App Campaigns Make Their Landing: Introducing A Simpler Name For Google’s App Ad Solution

People reach for their mobile phones throughout the day for help getting things done. And it’s often a mobile app that delivers what they need—whether it’s a new pair of rain boots or a puzzle game to pass the time during a commute.

Universal App campaigns help connect your app with more of these app-happy consumers. Today, we are simplifying the name of “Universal App campaigns” to “App campaigns.” This move will not affect campaign features or functionality, and there’s no action required for existing app promotion customers.

App campaigns will join Search, Display, Video, Shopping and Smart as the top-level campaign names available in Google Ads.

App campaigns use Google’s machine learning technology to help you find the users that matter most to you, based on your defined business goals—across Google Search, Play, YouTube, and over three million sites and apps—all from one campaign.

To date, App campaigns have delivered unprecedented results for the developer community—helping drive more than 17 billion app installs, according to Google Internal data from 2019. We hope this more direct name will help advertisers and developers get started with Google Ads and select the right campaign type for their business goals.

You’ll start to see these changes roll out over the next month. We’ll talk more about this change—and other new App ad innovations—at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in mid-March. We hope to see you there!

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Using AMP To Make Display Ads Safer, Faster, And Better For Users

The performance benefits and security guarantees offered by AMP HTML ads, which are display ads created using the AMP framework, translate to better advertiser ROI, publisher revenue, and overall better user experience. Because of this, Google has expanded serving AMP HTML ads not only to AMP pages but also to regular web pages. As of January this year, 12% of all display ads served by Google are now AMP HTML ads.

All of the code in the AMP repository is open source which is carefully reviewed by the project maintainers before being merged. As a result, ads written in AMP start performant and stay performant. Such a process also drastically reduces the likelihood of AMPHTML ads having code that takes advantage of chipset level vulnerabilities or drain CPU by crypto-mining from users’ devices. 

Since AMP HTML ads can be trusted, they can be rendered into a more performant same-origin iframe. This performance boost results in the ad rendering faster on a page which translates to higher publisher revenue and better advertiser ROI.

AMPHTML ads on AMP pages deliver even better ROI

An AMPHTML ad delivered to an AMP page has better performance compared to the same ad running on a regular web page. This is due to the inherent design of AMP HTML ads outlined here, giving advertisers better click through rates and viewability.

AMP pages have seen steady growth over the past few years and advertisers now have access to well over 1 billion impressions/day worth of premium (from a user experience & ad experience standpoint) inventory. In addition, more than 35 percent of ads served to AMP pages are already AMP HTML ads.

Publishers and Advertisers seeing success with AMP pages and AMP HTML ads

The news publisher EL PAIS partnered with Volkswagen, one of their advertisers, to run a multivariate A/B test measuring how Volkswagen’s display ads created in AMPHTML vs HTML5 would perform on AMP vs regular pages.

Simply moving from a standard HTML page to an AMP page (with the same HTML5 ad) resulted in a 26 percent CTR increase. Moving further to an AMP page with AMP HTML ads resulted in an additional 48 percent CTR increase.

You can read the full case study here.

Getting started with AMP HTML ads for advertisers

AMP HTML ads are a subset of the AMP spec and ship with many good-by-default ads UI components, an analytics measurement framework, a spam detection system, viewability measurement, and other building blocks to create a good and measurable ad.

We encourage you to read more about the benefits of using AMPHTML ads, but if you want to jump ahead to start creating them, this is a good place to begin.

Once you have created the ad, you can choose one of the following options to serve AMP HTML ads:

  1. Work with an Authorized Buyer that allows to target just AMP or regular inventory
  2. Use Google Ads to target inventory in the Google Display Network
  3. Direct buy with publishers using Google Ad Manager
  4. [Coming Soon] Display & Video 360 support to deliver AMPHTML ads to AMP pages

Google continues to invest in delivering better user ad experiences by increasing the share of AMP HTML ads vs regular ads. Once mobile app support launches in Q2, 2019, advertisers can fully transition to creating a single AMP HTML ad and have it render across all environments and devices.

We hope you’ll take full advantage of the performance, security benefits, and the increased ROI by choosing to build & serve AMP HTML ads in your next campaign.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog