Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Protecting Our Ad Network: How Advertising Policies & Policy Enforcement Work

27 March 2018 by

On March 14, we shared information about our work to remove bad ads and bad sites from our ad networks. With a combination of people, policies, and technology we took down more than 3.2 billion ads in 2017, up from 700 million in 2015. That’s more than 100 bad ads per second. Today, we want to share more details about how our policies and policy enforcement work to help protect our network.

Policies
We continuously monitor ads and content for policy compliance.

  • If you’re an advertiser, our AdWords policies determine which ads are acceptable and what types of products or services can be promoted with Google ads. For example, we prohibit technologies that attempt to deceive users or abuse our network, like auto-redirecting ads, malware-laden sites, or “trick-to-click” ads. 
  • If you’re a publisher, our AdSense program policies outline the kinds of websites and content we allow to show Google ads. For example, our dangerous and derogatory content policy prohibits publishers from running Google ads on content that promotes discrimination against marginalized groups. 

We constantly review and update our policies to protect consumers, advertisers and publishers. In fact, in 2017, we added 28 new advertiser and 20 new publisher policies.

Technology & Talent

To enforce these policies, we use a combination of people and technology. Google’s technology is designed to detect when ads or content violate our policies and disable them quickly. We employ automated filters that continuously identify policy issues, clean, and defend our ad systems. And we consider user feedback when people report sites and ads that they believe may be in violation of our policies.

Technology helps us spot potential violations, but our talented reviewers and interdisciplinary team also work to enforce policies. When we review advertisers’ ads, we review everything from the ad creative to the landing page. For publishers, we evaluate elements including traffic patterns on the site and whether the content is appropriate to be monetized. Our teams are constantly reviewing because a publisher or an advertiser who is compliant with our policies today may not be tomorrow. 

Controls
In addition to evaluating ads and sites for policy compliance, we provide advertisers controls they need to manage where and when their ads appear, and provide publishers the ability to control the type and format of ads appearing next to their content. For example, an advertiser of an extreme sporting event may use a Digital Content Label, the film-rating style control for maturity level, to place their ads alongside content suitable specific audiences. Advertisers can couple these controls with placement exclusions, which allow advertisers to specify publishers, apps, or videos to avoid in their campaigns.

Protecting our network

Maintaining the health of our ad network is key to supporting the ecosystem of creators, publishers, and advertisers that rely on Google ads to build their businesses. That’s why our teams are committed to refining our policies and fine-tuning our systems and controls to make sure Google ads work for everyone.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

An Advertising Ecosystem That Works For Everyone

14 March 2018 by

Digital advertising plays an important role in making the web what it is today—a forum where anyone with a good idea and good content can reach an audience and potentially make a living. In order for this ads-supported, free web to work, it needs to be a safe and effective place to learn, create and advertise. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Whether it’s a one-off accident or a coordinated action by scammers trying to make money, a negative experience hurts the entire ecosystem. That’s why for the last 15 years, we’ve invested in technology, policies, and talent to help us fight issues like ad fraud, malware, and content scammers. Last year, we were able to remove more bad actors from our ad ecosystem than ever before, and at a faster rate.

We removed 100 bad ads per second

In 2017, we took down more than 3.2 billion ads that violated our advertising policies. That’s more than 100 bad ads per second! This means we’re able to block the majority of bad ad experiences, like malvertising and phishing scams, before the scams impact people. We blocked 79 million ads in our network for attempting to send people to malware-laden sites, and removed 400,000 of these unsafe sites last year. And, we removed 66 million “trick-to-click” ads as well as 48 million ads that were attempting to get users to install unwanted software.

New technology to better protect advertisers

Last year, we removed 320,000 publishers from our ad network for violating our publisher policies, and blacklisted nearly 90,000 websites and 700,000 mobile apps. We also introduced technology that allows us to better protect our advertisers by removing Google ads from individual pages on a website that violate our policies. Last year, we removed 2 million pages for policy violations each month. This has been critical in scaling enforcement for policies that prohibit monetization of inappropriate and controversial content. In fact, after expanding our policy against dangerous and derogatory content in April 2017 to cover additional forms of discrimination and intolerance, we removed Google ads from 8,700 pages that violated the expanded policy.

Fighting deceptive content online

Many website owners use our advertising platforms, like AdSense, to run Google ads on their sites and content and make money. We paid $12.6 billion to publishing partners in our ad network last year. But in order to make money from Google ads, you have to play by rules— that means respecting the user experience more than the ads.

Our publisher policies exist to help us maintain that balance, even as trends change online. For example, in recent years, we’ve seen the rise of scammers trying to take advantage of the growing popularity of online news to make money. We prohibit websites in our ad network from serving ads on misrepresentative content. Essentially this means that you can’t serve ads if you’re pretending to be a legitimate news website based in London when you’re actually a content scammer in a different city. In 2017, we found that a small number of publishers were responsible for the majority of these violations. Of the 11,000 websites we reviewed for potentially violating the misrepresentative content policy, we blocked over 650 of those sites and terminated 90 publishers from our network.  

More frequently, we see violations of our scraping content policy. This type of policy violation occurs when bad actors try to make money as quickly as possible by copying news or content from other sites. In 2017, we blocked over 12,000 websites for “scraping,” duplicating and copying content from other sites, up from 10,000 in 2016.

Does an ad with the headline “Ellen DeGeneres adopts a baby elephant!” make you want to click on it? You’re not alone. In recent years, scammers have tried to sell diet pills and weight-loss scams by buying ads that look like sensational news headlines but ultimately lead to a website selling something other than news. We suspended more than 7,000 AdWords accounts for tabloid cloaking violations, up from 1,400 in 2016.

New policies to tackle emerging threats

We’re constantly updating our policies as we see new threats emerge. Last year, we added 28 new advertiser policies and 20 new publisher policies to combat new threats and improve the ads experience online. This year, we updated several policies to address ads in unregulated or speculative financial products like binary options, cryptocurrency, foreign exchange markets, and contracts for difference (or CFDs). We also updated our gambling ads policies to address new methods of gambling with items that have real-world value (e.g., skins gambling). And we will introduce a new certification process for rehabilitation facilities, allowing legitimate addiction treatment centers to connect with people in need. Our work to protect the ads ecosystem doesn’t stop here—it’s ongoing. As consumer trends evolve, as our methods to protect the open web get better, so do online scams. Improving the ads experience across the web, whether that’s removing harmful ads or intrusive ads, will continue to be a top priority for us.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Grow Your Business Beyond Borders

15 February 2018 by

As more consumers come online around the world, there’s more opportunity than ever for marketers to reach potential customers beyond their borders. In fact, research shows that customers aren’t concerned about where a business is based as long as they’re happy with the product or service. For example, 96% of people didn’t know that Booking.com is from the Netherlands, and of these, 90% said this wouldn’t affect the likelihood of their buying from the company again.1

To get started, check out our Official Guide to Expanding Internationally with AdWords. This four-step guide outlines best practices and free resources that can help advertisers find more customers in new countries.

There are many tools and resources for businesses looking to expand. For example, Market Finder is a powerful tool built with insights from Google Search to prioritize the best markets for your business based on search volumes in your category, ease of doing business, consumer purchasing power, and more. It’s available in the US, UK, and China, with more countries on the way in 2018. Another resource is Consumer Barometer, which helps advertisers learn about consumer preferences and trends. Did you know that clothing, books, cosmetics, and computer hardware/software are the products most often purchased online from abroad?2 Last but not least, tap into the Go Global Community for the latest research on emerging market trends, conversations with international market specialists, and updates on new ad innovations. Companies from around the world have grown their businesses with these tools. For example:

Kabam is a leading provider of mobile games, including Marvel Contest of Champions with over 130M downloads. To expand its game into Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, Kabam used insights from consumer gaming trends and video engagement from each market to localize its Search and YouTube campaigns. As a result, the game reached the top 10 in download charts for its category on both iOS and Android in target APAC markets.

French DIY website ManoMano offers two million products from 750 sellers, including electrical, hardware, furniture and tools. The DIY market is highly seasonal and constantly changing — customers love gardening and outdoor activities in warm seasons and indoor projects during the winter. ManoMano predicted these purchase patterns, understood consumer trends in each market, and engaged customers with timely, localized campaigns. As a result, its sales more than doubled in 2016, and ManoMano now has nearly 2 million customers across Europe, with localized websites in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

The Browser For A Web Worth Protecting

13 February 2018 by

The web is an incredible asset. It’s an engine for innovation, a platform for sharing, and a universal gateway to information. When we built Chrome, we wanted to create a way for people to interact with the magic that is the web, without the browser getting in the way. We created a browser that took up minimal space on your screen, made the omnibar so you could quickly search or get directly to a website, and built our pop-up blocker to help you avoid unwanted content. Since then we’ve also added features such as Safe Browsing, pausing autoplay Flash, and more—all aimed at protecting your experience of the web.

Your feedback has always played a critical part in the development of Chrome. This feedback has shown that a big source of frustration is annoying ads: video ads that play at full blast or giant pop-ups where you can’t seem to find the exit icon. These ads are designed to be disruptive and often stand in the way of people using their browsers for their intended purpose—connecting them to content and information. It’s clear that annoying ads degrade what we all love about the web. That’s why starting on February 15, Chrome will stop showing all ads on sites that repeatedly display these most disruptive ads after they’ve been flagged. More technical details about this change can be found on the Chromium blog.

To determine which ads not to show, we’re relying on the Better Ads Standards from the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group dedicated to improving the experience of the ads we see on the web. It’s important to note that some sites affected by this change may also contain Google ads. To us, your experience on the web is a higher priority than the money that these annoying ads may generate—even for us.

The web is an ecosystem composed of consumers, content producers, hosting providers, advertisers, web designers, and many others. It’s important that we work to maintain a balance—and if left unchecked, disruptive ads have the potential to derail the entire system. We’ve already seen more and more people express their discontent with annoying ads by installing ad blockers, but blocking all ads can hurt sites or advertisers who aren’t doing anything disruptive. By focusing on filtering out disruptive ad experiences, we can help keep the entire ecosystem of the web healthy, and give people a significantly better user experience than they have today.

We believe these changes will not only make Chrome better for you, but also improve the web for everyone. The web is a vital part of our day-to-day. And as new technologies push the web forward, we’ll continue working to build a better, more vibrant ecosystem dedicated to bringing you only the best experiences.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Grow Your App Business With Google’s New Education Program For Universal App Campaigns

17 January 2018 by

Today, we’re launching a new interactive education program for Universal App campaigns (UAC). UAC makes it easy for you to reach users and grow your app business at scale. It uses Google’s machine learning technology to help find the customers that matter most to you, based on your business goals—across Google Play, Google.com, YouTube, and the millions of sites and apps in the Display Network.

UAC is a shift in the way you market your mobile apps, so we designed the program’s first course to help you learn how to get the best results from UAC. Here are a few reasons we encourage you take the course:

  • Learn from industry experts. The course was created by marketers who’ve been in your shoes and vetted by the team who built the Universal App campaign.
  • Learn on your schedule. Watch snackable videos at your own pace. The course is made up of short 3-minute videos to help you master the content faster.
  • Practice what you learn. Complete interactive activities based on real-life scenarios like using UAC to help launch a new app or release an update for your app.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Product Ratings On Shopping Ads Now Available Globally

5 December 2017 by

Since we introduced product ratings, we’ve been working on new ways to help you gather feedback about your products and drive more qualified traffic to your site. Today, we’re making product ratings available in all markets where Google Shopping is present.

Product ratings appear in the form of stars and review counts on Shopping ads. This 5-star rating system represents aggregated review data for the product, compiled from multiple sources including merchants, third-party aggregators, editorial sites and users.

How to enable product ratings on Shopping ads

If you have a Merchant Center account for your store, you’ve already taken the first step towards displaying Product Ratings. Once you sign up and satisfy the program requirements, you can begin uploading Product Ratings feeds to your Merchant Center account. Alternatively, you may want to work with one of our approved third-party aggregators.

Additionally, you can now collect reviews about the products you sell through Google Customer Reviews. Whenever your shoppers complete a purchase, we’ll ask them about their shopping experience with your store, as well as the product they purchased. The reviews collected about their shopping experience will contribute to your seller rating and, the product reviews collected can make you eligible to show product ratings. To learn more about how to use Google Customer Reviews to collect product reviews, see here.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Win Over More Users With A New Playable Ad Format In Universal App Campaigns

4 December 2017 by

The holiday season is upon us, and millions of consumers around the world are looking forward to unwrapping their new devices and downloading their favorite apps. People have so many choices when it comes to apps, so it’s critical for you to capture their attention and give them a reason to engage with your app.

That’s why we’re rolling out HTML5 playable ads in Universal App campaigns (UAC)—so users can quickly spin a wheel, score a point or jump into level two, right from the ad.

Playtika gets more people in the game

To show how playable ads in UAC benefit game developers and app marketers, let’s take a look at how Playtika, a leading mobile gaming company, used this format to reach more users for its game: House of Fun. People can spin a wheel directly in the ad and experience the thrill of the game before downloading. This gives game lovers a sense of how the game works, and what it takes to win, before installing.

After introducing interactive and engaging playable ads and testing multiple creative formats, Playtika increased its return on ad spend (ROAS) by 1.8X.

According to Nir Schlaen, Marketing Team Leader, “We want to put Playtika’s games in the hands of more potential players at scale…We’ve found that playables drive more engagement and long-term customer value because users have already had a taste of the game.”

Here are three tips to help you get started with playable ads in UAC.
1. Make it short and sweet: Keep playable content short and engaging so that users don’t choose to skip your ad. We recommend that your ad be between 30-60 seconds long. Tailor the length for your app; it can vary depending on the vertical and complexity of the ad. And gameplay in the ad should be easier to complete than in the actual game.
2. Be engaging but accurate: Make sure to include how you want users to interact with your ad in its design. This starts with a good first impression. Focus on the aspects of your game that capture people’s attention and get players to come back. Set clear user expectations by including clear instructions and captions about how the gameplay works—for example, “swipe to scroll” and “shake your phone to jump”.
3. Have a clear call to action: This is your chance to summarize your game and to encourage users to play the full version by downloading your app. As an example, “Enjoyed playing? Download now to beat level two.” It’s important to make the call to action as clear as possible with a clickable area for a smooth transition into your game.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Google Manufacturer Center Rolls Out International Expansion, API Updates, And New Content Discovery Opportunities To Help You Better Showcase Your Brand Online

29 November 2017 by

With the launch of self-sign up earlier this year, thousands of top brands and manufacturers have already begun using Google Manufacturer Center to enhance their product’s images, descriptions, and variants in Shopping ads. Today, we’re excited to announce new ways to help brands — both in the US and abroad — manage their data more easily and provide a more consistent brand experience on Google and across the web.

Manufacturer Center expands to more countries

To help brands abroad, we’ve expanded availability for Manufacturer Center to the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, France, Brazil, and the Netherlands. Now, brands with products sold in these markets can use Manufacturer Center to best represent their products to shoppers, access unique analytics and insights, and improve the performance of Shopping ads featuring their products.

Increase opportunities to highlight your products’ best features and benefits

Shoppers are constantly looking for information, trying to ensure the product they ultimately choose is the perfect fit for their needs. Information from Manufacturer Center now appears in Google Knowledge Panels in the US, highlighting core product features to shoppers at key decision-making stages. With descriptions, images, features, and more directly supplied by you, the manufacturer, shoppers will be better informed and feel more confident choosing your branded products.

Manage product information programmatically with the Manufacturer Center API

We know that manually uploading, editing, deleting, and distributing product data can make it difficult to keep up with a brand’s ever-changing product assortment, and using feeds may not offer the desired level of control. With the launch of the Manufacturer Center API, brands (or their 3rd party data partners) can streamline product data updates in the following ways:

  • Add new products directly to Manufacturer Center.
  • Update existing products in Manufacturer Center with the most current product data.
  • Delete products from an existing Manufacturer Center account.
  • Monitor data quality and review product data errors to optimize a brand’s presence on Google.
  • Surface Google’s product data feedback in external data management tools.
  • Streamline product data updates and syndication to Google by creating custom workflows compliant with data management policies and procedures.

To get started with the Manufacturer Center API, check out the Developer’s Guide and Portal article here.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

New AdWords Innovations To Drive Better Results For Your Business

16 November 2017 by

Consumers are more curious, more demanding, and more impatient than ever—and even more so during the busy holiday season. AdWords has been redesigned to help you reach these mobile-first consumers in faster and easier ways. Today, we’re introducing more innovations available only in the new experience. From promoting your latest offers to finding ways to grow your business, these products can help you save time and boost performance. Learn how some advertisers are seeing an increase in conversion rate and return on ad spend when applying these innovations to their campaigns.

Highlight your top deals with promotion extensions

People are always looking for deals, whether it’s for a discount on holiday gifts or a cheaper flight. In fact, 7 out of 10 internet users look for sales or discounts before visiting a store.1 To help attract these deal-seeking customers with your latest offers, we’re introducing promotion extensions.

Show your latest offers with promotion extensions

 
Promotion extensions make it easy for you to keep your promotions up to date without the need to create new ads. They also free up the rest of your ad for more unique content, like your brand terms or a clear call to action.

For example, if you’re a shoe store, you might use promotion extensions to show a “30% off” promo code on all Black Friday orders. You can also make these types of seasonal offers more prominent in your ad by selecting one of 12 occasions, like Black Friday or Back-to-school.

Brands like Torrid and Shoe Carnival have already seen great results after using promotion extensions:

“Promotion extensions effectively communicate our promotions without sacrificing our core message of quality and fit, giving us a conversion rate lift of 30%.” – David Chau, Senior Digital Marketing Analyst at Torrid Brands

“Promotion extensions give customers even more reason to come to our site and buy–all while raising our ROAS by 20%. This extension should be in every ecommerce advertiser’s toolbox.” – Michael Nuss, Director of Digital Marketing at Shoe Carnival

Test drive new ideas with ad variations

Sometimes small changes to your ad text—like adding a touch of holiday spirit or using a different call to action—can dramatically affect performance. That’s why today, we’re rolling out ad variations in the new AdWords experience: a fast and easy way to test changes across your text ads at scale.

For example, you may want to see how “Happy Holidays” performs when used in your text ads. With ad variations, you can test this change across thousands of ads in just a few clicks. In fact, some advertisers have set up variations for more than 1 million ads in less than a minute.2

You’ll then get the test results as soon as they’re statistically significant. If you see that an ad variation is doing well, you can quickly replace all of your original ads with the new variation.

Businesses like Merkle and Agoda are already using ad variations to test, measure, and apply variations that drive better results for their business in less time.

Performance marketing agency Merkle helped their client, a leading online educator, achieve a 13% increase in clicks and a 14% increase in conversions when their ad variations test revealed that expanding their text ads and implementing optimized ad rotations would improve their performance.

“With ad variations, we’re able to test ad copy changes across our entire account in just a few minutes, which previously took hours of manual work. This means we get to quickly test ad copy and make improvements that result in better ad performance.” – Robert Tayon, Head of PPC at Agoda

Reach the right shoppers with custom intent audiences

Right now, people may be actively shopping for gifts that only you can deliver. To help you reach these I-want-to-buy shoppers, we’re rolling out custom intent audiences for the Google Display Network. Custom intent audiences make it easy for you to reach people who want to buy the specific products you offer–based on data from your campaigns, website and YouTube channel.

For example, if you’re a travel agency offering holiday getaways, Google could automatically create an audience of people shopping for “all-inclusive ski resorts” or “flights to Palm Springs.” We’ll then show you reach and performance estimates for each audience, so you can plan your campaign with precision.

Find new opportunities to grow your business

Looking for more ways to improve campaign performance this holiday season? The Opportunities page now offers more actionable recommendations, relevant insights, and best practices to help you meet your business goals. With manager account support and the ability to filter by category (like “bids & budgets”), your opportunities are clearly organized so you can apply them across all your accounts and campaigns with just a few clicks.

Customers like Mindshare said the improvements on the Opportunities page were very helpful for their business:

“The Opportunities page in our manager account lets us quickly identify optimization and efficiency improvements, estimate cost, traffic, and performance impact across multiple markets, and implement them in one click.” – Amy Perkins, Paid Search Account Director, Mindshare

Get started

Log in to the new AdWords experience to start using these innovations and deliver better results for your business.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

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