Google Marketing

Goodbye Google Webmasters, Hello Google Search Central

11 November 2020 by

The history behind Google Webmasters

Merriam-Webster claims the first known use of the word “webmaster” was in 1993, years before Google even existed. However, the term is becoming archaic, and according to the data found in books, its use is in sharp decline. A user experience study we ran revealed that very few web professionals identify themselves as webmasters anymore. They’re more likely to call themselves Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), online marketer, blogger, web developer, or site owner, but very few “webmasters”.

We’re changing our name

In brainstorming our new name, we realized that there’s not one term that perfectly summarizes the work people do on websites. To focus more on the topic that we talk about (Google Search), we’re changing our name from “Google Webmasters Central” to “Google Search Central”, both on our websites and on social media. Our goal is still the same; we aim to help people improve the visibility of their website on Google Search.The change will happen on most platforms in the next couple days.

Centralizing help information to one site

To help people learn how to improve their website’s visibility on Google Search, we’re also consolidating our help documentation and blogs to one site.

Moving forward, the Search Console Help Center will contain only documentation related to using Search Console. It’s also still the home of our help forum, newly renamed from “Webmasters Help Community” to “Google Search Central Community“. The information related to how Google Search works, crawling and indexing, Search guidelines, and other Search-related topics are moving to our new site, which previously focused only on web developer documentation. The content move will happen over the next few days.

We will continue to create content for anyone who wants their websites to show up on Google Search, whether you’re just getting started with SEO or you’re an experienced web professional.

Consolidating the blogs

The blog that you’re reading right now is also moving to our main site. However, we will wait one week to allow subscribers to read this last post on the old platform. Moving this blog, including our other 13 localized blogs, to one place brings the following benefits:

  • More discovery of related content (help documentation, localized blogs, event information, on one site)
  • Easier to switch between languages (no longer have to find the localized blog URL)
  • Better platform allows us to maintain content, localize blog post more easily, and format posts consistently

Going forward, all archived and new blog posts will appear on developers.google.com/search/blog. You don’t need to take any action in order to keep getting updates from us; we will redirect the current set of RSS and email subscribers to the new blog URL.

Googlebot mascot gets a refresh

Our Googlebot mascot is also getting an upgrade. Googlebot’s days of wandering the web solo come to a close as a new sidekick joins Googlebot in crawling the internet.

When we first met this curious critter, we wondered, “Is it really a spider?” After some observation, we noticed this spider bot hybrid can jump great distances and sees best when surrounded by green light. We think Googlebot’s new best friend is a spider from the genus Phidippus, though it seems to also have bot-like characteristics. Googlebot’s been trying out new nicknames for the little spider bot, but they haven’t settled on anything yet. Maybe you can help?

As parting words, update your bookmarks and if you have any questions or comments, you can find us on Twitter and in our Google Search Central Help Community

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

Make Every Marketing Dollar Count With Attribution And Lift Measurement

12 October 2020 by

Understanding how each media touchpoint contributes to your goals can mean the difference between marketing that drives business growth and marketing that fails to deliver. To make every dollar count, you need tools that help you learn how people are responding to your ads, so you can take action to improve your results.

Today, we’re announcing improvements to Attribution in Google Ads including coverage for YouTube ads and a significant expansion in the availability of data-driven attribution. We’re also sharing updates to our lift measurement solutions including a new way to measure incremental conversions and an accelerated time frame so you get results even faster.

Measure more of your Google media

Attribution in Google Ads helps you understand the paths people take to complete conversions. It awards credit for conversions to different ads, clicks, and factors along the way, so you can focus your investments on the media having the biggest impact on results.

Earlier this year, we launched a new look for attribution reports to help you get important insights faster. And with more people turning to YouTube as we spend more time at home, we added YouTube to attribution reports, to help you better understand the role video plays in your customer’s path to purchase.

fuboTV, a live TV streaming platform that includes sports, news, network television and movies, used attribution reports to understand how customers interact with their YouTube and Search ads before converting. They saw that for every conversion YouTube drove directly, it assisted 2 more conversions on Search. “These insights helped us see the full value of video. This enabled us to start thinking about YouTube and Search media in one view and take into account blended cost-per-acquisition goals that more accurately reflect the total impact of our ads at driving conversions,” said Antonio Armenino, Search and Display Lead at fuboTV.

YouTube ads in attribution reports is now in beta. Eligible advertisers will be able to opt-in within the Measurement > Attribution section of Google Ads to see YouTube ads in the Top Paths, Assisted Conversions and Path Metrics reports, alongside Search and Shopping ads. And to give advertisers a more holistic view of Google media, we’re also adding Display ads to attribution reports in the coming months.

Data-driven attribution is now available to more advertisers

Data-driven attribution (DDA) is a type of attribution model that uses Google’s machine learning to determine how much credit to assign to each ad interaction along the consumer journey. Trained on and validated against incrementality experiments, data-driven attribution gives credit based on the incremental impact of your ads. It continuously analyzes unique conversion patterns, comparing the paths of customers who completed a desired action against those who did not, to determine the most effective touchpoints for each business. DDA is our recommended attribution model because the constantly updating, machine learning-based approach ensures you are always getting accurate results that account for the latest changes in consumer behavior.

DDA requires a certain volume of data in order for us to build a precise model, but to make DDA available to more advertisers, we’re lowering the data requirements for eligibility. With this change, each conversion action in your Google Ads account that has at least 3,000 ad interactions and at least 300 conversions within 30 days will be eligible for DDA. This is possible due to ongoing improvements to the machine learning algorithms we use to train data-driven attribution models, so we can do more with less data without sacrificing precision.

Use full-funnel lift measurement to validate and implement findings

Attribution is best for day-to-day, always-on measurement and is effective for setting ad budgets and informing bid strategies on a campaign or channel level. Businesses that are prepared to move beyond DDA can use randomized controlled experiments—also known as incrementality or lift—to set channel-level budgets or to optimize future campaigns.

For years, marketers have used Brand Lift and Search Lift to measure the impact of YouTube ads on perceptions and behaviors throughout the consumer journey, from brand awareness to purchase intent, and lift in organic searches on Google and YouTube. Today, we’re announcing that Conversion Lift is now available in beta. Conversion Lift measures the impact of your YouTube ads on driving user actions, such as website visits, sign ups, purchases and other types of conversions.

Each of Google’s lift measurement tools use best-in-class methodology to ensure accuracy and precision, and that no additional costs are incurred to run these experiments. In addition to delivering accurate, full-funnel measurement, we’re making changes to our lift measurement tools so you get results even faster.

For Brand Lift, we recently launched accelerated flights so you can get the brand perception metrics you care about sooner, with the ability to re-measure over time. We’re also reporting Search Lift and Conversion Lift results as soon as they become available, with flexible study durations and integrated daily reporting, so you can see changes more frequently and over time. Last, you can now run Brand Lift, Search Lift and Conversion Lift measurement on the same campaign, so you can get fast, actionable results across the entire consumer journey.

Fiverr, one of the world’s largest marketplaces for freelance services, wanted to drive both consideration and website engagement. They ran YouTube ads to reach audiences throughout the funnel, and used Brand Lift, Search Lift and Conversion Lift to measure full-funnel impact. They saw that their first test delivered strong relative lift, with a 10 percent lift in consideration, 62 percent lift in searches on Google and YouTube, and 30 percent lift in new users. “We received excellent insights from this campaign. Now that we’ve seen success in reaching first-time users throughout the funnel, our next step is to develop messaging for user retention,” said Tal Moravkin, Creative Manager at Fiverr.

We look forward to seeing these insights help you understand how people interact with your marketing throughout the consumer journey. Looking ahead, we’re working to bring more channels and formats into attribution and lift measurement, so you can get better insights to make every marketing dollar count.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing | Youtube Marketing

Get Your Business Ready For What Comes Next

6 October 2020 by

Advertising Week is an event I look forward to every year—it brings global thought leaders together to find new ways we can use technology to solve business challenges. Over the past few months, I’ve had a chance to meet virtually with many of you to learn how COVID-19 is impacting your business and how partners like Google can help. I’ve been inspired by how you’re supporting your local communities and re-imagining ways to run your business. 

You’ve also shared great ideas for how we can build better solutions that help you grow your business online. Today at Advertising Week, I’m excited to share innovations that will give you new insights about changing consumer behavior and help you meet customer demand in real time through automation.

Get insights tailored for your business

Consumer behavior is constantly changing, and the pandemic has only accelerated the pace of that change. For example, Kettlebell Kings saw a surge in interest for home fitness products when communities began sheltering in place. By meeting this demand from customers, the team processed more sales in one day than they typically would have over the course of months! For Zazzle, an online marketplace for customized products, exploring search trends allowed them to identify rising categories like puzzles and outdoor games as people looked for activities to do at home. By investing in these categories, Zazzle was able to deliver on customer needs and improve campaign performance. 

These businesses are proving how important it is to stay ahead of shifts in consumer behavior in order to drive continued growth. That’s why we’re introducing the new Insights page in Google Ads to give you custom insights specific to your business. We’re rolling out the beta in the coming months and will add new information over time—including audience and forecasting insights. 

The Insights page will feature a trends section that shows current and emerging search demand for the products or services most relevant to your business. For example, an outdoor retailer can quickly take notice of rising demand for tents as consumers gear up for more outdoor adventures. And a vacation rental company might see a growing trend for cabins. Explore these trends to uncover opportunities for categories you already promote in your campaigns—as well as for new, related areas you could tap into.

You can deep dive into a trend to understand which queries consumers are searching for or the geographic locations where demand is growing the most. These trends are aggregated and anonymized across many queries and can’t be tied to any individual user. Also use the integration with recommendations to easily activate keyword, budget and bidding optimizations in a few steps. You can apply these learnings to unlock new business opportunities, like new product areas to pivot into or future promotions to highlight. 

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Keep up with consumer demand and take action in real time

Insights help you keep a finger on the pulse of changing consumer demand, and automation makes it possible to act on it in real time. To bring the full value of automation to more businesses, we’re introducing Performance Max campaigns, a new way to buy Google ads across all our inventory.

Google Ads currently offers fully-automated campaigns for app marketers, retailers, and businesses with physical locations to drive results across Google’s surfaces. Performance Max campaigns will build on learnings from those campaigns to deliver a comprehensive solution that works for all advertisers across a wider range of marketing objectives. They’ll deliver four main benefits:

1. Customer reach: Performance Max campaigns will complement your keyword-based Search campaigns, and be the most complete solution to help you drive conversions and revenue by unifying Google’s ad inventory.

2. Performance towards your business goals: Over time, you’ll be able to choose from multiple marketing objectives like online sales, new customer acquisition, and offline sales. For the first time, you’ll also be able to drive new leads across Google from one campaign. Machine learning will automatically optimize for your most valuable customers across channels. 

A new goals-first setup makes it easier to fully define your conversion goals. For example, if your objective is to generate leads, you can make sure you’re capturing both form submissions and phone calls as goals.

3. New reporting and insights: Get a deeper understanding of how machine learning is working for your business, such as which audiences and creative asset combinations are performing the best. Performance Max campaigns will also be included in the new Insights page to help you understand what’s driving changes in your performance.

4. New campaign inputs: While automation helps you drive better results, your expertise and knowledge of your business can improve how machine learning performs. Speed up the campaign learning process by specifying which audiences are most likely to convert. Combine these inputs with value rules to indicate which conversions are worth the most to your business based on characteristics like audience, location and device.

We’re still in the early stages of testing Performance Max campaigns and will invite more advertisers to join the beta next year. You should continue to use existing campaign types to meet your business goals during this important holiday season.

Reach more viewers and inspire action

As people spend more time at home, video streaming is a key area where a “new normal” is emerging.  On YouTube in particular, over 2 billion people globally are gravitating towards timely content to stay entertained, keep up with current events, and learn new skills. In the coming weeks, Video action campaigns will expand to all advertisers to help you drive more conversions from video and inspire action across YouTube and Google video partners.

People are also watching YouTube in more ways than before—for example in the U.S., over 100 million people watch YouTube and YouTube TV on their TV screen each month. Given this boom in TV viewership, we’ll continue exploring ways your ads can appear with Video action campaigns and test direct-response video ads on new surfaces like connected TVs over the next year.

Even as the world around us continues to change, our commitment to you remains the same: we’re here to help businesses of all sizes grow online and get ready for what comes next. To learn more about our latest product innovations, watch the full Advertising Week keynote.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

Options For Retailers To Control How Their Crawled Product Information Appears On Google

21 August 2020 by

Earlier this year Google launched a new way for shoppers to find clothes, shoes and other retail products on Search in the U.S. and recently announced that free retail listings are coming to product knowledge panels on Google Search. These new types of experiences on Google Search, along with the global availability of rich results for products, enable retailers to make information about their products visible to millions of Google users, for free.

The best way for retailers and brands to participate in this experience is by annotating the product information on their websites using schema.org markup or by submitting this information directly to Google Merchant Center. Retailers can refer to our documentation to learn more about showing products for free on surfaces across Google or adding schema.org markup to a website.

While the processes above are the best way to ensure that product information will appear in this Search experience, Google may also include content that has not been marked up using schema.org or submitted through Merchant Center when the content has been crawled and is related to retail. Google does this to ensure that users see a wide variety of products from a broad group of retailers when they search for information on Google.

While we believe that this approach positively benefits the retail ecosystem, we recognize that some retailers may prefer to control how their product information appears in this experience. This can be done by using existing mechanisms for Google Search, as covered below.

Controlling your preview preferences

There are a number of ways that retailers can control what data is displayed on Google. These are consistent with changes announced last year that allow website owners and retailers specifically to provide preferences on which information from their website can be shown as a preview on Google. This is done through a set of robots meta tags and an HTML attribute.

Here are some ways you can implement these controls to limit your products and product data from being displayed on Google:

nosnippet robots meta tag

Using this meta tag you can specify that no snippet should be shown for this page in search results. It completely removes the textual, image and rich snippet for this page on Google and removes the page from any free listing experience.

max-snippet:[number] robots meta tag

This meta tag allows you to specify a maximum snippet length, in characters, of a snippet for your page to be displayed on Google results. If the structured data (e.g. product name, description, price, availability) is greater than the maximum snippet length, the page will be removed from any free listing experience.

max-image-preview:[setting] robots meta tag

This meta tag allows you to specify a maximum size of image preview to be shown for images on this page, using either none, standard, or large.

data-nosnippet HTML attribute

This attribute allows you to specify a section on your webpage that should not be included in a snippet preview on Google. When applied to relevant attributes for offers (price, availability, ratings, image) removes the textual, image and rich snippet for this page on Google and removes the listing from any free listing experiences.

Additional notes on these preferences:

  • The above preferences do not apply to information supplied via schema.org markup on the page itself. The schema.org markup needs to be removed first, before these opt-out mechanisms can become active.
  • The opt-out preferences do not apply to product data submitted through Google Merchant Center, which offers specific mechanisms to opt-out products from appearing on surfaces across Google.

Use of mechanisms like nosnippet and data-nosnippet only affect the display of data and eligibility for certain experiences. Display restrictions don’t affect the ranking of these pages in Search. The exclusion of some parts of product data from display may prevent the product from being shown in rich results and other product results on Google.

We hope these options make it easier for you to maximize the value you get from Search and achieve your business goals. These options are available to retailers worldwide and will operate the same for results we display globally. For more information, check out our developer documentation on meta tags.

Should you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us, or drop by our webmaster help forums.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

Grow Your Games Business With New Ads Solutions

5 August 2020 by

Whether it’s to join the latest multiplayer craze or dive back into an old favorite, user interest in gaming worldwide continues to rise as people spend more time at home. In fact, our data shows that global searches for “best online games” between February and April were up over 100 percent compared to the same time last year.

Mobile game developers have a huge opportunity to connect with these eager players around the globe. This week at Think Games in China, we’re announcing new ways for developers to engage with the right players and maximize revenue so your team can spend more time creating awesome gaming experiences.  

Reach more of the right players for your game

In today’s crowded gaming landscape, it’s not easy to build a community and retain players over time. App campaigns for engagement were built to help you get players who’ve previously installed your game to return, with custom messages across Search, YouTube and over 1 million apps in our network. 

Available globally in September, App campaigns for engagement will soon also run in Google Play and support audiences from Google Analytics for Firebase. We’re also updating our audience management features to make it easier for you to connect with the right player segments. 

FunPlus, the developers behind the mobile strategy game King of Avalon, wanted to find ways to also get current players to come back during a mega update event. It used App campaigns for engagement to create custom messages for previous player groups who had stopped playing. This resulted in 34 percent more high-value players returning to play, as compared to other strategies it used.

To get started with App campaigns for engagement, make sure you set up deep linking and app conversion tracking, and use a supported measurement solution like Google Analytics for Firebase or one of our App Attribution Partners.  

Here are a few more features designed to help you reach players across the lifecycle of your game:  

  • App campaigns for pre-registration: Get a head start in building an excited community for your game before it launches. Learn more.
  • Maximize conversions bidding for App campaigns for installs: Drive as many installs as possible within a set budget to reach your campaign goals. Learn more.
  • Target Return on Ad Spend (tROAS) open beta for App campaigns for installs: Adjust your bids dynamically based on the value each user is likely to bring for your game. Available later this year to all advertisers bidding on Google Analytics for Firebase events. Learn more. 
  • Creative simplification: Simplify your creative development process by creating image ads only in 1.91:1, 1:1, and 4:5 aspect ratios. You can also crop existing image assets to these aspect ratios with our new cropping tool. Learn more.

Maximize your ad revenue

To help you get the most value from your ads, Open Bidding will be available as a beta to all AdMob developers this fall. Today, many developers rely solely on waterfall mediation, a tried-and-true way to monetize with multiple advertising sources that can be hard to set up and manage at scale. Waterfall mediation calls ad networks one at a time until one of them returns an ad. Though effective, you could be losing out on additional revenue since networks are prioritized based on historical CPMs, rather than real-time pricing.

As Google’s in-app bidding solution, Open Bidding puts participating networks in a fair real-time auction to compete for your impressions, so the winner is always the highest paying network. This means you’ll get the highest revenue available for every impression. With Open Bidding, you can find the most popular demand sources to compete for your impressions in real time. Open Bidding makes earning more even easier by eliminating the need to manually set CPMs and reducing the number of SDKs your teams need to integrate and manage. 

CookApps used Open Bidding in order to grow revenue for its match-three puzzle game Candy Blast. By switching to Open Bidding, CookApps optimized revenue across ad networks and saw a 26 percent increase in both total ad revenue and CPMs, compared to their previous waterfall mediation setup. Open Bidding also enabled teams to save time from managing multiple networks, allowing it to focus on other priorities to expand its business. 

Along with Open Bidding, we’re announcing several other solutions to simplify your setup so you can earn even more from your apps:

  • Impression-level LTV pingback: Get real-time estimates of impression values to help measure lifetime value of players across all revenue sources (iOS, Android, Unity).
  • Rewarded interstitials: Increase engagement with rewarded ads by proactively showing players in-game offers in exchange for watching a video during gameplay breaks.
  • App open beta: See up to twice as much user engagement with the improved user experience of app open ads, which now offer standardized publisher branding and simplified user tap targets.Learn more.
  • AdMob plug-in for Unity software: Create and edit ads easily in the Unity interface, letting you quickly implement ads into your Unity game with just a single line of code. 

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

Updates On Our Work To Improve User Privacy In Digital Advertising

31 July 2020 by

Privacy is core to our work at Google, and to our vision for a thriving internet where people around the world can continue to access ad-supported content, while also feeling confident that their data is protected. But in order to get there, we must increase transparency into how digital advertising works, offer users additional controls, and ensure that people’s choices about the use of their data are respected—not worked around or ignored. 

Today we’re sharing updates on our work in these areas, including new tools that provide people more information about the ads they see. We’re also introducing new resources for marketers and publishers that offer guidance on how to navigate today’s privacy environment, along with real-world examples from brands and media companies who are delivering effective, privacy-forward ad experiences that use data responsibly.

Greater transparency, more control

For many years Google has offered a feature called Why this ad, where from an icon in a digital ad, users can get more information on some of the factors that were used to select the ad for them, or choose to stop seeing that ad. There are over 15 million user interactions per day with Why this ad as people seek to learn more about and control the ads they see, and we recently extended this feature to ads on connected TVs. 

Over the next few months, we’ll be making improvements to the experience with a new feature called About this ad, which will also show users the verified name of the advertiser behind each ad. About this ad will initially be available for display ads purchased through Google Ads and Display & Video 360, and we’ll bring it to other ad surfaces throughout 2021.

Our commitment to increase transparency and offer users more control goes beyond the ads Google shows. Due to the complexity of the digital ads ecosystem and the large number of entities involved, it’s typically not clear to users which companies are even involved in showing them an ad. To provide people with detailed information about all the ads they see on the web, we’re releasing a new tool called Ads Transparency Spotlight, now available to try out as an alpha extension from the Chrome Web Store. We’ll continue to improve this extension based on feedback from users, and over time we expect to offer additional disclosures about ads, as well as introduce controls. Our hope is that other technology providers will build similar transparency and control capabilities into the experiences they offer as well.

Evolving the ad-supported internet

Chrome continues to explore more privacy-forward ways for the web browser to support digital ads with the Privacy Sandbox open standards initiative. As part of the Privacy Sandbox, several proposals have been published for new APIs that would solve for use cases like ad selection, conversion measurement, and fraud protection in a way that doesn’t reveal identifying information about individual users. One of the proposed APIs, for trust tokens that could combat ad fraud by distinguishing between bots and real users, is now available for testing by developers, and more will move to live testing soon.

Once these approaches have addressed the needs of users, publishers and advertisers, Chrome plans to phase out support for third-party cookies. These proposals are being actively discussed in forums like the W3C. Our ads team is actively contributing to this dialog—as we encourage any interested party to do—and we expect to incorporate the new solutions into our products in the years ahead.

We’re also exploring a range of other approaches to improve user privacy while ensuring publishers can earn what they need to fund great content and advertisers can reach the right people for their products. For example, we support the use of advertiser and publisher first-party data (based on direct interactions with customers they have relationships with) to deliver more relevant and helpful experiences—as long as users have transparency and control over the use of that data. What is not acceptable is the use of opaque or hidden techniques that transfer data about individual users and allow them to be tracked in a covert manner, such as fingerprinting. We believe that any attempts to track people or obtain information that could identify them, without their knowledge and permission, should be blocked. We’ll continue to take a strong position against these practices.

Much of the recent conversation about improving the privacy of digital ads has been focused on the web, but there are a range of environments in which people engage with digital ads. Our technical approach and the implementation details may vary based on the unique characteristics of each, but our vision to uplevel user privacy while preserving access to free content is consistent across web, mobile app, connected TV, digital audio—and whatever the next area to emerge may be.

Guidance for advertisers and publishers

The future state of digital advertising promises new technologies, new standards, and better, more sustainable approaches, but it will take some time to get there. We recognize the unease that many in the industry feel during this period of transition. While there is certainly more change on the horizon, it’s critical that marketers and publishers do not wait to take action. 

To help you prepare, we’ve assembled a number of recommendations for marketers and publishers to consider today. From best practices for building direct relationships with your customers and managing data, to tips for evaluating your partner and vendor relationships, to actionable examples for using machine learning and the cloud, these playbooks offer practical guidance and numerous real-world examples of companies that are successfully navigating today’s changing privacy landscape. 

We’ll continue our work to move the digital ads industry towards a more privacy-forward future. In the meantime, make sure your organization is having an active discussion about privacy and that you are taking steps now to plan for what lies ahead.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

Meet Your Marketing Objectives With Helpful Tools And Automation

7 July 2020 by

Consumer behaviors, habits and schedules are shifting faster than ever. Google data shows that searches have surged in the past month for sprinkler controls in the United States, mechanical puzzles in Germany, and powered hand fans in Japan. Keeping pace with these trends can be difficult, especially if the pandemic has impacted your business. 

Marketers have more work to do than ever before, and less time to do it. That’s why we’re introducing improved tools and automated solutions to help you get things done, respond to changes, and grow your business.

Finding new opportunities in a dynamic market

It’s never easy to keep up with shifts in consumer demand, and it’s especially challenging in a dynamic market. The Recommendations page is your best source for real-time, personalized guidance to adjust to these changes. With optimization score, you can prioritize the recommendations that help you discover new opportunities for your campaigns.

For example, “Keywords & Targeting” recommendations make it easy for you to find new trends that are relevant to your business. More than 16 million keyword recommendations in Google Ads are based on market trends, with new recommendations added every day. In March, consumer goods company Artnaturals noticed that demand was increasing for organic hand sanitizer and soaps. Using keyword recommendations, they were able to quickly pivot their advertising to these new trends. As a result, the brand’s monthly site traffic increased by 700 percent.

You can currently find recommendations throughout your campaigns, on the Recommendations page, and in the Google Ads mobile app. Soon, you’ll be able to see them in Google Ads Editor as well. We’ve also added support for recommendations and campaign level optimization score to the Google Ads API, and account level optimization score will be coming soon. This will make it even easier for you to review, manage and act on your recommendations at scale.

Planning with confidence

There are many new growth opportunities emerging in search due to shifts in consumer behavior. Performance Planner removes the guesswork in this process by giving you a performance plan with predicted clicks, conversions and conversion values based on different spend levels and return-on-investment targets.   

In the meal delivery sector, Cook it used Performance Planner to optimize campaign budgets and make the most of rising search interest in meal kits in March. Paired with Smart Bidding, the brand saw a 200 percent increase in conversions in just two weeks.

Starting today, you can now use Performance Planner to plan Search campaigns using shared budgets. Performance Planner is currently available for Search and Shopping campaigns, and will soon be available to Display and App campaigns.

Performance Planner is a great way to make sure your budgets are set at the right level to capture new growth opportunities on search.

Optimizing campaigns in real time

These days, marketers have to deliver on performance while dealing with limited time and resources. Smart Bidding is key to helping you balance these constraints; it can help you automatically drive more performance out of every dollar you spend while freeing up time. Over the last few months, we’ve built new Smart Bidding features based on your feedback.

In the coming weeks, you’ll be able to create, monitor and manage your portfolio bid strategies across accounts at the manager account level. By combining campaigns from different accounts into a single portfolio, it’ll be easier to drive more performance across those accounts. As part of this update to portfolio bidding, bid strategy reports will be available for your new cross-account bid strategies. These reports give you more visibility into how your bid strategy is working via status updates, advanced performance reports, and top signals.

It’s important to provide more transparency into your bids, especially right now—so in the coming months, we’ll make explanations available for Smart Bidding campaigns. This will make it easier for you to understand what caused clicks, impressions, costs and conversions to change.

Over the rest of the year, we plan to roll out even more reporting updates to give you further insight into your automated bidding—such as limited inventory status for Maximize conversions and Target CPA, improved top signals, and conversion value estimates.

Monitoring performance to take action

In an ever-changing market, it’s important to check your performance on a regular basis. The Google Ads mobile app makes it easy for you to monitor campaigns in real time, helping you take quick action from wherever you are. We’ve been listening to your feedback and continue to invest in new features to make the app a helpful and personalized companion for your marketing efforts.

As part of that investment, we’ve launched manager accounts in the mobile app. This means you can view and manage all your Google Ads accounts in one place, on the go. With manager accounts in the app, you’re now able to:

  • Discover business-wide trends and performance insights for all your accounts on the Overview page.
  • Improve performance at scale with optimization score, and prioritize recommendations across all your accounts.
  • Manage campaigns and compare performance across your accounts.
  • Use push notifications to monitor all your accounts, wherever you are.

AGY47, an agency based in the UK, saved over two hours per week using the mobile app to check in on performance, make improvements, and keep their accounts organized on the go. As Sarah Williams, AGY47’s head of paid marketing, put it: “We never miss a beat with the Google Ads mobile app.”

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

New Ways To Put Your Customers First And Achieve Your Marketing Objectives

24 June 2020 by

Life looks very different now for my family than it did earlier this year. From juggling work priorities to managing distance learning for my kids, there never seems to be enough hours in the day. As we adapt, we’re relying on our phones to get things done.

How can brands lend a hand? We believe there are three key ways to put consumers at the core of your strategy: help people quickly get what they want, deliver relevant information and make it easy for your customers to take action.

Today, we’re sharing new ways to put your customers first and achieve your marketing objectives.

Help people get what they want, faster

The stakes are high on mobile. If you don’t give people what they want quickly, they’ll take their business elsewhere. In fact, we recently found that for retail sites, improving your site load time by 0.1s can help you improve conversion rates by 8 percent.

Test My Site has been an important tool for helping diagnose site speed and providing custom tips on how to make it faster. Today, we updated the tool to provide specific recommendations on how you can improve your mobile site—beyond speed—and deliver more personalized and seamless experiences. Key updates include:

  • Aligning speed metrics with Web Vitals, an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals that, we believe, are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web. When marketers and developers share the same definition of success, it’s easier to agree on what’s driving results.
  • Customized tips on how to make your site experience relevant and easy to use. For example, learn how to build a one-step checkout and keep customers coming back with relevant push notifications. 

To get started, visit Test My Site to see how your site is doing and download your customized report—with sections for both marketers and developers—that you can share with your team.

Deliver more engaging and helpful ad experiences 

Many marketers already use feeds in Display, Shopping and Local campaigns to quickly upload and showcase products in your ads. With more product images directly in your ad, consumers are able to easily and seamlessly find what they’re shopping for. In the coming months, we’ll roll out feeds in App campaigns globally to all customers. According to beta testing, advertisers using feeds saw, on average, 6 percent more installs from Google.com and 17 percent more in-app actions (like log-ins and purchases) on sites and apps in our network.

Wish, an e-commerce company, used feeds to display diverse products from its marketplace. Wish also enabled deferred deep linking, which gave new app users a smoother onboarding experience—from app install straight to the item they saw in the ad.

Here’s how it works: if a new user taps on a Wish ad for running shoes, she will be directed to her app store to install the Wish app. After installing and opening the app for the first time, she would automatically land on the running shoes’ product page to learn more or make a purchase.

Since adopting feeds and deferred deep linking, Wish has seen a 105 percent increase in purchases from its app at a similar CPA. “These features have made our app more discoverable and appealing to customers,” says Krishanth Kathiresan, Wish’s Head of Growth Marketing. “It’s a scalable way for us to drive more lower-funnel user engagement and, most importantly, mobile orders.”

To get started, you can reach out to your account manager to join our beta or learn more.

Make it easier for your customers to take action

Loyal customers stick with brands that make it easy for them to get things done. For customers who already have your app installed, deep linking lets them get to the relevant page in the app without having to log in or re-enter information. 

Last year at Google Marketing Live, we announced app deep linking from Search, Display and Shopping ads. In the coming months, we’ll be rolling out deep linking from YouTube, Hotel, Gmail and Discovery ads. On average, deep linked ad experiences drive 2X the conversion rates.

Let’s say, your customer is watching a cooking video on YouTube and sees a discount for “2-hour grocery delivery.” Once she taps on the ad, she’s taken directly to a page in the store’s app to place an order.  

Rakuten Ichiba, a Japanese e-commerce company, found that enabling deep linking helped its loyal customers take action on ads directly in the brand’s app, resulting in 4X mobile purchases and 3X conversions. 

App deep linking introduces an important and seamless path to conversion. To give you better insight into where consumers are landing and converting from your ads, you can start to use ad destination reporting in Google Ads—available globally starting today.

For example, let’s say you’re a retailer with both a website and app. With the ad destination report, you can see in the “App deep link” row that these ads drive a higher conversion rate at a lower cost per conversion.

To get started with reporting for your app, use Google Analytics for Firebase or work with one of our App Attribution Program partners. 

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

New Ways To Put Your Customers First And Achieve Your Marketing Objectives

24 June 2020 by

Life looks very different now for my family than it did earlier this year. From juggling work priorities to managing distance learning for my kids, there never seems to be enough hours in the day. As we adapt, we’re relying on our phones to get things done.

How can brands lend a hand? We believe there are three key ways to put consumers at the core of your strategy: help people quickly get what they want, deliver relevant information and make it easy for your customers to take action.

Today, we’re sharing new ways to put your customers first and achieve your marketing objectives.

Help people get what they want, faster

The stakes are high on mobile. If you don’t give people what they want quickly, they’ll take their business elsewhere. In fact, we recently found that for retail sites, improving your site load time by 0.1s can help you improve conversion rates by 8 percent.

Test My Site has been an important tool for helping diagnose site speed and providing custom tips on how to make it faster. Today, we updated the tool to provide specific recommendations on how you can improve your mobile site—beyond speed—and deliver more personalized and seamless experiences. Key updates include:

  • Aligning speed metrics with Web Vitals, an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals that, we believe, are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web. When marketers and developers share the same definition of success, it’s easier to agree on what’s driving results.
  • Customized tips on how to make your site experience relevant and easy to use. For example, learn how to build a one-step checkout and keep customers coming back with relevant push notifications. 

To get started, visit Test My Site to see how your site is doing and download your customized report—with sections for both marketers and developers—that you can share with your team.

Deliver more engaging and helpful ad experiences 

Many marketers already use feeds in Display, Shopping and Local campaigns to quickly upload and showcase products in your ads. With more product images directly in your ad, consumers are able to easily and seamlessly find what they’re shopping for. In the coming months, we’ll roll out feeds in App campaigns globally to all customers. According to beta testing, advertisers using feeds saw, on average, 6 percent more installs from Google.com and 17 percent more in-app actions (like log-ins and purchases) on sites and apps in our network.

Wish, an e-commerce company, used feeds to display diverse products from its marketplace. Wish also enabled deferred deep linking, which gave new app users a smoother onboarding experience—from app install straight to the item they saw in the ad.

Here’s how it works: if a new user taps on a Wish ad for running shoes, she will be directed to her app store to install the Wish app. After installing and opening the app for the first time, she would automatically land on the running shoes’ product page to learn more or make a purchase.

Since adopting feeds and deferred deep linking, Wish has seen a 105 percent increase in purchases from its app at a similar CPA. “These features have made our app more discoverable and appealing to customers,” says Krishanth Kathiresan, Wish’s Head of Growth Marketing. “It’s a scalable way for us to drive more lower-funnel user engagement and, most importantly, mobile orders.”

To get started, you can reach out to your account manager to join our beta or learn more.

Make it easier for your customers to take action

Loyal customers stick with brands that make it easy for them to get things done. For customers who already have your app installed, deep linking lets them get to the relevant page in the app without having to log in or re-enter information. 

Last year at Google Marketing Live, we announced app deep linking from Search, Display and Shopping ads. In the coming months, we’ll be rolling out deep linking from YouTube, Hotel, Gmail and Discovery ads. On average, deep linked ad experiences drive 2X the conversion rates.

Let’s say, your customer is watching a cooking video on YouTube and sees a discount for “2-hour grocery delivery.” Once she taps on the ad, she’s taken directly to a page in the store’s app to place an order.  

Rakuten Ichiba, a Japanese e-commerce company, found that enabling deep linking helped its loyal customers take action on ads directly in the brand’s app, resulting in 4X mobile purchases and 3X conversions. 

App deep linking introduces an important and seamless path to conversion. To give you better insight into where consumers are landing and converting from your ads, you can start to use ad destination reporting in Google Ads—available globally starting today.

For example, let’s say you’re a retailer with both a website and app. With the ad destination report, you can see in the “App deep link” row that these ads drive a higher conversion rate at a lower cost per conversion.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

Drive Results With New Direct Response Solutions On YouTube

18 June 2020 by

Prolonged store closures have forced brands around the world to recalibrate their media campaigns to focus on driving online sales. With this shift to digital, it’s become even clearer that every advertiser is a performance advertiser. 

With YouTube, marketers have the flexibility to shift budgets and invest in driving the results that matter most. As businesses begin to reopen, they have an opportunity to use video to drive both online and offline actions on YouTube, where 70 percent of people say they bought a brand as a result of seeing it on our platform.1 That’s why we’ve invested heavily to introduce effective video solutions that drive action. Last year, the number of active advertisers using TrueView for action grew over 260 percent.2 

Today, we’re making it even easier for you to inspire people to take action on YouTube with smarter solutions that make video more shoppable, use automation to drive conversions, and help you better understand attribution.

Make your video ads your new storefront

Brands are strategically using video ads when merchandising new products. Recently, Aerie needed to simultaneously drive brand love and omnichannel apparel sales for their 2020 spring campaign. They used YouTube as a full funnel solution and connected with audiences with the highest likelihood to purchase. As a result, Aerie saw strong engagement for their brand and achieved a 25 percent higher return on ad spend than the previous year—with nine times more conversions compared to their traditional media mix. 

To help businesses establish a stronger e-commerce presence, we’re experimenting with a new way to make your actionable video ads more shoppable—complementing your ad with browsable product imagery to inspire the next purchase. All you need to do is sync your Google Merchant Center feed to your video ads, and you can visually expand your call-to-action button with the best-sellers you want to feature and drive traffic to the product pages that matter. 

An easier way to drive more conversions

In addition, we know that with limited marketing budgets, it’s become harder to drive reach and convert demand at the same time. Today we’re announcing Video action campaigns, a simple and cost-effective way to drive more conversions across YouTube. It automatically brings video ads that drive action to the YouTube home feed, watch pages, and Google video partners, all within one campaign. To make it even simpler, we’ll include any future inventory that becomes available, like the What to Watch Next feed. This way you can save time to focus on strategic initiatives like crafting the right creative and messaging for your audiences.

We’ve seen Video action campaigns work for companies of all sizes, including Mos, a startup that helps students find funds for college to avoid large student debts. As a newer company, Mos was excited to test out a solution that could drive results quickly. In the last few months, Mos saw 30 percent more purchases for their service at a third of the cost compared to their previous YouTube benchmarks. 

Transform your campaign into a lead generation tool

For businesses that rely on new leads to sustain growth, we recommend adding lead forms to your Video campaigns. Lead forms help advertisers capture qualified leads while reducing costs – all without interrupting the viewing experience. Automobile giant Jeep tried this approach with their Korea branch and saw a 13 times increase in completed leads at an 84 percent lower cost per lead. With lead forms, they generated “the most leads at the most efficient cost among all ad platforms,” says Kenny Hwang, Jeep’s Korea Marketing Manager.

Plan for greater impact across different consumer touchpoints 

We often see that people switch between Search and YouTube to find new information that influences what to buy. In order to help you understand where your conversions are coming from and provide more transparency around your customer’s path to purchase, we’ve included YouTube in our Google Ads attribution reports. Attribution reports can provide insight into how budgets can be allocated to maximize impact across YouTube, search and shopping campaigns.

As businesses begin to reopen and enter into a state of recovery, we hope these new solutions will make it even easier for you to find new leads, boost web traffic or drive sales. To get started on any of these new products and features, please reach out to your Google account team and we’ll be ready to help.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

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