Google Marketing

Investing In The Next Generation Of Measurement On YouTube

16 October 2019 by

Ad reporting and measurement is an important part of getting digital advertising right. We invest a lot to help our advertisers understand the value of running ads on services like YouTube. 

Advertisers use different tools to understand the effectiveness of their ad campaigns. One type, called pixels, has played an important role across the web for over a decade, but was built for a world of single screens, not for the ways many people watch YouTube today. While more than 70 percent of time spent watching YouTube globally occurs on mobile devices, pixels can’t report on the effectiveness of ads that appear in mobile apps. And many third-party pixels lack the privacy controls and user protections of newer technology. That’s why, for the past several years, we’ve been taking action to limit the pixels we allow on YouTube while investing in a cloud-based measurement solution called Ads Data Hub that allows our advertisers to understand the effectiveness of their ads in a secure, privacy-safe environment. 

Over the last year, we’ve been working with key measurement companies including Nielsen, Comscore, DoubleVerify, Dynata, Kantar and Integral Ad Science to migrate their services to Ads Data Hub. Once the migrations are complete early next year, we will stop allowing third-party pixels on YouTube.

Unlike pixel-based measurement, Ads Data Hub allows advertisers to understand how their advertising is performing across screens, including mobile apps, through aggregated insights from Google ad platforms, including YouTube, Google Ads and Display & Video 360. Because Ads Data Hub limits the use of user data, it adds another layer of privacy protection for users while still enabling marketers to measure their YouTube ad campaigns. 

Over the past year, we’ve invested significantly in infrastructure improvements to Ads Data Hub to make it faster, easier to use and more reliable. This has allowed us to dramatically increase the number of advertisers and technology providers we can serve and the use cases supported in Ads Data Hub. Advertisers have run millions of successful queries to date. 

While there is still more work to be done, we think this change will be beneficial to consumers and advertisers. With the migration from pixels to Ads Data Hub, our third-party measurement partners will be able to provide YouTube advertisers with more comprehensive reporting and measurement, using technology that’s built to enhance user privacy.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog  

Google Marketing

Google Ads Auction-Time Bidding Comes To Search Ads 360

18 September 2019 by

Smart Bidding in Google Ads uses machine learning to set bids at auction-time by factoring in a wide range of signals that help predict performance. Now you can take advantage of Google Ads auction-time bidding in your Search Ads 360 bid strategy. By activating auction-time bidding you can enhance your performance when bidding on Google Search, while still maintaining your cross-channel bidding strategy powered by Search Ads 360. During beta testing hundreds of Search Ads 360 advertisers enabled Google Ads auction-time bidding and saw an average lift in conversions of fifteen to thirty percent at the same or better ROI.

Identify more opportunities with auction-time signals

Every day billions of people turn to Google to find answers. While people are often searching for the same things, their searches are unique thanks to their context. This includes their device, browser, language, location, time of day, and other factors. Google Ads auction-time bidding automatically sets bids based on these signal combinations.

For Vodafone, factoring these signals into its bidding strategy was mission critical. Vodafone is one of the world’s largest telecom companies with mobile operations in 25 countries. During the beta period, Vodafone enabled Google Ads auction-time bidding in Search Ads 360 to ensure the right bid was being set for each auction across every location in which they operate. Now the team plans to activate Google Ads auction-time bidding across their Search Ads 360 bid strategies.Auction-time bidding in Search Ads 360 has enabled us to leverage the full potential of Google’s Smart Bidding technology in combination with Search Ads 360 Floodlights. As a result we have been able to lower our cost-per-conversion by 15%.Samantha Mikula
Marketing Specialist, Vodafone

Reach more customers when they are ready to convert

Google Ads auction-time bidding anticipates when a conversion is likely by analyzing your account history, Floodlight conversions, and exclusive signal combinations. This unique approach improves Search Ads 360 bidding results by helping you reach more customers when they are ready to convert.

Head of Marketing, Jamima White, at Australian energy company AGL, discovered that Google Ads auction-time bidding helped drive results for her business in a competitive environment. With Google Ads auction-time bidding enabled, AGL saw conversion volume increase nineteen percent at the same cost per acquisition.With Search Ads 360 and Google Ads auction-time bidding we have been able to increase conversions by 19% while maintaining the same cost per acquisition efficiency.Jamima White
Head of Marketing, AGL

Give Smart Bidding time to learn and improve

Google Ads auction-time bidding performance improves over time with more data. When enabling auction-time bidding, plan for a one-week window where Google Ads Smart Bidding learns about your business and doesn’t set auction-time bids. After the initial learning period, Google Ads will begin setting auction-time bids while continuously learning and adapting to changes in your performance. 

How to enable Google Ads auction-time bidding functionality in Search Ads 360

Auction-time bidding in Search Ads 360 is generally available for Google Search campaigns, and launching in open beta for shopping campaigns. If you’d like your shopping campaigns in Google Ads added to the beta, reach out to your account representative.

To get started with Google Search campaigns navigate to an existing bid strategy. Then, under “Engine features”, check the box for “Auction-time bidding.”

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

Next Steps To Ensure Transparency, Choice, And Control In Digital Advertising

22 August 2019 by

Ads play a major role in sustaining the free and open web. They underwrite the great content and services that people enjoy and support a diverse universe of creators and publishers. But the ad-supported web is at risk if digital advertising practices don’t evolve to reflect people’s changing expectations around how data is collected and used. 

The mission is clear: we need to ensure that people all around the world can continue to access ad supported content on the web while also feeling confident that their privacy is protected. As we shared in May, we believe the path to making this happen is also clear: 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. 

Working together across the ecosystem

The web ecosystem is complex—it includes users, publishers, advertisers, technology and service providers, advocacy groups, regulatory bodies and more. We’ve seen that approaches that don’t account for the whole ecosystem—or that aren’t supported by the whole ecosystem—will not succeed. For example, efforts by individual browsers to block cookies used for ads personalization without suitable, broadly accepted alternatives have fallen down on two accounts. 

First, blocking cookies materially reduces publisher revenue. Based on an analysis of a randomly selected fraction of traffic on each of the 500 largest Google Ad Manager publishers globally over the last three months, we evaluated how the presence of a cookie affected programmatic revenue. Traffic for which there was no cookie present yielded an average of 52 percent less revenue for the publisher than traffic for which there was a cookie present. Lower revenue for traffic without a cookie was consistent for publishers across verticals—and was especially notable for publishers in the news vertical. For the news publishers in the studied group, traffic for which there was no cookie present yielded an average of 62 percent less revenue than traffic for which there was a cookie present.1

Second, broad cookie restrictions have led some industry participants to use workarounds like fingerprinting, an opaque tracking technique that bypasses user choice and doesn’t allow reasonable transparency or control. Adoption of such workarounds represents a step back for user privacy, not a step forward.

Exploring new privacy-forward standards for the web

Today, Chrome shared an update on their efforts to explore new foundational technologies for the web that will deliver on the vision laid out above—widespread access to free content and strong privacy for users. Chrome has offered a number of preliminary proposals to the web standards community in areas such as conversion measurement, fraud protection and audience selection. The goal of these proposals is to promote a dialog on ways browsers could advance user privacy, while still ensuring publishers can earn what they need to fund great content and user experiences, and advertisers can deliver relevant ads to the right people and measure their impact.

Getting the web standards community to work on developing a new set of technologies is a tall order, but it’s not unprecedented. The community has worked together on a number of similar challenges over the years—such as gaining consensus to phase out browser plug-ins and reaching agreement to move away from Flash. We expect this will take years, not months, and we don’t anticipate any near-term changes to how our ads products work on Chrome. But this is important work and we support the effort. 

Pursuing a new level of ads transparency and user control

While Chrome explores new technologies for the web, we’re also acting on the commitment we made in May of this year to increase the transparency of digital ads and offer users more control. Over the past few months, we’ve been listening to feedback from users and partners, and have arrived at an initial proposal to give people more visibility into and control of the data used for advertising. We’ve begun sharing this proposal for discussion to key industry and stakeholder groups and we’re eager to hear and incorporate feedback.

Whether it’s working with the standards community to explore a new set of technologies, or getting feedback from participants across the digital ads industry on a proposal to increase transparency and offer users more control, Google is committed to partnering with others to raise the bar for how data is collected and used. Only by working together can we define and implement new practices that result in better, more privacy-focused experiences for users while addressing the requirements of publishers and advertisers that fund and ensure access to free content on the web.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

Growing In-App Viewability Coverage With Open Measurement

15 August 2019 by

People are spending more time on their mobile phones, especially in apps, and move across screens frequently. As people’s usage of mobile apps has grown, so has the importance of standardizing the way viewability is measured on mobile devices.

Today we’re sharing how we’ve made in-app inventory more measurable through the IAB Tech Lab’s Open Measurement standard. Integrating the Open Measurement Software Development Kit (SDK) into both our Google Mobile Ads (GMA) and Interactive Media Ads (IMA) SDKs has allowed us to enable Open Measurement on 85+ percent of in-app display and video impressions on Google AdMob and Google Ad Manager publishers. This means that buyers of this inventory can now take viewability measurements using solutions like Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify, Comscore, and Moat in addition to measurement that was previously available with Active View.  

“IAB Tech Lab’s Open Measurement (OM) initiative makes it easier for ad buyers and sellers to work together for viewability measurement and other verification needs,” said Dennis Buchheim, Executive Vice President and General Manager, IAB Tech Lab. “The sell-side has been adopting OM quickly, and we ask brands, agencies, and Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) to get more active and take advantage of what OM offers.” 

Advertisers can get started today by appending Open Measurement enabled tags from their viewability vendor of choice to their creatives.

Measurement vendors are lauding this development as progress for a more measurable future. Joseph Ranzenbach, Director of Product Management, IAS says, “Google’s adoption of the Open Measurement SDK is a huge step in moving the industry forward and creating more transparency for advertisers.” Sumit Shukla, SVP, Strategic Partnerships, Comscore says, “It’s important for Brands to consistently measure viewability across the entirety of their media buys. With Comscore’s cross-platform campaign measurement as a trusted market currency, this close partnership with Google further helps Brands measure what matters.”  

Viewability measurement unlocks high-performing In-app inventory for advertisers

Viewability continues to be an integral part of measuring ad effectiveness—it helps advertisers understand if their ad had the opportunity to be seen and it helps publishers offer more high-quality inventory.

In-app viewability means that advertisers can confidently take advantage of this high-value inventory. In 2018 we worked with Ipsos MORI to understand the impact of in-app advertising and found it was successful in driving action. People were 50 percent more likely to interact with a brand, buy a product or service, follow a call-to-action or recommend a brand to their family or friends after seeing its ad in an app, compared with those who saw it via a browser. Display & Video 360 customers can now confidently extend their brand campaigns to apps knowing they are able to measure ad viewability at the impression level as they would in other environments.

Publishers like Pandora recognize the importance of holistic viewability measurement. Maria Breza, VP, Ad Quality Measurement and Audience Data Operations at Pandora said, “Advertisers should be able to seamlessly use one viewability provider to measure their buys across all publishers and platforms. Open Measurement has allowed Pandora to make this a reality for our clients with less latency, less maintenance and more stability.”

What’s next for Open Measurement

We’re continuing to work with the IAB’s Tech Lab Open Measurement Working Group to expand Open Measurement to use cases beyond viewability, as well as to other environments such as web video. We believe Open Measurement has the potential to create a more transparent and accountable digital media ecosystem across all screens. Reach out to your measurement partners and Google representative to find out how you can take advantage of this new measurement technology.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

New Innovations To Grow Your App Business With Ads

31 July 2019 by

App developers around the world are pushing the limits of innovation to meet consumers’ high expectations. In an increasingly competitive global market, it’s more important than ever for app developers to find better ways to build and grow their businesses.

Today at Think Games at ChinaJoy, we are sharing innovations that help you find more users and grow your revenue with Google’s latest solutions.

Reach more users when they’re looking for something new 

Connecting with the right people at the right time is key to building a strong user base. Google App campaigns make it easy for you to find app-happy users across Google Search, Play, YouTube and over 3 million sites and apps in our network. Here are some new ways App campaigns can help you expand your global reach.

Discover (formerly known as the Google feed) helps over 800 million monthly active users uncover fresh and interesting content related to the things they care about—like global news and topics of interest like sports, music, and mobile games. Now, you can access Discover inventory through App campaigns to make a strong impression on more users with relevant and visually engaging ads.

App campaigns running in the United States will now automatically reach more potential users on Discover who are open to exploring your app. And in the coming months, your app ads on Discover will also serve in Malaysia, South Africa, India, Pakistan, Canada, Brazil, Japan and Indonesia. We aim to bring app ads in Discover to all available markets before the end of this year. 

In addition to Discover⁠, we’re introducing new reach opportunities on two more platforms:

  • App ads on YouTube Search: Your app promotion ads are now eligible to show in the top slot of YouTube’s mobile search results. Combining YouTube’s global audience with rich intent signals helps you deliver relevant and useful ads to more prospective app users.
  • In-stream video ads in our display network: Display in-stream video ads are skippable video ads that play before, during, or after a video a user is watching. Starting next month, you can reach more people with your ads while they’re viewing video content on mobile apps and sites in our network.

Grow revenue and deliver a better user experience

Finding the right users is important, but developers need to think about growing overall revenue in order to build sustainable businesses. By integrating ads during natural break points in your app you can build a new revenue stream and deliver a better user experience.

Our new app open ad format allows you to show ads to your users as they wait for your app to load. Designed to seamlessly integrate with your app’s branding, this format gives you new ways to earn revenue while creating a good user experience. Reach out to your account manager to get started with this format in alpha.  

In addition to the new app open ads, here are two more ways we are helping you grow revenue while delivering better ad experiences for your users:

  • Smart segmentation is now available for rewarded ad units. This feature, announced earlier this year for interstitial ads units, only shows ads to users unlikely to make purchases in your app. This protects the user experience of your purchasers while growing your ads revenue.
  • AdMob Insights: Our new Insights feature provides alerts to your AdMob dashboard when our system detects abnormal changes to your key metrics like eCPM, impressions and revenue. This new beta lets you know instantly if changes in your app are impacting user experience.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing | Local Marketing

Get Your Campaigns Ready To Reach The Always-On Deal Seeker

26 June 2019 by

Marketers recognize Black Friday and Cyber Monday as major shopping holidays to prepare for. But did you know that only 18 percent of shoppers consolidate their holiday shopping to these days? 

Consumers are on the lookout for deals year-round—about 60 percent say that finding a great deal is what they enjoy most about shopping. So whether you’re gearing up for July 4th in the U.S., Bastille Day in France, or back-to-school shopping around the world, check out new tools coming soon to help you highlight in-store promotions, factor seasonal sales into your bidding strategy, and reach in-market consumers this season and beyond.

Heat up in-store sales with new Local campaign features

Before they’re heading to the store, local shoppers are hunting for deals: searches for “on sale near me” have grown by 250 percent since 2017. 

With Local campaigns, you can dedicate your entire campaign to offline sales and complement other channels like TV or print that also help deliver foot traffic to your business during important promotions. In fact, in recent global studies with 10 advertisers, we found that Local campaigns helped brands drive a median five times greater incremental return-on-ad-spend from their business locations. 

We have new features coming for Local campaigns to make it available to more advertisers and improve how you manage your locations and creatives. In the next few weeks, you’ll be able to set up your Local campaigns to drive calls to your business locations—even if you don’t have store visits measurement. By expanding Local campaigns to optimize for calls, more advertisers will now be able to access it and highlight what makes their stores unique across Google Search, Maps, YouTube and more.

Starting today, you can also create location groups to make it easier to promote a subset of business locations. For instance, if you’re selling special back-to-school product bundles at certain locations, use location groups to tailor your budget and messaging to this offer. Finally, asset reporting has started rolling out to give you better insight into creative performance. See what kinds of messaging and assets work best and use these learnings to improve your current and future creatives. 

Sanborns, a leading department store in Latin America, is one brand using Local campaigns to drive results during key promotions.

We’re excited to work with Google’s new technology to help us grow our business. For Father’s Day in Mexico and for a major sale we ran at the end of May, we used Local campaigns to make our in-store offers more prominent. It’s amazing how we can get exposure with customers at the right time, and this helped us drive a 10x increase in store visits during these promotions year-over-year. 

– Grupo Sanborns’ marketing team

Put your in-store promotions front and center in local inventory ads

We’re also making it easier for retailers to highlight in-store promotions for specific products through Shopping ads. Today, retailers have connected over 2 billion offers to physical store locations globally using local inventory ads. Now, you can add a promotion to your local inventory ads. Call out in-store offers like “20% off” or “buy one get one free” for inventory you have in stock and drive more nearby deal-hunters to your physical locations.

We’re rolling this out in the U.S. and Australia, with more countries coming soon. If you’re a retailer interested in participating, request to join the allowlist here. 

Improve Smart Bidding performance by factoring in seasonal sales

Smart Bidding automatically optimizes your bids for every auction to help improve your return on investment. And while it factors in seasonality as a signal, we know there are key moments for your business—like during a big sale—when you can anticipate changes in conversion rates well in advance. For these occasions, we’ve introduced seasonality adjustments. 

Let’s say you’re running a promotion for grills as people get ready for their summer cookouts. Based on past promotions, you predict seeing a 50 percent increase in conversion rates during your sale. Use seasonality adjustments to let Smart Bidding know to expect and prepare for this conversion rate increase, and help our systems ramp up performance more quickly. 

Reach shoppers in the market for your products

In-market audiences for Search help advertisers drive more conversions by reaching qualified shoppers who are actively considering products or services to buy. These are aggregated and anonymized groups of consumers who’ve recently demonstrated an intent to purchase. This gives you a great opportunity to help your business stand out with compelling offers or deals when people are making their final decisions about what to buy.

We’ve recently rolled out more in-market segments across popular categories like beauty, sports, education and real estate. This includes over thirty new categories for retail, just in time for your seasonal sales.

No matter what season you’re ramping up for around the globe, we hope these new products set you up for success!

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing | Youtube Marketing

Create with Google: Inspiration, Resources, And Tools To Fuel Your Next Big Idea

19 June 2019 by

The case for creativity has never been greater. Big thinking and bold ideas are in high demand, and creative execution is consistently confirmed as the largest contributor to driving sales. And as we see from the brands we partner with, success occurs when data and technology inspire creativity.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. There are more platforms, more signals, and more data sources informing creative than ever before. We want our clients and partners to grow and thrive on our platforms, and that’s why we’ve made it a priority to invest in resources and tools to support creative makers and agencies at every stage of the creative process.

This year at Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, we’re expanding a new resource for the global creative community: Create with Google. Made for creatives by creatives, this platform is designed to inspire, inform and enable creative makers from ideation to execution. The global site is currently available in English, Spanish, Korean and Japanese, with a plan to expand to more languages throughout the year.

Get inspired for your next big campaign

We’ve searched the globe to find the most innovative, intelligent, and imaginative work across Google’s creative canvas. Filter by format, vertical, and platform, or search by keyword to inspire your creative thinking.

Master Google’s platforms, formats and tools

Read up on a range of resources and get insider tips on how to build work across Google’s creative canvas—from ARCore to Display and YouTube Director Mix.

Access tools to support your idea, from pitch to production

Two new tools, Audience Connect and YouTube Mockup Tool, make it easier for you to create and sell in work on our platforms—from pitching in concepts right through production.

Audience Connect transforms creative presentations from broadcast into a conversation, by tracking client engagement in response to any video. When pitching in a TrueView concept, for example, the tool provides real-time feedback on when your audience is more leaned in and when they would skip.

YouTube Mockup Tool lets you upload and showcase work to clients and colleagues in an authentic YouTube environment, simulating your creativity across desktop, tablet, and mobile.

We want to champion and challenge creative makers to experiment and make better work, recognizing we only succeed when our partners do. We hope Create with Google can become a genuine global community where the industry comes together to find the inspiration, resources and tools for their next project.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

Google Marketing Live: Building For The New Consumer Journey

14 May 2019 by

Today, mobile phones allow people to engage more often, in more ways, and from more places than ever. This means the once linear path from discovery to consideration to purchase has not only evolved but is always evolving.

Consider a woman from a recent study, who spent 73 days and interacted with more than 250 touchpoints (searches, video views, and page views) before purchasing a single pair of jeans. She visited several blogs, browsed large merchant sites, searched for local retailers, and watched product reviews on YouTube. Like many of today’s consumers, she wanted to enjoy her time shopping, engaged with brands that inspired her, and narrowed limitless choices before picking the perfect pair.

In a world where we have less time and more options, it’s crucial for brands to anticipate what consumers need in order to stand out. But just because the customer journey is complex doesn’t mean delivering useful experiences has to be. Whether you’re a scrappy entrepreneur or a large company, your marketing goals remains the same: reaching people at the right moments with the right offer.

At Google Marketing Live, you’ll hear directly from our ads teams about the latest products designed to help you do just that. We’ll show how ads can be there, be useful, and be responsible—unlocking more opportunities for you to connect with your customers and grow your business. Join us live today at 9am PT (12pm ET): g.co/marketinglive and get a front row seat for our biggest announcements. 

Get discovered in more places

People turn to Google to communicate, find answers and stay entertained. And increasingly, they’re swiping and scrolling through feeds as part of that journey—whether it’s browsing videos in the YouTube home feed, checking timely offers in the Gmail Promotions tab or swiping through Discover to catch up on the latest news. These are opportunities for brands to engage them when it matters.

In a recent Google / Ipsos study, we saw that 76 percent of consumers enjoy making unexpected discoveries when shopping. And 85 percent of consumers will take a product-related action within 24 hours of discovering a product: reading reviews, comparing prices or purchasing the product—sometimes all at once!

Today, we’re introducing Discovery ads. Rolling out to all advertisers globally later this year, Discovery ads are a new way to reach people across Google properties in the moments when they’re open to discovering your products and services.

  • Rich and relevant creative: Inspire consumers with an open canvas showcasing your brand or products in a swipeable image carousel, rendered natively across each Google property.
  • Results: By combining this incredible reach and creative canvas with Google’s understanding of intent, you can be confident you’re anticipating what your customers want and delivering the results you care about.
  • Unmatched reach: Reach hundreds of millions of people across the YouTube home feed, the Gmail Promotions and Social tabs, and the feed-in Discover using a single campaign.

“Discovery has created a great opportunity for us to easily drive growth at scale for our brands beyond what we thought was possible with Google,” says Daniel Pahl, VP of Media and Acquisition at TechStyle. “It’s definitely outperformed my expectations in driving high-value leads and signups. We’re now able to inspire a completely new audience to action.”

Indeed, high-quality creative can be a great way to showcase your brand and set your products and services apart by highlighting what it’s like to use them. That’s why later this year we’re launching Gallery ads: a new search ads format that brings more of your content to the Search results page. By combining search intent with a more interactive visual format, gallery ads make it easier for you to communicate what your brand has to offer. We’ve found that, on average, ad groups including one or more gallery ad have up to 25 percent more interactions—paid clicks or swipes—at the absolute top of the mobile Search results page.

And when it comes to getting ideas and inspiration, hundreds of millions of people enter shopping-related queries on Google each day. According to our data, about 60% of those shopping queries are from users browsing a category or brand – like “Max Mara dress” or “living room decor ideas.” So today, we’re bringing Showcase Shopping ads—a highly visual ad format that incorporates rich lifestyle imagery into your Shopping ads—to even more surfaces like Google Images and the feed on Discover—places where we know people are looking for inspiration and ideas.

The new Google Shopping

This year we’re unveiling a redesigned Google Shopping experience with new, immersive ways for shoppers to discover and compare millions of products from thousands of stores. When they’re ready to buy, they can choose to purchase online, in a nearby store, and now directly on Google. For retailers and brands, it brings together ads, local and transactions in one place to help them connect with consumers across their shopping journey.

Shoppers will have a personalized homepage on the Shopping tab where they can filter based on features they care about and brands they love, read reviews, and even watch videos about the products. For example, if they’re looking for headphones, they can filter for wireless and the brand they’re looking for.

The blue shopping cart on the item shows shoppers they can purchase what they want with simple returns and customer support, backed by a Google guarantee. People can buy confidently, knowing Google is there to help if they don’t get what they were expecting, their order is late, or they have issues getting a refund. With this new experience, we’re merging the best of Google Express with Google Shopping.

If you’re a Shopping Actions merchant, your products will automatically be part of this new easy purchase experience on Google Shopping, Google.com and the Google Assistant. Later this year, we’ll expand Shopping Actions to other Google surfaces including YouTube and Google Images.

Frictionless Mobile Experiences

For many of you, your businesses span mobile web and apps, and directing your customer to the right experience is critical to acquiring new customers and building loyalty with existing ones.

That’s why, over the next few weeks, we’ll enable app deep linking from Google Ads and offer more robust reporting across web and apps. Your app users will be taken directly from your Search, Display and Shopping ads directly to the relevant page in your mobile app, if they have your app already installed. This means your customers will be able to complete their desired action—buy something, book a trip or order food delivery—in a way that’s optimized for the destination that drives the highest value for your brand. This delivers a better experience for your loyal customers while improving insight and measurement for you.

Early tests have been promising—on average, deep linked ad experiences drove 2X the conversion rates.

Magalu, one of Brazil’s largest retail companies, is seeing the benefits of this first-hand. Magalu recognized that its app was growing in popularity. By enabling deep linking, loyal customers who tapped on a Magalu ad were taken directly to the mobile app they already have installed, resulting in more than 40 percent growth in overall mobile purchases.

Tune in to see more!

Join us today at 9am PT (12pm ET) for even more announcements, consumer insights, and in-depth looks at how to use our latest products. Whether you’re joining us in San Francisco or watching at home on the live stream, we’re grateful and honored to be on this journey with you. See you at Google Marketing Live!

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

Smart Strategies For Growing Your App Business With Ads

8 May 2019 by

Every year Google I/O showcases the delight that technology can bring to our lives. Mobile apps have extended that delight to billions of people around the world, paving the way for app developers to unlock new business opportunities.  

Today we’re sharing a few ways to help scale your business using Google’s growth and monetization solutions.

Find the right app users

Smart user acquisition starts with reaching the people who will be most engaged with your app and help you generate the most revenue. With Google App campaigns, you can choose a bidding option that best supports your growth goals. Target CPA bidding, for example, makes it easy for you to find new users who install your app and take an in-app action.

To grow profitably, it’s also important to also consider how much revenue you generate relative to the cost of driving those installs and actions. That’s why, you’ll soon be able to bid on a target return on ad spend (tROAS) so you can automatically pay more for users likely to spend more, and pay less for users likely to spend less. If you’re looking for users who will spend twice as much as they cost to acquire, you can set that multiplier for your tROAS bid, and it will find you the right users accordingly. tROAS will be available next month for Google App campaigns on iOS and Android globally. Learn more.

Bidding is a great lever to reach the customers you want. The next step is to win and keep these customers’ attention. That’s why we’re giving you new ways to develop and manage your creatives, making it easier for you to show your customers more relevant ads in more places.

  • YouTube–you automatically qualify to promote your app in two new YouTube placements when you have at least one landscape image and one video. The first placement is on the YouTube homepage feed, and the second is on in-stream video.
  • Ad groups–starting later this month, you can set up multiple ad groups in the same campaign and tailor the assets in each ad group around a different “theme” or message for different customers. Learn more.
  • Agency partnerships–we’re teaming up with 8 trusted agencies including Vidmob, Consumer Acquisition, Bamboo, Apptamin, Webpals Mobile, Creadits, Kaizen Ad and Kuaizi to help you manage creatives end-to-end, from design to reporting.

Monetize more easily

The second piece to building a profitable apps business is creating a sustainable revenue stream. In other words, you need to keep users engaged with your app, while still monetizing it effectively, which can be tough to balance. That’s why AdMob is investing in automated solutions to help you earn more from your app while delivering a great user experience.

Last year we announced a new monetization model called Open Bidding that helps you maximize the value of every impression automatically. Since then, dozens of developers have joined the beta and are seeing meaningful revenue lift, including Korea-based game developer Sticky Hands.

“We’re really excited about Open Bidding. In one month, revenue and ARPDAU have grown by 14% and 15% respectively, and we expect them to keep climbing as more demand sources come online. What’s even better is that we’re spending almost no time managing it.“
– Minu Kim, CEO of Sticky Hands

In addition to the revenue lift, Open Bidding offers simplicity and time savings compared to traditional mediation–fewer SDKs means less time spent on integrations and more stability for your app. Stay tuned, as we’ll be expanding the program to all publishers later this year.

In the meantime, here are a few more ways AdMob can help you grow your overall app revenue and protect user experience more easily:

  • Image search is a robust new search tool that helps identify and remove bad ads across every size, campaign, and rotation, using just a screenshot of the ad. Learn more.
  • Maximum ad content rating can prevent inappropriate ads from being shown to young users. Learn more.
  • User metrics, such as daily active users and average session time, will be available soon in a new dashboard card, so you can quickly see how changes to your monetization strategy (e.g. adding a rewarded ad) impact key indicators of user engagement. These insights can help you optimize the lifetime value of your users across all your revenue sources – ads, in-app purchases, and commerce. Learn more.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

Gathering Insights In Google Analytics Can Be As Easy As A-B-C

15 April 2019 by

Today’s customers are deeply curious, searching high and low for information about a product before making a purchase. And this curiosity applies to purchases big and small—just consider the fact that mobile searches for “best earbuds” have grown by over 130 percent over the last two years. (Google Data, US, Oct 2015 – Sep 2016 vs. Oct 2017 – Sep 2018. ) To keep up with this curious customer, marketers are putting insights at the center of the strategy so that they can understand customers’ intentions and deliver a helpful, timely experience.

In our new guide about linking Google Analytics and Google Ads, we explore the broad range of reports available in Analytics. These reports give you crucial insights about the customer journey that can then be used to inform your campaigns in Google Ads. Here’s what you should know about the A-B-Cs of reporting.

Acquisition reports

How did your customers end up on your site in the first place? Acquisition reports answer this question, offering insights about how effectively your ads drive users to your site, which keywords and search queries are bringing new users to your site, and much more. This video gives you a quick overview of how Acquisition reports work.  

Behavior reports

How do you users engage with your site once they visit? Behavior reports give you valuable insights about how users respond to the content on your site. You can learn how each page is performing, what actions users are taking on your site, and much more about the site experience. Learn more about behavior reporting here.

Conversion reports

What path are users taking towards conversion? Conversion reporting in Analytics gathers valuable insights about those actions that are important to the success of your business—such as a purchase or completed sign-up for your email newsletter. Goal Flow reports help you see how a user engages as they move toward a conversion while Ecommerce reports are specifically designed to deliver insights for sites centered around purchases.

Reports open up a world of actionable insights that help you deeply understand and then quickly enhance a customer journey that is more complex than ever.

Missed the other posts in this series? Catch up now to read how creating effective campaigns for the modern customer journey can be achieved by bringing Google Analytics and Google Ads together.

And, download our new guide and learn how getting started with these reports is easy as A-B-C.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

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