AdWords Agency Blog

Meet the Mobile Champs: Introducing a new series of video interviews with mobile thought leaders

2013-05-14T09:15:00.003-07:00

What is top of mind for mobile leaders in the agency community? How are agencies helping their clients win with mobile? In an effort to better understand the challenges that agencies face when it comes to mobile, and to strengthen our efforts to help them tackle and overcome these challenges, we decided to bring together a group of mobile evangelists from the agency world. At a recent event in New York City, we asked a few of these mobile leaders what excites them - and what challenges them - about mobile today. Today, we are excited to share these interviews with you on Think Insights, Google’s hub for marketing insights and inspiration for advertisers and agencies.

One of the topics that we found to be top of mind for everyone is the challenge of mobile measurement in a multi-screen world. "We need to get beyond the old metrics of the Internet, television and print, and define what the new metrics are for mobile engagement," shared Jeffery Hinz, Managing Partner & US Digital Director at MediaCom. Zach Morrison, VP & Director of SEM at Elite SEM, outlines the so-called "holy grail" of understanding consumer behavior across multiple devices to see the full customer journey. As Morrison says, "The first thing people do in the morning is wake up and grab their phones and the last thing they do at night is do something on their tablet - I think the next biggest thing is tying it all together."

We also spoke with our mobile champs about topics ranging from brand building strategies to showrooming to where they think mobile is headed next. Be sure to check out the full interviews on Think Insights. We hope you will find what these mobile thought leaders had to say as interesting and thought-provoking as we did.

Posted by: Samantha Podos Nowak, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

Sign up for our new webinar: Driving Direct Response with Video

2013-05-10T10:52:00.000-07:00

Sign up for Learn with Google webinar "Driving Direct Response with Video" (May 14, 10 am PST). Join us to learn about techniques and tools that help you drive online and offline conversions efficiently. The webinar is recommeded to those who have already been using video ads and would like to learn about more advanced direct response techniques.

Understanding smartphone use in stores: Shoppers who use mobile more, spend more in store

2013-05-09T06:49:00.000-07:00

Smartphones are our constant shopping companions - helping us research, compare, and even purchase products online and in stores. We’ve already seen that smartphones are key to pre-purchase activities. With 84% of mobile shoppers now using their phones to help with shopping in physical stores, smartphones are now as commonplace in stores as shopping carts and cash registers. In “Mobile In-Store Research: How in-store shoppers are using mobile devices”, with the help of M.A.R.C. Research and the Google Shopper Council, we set out to understand mobile’s role in stores and how marketers can take advantage. We found that across the board, shoppers who use mobile more actually spend more in store, so marketers should face the mobile in-store challenge head on and own the digital shelf.

Smartphones are transforming the retail experience
Now that consumers have product details, price comparisons and reviews available instantly at their fingertips, shoppers complement what they’re seeing on store shelves with what they can find on the web. This behavior isn’t just limited to high consideration purchases like appliances and electronics. In every industry we looked at, including household items, apparel, and pet care, more than 70% of smartphone shoppers use their phones in store to help with shopping. In fact, two-thirds of baby product shoppers compare prices on their phones in-store.

So what are shoppers using their smartphones for in stores? The research showed that phones were primarily used for:
• Price comparison (53%)
• Finding offers and promotions (39%)
• Finding locations of other stores (36%)
• Finding hours (35%)

Shoppers who use mobile more, spend more in store
While many businesses might assume that smartphone use in store drives shoppers to seek better prices elsewhere and order online, we found that the opposite was true. We compared the in-store purchases of moderate and frequent smartphone users and found that basket sizes of frequent mobile shoppers were 25-50% higher. For instance, while the average appliance smartphone shoppers spends $250 per shopping trip, frequent smartphone shoppers spend $350. Marketers shouldn’t shy away from the showrooming challenge, and should instead, meet it head on.

Search is often the starting point for in-store mobile activity
While many marketers assume that smartphone shoppers use shopping apps or navigate directly to brand and retail websites while in a store, we found that 82% of smartphone shoppers use mobile search to help make purchase decisions. This represents a critical moment where businesses can win or lose customers - whether they’re navigating the aisle in your store or your competitor’s. Mobile shoppers are looking for information or savings in the key decision moments, so businesses should own the digital shelf by making sure they’re present when customers are searching and that relevant information is easy to find.

Understanding how mobile changes the retail game
For businesses, this new mobile behavior doesn’t just impact your marketing efforts, it also has clear implications for the entire business - from the products you stock on shelves to the way you train employees. For instance, 1 in 3 smartphone shoppers would rather find information using their smartphone than ask a store employee. In categories like electronics and appliances, this behavior occurs for close to 50% of smartphone shoppers.

However, understanding and embracing this new retail behavior can open up new opportunities for brands to connect with customers in key consideration moments. Some stores promote their expanded inventory online or implement a price match guarantee to retain savings-hungry shoppers. Others are putting smartphones to use with QR codes that share more information about products, or apps with store maps and real-time inventory. Whatever tactics marketers choose, it’s clear that smartphones are changing the in-store experience, and that winning the key decision moments at the physical shelves means owning the digital shelves too.

Check out the full research report to learn more or register now for a webinar on Thursday, May 16 where we’ll discuss the research and how businesses can take advantage of mobile use in stores.

Posted by: Adam Grunewald, Mobile Marketing Manager

Updated Google Shopping feed specification

2013-05-08T12:20:00.000-07:00

Last year, we announced the rollout of the new Google Shopping commercial model built on Product Listing Ads both in the United States and globally. We believe these changes, and the improved user experience, will create new opportunities for merchants and help retailers of all sizes attract more customers to their stores.

The quality of data provided by merchants is critical for achieving these goals. Therefore, we're announcing some changes to the Google Shopping Feed Specification:

• We are improving our support for merchant-defined multipacks. For example, many consumer products like toothpaste are sold in custom multipacks. The feed specification now clarifies how such products should be submitted.

• We are moving towards a world with high-resolution displays. Therefore, we are also starting to recommend higher-quality images with at least 800 pixels in height and width to give users a better visual representation of advertised products.

• Some products like custom goods, vintage items, or collectibles don't have unique product identifiers. For such products we are now introducing the 'identifier exists' attribute. Additionally, we have updated our requirements on unique product identifiers.

• We have updated our guidance for the description and color attributes to make them more precise and actionable.

• We now provide dedicated support for energy efficiency labels and unit pricing for merchants targeting countries in the European Union and Switzerland.

• Merchants promoting non-family safe items on family-safe websites can now tag individual items as non-family safe.

Some of these changes won't be visible to Google Shopping users immediately. We want to give merchants enough time for preparation and adoption. We encourage merchants to use the test feeds feature or the feed debugger to ensure that their updated feeds can be processed correctly.

Merchants can review the new feed specifications and a summary of attribute requirements to help prepare for these changes. They should always make sure to comply with legal requirements while participating in the Google Shopping program.

Enforcement of new Google Shopping Feed Specifications
For accounts that are currently exempted from requiring unique product identifiers, Google Shopping will start enforcing these new requirements for unique product identifiers on July 15th, 2013 in the US, and September 16th, 2013 in all other target countries. Enforcement for all other accounts will start July 15th, 2013 for the US, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, and September 16th, 2013 for all other target countries. Non-compliant items might then be disapproved and disappear from Google Shopping.

Account level exemptions for unique product identifiers won’t be supported after the above mentioned dates – the 'identifier exists' attribute should be used instead.

Posted by Angelika Rohrer, Program Manager, Google Shopping

Six Trends in Digital Creativity

2013-05-07T10:52:00.001-07:00

Today, we’re in the midst of a creative revolution being driven by technology. Code is being added to the core creative process, enabling new forms of brand expression and engagement. Yet the need for human insights, breakthrough ideas and emotional stories is still very much at the core of great advertising. Our connected world is giving brands more dimensions and touch points, but they still need something compelling to offer in order to create a real connection.

The project Art, Copy & Code is experimenting with innovative brands to bring amazing ideas to life through technology. The project outlines a series of six trends in digital creativity. For the past week, we’ve presented one trend a day on our Google+ pages and today, we wanted to bring it all together for you.

The six trends in digital creativity are:

1. Connected Objects (let’s get phygital)

2. Re-Imagined Canvases (growing new ideas in familiar ground)

3. Useful Marketing (creating tools, not just ads)

4. Audiences of One (crafted just for you)

5. Collaborative Storytelling (the audience is part of the show)

6. Data Stories (the emotional life of numbers)

Trend #1 - Connected Objects (let’s get phygital):

It used to be that there was the 'real' world and the digital world and the two rarely met. Not anymore. Thanks to ever-evolving technologies like NFC, RFID and Bluetooth, as well as real-time information like Twitter, the offline and online worlds are increasingly rubbing shoulders. Physical events are triggering actions online, and vice-versa, creating new opportunities for marketers to invite people to interact with their products through the web.

In Coca Cola’s “You Decide Who Wins” campaign, viewers saw a Coke commercial which explained a Twitter contest: people could tweet throughout the TV show they were watching and vote on which Coke commercial they wanted to see next; the commercial with the most votes was aired at the end of the TV show.

In the “Tweet for Tea” campaign, South African brand BOS Ice Tea created a “Tweet-activated” vending machine that dispensed a BOS Ice Tea every time someone tweeted the hashtag #BOSTWEET4T. They linked the real life experience of tasting BOS Ice Tea with something that was immediately shareable via people's social networks.

Trend #2 - Re-Imagined Canvases (growing new ideas in familiar ground):

Innovation doesn't always have to mean inventing something new. Bringing fresh thinking to established media and ad formats can be an easy and inexpensive way to stand out in a connected world. Sometimes it’s about the unexpected marriage of an idea and an existing technology. Or it can be a matter of taking a well-known ad space and making it sing with an innovative creative approach. Whether you’re crafting surprising experiences with pre-roll, giving the classic printed circular an online dimension, or simply bringing wit and charm to search ads, there are plenty of opportunities on the modern web that can be exciting without being brand new.

In Sony Picture's Skyfall campaign, Spinnaker wanted to illustrate the fun and adventure of the Skyfall movie, by allowing viewers to partake in the motorbike chase in the opening scene. They built a display campaign where viewers could scan a QR code with their mobile or tablet device and then use their mobile phone as the “video game controller” to control the action occurring on the screen.

In the “Assasin’s Creed” campaign, video game publisher Ubisoft along with Biborg created mobile ads aimed at immersing the user in a fully interactive and innovative experience. Additionally, the digital outdoor campaign used synchronized screens to catch the audience’s attention and engage them to follow character’s steps in epic adventures.

Trend #3: Useful Marketing (creating tools, not just ads)

Marketing has become less about talking and more about doing. While ideas about branded utility have been tossed around for a while, lately they’ve been getting more serious attention. Ads that make people’s lives easier, more productive and more fun can bring a brand’s promise to life in tangible ways.

Cadillac created an interactive video ad that mimicked their website. Within this ad unit, a viewer could watch Cadillac’s main commercial, but then could also also interact with a 360 degree view of the car, pictures of the inside of the car, and different colors for the car. Users got a website experience all through a single ad unit.

The KLIPPBOK by IKEA campaign is an iPad app which gives users access to IKEA products all year round. KLIPPBOK gives home decoration enthusiasts a space to mix’n’match IKEA products to create ideas for their home. It takes advantage of the tactile and immediate nature of touch screen devices and lends itself to being a freeform creative tool (in this case a scrapbook). The portability allows people to engage whenever inspiration strikes; at home, on the bus to work or when they’re on a break. It also means they can easily share ideas with family and friends

Trend #4: Audiences of One (crafted just for you):

The best storytellers have always been able to make us feel as if they’re speaking to each one of us individually. Can technology take that idea further? Using real-time data and cues like time of day, location and interests, we can already tailor and personalize ads in ways that make them more valuable and meaningful. Instead of creating messages aimed at audiences, consumer segments and personas, we can now simply talk to people the way they want to be talked to.

In Project Re-Brief, Alka Seltzer re-imagined their original “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” campaign, to showcase the entire day that Ralph ate the whole thing. Using the power of real-time creative, they were able to build an ad that automatically stitched together video pieces that reflected the current weather, time, part of day, location, and interests of the person viewing the ad in the moment.

In Hyundai’s “Elantra Driveway Decision Maker” campaign, the company wanted to create an innovative way to help car buyers decide between the three Elantra models. The creative team combined Google Street View, projection mapping and real-time 3D animation to help viewers see what an Elantra would look like in their own driveway. Viewers began by selecting one of three Elantra models. Then with projection mapping, the chosen Elantra would drive through a colorful digital world, transitioning into Google Maps, then Google Street View where it drove down their street and arrived in their actual driveway. Once there, they could change the colors, trim levels or model.

Trend #5: Collaborative Storytelling (the audience is part of the show):

It’s an old maxim that ideas can come from anyone and anywhere, but the web has been great proof of it. Given the opportunity, people have consistently surprised us with their boundless creativity. In traditional media, audiences are passive spectators. They sit back and watch a story created by someone else. But on the web, we can harness their desire to co-create with us by building platforms that bring ideas to life which could never be accomplished alone. More and more, inspiring this kind of participation is going to be crucial for brands.

BMW wanted to celebrate the holiday season in a way that was meaningful, yet relevant to the brand. So they told a story about the journey that everyone takes over the holidays – The Road Home. They asked more than 50 employees at their agency to record their journeys on smartphones and personal cameras as they traveled home for Thanksgiving. They then took all the footage and edited it in-house. The end result was a video narrative celebrating the best road there is and an ad campaign that got right at the heart of the individual’s experience being “on the road.” Check it out here.

In the Stella Artois “Christmas Carole” campaign, fans and users created unique, personalized holiday greetings from “Christmas Carole” for their friends and family. The interactive holiday greeting showed “Christmas Carole” on a journey to perform a festive song at your friend's home. The experience used a combination of Google Street View, Google Maps and satellite imagery, Google Places, and Google's Directions and Geocoding APIs to build the custom, personalized film.

Trend #6: Data Stories (the emotional life of numbers)

Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion (that’s 2,500,000,000,000,000,000) bytes of data. To put that in perspective, 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years. It’s a crazy thought, but it’s also an exciting one.

We've begun using this knowledge for things like beautiful data visualizations and targeted messaging, but we've only scratched the surface of what's possible. In the right hands, data can be used to tell emotional stories that grow and change over time. And, because data-driven executions are grounded in cold, hard facts, they're tough to argue with. Which is also kind of a plus.

Instead of creating content for Twitter, Evian decided to create content with Twitter. They wondered, "What if Twitter ceased to be a tool and instead became a toy?" The answer to this was a "digital toy" called Evian MeloTweet, which transformed Twitter into a musical experience and let users interact with their Twitter timeline in a fresh new way. Twitter data and posts from a user’s feed is depicted as marbles in a musical “marble-factory” that the user “composes” from a library of parts. By playing with Twitter data in a new way, while still retaining the original product’s features, Evian was able to achieve a high level of user engagement and convey their “Live Young” spirit and brand.

Vodafone’s “Lost Phone Experiment” introduced Mobile Protect, an app that allows smartphones users to track their phone in case it is lost or wipe data from a distance. In this particular campaign, the app measured the phone's location, movement, and whether it was being used to make phone calls or simply to browse the web. The data was updated in real-time and visitors could browse back in time to see where the phones were dropped, where they got picked up and where they were ultimately returned.

These six trends in digital creativity highlight the fact that brands are beginning to push the boundaries of the online medium to provide beautiful, engaging, and innovative experiences to consumers.

Know of other great examples like these? Submit them to the Creative Sandbox Gallery.

Know of other trends in digital creativity? Let us know!

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

New Learn with Google Webinars to Help you Become a Smarter Digital Marketer

2013-05-02T11:13:00.002-07:00

At Google, one of our goals is to help make the web work for you. Today we’re announcing a new series of Learn with Google webinars, which will teach you how to use digital to build brand awareness and give you the tools you need to drive sales and grow loyalty and retention. Each of our sessions gives you deep-dive educational content, across a breadth of products and marketing objectives, in a format that’s convenient for you. Every webinar is led by Google product experts and includes time for audience Q&A. Sign up to start becoming a smarter digital marketer now.

Upcoming live webinars:

May
[YouTube] Driving Direct Response with Video
[Shopping] Google Shopping 101: Google Shopping for Beginners
[Research] New Research: How US Shoppers use Smartphones in Stores
[Mobile] Driving Deeper Engagement with your App Users
[Mobile] Driving Brand Engagement with Mobile Rich Media
[Analytics] Measuring Success in a Multi-Device World

June
[Mobile] Understanding Mobile Ads Across Marketing Objectives
[Shopping] Google Shopping 201: Merchant Center Deep Dive
[YouTube] Building your Business with YouTube Video Ads
[Analytics] Metrics for the Mobile App Ecosystem
[Search] What's New & Next in AdWords
[Analytics] Unleashing the Combined Power of Google Analytics & AdWords
[Social] Growing your Business & Engaging your Audience with Google+
[Shopping] Google Shopping 301: Creating & Optimizing Product Listing Ads
[Social] Launching & Amplifying your Impact Across Social Channels
[Display] Reaching the Right Audience with Remarketing
[Research] Creating Custom Infographics with the New Google Databoard

Webinars are held Tuesdays through Thursdays at 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern.

Visit our webinar site to register for any of the live sessions and to access our large library of recorded content. You can also stay up-to-date on the schedule by adding our Learn with Google calendar to your own Google calendar to automatically see upcoming webinars.

During our last series of webinars, attendees had the chance to win a Nexus 7. Clint Wilson was our lucky winner and he’ll soon be enjoying all of the tablet’s cool features. Check out our upcoming webinars for another chance to win!

Learn with Google is a program to help businesses succeed through winning moments that matter, enabling better decisions and constantly innovating. We hope that you’ll use these best practices and how-to’s to maximize the impact of digital and grow your business. We’re looking forward to seeing you at an upcoming session!

Reaching Gen C on YouTube

2013-05-01T17:30:00.000-07:00

Today on our YouTube blog we announced exciting new milestones for our ecosystem. People are tuning into YouTube every day on their phones, laptops and tablets as their first source for entertainment, news, and education. In fact, people are now watching 50% more on YouTube than last year. And now, according to Nielsen, YouTube reaches more U.S. adults aged 18-34 than any cable network.

Driving this growth is a group of connected consumers that consume media on their own terms - or as Nielsen calls them, Generation C. Gen C is a psychographic that spans teens, millennials and Gen X, and is defined by a focus on Creation, Curation, Connection and Community.

In our last post about Gen C we explored how people watch YouTube on mobile devices. To gain more insight into Gen C, we worked with third party research firm Ipsos to survey people that fall in the Gen C psychographic about their media consumption. We found that 66% of Gen C spend the same or more amount of time watching online video as they do watching TV. In fact nearly 1 in 3 people within Gen C spend more time watching online videos than TV.

Additionally:

46% of Gen C believe YouTube is an alternative to TV
51% of Gen C say that watching a YouTube video about a product or service has impacted their purchase decision
70% of Gen C have subscribed to one or more YouTube channels
52% of Gen C say they often share YouTube videos with other people they know
Nearly 40% of Gen C proactively go to YouTube to engage with their favorite brands

YouTube drives sales

As Gen C spends more time online and less time watching TV, brands are rethinking the way they engage with consumers. To better understand how YouTube drives business results, we took a look at the impact of media spend on sales.

We partnered with third party analytics firm MarketShare to develop media allocation models for five categories including Smartphones, Auto Insurance, Credit Cards, Cosmetics and Entry Level Luxury Auto sales, using aggregated and anonymized data.

For every category MarketShare looked at, they found significant sales opportunities for brands by shifting meaningful media spend to YouTube. MarketShare recommends shifting on average 5% of media spend to YouTube to achieve 1-3% lift in sales at no additional cost.

For more information on Gen C and how your brand can reach consumers on YouTube, visit Think Insights.

Posted by Gunnard Johnson, Advertising Research Director, Google

The Importance of Being Seen: Viewability and Brands

2013-04-26T06:43:00.002-07:00

Brand marketers since the “Mad Men” era have often sought insight to a simple question: ‘Was my ad seen?’ The answer was that your ad was published, your commercial ran, your online impression served on a web page, but it was impossible to say with certainty whether an ad was viewed or not. Thanks to leaps forward in digital technology and the hard work of many in the industry, it's now possible to measure whether an ad is viewable onscreen. Given this progress, it's not a matter of if this becomes the standard, but when.

We support a viewable impressions standard and have been partnering with the industry to push this forward. Today we've reached an important milestone on this journey - Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation for our viewability measurement solution, Active View, which we introduced last year.

"We are very pleased that Google has achieved accreditation for its Active View product" said George Ivie, CEO and Executive Director of the Media Rating Council. "Viewable impressions are an important foundational improvement in digital measurement and an important step toward comparability with other electronic media."

Active View complements our other investments in making digital an effective medium for brand marketers and their awareness-building campaigns, like Lightbox ads and TrueView in AdMob and games. These efforts appear to be paying off for brand advertisers: we saw a 65 percent increase last quarter alone in the number of brand advertisers using our brand formats and buying tools.

The Active View Roadmap

Viewability has the power to transform the industry: improving the value of marketers’ spend, and of publishers’ sites. We’ve also designed this metric to be actionable, not just for after-the-fact reporting. Based on Active View, advertisers can buy reservable inventory on the Google Display Network (GDN), paying only for impressions that meet the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s proposed viewability standard - at least 50% on screen for one second or longer.

Effective metrics also serve as a universal currency, building an understanding between marketers and content creators about the best way to reach an audience, and the value of an ad on a page. This is why we’ll be building Active View into our products both for advertisers and publishers. In addition to its use on the GDN, Active View reporting will be available in DoubleClick for Advertisers and DoubleClick for Publishers in 2013. Long term, we see this becoming the new standard for how impressions are bought, sold and measured, replacing the “served impressions” metric we have today.

While many intuitively suspected that increased viewability would directly translate into better campaign performance, we now have data to back that up. On our network, we compared ads by the number of seconds they appeared on screen and found:

Users are more likely to click on viewable ads -- up to 21 times more.
Viewability can help publishers discover “gold below the fold,” with CTR doubling, on average, for below-the-fold inventory. On average, we’ve found that CTR is comparable for viewable above-the-fold and viewable below-the-fold inventory.
The longer users view an ad, the bigger the boost for click-through rates (we saw up to a 125% increase when an ad was viewed for more than 20 seconds).

Figure 1. Comparison of CTR for viewable v. non-viewable ads, shown for all ads (left panel) and BTF inventory only (right panel) (100% = the average CTR of the specified dataset).

Figure 2. CTR by viewable time, detail.

*Data source for all figures: Google Display Network 2% sample from February 2013; display ads only; viewable = 50% onscreen. In all figures, 100% on the y-axis denotes the average CTR across all ad queries in the specified dataset.

Google’s MRC accreditation, which currently applies to the Google Display Network and DoubleClick for Advertisers, was based on a thorough assessment of a number of factors, including the detection process, quality control and delivery standards.

With this accreditation, we are one step closer to making a viewable standard a reality for our partners. With better measurement, we think it's possible to unlock a new golden age of creation across the web, where users can enjoy great content, brands can connect with their customers and content creators can accelerate their growth.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Display Advertising

Easier planning, better reporting: New tools for display ads

2013-04-26T06:33:00.002-07:00

Great ad campaigns have always required two things: knowing your audience, and using that knowledge to reach them in smart ways.

Today we're thrilled to announce new innovations that will help display advertisers with both parts of that equation. They are the Google Display Planner and two new reports: Demographic Performance and Placement Performance.

First, meet the Google Display Planner, a free research and planning tool that delivers targeting ideas and estimates to help you build better display campaigns. Based on data you enter, the tool suggests places to run your ads on the Google Display Network along with key related details: impression and cookie ranges for our inventory, age and gender breakdowns, and historical cost-per-click (CPC) information. These features can help you:

Find new inventory. Display Planner finds and suggests thousands of websites, mobile applications and video channels for your ads across the online world.
Generate targeting ideas. Are you trying to reach golfers, or new parents? Just describe their interests, websites you know they visit and products they buy. Display Planner will use that data to suggest good keywords and other targeting ideas.
Turn data into insights. What is the total opportunity for your Google Display Network campaign and what can you expect in return? Display Planner tells you, with estimates and historical data to back it up.

Display Planner

Display Planner is part of AdWords, so with one click you can add your plan directly to your account, or download to share it. Display Planner will be available in the Tools & Analysis menu, and will be rolling out to the US over the course of this week, and globally in the next few weeks. You can learn more in our Help Center.

Now for the other half of the equation: knowing your audience. Our two new reports will help you understand how your ads perform across different customer segments and websites.

Demographic Performance Reports show how different demographic segments, gender and age buckets, respond to your messages by showing the impression, click and conversion rates for each group - a marketer's dream! Armed with these new insights you can quickly tailor your ads to be more relevant for your audience, and modify your targeting and bidding settings for better performing campaigns.

New Age Reports in Display Network Tab

New Placement Performance Reports combine automatic and managed placements in one report, so you can see quickly how your ads perform on different websites and adjust your targeting and bidding accordingly and with ease. These new reports will be available globally in the next few weeks in the Display Network Tab.

The beauty of digital is real-time information and real-time action. We hope these new features will give you more insights, better ways to act on them, and an easier and more efficient way for you to buy display ads.

Posted by Christian Oestlien, Director of Product Management, Google Display Network

Introducing "The Customer Journey to Online Purchase" - Interactive insights on multi-channel marketing

2013-04-25T10:54:00.000-07:00

Savvy marketers understand that you don’t always seal the deal with a single message, image, or advertisement. A user may see a display ad, click on a link from a friend, or do a search before buying something from your website — and all of these interactions can play a role in the final sale. It’s important to understand the entire customer journey so you can measure all of the elements that contribute to your campaigns, attribute the right value to them, and adjust your marketing budgets where appropriate.

That’s the philosophy behind Google Analytics tools like Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution Modeling. Tens of thousands of our largest advertisers are gaining valuable insights from Multi-Channel Funnels every month, and we’ve collected these insights using aggregate statistics to develop a benchmarking tool — The Customer Journey to Online Purchase. This interactive tool lets you explore typical online buying behavior and see how different marketing interactions affect business success.

The tool draws on Ecommerce and Multi-Channel Funnels data from over 36,000 Google Analytics clients that authorized sharing, including millions of purchases across 11 industries in 7 countries. Purchase paths in this tool are each based on interactions with a single ecommerce advertiser.

You’ll find benchmark data for:

how different marketing channels (such as display, search, email, and your own website) help move users towards purchases. For example, some marketing channels play an “assist” role during the earlier stages of the marketing funnel, whereas some play a “last interaction” role just before a sale.
how long it takes for customers to make a purchase online (from the first time they interact with your marketing to the moment they actually buy something), and how the length of this journey affects average order values.

Channel Roles in the Customer Journey

The data shows that every industry is different — the path to purchase for hotel rooms in Japan is not necessarily the same as the path as for an online supermarket in Canada.

A few findings stand out, in particular:

As you might expect, customers typically click on display ads early in their purchase journeys, but in some industries, such as US travel and auto, display clicks tend to occur closer to the purchase decision.
Across industries and countries, paid search has a fairly even assist-to-last interaction ratio, implying that this channel can act both in the earlier and later stages of the customer journey.

Advanced tip:

Once you’ve explored the benchmarks, look deeper into your own marketing data with the Multi-Channel Funnel reports, and consider defining your channels and campaigns to separate out categories that are specific to your business needs.

Purchase values and the length of the journey

We also see interesting patterns emerge when examining the length of the customer journey. While the majority of purchases take place within a single day or a single step (i.e., a single interaction with one marketing channel), longer paths tend to correlate with higher average order values.

For example,

in US Tech, online purchases that take more than 28 days are worth about 3.5 times more than purchases that occur immediately. And while 61% of tech purchases take place on that first day, only 53% of revenue comes from single-day purchases.
in Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), on the other hand, most purchases (82%) are quick, likely because these are smaller and simpler purchases that don’t require much research.
in Edu / Gov, 41% of revenue comes from multi-day purchases, but 60% of revenue comes from multi-step purchases — suggesting that even when customers make decisions in a relatively short time period, they often have multiple marketing interactions before purchasing.

Advanced tip:

In Multi-Channel Funnels or the Attribution Modeling Tool, you can adjust the lookback window to reflect the typical length of the purchase path in your industry. For example, if your business tends to have shorter paths, you can zoom in on paths that take 5 days or less:

Putting the benchmarks to work

For marketers, it’s always a crucial challenge to design campaigns that deliver the right message at the right moment in a customer’s journey to purchase. We hope these benchmarks will provide useful insights about the journey and help you put your business into context. In particular, take a look at the final infographic, the “Benchmarks Dashboard,” to get a quick overview of your industry. Then, when you view your own data in the Multi-Channel Funnels reports in Google Analytics, you’ll gain a better understanding of where different channels impact your conversions and what your typical path looks like, so you can adjust your budgeting and marketing programs accordingly.

Try The Customer Journey to Online Purchase today on Google’s new Think Insights website.

Happy analyzing!

Posted by Paul Muret, Director of Engineering, Google Analytics
(This is a cross-post from the GA blog)

How does Gen C watch YouTube? On all screens, all the time

2013-03-20T18:00:00.000-07:00

-->The way people consume content is changing. For the first time, an entire generation has grown up watching content on their own terms. This generation is defined by the Internet, mobile, and social - consuming content when and where they want. Nielsen calls this group Generation C because they are not just defined by their age group, but by their connected behavior. On YouTube, this generation thrives on 4Cs:

Connection - Gen C watches YouTube on all screens, constantly switching between devices.
Creation - Gen C is deeply engaged with online video, watching, creating and uploading videos on YouTube.
Community - Gen C thrive on community, defining what’s popular on YouTube by sharing videos with friends and family.
Curation - Gen C is made up of expert curators who care about finding content that matters to them.

Gen C is a powerful demographic - not only are they cultural tastemakers, they influence $500B of spending a year in the U.S. (U.S.Chamber of Commerce). Yet they can be a hard to reach audience for brands. Gen C are 45% more likely to be light TV viewers, choosing instead to consume many forms of content across many screens (GfK MRI Fall 2012).

Over the next few months, we’ll take a deeper look at Gen C, sharing insights and trends about our audience on YouTube. To start, we’re focusing on how Gen C watches YouTube across devices.

Multiscreen is essential to reaching Gen C

Young adults are leading the growth in smartphone ownership in the U.S. - 76% of 18-34 year olds now own smartphones, versus 60% of the general population (Nielsen Mobile Insights Survey, Q4 2012). To better understand how Gen C connects with YouTube across screens, we worked with Nielsen to take a look at viewing patterns on smartphones.

We found that that the amount of time Gen C spends watching YouTube on their smartphones is up 74% from last year. In fact, in 2012 the number of Gen C viewers who regularly watch YouTube on smartphones caught up to the number of viewers tuning in on their PCs. 67% of Gen C watch YouTube on two devices or more, compared to 53% of the general population.

How does Gen C watch YouTube on smartphones?

Gen C tunes in to YouTube throughout every part of their day. YouTube usage by Gen C on smartphones mirrors usage on PCs and peaks during prime time hours.

Gen C watches YouTube on their smartphones as a complementary activity to their lives. For example, 41% tune in to YouTube on their smartphone while waiting for something/someone, 18% while commuting from work or school, and 15% tune in while commercials are running on TV.

On smartphones, most of Gen C engage with YouTube as a destination by actively searching for videos on YouTube (47%). Viewers are also discovering videos socially - 9% of respondents said they watched a video on their smartphone because it was shared by friends in an email, while 18% watched a video because it was shared on a social network.

What does this mean for brand marketers?

Caring deeply about creation, curation, connection, and community, Gen C have taken up permanent residence on YouTube, making it one of their primary daily destinations. We’re making it easy for you to connect with your most passionate fans wherever they watch YouTube. With TrueView video ads, you create one ad that we’ll run across all screens - helping you reach your audience at scale. And our new One Channel design for brand channels enable viewers to have a seamless experience with your brand on all devices.

To view an infographic of this research,visit Think Insights.

Posted by Gunnard Johnson, Advertising Research Director, Google.

The brand revolution is underway

2013-03-18T10:57:00.002-07:00

As we’ve said before, we’ve entered the next wave of digital marketing, as major brands like L’Oreal, Audi and Kay Jewelers embrace digital media and make it a core part of their marketing strategy. We’ve seen a 65 percent increase in the last quarter alone in the number of brand advertisers using our brand formats and buying tools.

This influx of brand investment is translating into meaningful results for digital publishers.

• We looked at the 50 top publishers that enable brand-friendly ad formats on their sites. Over the past three months we found that, on average, they experienced a CPM increase of 2x or more when running these engagement-driven ads, such as our Lightbox ad, which expands to a full page only after a user has deliberately engaged with the ad. “We've seen CPM increases of more than 3X, and our advertisers love the large canvas and pay for engagement model," says Rich Dredge, Answers.com's Chief Revenue Officer.

• We’ve seen an overall increase in higher CPMs across our exchange -- in the U.S., CPMs over $5 have increased 24% year-over-year while those over $10 have increased 23% year-over-year. Brand spend is a critical piece of these increases.

Fueling brand adoption
To continue this momentum, we’ve been investing in a suite of brand solutions over the past year to help these advertisers make the most of what digital marketing has to offer:

• New Ways to Buy -- Last year, we introduced Active View, offering for the first time the ability to not only measure whether ads are viewable, but actually buy based on it. Brands are able to “reserve” a guaranteed number of impressions on brand-friendly sites across the web -- and they pay only for impressions that are viewed.

◦ Over the past year, the number of advertisers using the reserve option has increased fourfold.
◦ Nearly two-thirds of those are Ad Age top 100 brands.

• New Ways to Engage -- Last year, we introduced a new family of brand-friendly, engagement-focused ad formats. Engagement formats are already showing terrific early returns. For example, L’ORÉAL PARiS was one of the first brands to run a campaign using engagement ads. They ran an expandable ad in Germany as part of their “Beauty Minute” campaign and found that 30% of those who expanded the ad watched the entire 30-second embedded video.

• New Ways to Measure -- We’re committed to providing meaningful metrics for brands, measurement that goes beyond just clicks and conversions. Earlier this week, we introduced Brand Lift in AdWords, which will enable marketers to run surveys along with their ad campaigns, to determine how their ads helped their marketing objectives (i.e., whether their ads helped build awareness, increased favorability towards their brand, etc.). Brand Lift complements our other investments in brand measurement, like Active View and Active GRP.

Digital media represents an amazing opportunity for both brands and publishers, bringing together sight, sound, motion, interactivity and measurement in ways we’ve never seen before.

Over the coming year, we’ll be continuing to invest in our products and systems that will help brands thrive in the digital space, as well as help publishers capitalize on the shift...so stay tuned for more to come.

-- Authored by Neal Mohan

Think Insights: Marketer data, information and inspiration just got a new address

2013-03-14T10:06:00.000-07:00

Today marks the debut of the new Think Insights, Google’s hub for marketing insights and inspiration for advertisers and agencies. On google.com/think, you can learn about the latest research in digital marketing, be inspired by creative brand campaigns, and find useful products and tools. You’ll also find industry-leading case studies and Google’s latest research, strategic perspectives, interviews with innovators and experts and more—all to help you make the most of the web.

Every week, we’ll feature content that spans industries and interests. Here’s a snapshot of our top stories:

• In Understanding the Full Value of Mobile, learn how sporting goods industry leader adidas worked with digital performance agency iProspect to understand how mobile drives value beyond mobile commerce, particularly in-store sales. The campaign proved that mobile brought a 680% incremental increase in ROI.

• The Hyundai Elantra: Driveway Decision Maker campaign lets you watch your favorite Hyundai model drive right to your driveway, using a combination of Google Maps Street View, projection mapping and real-time 3D animation.

• YouTube Ads Leaderboard shows which YouTube ads most moved audiences this month, through a winning combination of savvy promotion and smart creative strategy; a new list is featured each month.

In our Perspectives section, we tap our own experts—as well as heads of industry, digital visionaries and Wharton professors—to lend their insights and analyses on the topics that matter most to marketers. The Product & Tools section contains information about our products and advertising platforms, as well as Planning Tools like the Brand Impressions tool and the popular Real-Time Insights finder.

We built google.com/think to help you do it all—stay up-to-date on the latest in digital marketing, arm yourself with data to support your business cases and create inspiring campaigns. Explore the site now, and if you like what you discover, don't forget to subscribe to our Think Letter for a monthly round-up of our most popular content.

Authored by Lisa Gevelber, Head of Global Ads Marketing

Big Spaceship takes the title for the most wins in the Ping-Pong Hangout

2013-03-13T07:00:00.000-07:00

After six weeks of intense game play across the agency world, the Ping-Pong Hangout agency face-off has come to a close. There was fierce competition from all 48 agencies and more than 25,000 games played. The winner: Big Spaceship who played their way to the top with more than 3,400 wins. Congratulations to 360i, Carrot Creative, The Barbarian Group and Deep Focus who swept the remaining top five spots.

Though the competition is over, you can still join the fun on CreativeSandbox.com and try out the Ping-Pong Hangout. Using this Hangout app, you can play a game of Ping-Pong with an opponent using your face to control the paddle. The site also features a Guidebook that covers the basics of Hangouts, Hangout apps and ideas for use cases. Want more? Check out the recording of the Hangout with the agencies behind the game or grab our one sheeter to get started.

The Ping-Pong Hangout is fun stuff, but its the technology behind it that’s most impressive: the Google+ Hangouts API. The API can help you build deep, engaging and unique experiences for Hangouts. We’ve also found that the average duration of a Hangout increases by 2.5 times when participants use an app. The best part? Anything you can put in an iFrame, you can add to a Hangout app.

Interested in working on a Hangout app for your client? We have plenty of resources to help you get started. Check out our getting-started guide for the Hangouts API, get some inspiration from the Hangout Apps Showcase or ask questions of the Google+ Developers team in their Hangout office hours on Tuesdays at 2:30pm PT.

Posted by Lindsay Rumer, Google+ Marketing

Measuring Brand Lift With Google Consumer Surveys

2013-03-11T09:00:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, Susan Wojcicki spoke at IAB about building an ads ecosystem for 2020. There, she introduced a new tool, Brand Lift surveys in AdWords, that will help advertisers measure the brand impact of their display campaigns via surveys. We wanted to provide a bit more detail about this new feature and how advertisers can begin to use it.

First, some context. We've made good progress (through efforts to measure GRPs and viewable impressions) to help advertisers measure their brand campaigns, but many still rely on basic metrics like clicks and impressions.

Historically, if a brand wanted to see how its advertising campaign impacted things like consumersí purchase intent, brand awareness or brand favorability, it would have to wait weeks or months to conduct expensive survey research.

Brand Lift surveys in AdWords use the speed and scale of the web to help advertisers gain a better, more nuanced understanding of how their campaigns are performing. Results are accurate, occur in real-time, and donít cost anything extra.

Advertisers will be able to set up and run Brand Lift surveys alongside their campaigns without any additional tagging, third-party set-up or fees, all from within AdWords. Hereís how they work:

In AdWords, an advertiser designs a basic survey from a list of templatized questions about purchase intent, brand awareness, and other common categories.
Then they launch their display or video campaign.
Automatically, one group of users will see display ads from the advertiserís campaign, followed shortly afterwards by the survey. A second, similar group will not be shown the ads, but will receive the same survey.
Publishers are paid for displaying survey questions on their sites, which helps to fund content and services online.
Google compares the aggregated and anonymous data from the two groups of respondents and gives it to advertisers to measure the impact of their campaigns.

Brand Lift surveys are powered by Google Consumer Surveys, which launched in April 2012 and run across many partner sites, such as NY Daily News, SJ Mercury News, Bloomberg, YouTube and other publishers. You may also see some anonymous sampling questions (like those asking your age range, gender or other demographic questions). Your responses are aggregated with other users' to help us show more relevant ads to users based on their interests and demographics.

Itís still early days, but weíre already seeing advertisers benefit from Brand Lift Surveys. Brand Lift surveys are available to measure the impact of YouTube campaigns, and weíre looking forward to expanding this beta to many more brand advertisers (both display and video) in the coming weeks.

Posted by Paul McDonald, Product Manager, Google Consumer Surveys

Fueling discoverability and engagement with Google+

2013-03-11T06:00:00.000-07:00

Automotive brands were among the first advertisers to adopt Google+ and theyíre making it pay off in big ways. Our research has shown that the path to buying a car is becoming more and more social, with consumers relying on information and advice from their social connections and brands to inform their purchase. Millions of consumers are already engaging with the top global auto companies on Google+, and brands are using this opportunity to connect and engage with customers in unique ways, from connecting with auto enthusiasts through G+ Communities to launching new car models via Hangouts.

Today weíre releasing new insights on how Google+ is working to amplify auto brandsí existing marketing campaigns. For example, we found that brands can experience a 91% increase in conversion rate for non-brand terms when running social annotations on search ads.

Please check out our infographic below for additional insights and tips, and visit our Google+ Business site to learn more about Google+.

Click to see full-size infographic

Posted by Gretchen Howard, Director of Global Social Solutions

Art, Copy & Code: a series of experiments to re-imagine advertising

2013-03-07T15:49:00.004-08:00

Last year, we started a program to partner with advertisers and agencies to re-imagine how brands tell stories in a connected world. Project Re: Brief set out to recreate some of the advertising industry’s most iconic, classic campaigns using the latest technology tools. This year we’re expanding that program to work with some of today’s most iconic brands and innovative marketers, in our new project: Art, Copy & Code.

Art, Copy & Code is a series of projects and experiments to show how creativity and technology can work hand in hand. Some of these will include familiar brands like Volkswagen, Burberry and adidas—projects developed in partnership with their creative teams and agencies. Others will be creative experiments with innovative filmmakers, creative directors and technologists to explore how brands can connect with consumers through a whole range of digital tools—including ads, mobile apps and social experiences. Our first partner project is a new social driving experience—Volkswagen Smileage.

Building off their 2012 campaign, “It’s not the miles, it’s how you live them,” Volkswagen Smileage is a mobile app and web service that aims to add a little bit of fun to every drive, from your daily commutes to holiday road trips. The app measures the fun factor of each trip using a metric called “smileage,” based on signals like weather, traffic, location, time and social interactions (e.g., a long drive on a sunny Saturday afternoon might accumulate more smileage than a morning commute in the snow). You can use it with any car, not just Volkswagens.

Powered by the new Google+ sign-in, you can choose to share Smileage experience with friends and family. For example, during a road trip, photos and videos taken by you and your co-passengers can be automatically added to a live interactive map. The inspiration for the service came from a recent study showing that every day, 144 million Americans on average spend 52 minutes in a car—76 percent of them alone. We wanted to make that time a more shareable experience. Volkswagen Smileage will be available soon in beta—you can sign up on this webpage for early access.

We’ll have many more experiments to share in the Art, Copy & Code project soon—subscribe for updates at ArtCopyCode.com. We’re committed to investing in technology and tools over the long term to help brands and their agencies succeed not just today, but in a digital future that will look very different.

If you’re planning on attending SXSW, stop by the Google Playground on March 9 to see demos of these experiments, or attend our talk on March 10.

-- signed by Aman Govil, Art, Copy & Code Project Lead

5 Things to Love About the New Channel Design

2013-03-07T08:15:00.001-08:00

If you’ve looked around YouTube today, you’ll likely notice that many channels are sporting a brand new design. Today we’re excited to extend the opportunity to use the new layout – called One Channel since your channel will have a consistent design and branding across screens – to all advertisers.

This new design will give you powerful tools to transform your YouTube channel into a home base for building audience love and loyalty. Here are just a few of the benefits of the One Channel layout:

One Channel, all screens: with the new design, your channel will have a consistent, beautiful look and feel regardless of whether visitors view it on desktop, tablet, mobile or TV. We’ve made it easy to upload brand assets so that they look amazing on any device, and we’ll continue to work to make your channel art look especially beautiful on mobile in the coming weeks.

Curate your content with Sections: the new channel design gives you flexibility to arrange your videos however you please without having to create sub-channels or pages. Want to show your greatest hits at the top? Sections let you do just that, and gives you control over what visitors see when they check out your channel.

Welcome non-subscribers (and invite them to subscribe!): you can now feature a channel trailer that only appears to visitors that aren’t yet subscribers to your channel. Tell them your story to invite them in!

In good company – connect your associated channels: you can now link to relevant channels directly from your page. Here Intel is using this feature to promote their international channels (and check out more best practices direct from Intel here). If you haven’t subscribed to Intel’s channel, perhaps checking out their “Harlem Shake” video will change your mind.

Your channel is always just one click away: with each user’s guide appearing on every page of YouTube, your brand channel is always at their fingertips.

People who subscribe to channels on YouTube tend to watch more content, more often than those who don’t – demonstrating the immense value of subscriptions for your brand. We hope you take advantage of the new One Channel design to continue to build your audience on YouTube!

Google Engage for Agencies Announces Enhanced Campaigns Hangout on Air

2013-02-25T12:00:00.000-08:00

Today's consumers live their lives across multiple devices on smartphones, tablets and computers. Google recently launched AdWords enhanced campaigns to help you better manage your clients' campaigns and budgets in this multi-device world. Bid across devices, locations and time of day—all from a single campaign—by using bid adjustments. Google Strategic Partner Manager Dana Mckeithen, and Google Solution Specialist Wes Mathern will discuss how agencies can make the most of this upgrade for clients.

Join Google Engage for Agencies for a Hangout on Air on February 26, 2013.

AdWords Express is now available through My Client Center

2013-02-19T06:00:00.000-08:00

As AdWords Express continues to grow (now available internationally in 15 countries), our AdWords Premier SMB Partners have asked us to make it easier for them to tap into AdWords Express for their clients. We’re happy to announce that starting today, these partners, along with agencies and other third parties, can create and manage AdWords Express accounts at scale through My Client Center (MCC).

Using AdWords Express via MCC can save agencies and other third parties time and overhead by eliminating day-to-day management for local, small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). AdWords Express complements existing AdWords services provided by agencies today by offering them a new option to help SMBs get started quickly with online marketing.

Third parties can now create new accounts by simply selecting ‘AdWords Express’ through the MCC.

Get more details and instructions on using AdWords Express through MCC in the AdWords Express Help Center.

Steve Curry, President and CEO of 411.ca, a site serving millions of Canadians, has the following to say about AdWords Express:

"We have been using AdWords Express through MCC in a beta trial and have found it to be very simple to set up. Since AdWords Express doesn't need ongoing account optimization, it's a great tool for us to be able to efficiently deliver a valuable advertising solution to our SMB advertisers."

For more resources on My Client Center and other tools to effectively manage large accounts at scale, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Nicholas Boos, Product Manager

Join our webinar: Navigating the Road to the Consolidated Buying Platform

2013-02-12T10:37:00.002-08:00

Featuring Joanna O’Connell, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research Inc. and Danny Huynh, Managing Director of Digital and Client Leadership, Mindshare
Hosted by Chip Hall, Director of Media Platforms Sales, Google

Digital ad spend is growing. Programmatic is on the rise. DSPs are gaining traction. But for marketers and media buyers, this often becomes just another channel to add to the many they already manage. So how do we get from simply buying RTB to a seamless, data-driven, multi-channel approach to media management?

Please join DoubleClick on February 19th for a webinar in which we explore the trend of consolidated media buying and management. In this webinar:

Joanna O’Connell, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research will present findings from new commissioned research produced by Forrester on Navigating the Road to the Consolidated Buying Platform. Forrester interviewed a range of experts including agency and trading desk executives as well as marketers in order to delve into the challenges and opportunities they face in today’s media buying and management landscape. What emerges is a picture of an industry ripe for consolidation but in need of a path to get there.

Danny Huynh, Managing Director of Digital and Client Leadership at Mindshare will share his experiences in consolidating clients on a single platform, including benefits they are seeing, obstacles they faced, and advice for other organizations embarking on the their own journey to consolidation.

Register here for the webinar to be held on Tuesday, February 19, 2013 at 10:00am PST / 12:00pm CST / 1:00pm EST. The full study conducted by Forrester on the topic will be available for download following the webinar.

Posted by Emily Wright, Product Marketing Manager

Upcoming Learn with Google Webinars

2013-02-11T12:06:00.001-08:00

Learn with Google is back in action this winter with a host of exciting new webinars, beginning this week and next:

Brand Building in a Multiscreen World
Tuesday, February 12 - 12pm EST/9am PST
Sign up for Learn with Google webinar "Brand Building in a Multiscreen World" (Feb 12, 9 am PT). Join us to learn innovative ways to build awareness and influence consideration for your brand in today's multiscreen world. We will show you how YouTube, the Google Display Network, and the Google Mobile Network can together offer brand-building solutions that will drive engagement and ensure you have a spot in the new living room.

Video Advertising 101: How to Build Your Business with YouTube Video Ads
Wednesday, February 20 - 12pm EST/9am PST
Sign up for Learn with Google webinar "Video Advertising 101: How to Build your Business with YouTube Video Ads" (Feb 20, 9 am PT). Join us to learn how YouTube video ads can help you to increase awareness of your business, to establish and deepen relationships with your customer and to drive sales. We'll cover how to get started on YouTube as well as best practices that help you reach your business goals.

Learn with Google helps our customers win moments that matter, enable better decisions, and constantly innovate. Interested in learning how to make the web work for your business? Check out the complete selection of upcoming webinars!

2012 YouTube Ads Leaderboard

2013-01-31T08:00:00.000-08:00

In December, we announced the 2012 YouTube Ads Leaderboard, a celebration of the ads that people chose to watch on YouTube last year. Now, we’ve invited the creators behind these ads to share their story on the Creative Sandbox, our gallery of campaigns that make the most of the digital canvas. Explore the behind-the-scenes take on how these agencies created content so compelling, users chose to watch, engage and share.

Hear how #3 Volkswagen tee-ed up their ‘12 Super Bowl spot with a web trailer worth barking about. Or how #15 Sauza Tequila mixed up a new cocktail for success with a fireman and a cat. And how #18 Fiat launched a ‘bad boy’ car with the ‘bad boy’ of Hollywood.

Stay tuned this Friday for the next YouTube Ads Leaderboard on Think with Google, a celebration of ads people chose to watch in January 2013.

Posted by Justin Joy, Marketing Manager, Agency

AdWords for video makes reporting more insightful, purposeful and beautiful

2013-01-30T08:00:00.000-08:00

Building a brand online is about creating authentic connections with your audience. Since launching AdWords for video last year, we’ve helped more brands capture the power of sight, sound, and motion in a simple and easy way. Today, we’re helping brands further understand the impact of their campaigns by bringing three new measurement features to AdWords for video that make reporting more consistent with other media, more goal-oriented and just plain prettier.

Reach & Frequency Reporting: Speak the same measurement language across media
AdWords for video now displays reach and frequency metrics in your campaign reporting interface. These metrics give you more insight into how many unique viewers have seen your ad and the average number of times they’ve seen it, helping you better measure against other media such as TV. To view these metrics on a campaign, ad or targeting group level, just click on Columns; Customize Columns and look under the Performance section.

Column Sets: Tell us your marketing goals, and we’ll pull the metrics
To help you organize the metrics that matter most to your campaign, we’re introducing the Column Sets feature which groups relevant metrics by marketing objective. So all you need to do is select your advertising goal and we’ll show you useful reporting columns for your account. For example:

Want to build brand awareness? Select the Branding objective in the “Columns” drop down to see how broadly your video ad was viewed. We’ll automatically show unique viewers, average view frequency and average impression frequency.
Want to optimize for conversions? Select the Website Traffic and Conversions objective to see how your video ads drove viewers to action. We’ll show you website traffic, number of conversions, cost-per-conversion, and your conversion rate from people who viewed your ad.
Want to grow your audience? Select the Audience objective to understand how your video ads drove people to watch and engage with more of your content. We’ll show you follow-on subscribers and follow-on views.
Want to drive more views? Select the Views objective to understand the follow-on actions viewers take such as when a viewer goes to your channel to watch more videos. We’ll show you follow-on views and unique viewers.

GeoMap: Visualize your views
Where in the world are your views coming from? With the new AdWords for video visualization feature, you can tell with a mere glance. Just select the Campaign tab and click “Map View” to generate a beautiful snapshot that displays view activity on an interactive map. You can even click on regions to drill down to states and provinces globally, and to the DMA-level in the U.S. These geographic insights can help you understand which of your ad messages are resonating with specific markets.

We hope these new features to help you easily compare campaigns across platforms, discover new metrics and derive actionable insights. Head over to AdWords for video to try them out today!

Posted by David Tattersall, YouTube Product Manager, recently watched “Top Gear - Reliant Robin Space Shuttle”

Win moments that matter in 2013 with Learn with Google webinars

2013-01-29T09:34:00.001-08:00

What was your business’ New Year’s resolution, and how do you plan to keep it? At Google, ours is to help make the web work for you. Our new series of Learn with Google webinars will teach you how to use digital to build brand awareness, and they’ll give you the tools you need to drive sales. By tapping into technology that works together across your business needs, you can resolve to win moments that matter in 2013.

Check out our upcoming live webinars:

Build Awareness

02/12 [Multiscreen] Brand Building in a Multiscreen World
02/20 [YouTube] How to Build your Business with YouTube Video Ads
03/05 [Social] How to Use Google+ and Make Social Work for You
03/12 [Mobile] Understanding Mobile Ads Across Marketing Objectives
03/27 [Wildfire by Google] The Call for Converged Media

Drive Sales

01/29 [Analytics] Google Tag Manager: Technical Implementation *today*
02/07 [Search] Your Shelf Space on Google: Get Started with Google Shopping
02/26 [YouTube] From Awareness to Sales: Making the Most of Video Remarketing
02/27 [Search] What's New and Next in AdWords
03/06 [Display] Biggest Loser: Digital Ad Spend Edition
03/13 [Mobile] The Full Value of Mobile
03/20 [Display] Getting Started with Dynamic Remarketing

Visit our webinar site to register for any of the sessions and to access past webinars on-demand. You can also stay up-to-date on the schedule by adding our Learn with Google Webinar calendar to your own Google calendar to automatically see upcoming webinars.

During our last series of webinars, attendees had the chance to win a Nexus 7. Our lucky winner was Donella Cohen, who is happily enjoying her new tablet. Check out our upcoming webinars for another chance to win!

Learn with Google is a program to help businesses succeed through winning moments that matter, enabling better decisions and constantly innovating. We hope that you’ll use these best practices and how-to’s to maximize the impact of digital and grow your business. We’re looking forward to seeing you at an upcoming session!

Posted by Erin Molnar, Marketing Coordinator, Learn with Google