Inside AdWords

Webinar Next Thursday 5/30: Measuring Success in a Multi-Device World

2013-05-23T12:00:00.000-07:00

The digital journey has grown more complex, giving customers the option to move seamlessly across media and devices. This shift in technology can make it challenging to get a complete picture of customers’ interactions. As a marketer, your success depends on gaining visibility into your customers’ preferences and behaviors.

Next Thursday, join Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager for Google Analytics, for a detailed look at effective measurement for today's multi-device world. We will discuss strategies and best practices for measuring customer behavior, and we’ll look at how Google Analytics and other Google tools can help you measure and respond to the evolving customer journey.

The webinar will include live Q&A.

Date: Thursday, May 30, 2013
Time: 10am PST / 1pm EST/ 6PM GMT
Duration: 1 hr
Level: 100 / Beginner
Register: Register here

Posted by the Google Analytics team

Bidding Best Practices (Part 3) - Calculating mobile bid adjustments

2013-05-23T07:09:00.001-07:00

Today’s post about calculating mobile bid adjustments is the third in a bidding best practices series. The previous post covered improving your results with location bid adjustments.

People are now constantly connected and switching seamlessly between devices. In fact, more than 38% of our daily media interactions occur on mobile¹. This presents advertisers with new opportunities to reach customers anytime, anyplace, on any device. At Google, we want to help you capitalize on these opportunities and develop new strategies for your business to win on mobile.

Mobile bid adjustments in AdWords enhanced campaigns give advertisers the power to optimize bids across devices — all from a single campaign. In today’s post, we’ll help you understand how to calculate a mobile bid adjustment that accounts for the total conversion value your mobile ads drive for your business.

Review your current desktop and mobile performance
Before calculating your mobile bid adjustment, you can run an AdWords report to review your current desktop and mobile performance. While online conversions, app downloads, and calls are easy to track in AdWords, other conversions such as in-store visits may be harder to attribute directly to your ads. For those conversions, you may need to estimate their value. The closer you can estimate the value of these conversions, the more optimized your bid will be on mobile.

Calculate your mobile bid adjustment
The key to optimizing your mobile bid adjustment is to identify the ratio of mobile vs desktop (and tablet) conversion value. This is calculated by dividing your value per click on mobile by your value per click on desktop.

We’ll illustrate this calculation using the table below. Let’s say this data belongs to a national retailer with mobile and desktop websites as well as physical stores. In the past month, this retailer saw 10,000 clicks from her mobile ads and 10,000 clicks from her desktop and tablet ads. Her mobile ads drove $900 of revenue from phone calls to her stores, $5,000 from online sales and $5,000 from in-store visits for a total of $10,900. During this same month, her desktop and tablet ads drove $100 of revenue from calls, $10,000 from online sales, and $2,000 from in-store visits for a total of $12,100.

Click to enlarge image

With this information, the retailer calculates the value per click (for mobile and desktop) by dividing the total value (i.e., the total revenue from all conversion types) by the total number of clicks, respectively. In this case, the mobile value per click is $1.09 and the desktop value per click is $1.21.

The retailer’s mobile bid adjustment is the ratio of these two values: she divides the value per click on mobile by the value per click on desktop and then subtracts 1. In this case we have (1.09/1.21) - 1, or a -10% mobile bid adjustment that can be entered into AdWords.

Iterate and test
As with all online marketing techniques, mobile bid adjustments aren’t something you should just “set and forget.” Frequent iteration and testing will help you account for changes in seasonality or business operations. Due to varying screen sizes on mobile, we also recommend that you keep a close eye on your mobile impression share so that your ads show in the top positions.

Learn more
To learn more about mobile bid adjustments, visit the AdWords Help Center or watch this recording of this hangout on air, “Enhanced Campaigns: Optimizing Mobile Strategy.”

To use mobile bid adjustments, you’ll need to upgrade your campaigns to enhanced campaigns. Starting on July 22, 2013, we will begin automatically upgrading all campaigns.

Next week, we’ll dive deeper into ways you can use tools like conversion optimizer and eCPC to automate your bid settings based on specific business goals like ROI.

Posted by Andy Miller, Head of Mobile Search Solutions

¹http://www.google.com/think/research-studies/the-new-multi-screen-world-study.html

The new Display Benchmarks Tool: put context around your display campaigns

2013-05-22T14:30:00.000-07:00

Imagine: you’ve built a beautiful digital marketing campaign and it’s finally live. You get your reports back with a list of data points and while the numbers seem good, it’s pretty hard to understand them without any reference points. That’s the crutch: data doesn’t take on meaning when it’s just floating around in the ether; you need to build context around your data and anchor it to other relevant data points to better understand what your own numbers mean.

Industry benchmarks -- reference points aggregated from ad campaigns across the industry -- give you these comparisons. And today, for the first time, we’re launching the Display Benchmarks Tool, an easy-to-use webpage that lets you pull benchmarks to help you make better decisions about your campaigns.

Click here to enlarge

Whether you're after comparisons by country, industry vertical, ad size or ad format, our tool offers up-to-date benchmarks across 10 key display metrics, such as interaction rate and time, expansion rate and video completions. Here’s a quick demo of how to pull the benchmarks.

We've been playing around with the tool and identified some interesting trends around user engagement in our industry. Here's a bit of what we've seen:

Trend #1 User choice leads to more engagement: People want to choose how and when they consume content online. We’re starting to see new ad formats, such as the TrueView and Engagement formats, that let people choose whether to watch or skip an ad. Our benchmark data shows that people are increasingly choosing to interact with these ads. Video completion rates are the highest we’ve ever seen, with people completing 60% of the videos that they watch.

Trend #2: Richer ads lead to more engagement: Longer interaction also stems from more beautiful and compelling ads, which advertisers are increasingly incorporating in their campaigns. Interactive video ads, such as this one from Cadillac, allow advertisers to layer information about their brands on top of their video commercials. Dual-channel ads, such as this Skyfall ad, let viewers turn their mobile phones and tablets into controllers that dictate what happens within the content on their desktop. These ads represent the new creative formats that are closing the gap between advertising and awesome content. And we’re seeing the results: since last summer, people are interacting with rich media ads ~50-60% more frequently and spending ~20% more time interacting.

Click here to enlarge

Trend #3: Optimize your campaigns for engagement: Advertisers used to rely solely on click-through rates and reach/frequency reports to measure their campaigns. Now, these new rich media formats provide a better set of metrics, which help advertisers understand what’s best for users and optimize their campaigns. For example, from the benchmarks tool we’ve learned that interaction rates correlate strongly with larger ad area - the bigger the ad, the more frequently people will interact with it. Similarly, we’ve learned that rich media expanding formats are better for getting people to interact frequently, while in-page formats are better for getting people to interact for longer amounts of time. These types of insights are instrumental in making improvements to an advertiser’s campaign.

These findings confirm what we've heard from our partners -- as ads become more engaging and relevant to users, their performance improves. If you’re still hungry for more data, don’t worry -- next Tuesday, we’ll be kicking off a “Data Insights Blog Series,” where we’ll deep-dive into one trend a week and explain how the insights apply to your campaigns.

As you check out the tool for yourself, let us know if you find any nuggets you think we’ve missed. We just might feature your insight in one of our blog posts.

Posted by Becky Chappell, Product Marketing, DoubleClick

Enhanced campaign upgrade tools now generally available for DoubleClick Search

2013-05-22T10:21:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Search blog)

Last month, the DoubleClick Search team introduced the beta release of dedicated tools to help advertisers seamlessly upgrade to enhanced campaigns. Today, we’re excited to announce that these tools are available to all DoubleClick Search customers globally. Read on for details around the newly available features, what's coming, and how customers are seeing success in upgrading to enhanced campaigns with DoubleClick Search.

Easily upgrade to enhanced campaigns
With this release, advertisers can save time when upgrading to enhanced campaigns with custom solutions that will:

Identify similar campaigns that target different devices within your DoubleClick Search account
Create reports to quickly merge and upload these similar campaigns into one enhanced campaign
Provide the AdWords-suggested mobile bid adjustment in DoubleClick Search for more control and precision over bids in an enhanced campaign

Learn about these features and more in the enhanced campaigns upgrade guide.

Upcoming features
This is the second of several feature rollouts we have planned for enhanced campaigns. Over the next few weeks, the DoubleClick Search team will be introducing advanced features to prepare advertisers for a constantly connected world, including support for ad group mobile bid adjustments and granular device-segmented reports.

What we’re hearing so far
With the goal of simplifying search managing, we’re continuing to invest in solutions that will help marketers run effective search campaigns across devices, as well as across channels -- and our clients are seeing the benefits.

Keith Wilson, VP of Agency Products at The Search Agency, notes: "Recent enhancements in DoubleClick Search support for enhanced campaigns has been a wind on our backs for transitioning clients to enhanced campaigns. The overall functionality within DoubleClick Search is evolving rapidly, and that enables our teams to keep pace with the changes in the paid search space with the right tools.”

After performing initial upgrades using DoubleClick Search tools, Samridhi Chawla,
Senior Account Manager at Performics, said: "Our accounts look cleaner after upgrading to enhanced campaigns. The DoubleClick Search team has done a great job in making the transition smooth, and we're already seeing positive results."

Hear more about our enhanced campaigns vision from our clients and product experts:

To learn more about how clients have been using our enhanced campaigns upgrade tools, we’ll be at SMX Advanced in June, where Eric Papczun, US President of Performics, will share his company's plans, successes, and best practices on upgrades through using search platforms like DoubleClick Search. Register here, and stay tuned to the DoubleClick Search blog to learn more about our support of enhanced campaigns features.

Posted by Kim Doan, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search

Bidding Best Practices (Part 2): Improving Results with Location Bid Adjustments

2013-05-22T07:00:00.000-07:00

Today’s post about improving results with location bid adjustments is the second in a bidding best practices series. The series began with prioritizing and iterating on your bid adjustments.

Your advertising performance almost always varies by location, no matter what kind of business you run. The good news is that if you optimize your bids for different locations, you can increase your sales and ROI.

Optimizing bids for better performance by location
With enhanced campaigns, it’s now much easier to boost bids in locations where your performance is stronger and reduce bids where performance is weaker. Before enhanced campaigns, you’d have to set up and manage an identical campaign for every location where you wanted unique bids. Since this was hard, the most common approach to location optimization has been to cut out underperforming locations using targeting exclusions. But in the long run, this approach can limit your growth and reduce your business competitiveness. So we recommend using bid adjustments rather than location exclusions.

Calculating location bid adjustments
Start by downloading a location performance report. Here’s how, using the AdWords interface:

Set the date range to the past 30 days (longer if your campaign is on the smaller side).
Click on the “Location details” button and select “What triggered your ad.”
Click the View button and select Region.
Click Download.

To maximize orders or leads at a particular CPA or ROI level, a common best practice for setting bid adjustments is to equalize your target metrics across all locations. As a math formula, it looks like this:

Location bid adjustment = 100% * ( ( Campaign goal ÷ Actual performance ) - 1 )

Here’s an example from a campaign with a cost-per-action goal.

Example of calculating your location bid adjustment

Location	Conversions	Cost	CPA	CPA Goal	Location bid adjustment
Florida	100	$800	$8	$10	100% * [(10÷8) - 1] = +25%
New York	120	$1080	$9	$10	100% * [(10÷9) - 1] = +11%
Ohio	70	$1050	$15	$10	100% * [(10÷15) - 1] = -33%
Pennsylvania	85	$850	$10	$10	100% * [(10÷10) - 1] = 0%

You can implement your bid adjustments in the AdWords interface (directions) or using the AdWords Editor (directions).

Businesses with local stores or service areas
Closer customers are often more likely to buy from you and less costly to serve. So if your business has local stores or service areas, you should consider optimizing your bids based on customer proximity. For example, you can easily set one location target for customers within 2 miles of your business locations, and a second target for customers within 20 miles of your business locations (directions). Then use the approach described above to calculate your optimum bid adjustment for your two location extension targets.

Tips and reminders

Maintain a broad location target to cover your entire potential market. Targeting too narrowly can limit your reach, clicks and conversions.
It’s OK to set overlapping location targets with bid adjustments. We’ll only apply the most specific location bid adjustment. For example, say you have a +10% bid adjustment for Canada and a +20% bid adjustment for Montreal. When someone searches in Montreal, your bid will be increased by 20%. And you’ll see distinct performance stats for Montreal and all of Canada except Montreal on the Locations subtab on the campaign Settings main tab.
Be careful when you don’t have much data. Otherwise your calculated bid adjustments could end up being too high or too low, and you could end up with worse results instead of better. If you don’t have statistical expertise on hand, we recommend not adjusting bids in locations with fewer than 1000 clicks and 30 conversions, as a general rule of thumb. Lengthening the date range for your reports to the past 90 days or more can help.
Periodically check performance and increment your bid adjustments. From time to time, check your performance for each location target on the Locations subtab. Incrementally raise your bid adjustment where your performance is above your goal, and lower your bid adjustment where your performance is below your goal. This will allow you to optimize your bids over time and adjust to changing consumer behavior.

Posted by John Sullivan, Global Search Solutions

Connect, Click and Convert Around the World with Google Shopping

2013-05-21T12:10:00.000-07:00

On June 11th, Google Shopping will complete the transition to a commercial model in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Brazil, Australia, Switzerland and the Czech Republic. When the transition is complete, free product listings will no longer appear on Google Shopping. We believe this new model, built on Product Listing Ads, will help retailers of all sizes connect the right products with customers around the world, increase clicks to their sites, and convert more shoppers into buyers.

Onward and upward
We've been pleased with the rapid adoption of Google Shopping by the global retail community. Over 1 billion products are now being promoted globally on Google Shopping, largely driven by a 300% year-on-year growth in participating sellers (including many aggregators and marketplaces). And we’ve seen 20% growth in traffic to retailers over the past year.

Global merchant success stories
We’ve heard from a variety of retailers around the world who have embraced Google Shopping and are seeing great results. Check out the highlights below:

France	eSearchVision helped Vertbaudet, a retailer specializing in children’s apparel and decor, launch a Product Listing Ads campaign that accounted for 7% of sales from their website in the Autumn-Winter 2012 season.
Japan	Enigmo runs a social shopping site offering domestic customers brand items from sellers outside of Japan. After they optimized their data on Google Shopping and created a Product Listing Ads campaign, Enigmo succeeded in increasing the number of new customer sign-ups.
Netherlands	TuinFlora.com is a family-owned business that exports flower bulbs, seeds and plants across Europe and the US. They promoted their products on Google Shopping for their top export markets and saw their conversion rates increase by 20%.
United Kingdom	Forward3D helped New Look, a leading fashion retailer for men, women and teens in the UK, experiment with Product Listing Ads to increase reach and improve engagement beyond standard text ads. They used Merchant Center labels to categorize the catalogue by price bracket, balancing CPAs and ROI more effectively. As a result, New Look saw a 24% increase in revenue week over week, 68% overall revenue growth and 40% improved ROI. Equimedia helped WHSmith.co.uk, a retailer of books, stationery, and more, promote their products on Google Shopping. Product Listing Ads represent 6% of total PPC spend but generate 10% of the revenue, producing a total ROI that is 59% better than standard text ads.
Germany	Hurra.com helped bonprix, a leading fashion retailer, complement standard text ads with Product Listing Ads, achieving a 50% higher click-through-rate and 30% higher conversion rate at the same cost-per-click.

Make the most of Google Shopping
Whether you’re just getting started with Product Listing Ads or are looking for more advanced optimization strategies, we’ve compiled our top recommendations to succeed with Google Shopping below. Read on for these quick tips and sign up for one of our upcoming Hangouts on Air in your country to learn how you can prepare for the global commercial transition.

If you’re new to Product Listing Ads

Get started with Merchant Center, the place to upload your product data to Google
Once your products are in Merchant Center, create a Product Listing Ads campaign to promote your products on Google Shopping

If you’re already using Product Listing Ads

Use the All Products target to quickly promote your entire inventory
Take advantage of automatic bidding for Product Listing Ads, which saves you time and resources by enabling Google to automatically adjust your CPC bids to optimize traffic
Provide high quality data and follow our updated product feed specifications
Promote products across devices by ensuring all of your Product Listing Ads campaigns are upgraded to enhanced campaigns

For agencies

Join Google Engage to get the latest agency news, trainings and support from the Google Shopping team

Need additional assistance? We’re happy to help. Feel free to visit our Help Center or call one of our Shopping specialists in your country below:

Australia - 1800 087 124
Brazil - 0800 727 8947
Czech Republic - 800 500 353
France - 805 540 727
Germany - 0800 5894933
Italy - 800930819
Japan - 0120-984-684
Netherlands - 0800 2500026
Spain - 900 814 539
Switzerland - 0800 002539
United Kingdom - 0800 169 0711

Posted by: Sameer Samat, Vice President of Product Management, Google Shopping

AdWords Editor updates: More enhanced campaign features and improved performance reporting

2013-05-21T07:00:00.000-07:00

The latest version of AdWords Editor gives you more ways to make bulk changes to your enhanced campaigns. With the new version, you can:

Set bid adjustments for placements, topics, and audiences.
Set mobile bid adjustments at the ad group level.
Upgrade campaigns in bulk using CSV import or the Add/update multiple campaigns tool.
Use the new ValueTrack {ifmobile}, {ifnotmobile} parameters.

On the Keywords tab, new columns show detailed keyword performance metrics on the Display Network, enabling you to manage and optimize your Display campaigns with the same granular level of control as your Search campaigns. For example, you can adjust keyword bids depending on their performance, and fine-tune campaigns based on your specific goals.

We've also improved the performance statistics that you can download for locations, audiences, and placements.

For more details about these changes and other updates, see our AdWords Editor 10.1 release notes.

The next time you launch AdWords Editor, you'll see a prompt to upgrade to version 10.1. To learn more about upgrading, including how to keep unposted changes and comments when you upgrade, please review these instructions. You can also download version 10.1 from the AdWords Editor website.

Note: Support for previous versions of AdWords Editor will continue for four months to allow you time to upgrade. To ensure uninterrupted use of AdWords Editor, you will need to upgrade by September 16, 2013.

Posted by Darcy Lima, AdWords Editor

New Flexible Bid Strategies Available In Enhanced Campaigns

2013-05-20T13:00:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wished you could apply automated bidding to part of your campaign while manually bidding on other keywords in the same campaign? Or maybe you’ve wanted to apply a single bid strategy to some keywords, but they’re in different campaigns? Now you can with flexible bid strategies, available in the next couple weeks when you upgrade to an enhanced campaign. Flexible bid strategies let you apply multiple bidding strategies within a single campaign or across campaigns. This provides you the freedom to choose the appropriate bid strategy without being constrained by account structure.

Control and insights with new flexible bid strategies

Ramping up over the next couple weeks, flexible bid strategies can be found in the Shared library (see image below). Once you’ve created a flexible bid strategy, you can apply it to specific keywords, ad groups, and campaigns and monitor its performance.

Click here to enlarge

Here’s more information about what each flexible bid strategy does and when you can use it:

Flexible bid strategy	What it does	When to use it
Target search page location (new bid strategy)	Automatically tries to get your ads to the top of the page, or onto the first page of search results	+ When you want more visibility on the first page of Google Search results or in the top positions
Maximize clicks (flexible version of Automatic Bidding)	Automatically sets bids to get you the most clicks, within a target spend amount that you choose	+ When site visits are your primary goal + When you want to maximize traffic on long tail terms and keep to a certain spend
Target CPA (flexible version of Conversion Optimizer)	Automatically sets bids to get you as many conversions as possible while reaching your target average CPA goal	+ When you want to get the most conversions at your target CPA
Enhanced CPC (flexible version of Enhanced CPC)	Automatically adjusts your manual bid up or down based on each click’s likelihood to result in a conversion	+ When conversions are the main objective, but you also want control over keyword bids

Some of our bid strategies incorporate real-time details during each auction such as device, location, and other context signals to adjust your bids based on your ad’s predicted performance. This approach offers the potential for even better performance. Target CPA and Enhanced CPC use this technology today, and it will be incorporated into other bidding strategies in the future.

Customizing the new flexible bid strategies to work for you

Flexible bid strategies let you apply a bid strategy to keywords across separate campaigns, or test multiple bid strategies within a single campaign. Say, for example, you run a network security consulting business. You might have some keywords like ‘network security’ in multiple campaigns focused on generating awareness for your business. You can apply the Target search page location bidding strategy to those specific keywords regardless of where they are in your account, to keep them in top positions. Then let’s say you have another campaign mainly aimed at lead generation with keywords like ”perimeter network security audit,” but which also has some awareness building keywords, too, like “perimeter network security best practices.” In this campaign, you can use the Target CPA bidding strategy for the lead generation ad groups and use the Target search page location bidding strategy for the awareness building keywords.

You can learn more about flexible bid strategies by visiting our help center. As with all types of automation, we recommend that you periodically monitor your bid strategies’ performance relative to your advertising goals.

In addition to new features like flexible bid strategies and support for many-per-click conversions in Conversion Optimizer, we’re working on more optimization features to help you more easily achieve your advertising goals, like return on ad spend. Let us know what you think of these new flexible bid strategies on our Ads Google+ page and stay tuned for more to come.

Posted by Andrea Cohan, Product Marketing Manager, AdWords

Explore the future of digital marketing June 4th

2013-05-20T11:00:00.000-07:00

What’s the future of digital media and marketing? How are CMOs thinking about leveraging digital to reach and engage audiences? What marketing channels are proving most effective in building brands digitally - paid, owned or earned?

These are some of the questions executives from across the digital marketing ecosystem will address at thinkDoubleClick, Google’s annual discussion on the state of digital.

Register now to join the event livestream on June 4th, 9:00 AM - Noon Pacific. Registration enables you to participate in the conversation, and ask speakers and panelists your questions with #thinkDCLK.

thinkDoubleClick 2013 speakers include:

Wendy Clark, Senior Vice President, The Coca-Cola Company

Jim Lanzone, President, CBS Interactive

Peter Horan, President & COO, Answers

Meredith Kopit Levien, Group Publisher & Chief, Forbes

Randall Rothenberg, CEO, IAB

Lorraine Twohill, Chief Marketing Officer, Google

Michael Learmonth, Chief Editor, AdAge

We look forward to seeing you on June 4th!

Missed last year’s event? It’s not too late to catch up with the videos below.

Posted by Scott Brown, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick

Introducing Keyword Planner: combining the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator into One

2013-05-20T07:45:00.000-07:00

Behind every successful AdWords campaign are well planned out keywords and ad groups. In the past, you may have relied on tools like the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator to identify new keywords and ad groups, get traffic estimates, and choose competitive bids and budgets. Over time however, we’ve heard from you that having two tools for search campaign building was cumbersome.

We’re constantly working to simplify the process of building campaigns, and today we’re happy to announce the launch of a new tool, Keyword Planner, which combines the functionality of the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator into a smooth, integrated workflow. You can use Keyword Planner to find new keyword and ad group ideas, get performance estimates for them to find the bid and budget that are right for you, and then add them to your campaigns. You’ll also see some new features in the tool - some of which we’ll highlight below.

Find new keyword and ad group ideas
To find new keyword and ad group ideas, use Keyword Planner just like you would the Keyword Tool. You can search for ideas related to a keyword, your website, or a category. A new feature in Keyword Planner also allows you to ‘multiply’ keywords, or combine two or more keyword lists to generate new keywords. Unlike Keyword Tool, where you were only able to target countries, you'll now be able to target individual cities and regions within a country. Also, for each keyword idea you'll only get statistics that are specific to that exact term. To decide what keyword match type to use, you'll have to add the keyword to your plan and look at performance estimates for each match type.

Add keywords and ad groups to a plan
Next, you can review your keyword and ad group ideas and add them to a plan. Think of a plan as a shopping cart of ideas that you can add to a current or new campaign. While you build your plan, you can add ideas, delete ideas, and change your bid range to see total estimated clicks and cost. When you’re done building your plan, you can click “Get estimates and review plan” to pick a specific bid and get more detailed estimates.

Get performance estimates
When you review your plan, you’ll see a graph with a range of max CPC bids and daily performance estimates for your keywords and ad groups. To see more detailed estimates, you can select a bid (and optionally, a budget as well). You can also update your targeting settings, keywords, and ad groups to further refine your estimates. For example, you can change all your keywords in an ad group to phrase or exact match to see how this could affect performance.

When you’re satisfied with your plan, you can apply it to a new or existing campaign or download it to implement later.

With the launch of this new, combined tool, we will be sunsetting the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator in about 60 days. Please view this article for an in-depth look at the differences between using Keyword Tool and Keyword Planner. Going forward, you'll have to log in to AdWords to use Keyword Planner, which will enable you to get customized results and estimates. We hope that this integrated workflow will help you build and grow your campaigns even more efficiently. To learn more about Keyword Planner, you can also visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Deepti Bhatnagar, Product Manager, AdWords

Reach local customers searching on Google Maps

2013-05-17T14:23:00.000-07:00

Whether they are searching for a rental car near their office or a bakery close to a relative’s house, people expect fast, relevant and useful results from Google Maps. Great local commercial listings have always added useful information to Google Maps and helped businesses connect with consumers.

Ads in the new Google Maps
This past Wednesday at I/O, Google’s annual platform developers event, we provided a glimpse of the future of Google Maps. The new Google Maps instantly draws immersive, uniquely tailored maps for each person that adapt with every click and search to highlight the things that matter most.

We’re testing new ways to show ads in the new Google Maps:

Search ads with location extensions can appear directly on the map and just below the search box
Search ads without location extensions can appear just below the search box

Ads can appear just below the search box and directly on the map

Just like in the current version of Google Maps, the best way to have your ads seen by potential customers in the new Google Maps is to run search ads with location extensions. You’ll also need ensure you’re including search partners in your campaign network settings to appear on Google Maps.

Posted by Nabil Naghdy, Google Maps Product Manager

Upcoming Learn with Google webinar: Driving Deeper Engagement with your App Users

2013-05-16T11:00:00.000-07:00

With over 85 billion app downloads across the Google Play and Apple App stores, advertisers need to know how to promote their apps as efficiently as possible. They need to understand what channels drive the most engaged users and find ways to increase user engagement within their apps. With AdWords, advertisers can accomplish these goals by attributing app downloads to the right channels, measuring in-app activity, optimizing media spend towards the most valuable channels and reaching existing users with targeted messages.

Join Google on Tuesday, May 21st (10am PT/1pm ET) for a webinar about how you can drive deeper engagement with your app users. The webinar will walk you through Google’s basic app promotion tools and introduce new features.

We look forward to seeing you on May 21st!

Posted by Cameron Grace, Display Product Launch Lead

A fresh look for AdWords Express

2013-05-16T09:56:00.000-07:00

Today, when you log into AdWords Express, you’ll notice a brand new look. We’ve listened to your feedback and worked with a lot of small businesses to streamline the AdWords Express experience. It’s part of our ongoing efforts to make Google products more beautiful and efficient.

Clearer stats and reporting graphs
Small business owners have told us that they’re busy and that they don’t want to spend time looking for the information they need. We redesigned the dashboard to show you at a glance how many views, clicks and calls your ad has generated. There’s a simple pie chart for tracking your monthly spending, and you can also compare results over time with the new performance graph.

A faster, simpler signup
We’ve made some significant improvements to the signup experience. Now there are just 3 steps to start advertising: select your audience, create your ad, and select your budget. Getting your ad set up shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.

Real-time ad previews
With the new real-time ad preview box, you can now see your ad created right as you type. Just hover over the icons to preview all the ad formats that are available based on the text you provide. Try it out by creating an ad at google.com/adwords/express.

We’re constantly working to improve the AdWords Express user experience to make it easier for small businesses to get their ads online. Keep the feedback coming!

Posted by Cinthya Mohr and the AdWords Express User Experience Team

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

2013-05-14T08:49:00.000-07:00

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

New on Think Insights: Building websites in a multi-device world

2013-05-13T10:59:00.000-07:00

People are constantly connected and moving from one device to another to communicate, shop and stay entertained. They expect a great browsing experience regardless of what device they use - PC, laptop, tablet, smartphone, hybrid device, mini-tablet and television.

Creating a great website experience for consumers across all devices can help businesses generate more engagement and increase conversions. We want to support you in finding the right strategy for your business and help answer key questions related to user experience and website creation. So, today we’re launching a new initiative on Think Insights dedicated to multi-device web strategies: www.google.com/think/multiscreen

We understand that the key to success in a multi-screen world is to deliver a great user experience across devices and specifically address user needs based on context. Our new Think Insights page offers tips for businesses on how to approach multi-device websites and outlines different implementation options. We're also providing links to helpful resources, like a testing tool to analyze your website's load speed, examples of great multi-device user experience, and a list of partners that can help you get started.

This is part of our ongoing effort to provide you with industry-leading best practices, technical guidance and third party services that can help you optimize your site across screens. To stay up-to-date on the latest content added to the site, please subscribe to our monthly Think Letter.

Posted by Nabil Haschemie, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

Important Changes to AdWords Terms & Conditions In Some Countries

2013-05-09T21:47:00.001-07:00

The following changes apply to customers in all countries and territories in the Asia Pacific region, except China, Korea, Taiwan, and India

If you’re using AdWords, you’ve agreed to our Terms and Conditions. These are important so we have a common understanding in basic areas like policy, cancellation, payment, dispute resolution and liability.

With the advancements in our ad platforms and global growth, we need to make a few changes to keep up. So today we’re rolling out a new set of Terms and Conditions to many AdWords customers throughout the Asia Pacific region (full list).

What’s New
One of the main changes you’ll notice in the updated terms is that they accommodate new advertising products and services. For example, we now offer third-party ad serving in some situations, so you’ll see provisions about how we resolve ad serving disputes. Other changes include updated links to our policies and better consistency among our advertising terms globally.

Important Action Needed
You’ll have 45 days to review and accept the new AdWords Terms and Conditions. If you don’t accept them within 45 days, your ad serving may be paused until you’ve reviewed and agreed to them.

To review and accept the new AdWords Terms and Conditions, just sign in to your account at https://adwords.google.com. You’ll automatically be taken to a page with the updated terms and conditions. Then click to indicate your acceptance.

Not seeing the new terms when you sign into your account?
Don’t worry! If you’re not seeing the new terms when you sign into your account, there’s nothing more for you to do right now. Because we’re updating the new terms on a rolling basis, you may be scheduled for a later time. Or your terms may already have been accepted by someone you’ve authorized to act on your behalf (for example, an advertising agency, or someone you’ve authorized to be financially responsible for your accounts).

More Information
We encourage you to read through the updated terms carefully. For more information about this change to our Terms and Conditions, including a complete list of countries and territories where these changes apply, please visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Inside AdWords Crew

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

2013-05-09T07:22:00.000-07:00

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, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

Making it easier to manage bid adjustments in enhanced campaigns

2013-05-08T10:46:00.000-07:00

Bid adjustments in enhanced campaigns let you easily vary your bids depending on the user context -- like location, time, and device -- all within a single campaign. By optimizing for different contexts, you can get better results with AdWords.

Ad group mobile bid adjustment rollout begins today
Starting today and continuing over the next couple weeks, we’re rolling out ad group level mobile adjustments, as previously announced. This may be useful if you’ve been operating large scale campaigns and found that your optimal bids for some keywords require different mobile bid adjustments. The majority of advertisers will still see the most value in using the existing campaign level bid adjustments in enhanced campaigns.

Change multiple bid adjustments more easily
We’re also making it easier to change bid adjustments for several locations, dayparts and devices at the same time.

Say you want to set a bid adjustment of +10% for three cities that you’re targeting. Just tick the checkboxes next to each location, then click the “Set bid adjustment” button (see image below).

You’ll then be able to enter the +10% adjustment and apply the changes to all of the locations you’ve selected, rather than needing to enter the adjustments one at a time. This handy feature is available for making changes across multiple campaigns when you’re in the “All online campaigns” view, as well as when you’re editing a single campaign.

If you’re managing multiple campaigns and need to replicate lots of location bid adjustments or time-based bid adjustments from one campaign to another, you’ll save time by using the AdWords Editor. Available on Windows and Mac OS, AdWords Editor lets you easily copy and paste settings across campaigns, then review and post your changes.

Enhanced campaign reminders
Starting on July 22, 2013, we will begin upgrading all campaigns to enhanced campaigns.

We’d like to hear your suggestions on ways we can make managing enhanced campaigns faster and easier. Please share your ideas using this form so we can continue to improve the experience.

Posted by Prashant Baheti, AdWords Product Manager

Updated Google Shopping feed specification

2013-05-08T08:00:00.000-07:00

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

Bidding Best Practices (Part 1 of 6) - Prioritizing and Iterating on Your Bid Adjustments

2013-05-07T09:00:00.000-07:00

Today, we are kicking off an in-depth education series to help advertisers optimize bids for their AdWords campaigns in the multi-screen world using many of the new features and tools that we recently introduced. Throughout the series, we’ll cover best practices for setting bid adjustments within enhanced campaigns, including recommendations for how to set mobile, location, and time of day bid adjustments. We’ll also showcase ways to incorporate automation into the bid optimization process and share how businesses are using these solutions to meet specific objectives. We hope you will find this series useful.

Today’s post will provide best practices for prioritizing bid adjustments across location, time and device. It will also suggest ways to optimize these adjustments over time, especially as outcomes and business conditions change.

Overview

In this new multi-screen world, advertisers are seeking new ways to reach people with ads that are relevant to their context. With an enhanced campaign, you can easily reach consumers and vary bids by device, location, and time of day – all within a single campaign. Learn more about the three types of bid adjustments and what each one can do for your business.

Stacking bid adjustments

Bid adjustments can be stacked on top of each other to optimize reach for each campaign. For example, if you operate a store in San Francisco and know that your campaign performs well on mobile devices on every day except Sunday, then you can set bid adjustments to increase bids for mobile and San Francisco; and decrease them for Sundays.

Example:

Adjusted keyword bid =
Initial keyword bid $1.00 X (San Francisco 1.2) X (Sunday 0.5) X (Mobile 1.1) = $0.66

In this example, we set the location bid adjustment for San Francisco to +20%, the time bid adjustment for Sunday to -50%, and the mobile bid adjustment to +10%. Assuming that your initial bid was $1.00, then your final bid would be $0.66, or -34% compared with your original bid.

Multiple bid adjustments, as in this example, can help you achieve a desired bidding strategy. But individual bid adjustments still apply across all dimensions. For example, the decreased bid for Sundays applies across all devices and geographies.

Prioritizing bid adjustments

The way you manage your business operations and set overall goals are key factors that determine the order in which you set bid adjustments. We recommend setting your most important bid adjustment type first (location, device or time). When you’re happy with your performance, you can add the second type of bid adjustments -- and eventually the third.

It’s a good idea to apply basic business sense to this process:

If you have a store which is only open during certain hours, time will likely be the most important bid adjustment to set first.
If you see very different advertising performance across countries, cities, states or zip codes (or if you wish to bid higher for users who are physically close to your stores), location may be the first bid adjustment to set.
If your advertising performance varies widely between mobile and non-mobile devices, device could be your starting point for bid adjustments.

AdWords provides useful information to determine which bid adjustment type is the most important one for you. You may also have third-party tools or backend systems that can inform prioritization.

Iterate

Over time, you should iterate on each of your bid adjustments to achieve desired outcomes as your results and business conditions change. We recommend reviewing these adjustments on a regular basis to capture seasonal changes and to ensure that you are optimizing for ROI.

Keep in mind that better data about your advertising performance will help you optimize your bid adjustments. Below are some tips:

If you do not track conversions, you can optimize your bid adjustments based on clicks or impressions.
If you do track the number of conversions (using AdWords Conversion Tracking, Google Analytics or other tools), you can set your bid adjustments based on your actual conversions and CPA.
If you track the revenue or profit associated with each conversion (using the Ecommerce functionality of Google Analytics or other tools), you can set your bid adjustments based on the actual revenue that results from your ads.

Reminders

To use the features that we reviewed today, you’ll need to upgrade your campaigns to enhanced campaigns. Starting on July 22, 2013, we will begin automatically upgrading all campaigns. Learn more.

Next week, we’ll dive deeper into how to customize your mobile bid adjustment for each campaign by combining your AdWords data (impressions, clicks and cost) with key stats about your business, like number of in-store visitors from your ads and their average order value.

Posted by John Sullivan, Global Search Solutions

Announcing: Hangout on Air on Ad Disapprovals and Review Process

2013-05-06T16:32:00.000-07:00

Ads are at the lifeblood of any AdWords campaign — they share what’s unique about your business and drive users to action. But since we only want our users to see high-quality ads, disapproved ads are prevented from ever showing.

Some of the most common disapproval reasons can be fixed with just a quick edit to the ad:
(1) Destination URL (Invalid HTTP Response Code, Broken Link)
(2) Display URL (Inaccurate Display URL, One Display URL Domain Per Ad Group)
(3) Editorial Standards (Capitalization, Punctuation & Symbols)

To understand how you can avoid these common disapproval reasons or fix your ads if they’re disapproved, tune in to the Google Ads G+ page Hangout on Air with AdWords Specialists on Thursday, May 9. The Hangout on Air will be live both 11am GMT and 11am PDT, so advertisers around the globe can tune in.

To join the Hangouts, just sign into Google+ and add the Google Ads +Page to your circles. Then, on Thursday, navigate to your Stream where you’ll be able to view our Hangout live with just one click. See you there!

Posted by Charvi Singh and Saarini Bagga, Ads Review Operations

Simpler account structure for applicable accounts created before June 2012

2013-05-06T12:08:00.000-07:00

Last June, we simplified the process of setting up and managing your AdWords campaigns, allowing you to select a campaign type that best fits your needs. All campaigns created before we added these options were defaulted to “All features.” If you are not utilizing any of the advanced features in AdWords, we will migrate your campaign type to “Standard”, which provides a simpler AdWords experience. Note that this change, if appropriate, will happen only for campaigns which are classified “Search Network only” or “Search and Display networks.”

What’s happening?

In the next few weeks, if you have campaigns that only use the features exposed by “Standard” campaigns, we will be migrating them to the “Standard” type. This does not affect how your campaigns serve at all, but it will greatly simplify the set of features that you see when you are using AdWords to manage these campaigns. If you want to change your campaign types back to “All Features,” the migration is easily reversible. Simply go into your campaign settings, and under “Type” you can choose the campaign type you feel best suits your needs.

For more information on choosing a campaign type that is right for you, visit our help center.

Posted by Prashant Baheti, Product Manager, AdWords

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

2013-05-02T09:54:00.003-07:00

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!

Posted by Erin Molnar, Marketing Coordinator, Learn with Google

AdWords spreadsheet edit feature to be sunset May 30

2013-05-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

When we created the spreadsheet edit feature in 2009, we wanted to make it easier for you to make bulk changes in your campaigns. Since that time, we have released bulk editing to help you make large-scale changes across your AdWords account, and keyword bulk uploads to help you add, edit and remove keywords at scale. Bulk editing and keyword bulk uploads cover all the capabilities of spreadsheet edit while being more powerful and scalable. In light of this, we are sunsetting spreadsheet edit on May 30.

If you are accustomed to using spreadsheet edit, then based on what you want to achieve, you can do one of two things:

You can click the “Edit” drop down and choose the type of bulk edit you want to make. Bulk edits on your keywords will allow you to:

Search and replace text in the keyword or destination URL
Append text to the keyword or destination URL
Set new bids, including increasing to first page or top of page CPC
Increase or decrease bids
Change keyword match types
Add/remove labels

You can use keyword bulk uploads. On the same page where you’ve always been able to download keyword reports, click the box that says “Editable.” This will download a special, editable version of the keyword performance report that you can modify and then upload.

For more information about using these features in place of the spreadsheet edit feature, read the bulk edits article and the keyword bulk uploads article in our help center.

Posted by Prashant Baheti, Product Manager, AdWords

The Importance of Being Seen: Viewability and Brands

2013-04-26T06:00:00.000-07:00

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