Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing | Youtube Marketing

How Evolving User Patterns Drive New Ad Experiences On YouTube

21 November 2018 by

At YouTube, we’re on a constant quest to give people the perfect viewing experience. But over the years, what that looks like has changed significantly.

The way we watch video is always changing. And we want to keep advertisers abreast of these trends, with new ad experiences molded to the new ways people watch. This was the spirit behind our introduction of six-second bumper ads more than two years ago–as a response to the increasingly mobile habits of our users.

Today we’re highlighting how we’re adapting to three new trends in the user experience.

Longer viewing sessions

Our recent user experience research suggests that in addition to factors such as the length of ads, viewers are quite sensitive to the frequency of ad breaks, especially during longer viewing sessions. Through this research, we also learned that fewer interruptions is correlated with better user metrics, including less abandonment of content and higher rates of ad viewing. To respond to this, we will begin testing ad pods–two ads stacked back to back, where viewers have the option to skip directly to the content if it’s not the right ad for them.

Why does this solution make sense? Because when users see two ads in a break, they’re less likely to be interrupted by ads later. In fact, those users will experience up to 40 percent fewer interruptions by ads in the session.1 Early experiment results also show an 8-11 percent increase in unique reach and a 5-10 percent increase in frequency for advertisers, with no impact on Brand Lift metrics.2 This new experience, launching on desktop this year then followed by mobile and TV screens, aims to accommodate viewer preferences while continuing to help advertisers connect with their most important audiences.

More self-directed discovery

The way users prefer to find videos to watch is also changing. Remember back when the only YouTube videos you’d watch came in the form of a shared URL from a friend? Over the years, video viewing on YouTube has become more self-directed, as more viewers than ever before hop into their home or trending feeds and scroll to find a recommended video. In fact, over the last three years, watch time from content users discover on the YouTube homepage has grown 10X.3 That’s why we brought TrueView video discovery ads to the YouTube home feed, along with the Masthead and Universal App campaign ads. The YouTube home feed continues to be a great place for users to discover their next favorite creator, and now it can be a great place for them to discover your brand.

Watching on TV screens

We’re seeing incredible watchtime growth on TV screens: on average, users watch over 180 million hours of YouTube on TV screens every day.4  Last month, we introduced the TV screen device type in Google Ads and Display & Video 360, allowing you to tailor your campaigns for connected TVs – for example, by using a different creative or setting a specific device bid adjustment – and see reporting for ads that run on TV screens.

In the face of these burgeoning user trends—as well as the next wave, and the next—we’ll continue working to build the ideal video viewing experience, and keep thinking up ways to deliver value for our advertiser partners.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Drive Better Results: An Insider’s Look At The Latest Google Ads Innovations

25 October 2018 by

With the busy holiday season ahead, we’re investing in new ways to help you work smarter and exceed your omnichannel goals. Check out the innovations we unveiled today at SMX East.

Easier ways to manage your messages

It’s no surprise that messaging has become a big part of our modern lives. If you’re inviting a friend to “Friendsgiving” dinner, you’re probably sending a quick text message. In the coming weeks, we’re rolling out two improvements to click-to-message ads:

  • Email forwarding sends text messages to your email, so you don’t need to provide a phone number to use message extensions. Responding to the email will automatically send a text reply back to your customer.
  • Automatic reply sends a preset message back to customers as soon as they message you. For example, you can automatically reply with, “Thanks for your message. We’ll get back to you within the hour.”

To help measure the success of your click-to-message ads, we’re expanding message reporting to include message conversions. You’ll be able to define the number of user-initiated exchanges needed to count as a conversion. For example, if it typically takes two or more exchanges before a customer orders a holiday dinner from your restaurant, you can set that as your conversion threshold.

“Using message extensions, we can offer fast assistance when our busy customers are looking for a style recommendation or opinion on fit, and can easily share images and links. Now, message reporting will help us analyze which parts of our campaigns are driving the most in-depth, valuable conversations with stylists, and where we can improve performance.” – Michaella Kurdziel, Director of Experience Excellence & Learning at MM.LaFleur

Take action on your data across online and offline channels

Most customer journeys still end in store, and 61% of shoppers would rather shop with brands that have a physical location than ones that are online only.1 Businesses need to measure the offline impact of digital advertising in order to take action on omnichannel behavior: store visits measurement is one way to do that. As a reminder, store visits are estimates based on data from users that have turned on Location History. Only aggregated and anonymized data is reported to advertisers, and they aren’t able to see any store visits from individual website visits, ad clicks, viewable impressions, or people.

To help you take action on store visits, we’re bringing these insights to data-driven attribution and Smart Bidding which use machine learning to help you improve performance. Data-driven attribution helps you understand which keywords, ads, ad groups, and campaigns have the greatest effect on your business goals. You can use this information to drive more conversions using Smart Bidding.We’re also adding more ways to measure the full value of your marketing. In the coming weeks, Store Visits in Google Analytics will start rolling out to eligible advertisers to connect store visits to other marketing efforts that bring customers to your website and then to your store.

One example of a business measuring the online to offline impact of its marketing is department store JCPenney. JCPenney had long recognized that digital campaigns led to store visits but wasn’t able to attribute those visits to specific channels. With Store Visits in Google Analytics, JCPenney was able to look at store visits and visit rate by channel to understand which online marketing channels were most effective in driving in-store visits, and efficiently scale investment in those channels.

We hope these new products can simplify your day-to-day and improve performance across your Google Ads campaigns during the holiday season and beyond.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

From Discovery To Click, New YouTube Ads Capabilities For More Effective Video Storytelling

1 October 2018 by

The heightened role of video throughout today’s consumer journey is an exciting opportunity for marketers to build connections that drive better business outcomes. At Advertising Week New York, we’re announcing new ways for marketers to become more effective full-funnel storytellers using the combined power of YouTube’s creative canvas with Google’s machine learning and measurement solutions.

Help viewers take action with extensions

Soon you’ll be able to make your video ads more actionable with a greater variety of ad extensions. Similar to extensions on Search ads, extensions on YouTube enhance your video ad with additional useful information—giving consumers more reasons to take action. You can already add location and form extensions (currently in beta) to your TrueView in-stream ads. Now we’re exploring additional use cases that encourage viewers to complete lower-funnel actions like finding the next movie showtime, downloading an app or booking a trip.

Brands like Vodafone, Chili’s, 20th Century Fox, Headspace and Maybelline are already using extensions for video ads to bring more relevance to their mobile ads and drive impact on the metrics that matter most. Using extensions, Vodafone drove a 2.3x incremental lift in Ad Recall and a 3.5 percent CTR—a 785 percent increase over their regional benchmark.

Measure the full impact of your video campaign

Video storytelling isn’t just about driving short-term campaign wins—it’s also about driving measurable results at every stage of the consumer journey. We know this is easier said than done, which is why we’re evolving our Brand Lift solution and partnering with IRI to make it simpler for advertisers to measure and act upon upper- and lower-funnel metrics.

Based on your feedback, soon you’ll be able to set up Brand Lift studies directly in Google Ads or Display & Video 360 and conveniently view reporting alongside your other ad metrics. We’ve also started sending Brand Lift surveys continuously throughout the duration of your campaign so you can understand how your video ads are influencing viewer perceptions in near real time. Additionally, we’ve introduced two new metrics: lifted users, the number of people who were influenced by your ad, and cost-per-lifted-user to make it easier for you to optimize your campaign’s effectiveness and cost-efficiency. To get the most out of these new measurement tools, we recommend using Maximize Lift bidding.

We’re also ramping up our investments in Google Measurement Partners to ensure our advertisers can measure YouTube media with measurement solutions that meet rigorous, verified standards. We work closely with partners to ensure their solutions respect user privacy. In addition to Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS) and Oracle Data Cloud, soon CPG advertisers will have the option to measure their YouTube media using IRI. These offerings complement geo experiments with Nielsen MPA, giving advertisers a variety of options for seeing the offline impact of their video ads. Last week we also announced expanded integrations for brand suitability and reach reporting, continuing our commitment to providing both quality and choice when it comes to helping marketers better understand their media investments.

We’re excited about how these capabilities can help take your campaigns to the next level, driving real business impact all along the customer journey.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing | Youtube Marketing

New MRC Accreditations And Partners For Google And YouTube Ads Measurement

26 September 2018 by

Is my marketing working? It sounds like a simple question, but in today’s complex environment, answering it correctly is a challenge. To help advance advertising measurement, we’ve invested in third-party accreditations through the Media Rating Council (MRC), and partnerships with leading measurement technology providers. Together, these efforts help ensure that the metrics our advertising solutions deliver are trusted, align with industry standards, and can be compared across providers.

Today, we’re announcing new MRC accreditations across Google advertising products, including Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform (specifically Display & Video 360 and Campaign Manager), and Google Ad Manager.1

We’ve also made progress with Google Measurement Partners for viewability, brand safety, and reach reporting on YouTube.

Trusted metrics across Google’s advertising solutions

Advertisers consistently tell us that they struggle with comparing media placements to determine where to invest their limited marketing resources. It’s a problem that’s made even worse when media providers use different definitions of commonly accepted metrics like clicks, impressions, and viewable impressions.

By endorsing the MRC standards and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) guidelines for media measurement, we stand on the side of marketers, who deserve transparency and fairness in their media buys.

Below, you’ll see the comprehensive list of MRC accreditations we currently maintain across search, display, and video ads on the web and in apps. Accredited metrics include various aspects of our clicks, served impressions, viewable impressions, and invalid traffic detection and filtration. 

With today’s announcements, YouTube video ad impressions and viewability metrics for desktop, mobile web, and mobile in-app are now fully MRC accredited in Google Ads, Display & Video 360, and Campaign Manager. And we’ve begun the audit process for MRC accreditation of recently added metrics, including brand safety and Unique Reach reporting on YouTube in Google Ads.

“Google has consistently demonstrated a commitment to helping advertisers and publishers achieve transparency and quality in measurement through its work with the MRC. In addition to submitting products for initial consideration for MRC accreditation, Google also has expanded on the scope of what’s being submitted for existing accredited products. This progress is emblematic of what we at MRC consider to be our core industry mission: to help lift the bar for quality in measurement consistently upward.”

—George Ivie, CEO and Executive Director, Media Rating Council

“Google’s efforts to create transparency and choice through MRC accreditation demonstrates their commitment to delivering a better, more responsible advertising ecosystem. The ultimate goal is to ensure transparency at every step in the complex advertising supply chain, and Google’s efforts are helping us achieve that objective.”

—Bob Liodice, CEO, ANA

More transparent YouTube measurement with trusted partners

To help advertisers measure YouTube media in a verified, privacy-safe way with the measurement solution of their choice, we’ve also made progress with Google Measurement Partners for viewability, brand safety, and reach reporting.

First, the YouTube data feed for video viewability reporting by third-parties is currently under audit by the MRC. Our ultimate goal is to achieve MRC accreditation for our integrations with DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science (IAS), so advertisers can be confident that YouTube metrics have been third-party verified, no matter where they choose to measure.

In addition, brand safety verification on YouTube by both DoubleVerify and IAS is now in expanded beta. In beta tests with DoubleVerify and IAS, we’re seeing 99 percent success rates on brand safety across both auction and reserve, including Google Preferred.2

We’re also expanding our partnerships for reach measurement, which now include Nielsen, comScore, Kantar, and soon, Meetrics. This month, YouTube’s integration with Nielsen for mobile in-app measurement has expanded to Australia and Italy. This is in addition to the U.S., Canada, Japan, U.K., Germany, and France which are already available.

To know if their marketing is working, advertisers need access to accurate, timely metrics they can trust, regardless of which measurement provider they choose. Looking to the future, we’ll continue investing in measurement solutions and partnerships that help advertisers understand and compare the impact of their investments using commonly accepted metrics and standards.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

How To Help Shoppers Looking For Inspiration This Holiday

13 September 2018 by

Gone are the days where shoppers had one specific gift in mind. Today, they’re asking brands to help inspire them. Our research also shows that 61 percent of shoppers are open to buying from new retailers during the holiday season—and in the 2017 holiday season 46 percent of them actually did.

That’s a huge number of consumers looking to uncover new brands and products or re-discover old favorites. But with so much choice at their fingertips, shoppers need help cutting through the clutter and feeling confident in their choices.

A recent study shows that Google is the first place US shoppers go to discover or find a new brand or product. That’s why we’re continuing to invest in solutions to drive inspiration and discovery, capture intent, and amplify your message to customers, wherever they’re shopping across Google and the web. So lean back, grab an eggnog (it’s never too early), and learn about how consumers plan to shop this holiday—and how Google can help.

Helping shoppers discover with video in Showcase Shopping Ads

When it comes to finding new products and narrowing down their choices, nearly two-thirds of shoppers say online video has given them ideas for their next purchases, and over 90 percent of these folks say that they’ve discovered new products and brands via YouTube.

Video to Showcase Shopping ads helps shoppers more deeply engage with your products. This is our first retail search ad unit to feature video, designed to help you provide a more immersive, contextual experience for shoppers.  

Video in Showcase Shopping ads is the next addition to the Showcase Shopping ads we launched last year, which let you upload multiple images to a single ad and promote your products through beautiful imagery, descriptions, products, and relevant promotions. Since launch, we’ve seen that the top Showcase slot drives 3.6X higher than average CTR, and Showcase receives 20 percent more conversion credit with first-click attribution. And retailers like Venus Fashion are seeing success with acquiring new customers: 68% of purchases from shoppers who engage with Venus Showcase ads are new.

This format is available to advertisers already running Showcase Shopping ads.

Inspire undecided shoppers with Shoppable Image ads

Curious consumers aren’t just finding inspiration through video. Did you know that more than one-third of holiday shoppers said they searched for images before they went in store to shop? The growth of “street style” and online influencers all show the movement towards looking at lifestyle images for visual inspiration.

Shoppable Images enable you to highlight your shopping ads on curated, published content from our publisher partners. For publishers, it’s a chance for shoppers to be able to purchase seamlessly. For example, a shopper might visit her favorite blog like This Time Tomorrow, and see a selection of visually similar offers after clicking the tag icon in the image. Over the next year, we will continue to roll out this experience to more publishers, as well as pilot new surfaces like Google Image Search, where we also know shoppers go to look for inspiration. 

We hope these updates help you stand out from the crowd and capture undecided shoppers’ attention with inspirational imagery and video. For a look into more consumer trends this season, check out our Think With Google article on holiday 2018 insights.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

Introducing A New Transparency Report For Political Ads

15 August 2018 by

We first launched our Transparency Report in 2010 with the goal of fostering important conversations about the relationship between governments, companies, and the free flow of information on the internet.

Over the years, we’ve evolved the report, adding sections about content removed from Google Search due to European privacy laws, adoption of encryption on websites (HTTPS), and more. And today, we’re adding another new section to our Transparency Report: Political Advertising on Google.

Earlier this year, we took important steps to increase transparency in political advertising. We implemented new requirements for any advertiser purchasing election ads on Google in the U.S.—these advertisers now have to provide a government-issued ID and other key information that confirms they are a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident, as required by law. We also required that election ads incorporate a clear “paid for by” disclosure. Now, we’re continuing to roll out new transparency features with the addition of the political advertising report as well as a new political Ad Library.

The new political advertising report shows who buys federal election ads in the U.S., how much money is spent across states and congressional districts on such ads, and who the top advertisers are overall. We designed this report for anyone interested in transparency—the information is searchable and downloadable so that you can easily access and sort through the data. We’re updating the report every week, so as we head into election season, anyone can see new ads that get uploaded or new advertisers that decide to run Google ads.

Meanwhile, our new, searchable election Ad Library shows things like which ads had the highest views, what the latest election ads running on our platform are, and deep dives into specific advertisers’ campaigns. In addition, the data from the report and Ad Library is publicly available on Google Cloud’s BigQuery. Using BigQuery’s API, anyone can write code and run their own unique queries on this data set. Researchers, political watchdog groups and private citizens can use our data set to develop charts, graphs, tables or other visualizations of political advertising on Google Ads services. Together with the Transparency Report, we hope this provides unprecedented, data-driven insights into election ads on our platform.

Even though the political advertising report and Ad Library provide many new insights, we know there is more work to be done. We’re working with experts in the U.S. and around the world to explore tools that capture a wider range of political ads—including ads about political issues (beyond just candidate ads), state and local election ads, and political ads in other countries. We’re also continuing to share our Protect Your Election tools to safeguard campaigns from digital attacks. As we approach the 2018 midterm elections in the U.S, we’ve introduced new tools to help protect political campaigns, provide voters with accurate information, and increase transparency on our platforms, and we’ll continue to do more.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

Putting Machine Learning Into The Hands Of Every Advertiser

10 July 2018 by

The ways people get things done are constantly changing, from finding the closest coffee shop to organizing family photos. Earlier this year, we explored how machine learning is being used to improve our consumer products and help people get stuff done.

In just one hour, we’ll share how we’re helping marketers unlock more opportunities for their businesses with our largest deployment of machine learning in ads. We’ll explore how this technology works in our products and why it’s key to delivering the helpful and frictionless experiences consumers expect from brands.

Deliver more relevance with responsive search ads

Consumers today are more curious, more demanding, and they expect to get things done faster because of mobile. As a result, they expect your ads to be helpful and personalized. Doing this isn’t easy, especially at scale. That’s why we’re introducing responsive search ads. Responsive search ads combine your creativity with the power of Google’s machine learning to help you deliver relevant, valuable ads.

Simply provide up to 15 headlines and 4 description lines, and Google will do the rest. By testing different combinations, Google learns which ad creative performs best for any search query. So people searching for the same thing might see different ads based on context.

We know this kind of optimization works: on average, advertisers who use Google’s machine learning to test multiple creative see up to 15 percent more clicks.1

Responsive search ads will start rolling out to advertisers over the next several months.

Maximize relevance and performance on YouTube

People watch over 1 billion hours of video on YouTube every day. And increasingly, they’re tuning in for inspiration and information on purchases large and small. For example, nearly 1 in 2 car buyers say they turn to YouTube for information before their purchase.2 And nearly 1 in 2 millennials go there for food preparation tips before deciding what ingredients to buy.3 That means it’s critical your video ads show at the right moment to the right audience.

Machine learning helps us turn that attention into results on YouTube. In the past, we’ve helped you optimize campaigns for views and impressions. Later this year, we’re rolling out Maximize lift to help you reach people who are most likely to consider your brand after seeing a video ad. This new Smart Bidding strategy is also powered by machine learning. It automatically adjusts bids at auction time to maximize the impact your video ads have on brand perception throughout the consumer journey.

Maximize lift is available now as a beta and will roll out to advertisers globally later this year.

Drive more foot traffic with Local campaigns

Whether they start their research on YouTube or Google, people still make the majority of their purchases in physical stores. In fact, mobile searches for “near me” have grown over 3X in the past two years,4 and almost 80 percent of shoppers will go in store when there’s an item they want immediately.5 For many of you, that means driving foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar locations is critical—especially during key moments in the year, like in-store events or promotions.

Today we’re introducing Local campaigns: a new campaign type designed to drive store visits exclusively. Provide a few simple things—like your business locations and ad creative—and Google automatically optimizes your ads across properties to bring more customers into your store.

Local campaigns will roll out to advertisers globally over the coming months.

Get the most from your Shopping campaigns

Earlier this year, we rolled out a new Shopping campaign type that optimizes performance based on your goals. These Smart Shopping campaigns help you hit your revenue goals without the need to manually manage and bid to individual products. In the coming months, we’re improving them to optimize across multiple business goals.

Beyond maximize conversion value, you’ll also be able to select store visits or new customers as goals. Machine learning factors in the likelihood that a click will result in any of these outcomes and helps adjust bids accordingly.

Machine learning is also used to optimize where your Shopping ads show—on Google.com, Image Search, YouTube and millions of sites and apps across the web—and which products are featured. It takes into account a wide range of signals, like seasonal demand and pricing. Brands like GittiGidiyor, an eBay company, are using Smart Shopping campaigns to simplify how they manage their ads and deliver better results. GittiGidiyor was able to increase return on ad spend by 28 percent and drive 4 percent more sales, while saving time managing campaigns.

We’re also adding support for leading e-commerce platforms to help simplify campaign management. In the coming weeks, you’ll be able to set up and manage Smart Shopping campaigns right from Shopify, in addition to Google Ads.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

Introducing Simpler Brands And Solutions For Advertisers And Publishers

27 June 2018 by

We launched AdWords nearly 18 years ago with a simple goal—to make it easier for people to connect online with businesses. A search for eco-friendly stationery, quilting supplies, or for a service like a treehouse builder gave us an opportunity to deliver valuable ads that were useful and relevant at the moment. That idea was the start of our first advertising product and led to the ads business we have today.

A lot has changed since then. Mobile is now a huge part of our everyday lives. People quickly switch from searching for products, to watching videos, browsing content, playing games and more. As a result, marketers have more opportunities to reach consumers across channels, screens and formats. The opportunity has never been more exciting, but it’s also never been more complex. Over the years, Google ads have evolved from helping marketers connect with people on Google Search, to helping them connect at every step of the consumer journey through text, video, display and more.  

That’s why today we are introducing simpler brands and solutions for our advertising products: Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform, and Google Ad Manager. These new brands will help advertisers and publishers of all sizes choose the right solutions for their businesses, making it even easier for them to deliver valuable, trustworthy ads and the right experiences for consumers across devices and channels. As part of this change, we are releasing new solutions that help advertisers get started with Google Ads and drive greater collaboration across teams.  

Google AdWords is becoming Google Ads 

The new Google Ads brand represents the full range of advertising capabilities we offer today—on Google.com and across our other properties, partner sites, and apps—to help marketers connect with the billions of people finding answers on Search, watching videos on YouTube, exploring new places on Google Maps, discovering apps on Google Play, browsing content across the web, and more.  

For small businesses specifically, we’re introducing a new campaign type in Google Ads that makes it easier than ever to get started with online advertising. It brings the machine learning technology of Google Ads to small businesses and helps them get results without any heavy lifting—so they can stay focused on running their businesses. To learn more, visit this post.

We’ll introduce more new campaign types at Google Marketing Live. Sign up to watch the livestream on July 10.

Stronger collaboration with Google Marketing Platform

We’re enabling stronger collaboration for enterprise marketing teams by unifying our DoubleClick advertiser products and the Google Analytics 360 Suite under a single brand: Google Marketing Platform. 

We’ve heard from marketers that there are real benefits to using ads and analytics technology together, including a better understanding of customers and better business results. Google Marketing Platform helps marketers achieve their goals by building on existing integrations between the Google Analytics 360 Suite and DoubleClick Digital Marketing. The platform helps marketers plan, buy, measure and optimize digital media and customer experiences in one place. To learn more, visit the Google Marketing Platform blog.

As part of Google Marketing Platform, we’re announcing Display & Video 360. Display & Video 360 brings together features from DoubleClick Bid Manager, Campaign Manager, Studio and Audience Center to allow creative, agency, and media teams to collaborate and execute ad campaigns end-to-end in a single place. We’ll share more details about Display & Video 360 in the coming weeks, including a demo during the keynote at Google Marketing Live.

Google Ad Manager: A unified platform

We recognize that the way publishers monetize their content has changed. With people accessing content on multiple screens, and with advertisers’ growing demand for programmatic access, publishers need to be able to manage their businesses more simply and efficiently. That’s why for the last three years, we’ve been working to bring together DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange in a complete and unified programmatic platform under a new name–Google Ad Manager. 

With this evolution, we’re excited to do even more for our partners—earning them more money, more efficiently, wherever people are watching videos, playing games or engaging with content, and however advertisers are looking to work with them. To learn more, visit the Google Ad Manager blog.

Transparency and controls people can trust

We know that the media and technology advertisers and publishers choose to use impacts the relationships they have with their customers. As always, our commitment is to ensure that all of our products and platforms set the industry’s highest standard in giving people transparency and choice in the ads they see. For example, we recently announced new Ads Settings and expanded Why this ad? across all of our services, and almost all websites and apps that partner with us to show ads.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

New Innovations Remove Friction From Discovering Products In-Store And Online

12 June 2018 by

Driven by rapid changes in technology and mobile, consumer expectations continue to rise at an unrelenting pace. There are brand new ways for people to find and engage with businesses, and it’s becoming critical for marketers to remove friction at every step of the consumer journey. This morning at Search Marketing Expo Advanced, we made three announcements for marketers and retailers including:

1. New innovations to highlight your physical locations

Almost 80% of shoppers will go in-store when they have an item they want immediately.1 To help capture this demand, we’re expanding affiliate location extensions to video campaigns on YouTube– on top of Search and Display campaigns. This helps brand manufacturers drive and measure foot traffic to nearby retail stores and auto dealers that sell their products. We’ve seen that adding affiliate location extensions to TrueView in-stream and bumper ads can increase the clickthrough rate by over 15%.2

New local catalog ads on Display will also roll out to all advertisers by the end of the month to help shoppers discover what you sell, then visit your store. One-third of shoppers say finding inspiration is something they enjoy most about shopping.3 This interactive experience highlights a hero image and your inventory in an easy-to-scroll, mobile layout that helps shoppers explore your products. It also features in-store availability and detailed pricing information. This new format can complement your traditional print campaigns – including catalogs, flyers, and circulars – with the added audience and measurement benefits of digital ads.

Boulanger is one of the largest electronics and appliances retailers in France. The retail brand had a special promotional event for Spring 2018, so it turned to local catalog ads to boost its sales. Boulanger showcased a cheerful lifestyle image, a message welcoming the season and products carefully curated for local in-store promotion. With help from both click-based and impression-based store visits* (launched in March), the campaign drove over 20K visits to its stores, delivering a return of 42 times its investment on ad spend.

*Store visits are estimates based on aggregated, anonymized data from a sample set of users who have turned on Location History.

Onboarding to both local catalog ads and local inventory ads is now much easier for retailers of all sizes with the new local feed partnership program. The new program allows point-of-sale or inventory data providers, like Cayan, Pointy, Linx, and receipts, to provide sales and inventory data to Google on behalf of merchants, so they don’t have to create their own local product feeds. As an additional benefit, retailers can showcase their local inventory for free on the “See What’s In Store” feature on the search knowledge panel.

2. Competitive pricing insights to help deliver better sales results

Beyond availability of products in store, we know that price is also a top consideration for consumers. New price benchmarks in AdWords reporting will be available soon to show Shopping advertisers how other retailers are pricing the same products. You can use these pricing insights to inform your bidding strategy when you have price-competitive products to promote, to influence pricing strategy with your merchandising teams, or to troubleshoot performance drops due to competitors’ pricing.

For example, let’s say you find that you’re selling a sweater for $40 while most retailers are selling the same sweater for $60. You may choose to bid upon this sweater because your product is more price-competitive in the current market and will appeal to more potential customers.

3. Updates for our Shopping Actions program

Consumers continue to be open to new ways of discovering and buying products. Today at SMX Advanced, we shared an update on Shopping Actions, the program we launched in March to give consumers an easy way to complete the purchase from retailers, while on Google platforms like Search, the Assistant, or by voice.

Since its launch, thousands of retailers have requested to join through our interest form, and more than 70 retailers are live on the program today. Early testing indicates that participating retailers on average see an increase in total clicks and conversions at a lower overall cost per click and conversion, compared to running Shopping ads alone.4

As always, SMX Advanced is an exciting event that brings leading marketers together. We hope you’ll join us in our Learn with Google Classroom to connect and hear more about how these new products can help you grow your business.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Faster, Safer And Better Ad Experiences For Consumers

17 May 2018 by

Consumers have high expectations for faster, safer, and better digital experiences. This means it’s more important than ever for brands to deliver on these expectations.

At Google, we’re building new innovations to help AdWords advertisers design the best web experiences for your customers.

Speed: Improvements to click measurement

Speed matters. In fact, a one-second delay in mobile page load can decrease conversions up to 20%.1 That’s why we announced support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) as landing pages in AdWords and developed new tools like the Mobile Speed Scorecard and the Impact Calculator. With just a few inputs, this tool estimates the revenue impact that can result from improving the speed of your mobile website.

Another way we’re improving mobile site speed is parallel tracking (blog | help center) — which was introduced earlier this year for advertisers using click measurement systems. How does this improve speed? After an ad click, web browsers will process click measurement requests in the background, helping people reach your site up to several seconds faster.2 This creates better user experiences, leading to more conversions and less budget spent on bounced clicks.

Starting October 30, 2018, parallel tracking will be required for all AdWords accounts. To get a jump start, you can now opt in your Search Network and Shopping campaigns. And even if you don’t intend to turn it on today, you should start talking with your click measurement providers to ensure that they are ready for this change. Doing so, ensures there’s no disruption to your click measurement system.

If you’ve confirmed that your click measurement system is already compatible, you can opt in from your account-level “Settings” page in the “Tracking” section. Learn more

Security: Focus on HTTPS

You want your customers to have a safe and secure experience, every time they engage with your website. But too many brands still use unencrypted HTTP to send users to their landing pages. That’s why Google strongly advocates that sites adopt HTTPS encryption, the industry standard for ensuring the security and integrity of data traveling between the browser and the website.

Over the last year, Chrome has marked an increasingly large set of HTTP pages as “not secure.” Beginning in July 2018 with the release of Chrome 68, Chrome will mark all HTTP pages as “not secure.”

To make sure your users continue to have the best possible landing page experience, we’ve taken a few extra steps:

  • Enabled HTTP Search ad clicks to automatically be redirected to HTTPS when we know that your site prefers HTTPS, which we will begin rolling out the week of June 11.
  • Launched Ad version history to allow advertisers to update your landing page URLs from HTTP to HTTPS without resetting all of your performance statistics. 
  • Will start to warn advertisers in AdWords when you’re using less secure HTTP addresses for landing pages, in the next few weeks.

We hope that these innovations will help people browse more quickly, confidently, and securely.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 … 10