Ad Gallery.

Invitation State

Expanded State

Video ads for the AdMob network that people can choose to watch: TrueView ads have already been running across gaming apps in the AdMob network. In the coming months, they will roll out broadly across more apps in AdMob. With TrueView, your ads can reach consumers while they engage with their favorite apps. Plus, you only pay when a user chooses not to skip your ad.

Ads that stay put even while a person scrolls down the page: The anchor ad format is a mobile web ad unit that sits at the bottom of the screen on a mobile device. As a user scrolls down the page, the ad remains “anchored” to the bottom of the screen. The user can dismiss the ad at any time.

Magazine glossiness for your existing text ads: The magazine style text ad format (previously launched for mobile websites) has now been extended as an interstitial in-app format for the AdMob network, bringing the glossiness of print magazine ads to the ease and practicality of a text ad. Google Display Network text ads automatically become eligible to serve in this new ad space.

Anchor Ad Format and Magazine Style Text Ad Format

Tools to help make your existing ads mobile-ready:
These next generation mobile formats will make it easier for advertisers to build beautiful and engaging mobile ads that work across screens, but we also wanted to make it easier to do more with your existing ads designed for desktop. We've developed three new tools, that will be available in the coming months, to convert your existing ads into versions that will work across screens and devices.

Automatic mobile sizes for your image ads: The auto-resizing tool for the Google Display Network will automatically create new sizes of image ads, including mobile-specific ad sizes.

Interactive HTML5 backups when Flash isn’t supported: The Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tools for the Google Display Network and DoubleClick Campaign Manager will automatically create an HTML5 version of your Flash ads. When these ads are served on a device or browser that doesn’t support Flash, the system can show the interactive HTML5 ad instead of a static image backup.

HTML5 and in-app rich media ads built in minutes: There are now 29 HTML5 and in-app formats available in DoubleClick Studio Layouts, a tool that let’s you upload your existing creative assets into a pre-built rich media ad template to quickly create rich ads that work on smartphones and tablets.

With these new tools and formats, we’re making it easier for advertisers to develop beautiful display ads that just work, regardless of screen or device, ensuring a better experience for both consumers and brands.

Posted by Jonathan Alferness, Director of Product Management for Mobile Display Ads at Google

Customized Creatives at Scale

Thursday, September 25, 2014

Earlier this year, we announced our commitment to build tools specific to the needs of advertisers with large scale campaigns. We call these “Tools for the Power User,” and they’re designed to help our most sophisticated advertisers reach customers at scale, reduce account complexity, and act on data and insights.

Over the next few months, we’ll be rolling out a number of these new tools. The first of these is ad customizers, which fits this month’s theme of optimizing creatives at scale.

Real-time creatives at scale

For advertisers with thousands, or even millions of products, showing tailored messages for each product and promotion you’re offering can be a time-consuming and difficult process. Ad customizers let you show highly relevant ads to your customers, in real-time, even when you have thousands (and sometimes millions) of products, services, and promotions—all changing by the day.

For example, ad customizers allowed Extra Space Storage to deliver a relevant, dynamic ad to each of their customers, and scale their ad creation at an incredible rate. Extra Space Storage says: "By using ad customizers to dynamically insert details about price and timing on promotions into our ad text we saw a 113% increase in CTR over our control. Google gave us a solution to the growing need of delivering the right message to the right customer."

How it works

Ad customizers use a number of inputs, such as information about your business, to generate extremely relevant and timely ads. To get started, you’d simply provide business details like product, price, and timing on promotions, and which campaigns, ad groups or keywords they’re relevant for, through a spreadsheet. This information goes into the new Business data section of the Shared library in AdWords, where it can be stored and then accessed when we use it to show an ad.

Then, you create your ad with customizers which are parameters that tell us what information from your spreadsheet you want inserted into your ads. AdWords will dynamically take the product information that is most relevant to what each customer is searching for and insert it into your ad text. This saves you time, and lets you deliver a powerful, customized ad experience to each of your customers, every time.

Driving success

There are a number of different ways to drive success using these highly customizable text ads. With ad customizers, you can

Connect with customers at scale - create a single text ad with hundreds of variations so you can show the most relevant ad to each potential customer

Show real-time calls-to-action - inform consumers when time’s running out on a promotion, in real-time

Optimize workflow - spend less time developing ad copy and re-submitting ads because AdWords will create relevant ads for you

We’re already seeing many advertisers use ad customizers to effectively reach their audience—and their performance goals.

Ben Arabov from the agency Elite SEM, says: “When Elite SEM first learned about ad customizers, we jumped at the opportunity. We believed this feature would incentivize valuable clicks, and our hypothesis was right. Clients saw KPIs improve dramatically—sometimes as much as 2x. This has enabled us to drive incremental performance not only during promotions, but for the long term as well.”

HomeAdvisor.com, a free online tool for finding trusted home service professionals, says: “With the new ability to serve highly customized text ads that highlight our latest offerings, we’ve seen significant search performance improvement and considerable lift in CTR.”

And the agency, Merkle | IMPAQT, used ad customizers to effectively countdown the days to their seasonal promotions, and drive better performance for their customers: “We used the countdown feature to countdown the days until Thanksgiving and holiday deals began. We discovered the click and impression assisted conversions for this ad copy performed at a significantly higher rate than other copy. We also saw higher conversions associated with this copy on Thanksgiving and for about a week after as a result. We'll continue to use ad customizers for seasonal and on going promotions moving forward.”

Getting started

With ad customizers, advertisers get to save time while showing fresher and more relevant ads, and customers see ads with pertinent, up-to-date information that’s closely tied to their search. This is a better user experience for your customers, and helps you drive better performance on your text ads.

This feature will be rolling out globally over the next few weeks. For more information on how to get started, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Karen Yao, Group Product Manager, AdWords

Checklist for Mobile Success - Google Best Practices

Thursday, September 25, 2014

Effective mobile advertising in AdWords involves more than adjusting your bid modifier. There are a number of specific actions to take in your accounts to successfully engage mobile users.

We’ve put together a checklist, Smart Phone Tips, that covers everything you should be doing to win at mobile. The list addresses key questions you may have when it comes to mobile campaigns, such as:

How should your mobile-preferred ads be tailored to mobile users?
What extensions are must-haves for your mobile efforts?
What types of targeting could you be overlooking on mobile?
Are you capturing all mobile conversion types in your reporting?

Download Smart Phone Tips and be confident that you’re covered on the mobile PPC necessities.

Posted by Matt Lawson, Director, Performance Ads Marketing

Local inventory ads expand to more countries and formats

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

More and more people turn to search to plan their local shopping trips. In fact, 83% of shoppers would be more likely to visit a store if they could check the availability of an item online beforehand.1 Since we launched local inventory ads in the US last fall, many savvy retailers have taken advantage of the opportunity to promote their store items to nearby shoppers on Google.2 Now, we’re excited to make these ads available in the UK, France, Germany, Japan and Australia.

Promote store-only products on desktop
We have also expanded support for store-only products and campaigns to desktop devices, enabling retailers to promote stores to the right customers at the right time. For example, you can prioritize showing local products to get shoppers in your doors during the weeks and days leading up to the holidays. As items go out of stock online and last-minute shipping costs increase, retailers who can provide cost-effective, quick in-store purchase options stand out in the crowd.

Get started with local inventory ads
Local inventory ads help retailers drive foot traffic and sales by showing local product availability, price and store information to shoppers in the area. If you’re a retailer with physical stores and are interested in getting started with local inventory ads, visit the program overview and fill out the interest form.

Posted by Christina Ilvento, Product Manager, Google Shopping

1 Research background: Google/Ipsos MediaCT/Sterling Brands, Digital Impact on In-Store Shopping, March-May 2014. Survey conducted among 6,000 smartphone users aged 18-54 who have influence in the purchase decision making process of Retail, CPG or Tech products and have used the Internet to look for shopping-related information.
2 Local inventory ads were formerly called Local Product Listing Ads.

Making every character count in your mobile search ads

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

People expect information right at their fingertips, whether it’s locating the nearest burger joint or booking a flight. And they’re searching for all this information on small screens -- sometimes as narrow as 4 inches. This means that mobile ads must make every character count.

Today, we are announcing an improvement to the way ads look on smartphones to make it easier and faster for consumers to find things they are searching for, while on the go. Starting on October 15, 2014, your ad extensions may show instead of the second line of ad text (description line 2) on your mobile search ads. Description line 2 may or may not show, depending on how well it’s expected to perform. These improvements are designed to show more relevant and useful information to your customers. Many advertisers have already optimized their ad text in a way that’s updated for longer headlines in keeping with our ads best practices, so no action is required in many cases.

Highlighting the information that matters most to your mobile customers

By showing ad extensions in this more prominent location, consumers will have easier access to information about your business, like your location and product offerings. Advertisers will see improved ad performance because you’ll be able to:

Highlight featured products and services in a more pronounced way using callouts
Provide useful and timely local information with location extensions
Take customers to relevant pages on your site, like to the sale or promotion page, with sitelinks

What this looks like

Let’s take a look at an example business, Flowers Forever, to see how this update will work. Before the update, people who searched for “flowers” on Google.com saw the ad on the left which shows the business’ website URL, two lines of general information and a link to place orders.

After the update, potential customers may see a Google Maps marker that shows the location of the flower shop, in addition to the website URL, ad creative and online order form -- all within one ad.

By eliminating the second line of ad text, we give businesses another point of engagement with customers in their ads -- in this case, it’s the additional location extension. With just a single click on their smartphones, consumers can now directly engage with Flowers Forever in three ways: they can visit the mobile website, place an order, or get directions to visit the store.

Getting the most out of your mobile ads
While no specific action is required for these improvements, it’s always a good idea to keep these mobile ads best practices in mind:

Ensure that your most important information is in the first line of ad text (description line 1) to address customer needs right away. Remember to keep this text within the 35 character limit.
Enable all relevant extensions to help consumers find information faster and increase clickthrough rates (CTR).
Use mobile preferred creatives to help consumers quickly and easily take action while on the go. You’ll also get better results when your ads are more relevant to mobile searchers.

We’re constantly adapting our products to better meet consumer needs and help businesses connect with customers. While we believe that these new updates will provide improved performance for your mobile ads, you may opt out of this offering when it becomes available in October via a form on this Help Center article.

Posted by Senthil Hariramasamy, Product Manager, AdWords

Extend the reach of your Product Listing Ads to qualified shoppers

Tuesday, September 09, 2014

With the growth of product queries across the web, advertisers are looking for new ways to connect their products to interested shoppers.

By opting your Shopping Campaigns into Google’s search partners, you can now reach users as they search or browse for products on retail and commerce sites in the Google Search Network. These retailers, such as Walmart.com, are part of AdSense for Shopping, our latest product to help monetize site traffic.

Extending your Shopping Campaigns to these sites helps you reach qualified users beyond google.com and Google Shopping. Your Product Listing Ads show alongside contextually relevant results, determined by the user’s search, the product category or the product name. For example, if you sell tailgating grills on Google Shopping and a user searches tailgating grill on a retail partner's site, your Product Listing Ads may be eligible to appear.

Product Listing Ads on Walmart.com

Similar to text ads, opting your Product Listing Ads into search partners won’t affect your quality score on google.com.

AdSense for Shopping is currently limited to a small set of retail and commerce publishers. As we release the product to more publishers, we expect advertisers with Product Listing Ads opted into search partners to see increased traffic to their sites. If you’re a retailer and you’re interested in monetizing your site through AdSense for Shopping, please complete this interest form.

To learn more about showing your Product Listing Ads on search partners and evaluating your performance, please visit our AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Jesse Adkins, Product Manager, Google Search Ads

Call out what matters most to your customers

Wednesday, September 03, 2014

Whether it’s free shipping on all laptops or a price match guarantee on smartphones, the more information people have, the better purchase decisions they can make online. That’s why we’re introducing callout extensions: additional text that shows with your Google search ads, highlighting specific information about your products and services. Callouts will start rolling out today, with full availability to all advertisers in the next few weeks.

Example text ad highlighting callout extensions

Strengthen your message

Callouts show valuable information to potential customers before they click your ad; while also being a factor in Ad Rank. Use them to draw attention to important product details and benefits. Or highlight what makes your business different from your competitors.

“The use of callout extensions has meant we’ve been able to let our customers know how much more our hotels have to offer than just rooms. Spas, restaurants and meeting facilities are just a few of the attractive options our hotels have to offer, which may not be seen through a traditional revenue driving campaign. In just one month after implementing callout extensions, we’ve seen a 9% increase in conversion rate.” - James Harrower, Senior Search Manager, Hilton Worldwide

Callouts can also be used effectively in combination with other ad formats. For example, if you’re already using sitelinks for “Women’s Clothing” and “Back to School,” create a callout for “20% off entire site” to encourage people to click through and make a purchase. Or if you’re using call extensions, highlight “24/7 customer support” so your customers know they can call your business for help. However you plan to use callouts, make sure to keep them focused and relevant.

Create your first callout

You can manage, schedule, and report on your callouts from the Ad extensions tab. Since callouts can be added at the account, campaign, or ad group level, you can provide more general information about your products and services at the account or campaign level, and more detailed information at the ad group level.

For example, add callouts for “Special discounts” or “Free shipping” to campaigns containing more general keywords like cheap flights or shoes respectively. Or add callouts for product details at the ad group level to support more specific keywords like men’s running shoes or 12 cup coffee makers.

Keep in mind callouts are limited to 25 characters each and up to four can show with your ad. They can also co-trigger with all other ad formats in the auction.

Learn More

To learn more about creating and managing callouts, see our AdWords Help Center article.

Posted by Senthil Hariramasamy, Product Manager, AdWords

Inside AdWords

We've moved!

Measuring more value with estimated cross-device conversions, now available for display

Keep price and availability fresh with automatic item updates

Building the next generation of display ads for a multi-screen world

Customized Creatives at Scale

Checklist for Mobile Success - Google Best Practices

Local inventory ads expand to more countries and formats

Making every character count in your mobile search ads

Extend the reach of your Product Listing Ads to qualified shoppers

Call out what matters most to your customers

Google Best Practices

Best Practices Newsletter

Achieve Your Marketing Goals

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