Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing | Youtube Marketing

Track Your Goals With Campaign Groups And Performance Targets

6 September 2016 by

AdWords provides powerful tools to help advertisers grow their business. For example, if you’re about to launch a new holiday campaign, you can use TrueView ads on YouTube along with banner ads on the Google Display Network to drive brand awareness and more holiday sales. To make it easier for you to track and forecast the performance of these campaigns against your advertising goals, we’re introducing campaign groups and performance targets.

Create a campaign group

You can now package AdWords campaigns (including Video, Display, Search, and Shopping campaigns) into a single campaign group. For our holiday example, set up your YouTube and Display campaigns, select “campaign groups” from the left menu, and group those two campaigns together to create a campaign group called “Holiday Launch”.

Set a performance target

Performance targets make it easier to monitor and reach your performance goals for each campaign group. Tell us how many clicks or conversions you want to receive, how much you want to spend, and what average CPC or CPA you wish to maintain. We’ll then automatically show you a single view of how your campaign group is performing against those goals, and what we think you’ll likely achieve by the end of the campaign period.

 Here’s an early success story for campaign groups and performance targets:

“Previously I needed to export all my campaigns into a spreadsheet, group them together, and create a pivot table simply to see how they are performing. With campaign groups & performance targets, we can much more easily see how our groups are performing relative to our goals, all from within the AdWords interface.“

– Oleg Monakhov, Senior Lead Generation Manager at Wrike

Note that creating performance targets does not change how we serve your ads or optimize your campaigns. Instead, use it to evaluate whether or not your campaigns are working together toward your broader goals.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Learn From Experts In The AdWords Community

3 August 2016 by

The AdWords Community exists to help advertisers like you improve performance and share best practices. If you haven’t visited the AdWords Community in a while, you might be surprised by what you find. Over the last six months, we’ve made a number of exciting changes. From a new design to expanded content areas, the Google Advertiser Community continues to evolve and help you connect with our experts and improve your performance.

Ask an Expert 

One of the most valuable resources you’ll find on the Community is the experts who frequent the forum on a daily (or even hourly) basis. These experts, part of Google’s Top Contributor program, have years of professional experience with AdWords and a passion for helping fellow Community members succeed.

Most of our Top Contributors have an area of expertise. If you ask a question on the AdWords Community about account automation, you will probably meet Jon Gritton. Jon hails from the UK and runs his own AdWords agency. He is also one of our most tenured AdWords Top Contributors (he’s been answering questions on the forum since 2006!) and our resident AdWords Scripts expert. He has solved well over 800 questions in his time on the AdWords Community.

An Improved Look and Feel 

We also wanted to improve the look and feel of the Community.

  • Using Material Design, the Community now offers the same modern and intuitive experience that’s at the core of our favorite Google apps like Maps, Search, and Gmail. 
  • Managing your advertising isn’t something you only do at your desk, which is why we’re re-designing AdWords for marketing in a mobile-first world. The redesigned Community is also responsive and mobile-friendly—perfect for browsing and resolving questions on the go. 


Go Beyond AdWords 

Finally, we know that AdWords isn’t the only way to promote your business with Google. You can get information about other important Google products on the Community: Google Analytics, Google My Business, Google Partners and Google Small Business.

Get Involved 

Anyone can join the Advertiser Community, post questions and find answers. Visit today to connect with other advertisers.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing | Youtube Marketing

Introducing YouTube Director: A Suite Of Video Ad Creation Products For Businesses

15 June 2016 by

Whether it’s for entertainment, indulging a passion, or discovering something new, more people are turning to YouTube to watch videos. In fact, growth in watch time on YouTube is up at least 50% year-over-year.1 Now, more than ever, businesses can connect with their customers through video advertising on YouTube.

But we know that creating a video ad can be challenging. To make it easier for every business— from a dog walker to a barber shop owner—to get started with advertising on YouTube, we’re launching the YouTube Director suite of products. Three products that make video ads more accessible to businesses.

Make a video ad right from your phone

With the free YouTube Director for business app (available for iPhone today in the U.S. and Canada) anyone can create a video ad for their business quickly and easily—right from their phone. No editing experience required. People like Woody Lovell Jr., owner of the The Barber Shop Club in Los Angeles, are already seeing positive results with YouTube Director.

Woody shot and edited a video ad by himself, uploaded it to YouTube, and worked with an AdWords expert to run a campaign. As a result, Woody’s business saw a significant increase in potential customers being able to remember and recognize his ad.2

We challenged five business owners—including Woody—to create a video ad in twenty minutes or less. Watch what happened and download the app to give it a try.

Get a professional to make your video ad

In select U.S. cities, we’re also offering YouTube Director onsite, a service that sends a professional filmmaker to shoot and edit a video ad for free whenever a business spends at least $150 to advertise on YouTube. YouTube Director onsite is available in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C.—and coming to more cities soon.

Is your business an app? We can create a video ad for you too

YouTube Director automated video creates a video ad automatically from existing assets like logos and app screenshots in the App Store or Google Play Store, and is available globally. Reach out to a Google expert (1-855-500-2756) for more information.

No matter what kind of business you’re in, getting started with advertising on YouTube just became a whole lot easier. We can’t wait to see what you make. Happy filming.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

Ads And Analytics Innovations For A Mobile-First World

24 May 2016 by

The shift to mobile is no longer a change on the horizon. It’s here.

Every year, there are trillions of searches on Google and over half of those searches happen on mobile. And across the millions of websites using Google Analytics today, we’re seeing more than half of all web traffic now coming from smartphones and tablets.

When we asked people to describe the role smartphones play in their lives, they used phrases like “attached to my hip”, “butler” and “lifeline.” Smartphones have become the companion that people turn to in I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, I-want-to-do and I want-to-buy moments throughout the day.

To help marketers succeed in this mobile-first world, we have redesigned AdWords — from the ground-up — and re-thought everything from creatives and bidding, to workflow and measurement.

We’re also making it easier for marketers to bridge the digital and physical worlds. With location-related mobile searches growing 50% faster than all mobile searches, it’s clear that consumers are moving seamlessly between online and offline experiences. So it’s important to help marketers think this way too.

It was incredibly exciting to share new innovations with advertisers this morning at the Google Performance Summit. Below are highlights from today’s announcements. You can watch a replay of the full program here.

AdWords re-imagined for the mobile-first world

Over the last several years, we’ve discovered that accounting for mobile and designing for mobile-first are two very different things. That’s why we’ve completely transformed how we think about and build AdWords.

In order to enable advertisers and developers to drive more downloads of mobile apps — across Google properties — we built Universal App Campaigns. To date, Universal App Campaigns has delivered more than 2 billion downloads for advertisers, across Google Search, Google Play, YouTube, and the Google Display Network. And last week at Google I/O, we announced this campaign type is now available on iOS.

Today, we are announcing even broader changes to advertising with Google, from how text and display ads work, to the way advertisers optimize campaigns.

What do text ads look like in the mobile-first world? Mobile has revolutionized the canvas where ads live. Earlier this year, we removed right-hand side ads on desktop to improve the search experience and make it more consistent across devices. This paved the way for us to introduce the biggest changes to our text ads since AdWords launched fifteen years ago.

Optimized for screen sizes of the most popular smartphones, new expanded text ads in AdWords provide more ad space so you can showcase more information about your products and services before the click. Here are the key changes:

These upgrades help your ads work harder across screens, especially for the on-the-go mobile consumer that wants to know exactly what you offer before tapping into your website.

Based on early testing, some advertisers have reported increases in clickthrough rates of up to 20% compared to current text ads. We encourage you to start planning for this upgrade before it rolls out later this year. How do display ads look in a mobile-first world? From sites to apps to videos, mobile has unlocked a universe of new spaces to reach consumers. Responsive ads for display adapt to the diverse content across the more than two million publisher sites and apps on the Google Display Network (GDN). They also unlock new native inventory so you can engage consumers with ads that match the look and feel of the content they’re browsing. Simply provide headlines, a description, an image, and a URL — and Google will automatically design these beautiful responsive ads.

We’re also extending the reach of GDN remarketing campaigns by giving you access to cross-exchange inventory, which includes more websites and apps around the world. With this inventory, European airline SAS drove about 20% more conversions at a similar CPA for its remarketing campaigns. Learn more

What does bidding look like in a mobile-first world? Marketers need more control and flexibility to optimize bids on specific devices. In the next few months, you’ll be able to set individual bid adjustments for each device type — mobile, desktop and tablet. This lets you anchor your base keyword bid to the device most valuable to your business and then set bid adjustments for each of the other devices. You will also have a wider range to adjust bids, up to +900%. With more controls, you can now optimize with greater precision while keeping things simple with a single campaign that reaches consumers across devices.

Mobile is local, bridging digital and physical worlds for marketers

Nearly one third of all mobile searches are related to location. People’s online and offline worlds are colliding — whether you’re researching restaurant ideas for dinner on Friday night or looking for a store that sells rain boots in your size.

To help advertisers reach consumers searching for physical business locations, we’re introducing new local search ads across Google.com and Google Maps. Advertisers using location extensions will be able to prominently showcase their business locations when consumers search for things like “shoe store” or “car repair near me.” Learn more

We’re also investing in more branded, customized experiences for businesses on Google Maps — geared towards helping you increase store visits. We’re currently developing and experimenting with a variety of ad formats on Maps that make it easier for users to find businesses as they navigate the world around them. For example, Maps users may start to see promoted pins for nearby coffee shops, gas stations, or lunch spots along their driving route. Local business pages are also getting a brand new look — to encourage consumers to explore your store before they even arrive, we’re adding new features like special offers and the ability to browse product inventory.

With online ads bringing more people to your storefronts, how do you measure the impact?

AdWords is the largest online-to-offline ad measurement solution in the world. In fact, since AdWords store visits were introduced two years ago, advertisers have measured over 1 billion store visits globally. 

 
Businesses across a variety of industries around the world are using insights from AdWords store visits to measure the impact of online ads on offline activity. Nissan UK discovered that 6% of mobile ad clicks result in a trip to a dealership, delivering an estimated 25x return on investment. See the full story here.

Succeeding in a mobile-first world

As consumers live their lives online and blur the lines between online and offline, it’s more important than ever to build your business for mobile. Google’s building for this mobile-first world as well and we’re excited to go on this journey with you. 

To see the full range of ads and analytics innovations announced this morning, watch the Google Performance Summit keynote here. Also, check out the new AdWords Marketing Goals site to learn how to use ad solutions to meet your business objectives. 

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Test With Confidence Using Campaign Drafts And Experiments

18 February 2016 by

Have you ever wanted to make changes to your AdWords campaigns, but wanted to understand whether those changes will help you reach your business goals? Over the next few weeks, we’re rolling out campaign drafts and experiments to help you test changes to your campaigns, easily measure results, and apply the changes that are working well for your business.

Use drafts to stage your changes

Drafts let you prepare and review multiple changes to an existing campaign before implementing them. For example, let’s say you want to increase mobile bids for ad groups with strong mobile conversion rates. You can create a draft of your campaign and set different mobile bid adjustments for those ad groups — without impacting your campaign. If you’re happy with the changes in your draft, you can apply them directly to your original campaign.

But how do you know if those mobile bid adjustments will help you reach your business goals?

Run an experiment

Experiments let you test changes to your campaigns in a controlled environment. Let’s say you want to see how your new mobile bid adjustments perform compared to your original settings. First, create a draft with your new mobile bid adjustments. Then, create an experiment from that draft to test those changes against your current bidding strategy. You decide how much traffic (and budget) to split between your experiment and the original campaign, and how long you’d like the experiment to run.

Measure your results

An essential part of running a successful experiment is understanding how your changes are impacting your business goals. For example, measuring the uplift in conversions can help you understand whether your new mobile bid adjustments are resulting in a better return on investment.

With campaign drafts and experiments, you can monitor results in two convenient ways to understand whether your experiment is driving the desired outcome:

  • Compare performance with the reporting scorecard. The performance scorecard has icons that highlight whether the experiment’s metrics are higher or lower than the original campaign, and whether or not the differences are statistically significant. 
  • Evaluate ad group level performance for deeper insights. Sometimes individual ad groups are responsible for significant shifts in overall campaign performance. Monitor ad group-level metrics to understand how each ad group is impacting your campaign. 

If you’re happy with the results of your experiment, you can quickly apply the changes from your experiment to your original campaign, or convert your experiment into a brand new campaign.

Testing with success

Customers like Red Ventures and The Honest Company are using campaign drafts and experiments to test and apply new campaign strategies at scale.

“Campaign drafts and experiments have revolutionized testing for our Fortune 500 clients. The tool streamlines the test creation, analysis, and implementation process. We can now launch more powerful tests in a fraction of the time that it took to manually duplicate campaigns and ad groups. The new scorecard allows you to confidently measure the impact of your tests and implement them in a single click if they’re successful.” – Jeremy Mayes, Vice President of Marketing, Red Ventures

“We have multiple conversion types with varying levels of customer lifetime value. Campaign drafts and experiments let us test new bidding strategies with a quarter of our campaign traffic, and the reporting scorecard let us easily measure the impact on the different types of conversion values. In the past, a test like this would require massive changes to the account. The new streamlined process lets us quickly test new bidding strategies until we find the one that best fits our complex business model.” – Josh Franklin, Search Account Manager, The Honest Company

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog