Google Marketing

Supporting Election Integrity Through Greater Advertising Transparency

4 May 2018 by

Last year, Google committed to make political advertising more transparent. This week, we’re rolling out new policies for U.S. election ads across our platforms as we work to meet those commitments.

As a first step, we’ll now require additional verification for anyone who wants to purchase an election ad on Google in the U.S. and require that advertisers confirm they are a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident, as required by law. That means advertisers will have to provide a government-issued ID and other key information. To help people better understand who is paying for an election ad, we’re also requiring that ads incorporate a clear disclosure of who is paying for it.  

There’s more to come. This summer, we’ll also release a new Transparency Report specifically focused on election ads. This Report will describe who ​is ​buying ​election-related ​ads ​on ​our ​platforms ​and ​how ​much ​money ​is being spent. We’re also building a searchable library for election ads, where anyone can find election ads purchased on Google and who paid for them.

As we learn from these changes and our continued engagement with leaders and experts in the field, we’ll work to improve transparency of political issue ads and expand our coverage to a wider range of elections.

Our work on elections goes far beyond improving policies for advertising. We’re investing heavily in keeping our own platforms secure and working with campaigns, elections officials, journalists, and others to help ensure the security of the online platforms that they depend on. In addition to the industry-leading protections in our consumer products, we’ve developed a range of Protect Your Election tools with Alphabet’s Jigsaw that are specifically tailored for people who are at particularly high risk of online attacks.

Yesterday, we announced improvements to one such product. Google’s Advanced Protection Program, our strongest level of account security for those who face increased risk of sophisticated phishing attacks sent to their email address, now supports Apple’s native applications on iOS devices, including Apple Mail, Calendar and Contacts. We expect this will help more campaigns and officials who are often the targets of sophisticated phishing attacks.

We are also working across the industry and beyond to strengthen protections around elections. We’ve partnered with the National Cyber Security Alliance and Digital Democracy Project at the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School to fund security training programs for elected officials, campaigns, and staff members. We are also supporting the “Disinfo Lab” at the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, which will employ journalists to leverage computational tools to monitor misinformation in the run-up to and during elections.

For over a decade we’ve built products that provide information about elections around the world, to help voters make decisions on the leadership of their communities, their cities, their states, and their countries. We are continuing that work through our efforts to increase election advertising transparency, improve online security for campaigns and candidates, and help combat misinformation.  Stay tuned for more announcements in the coming months.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing | Youtube Marketing

A New Video Format To Reach People Across The Mobile Web And Apps

17 April 2018 by

Over the last year, we’ve been working on a way to extend the reach of your video campaigns to people beyond YouTube, especially as they spend more and more time interacting with apps and sites on their mobile devices. Starting today, you can use out-stream video ads, a new format built exclusively for mobile environments, to reach more potential customers with your video creativity.

Outstream ads drive incremental, cost-efficient and viewable reach beyond YouTube. Ads show on Google video partners, which are high-quality publisher websites and mobile apps where you can show video ads, including TrueView in-stream and Bumper ads. When outstream video ads come into view on a mobile screen, they begin to play with sound off. After that, a user can tap the ad to turn sound on and restart the video from the beginning, or simply keep scrolling.

In every context, an ad needs the opportunity to be seen in order to drive impact, which is why our outstream video ads are charged on viewable CPM. This means that every impression you pay for has been on screen and viewable (as measured by MRC standards). In addition to Active View and unique reach reporting, you can use brand interest lift to measure incremental interest in your brand or product as assessed by an increase in organic searches on Google.com or YouTube.

Outstream video ads complement our efficient reach solutions for YouTube: TrueView for reach and Bumper ads. Now, you can reach even more of your audience across the mobile web and apps with a video ad designed for the ways people read, play, swipe, and scroll on mobile.

Advertisers like Hong Kong Tourism board are already using out-stream video ads to increase awareness and cost-efficient reach. Tina Chao, General Manager, Marketing, says, “To build awareness for Hong Kong as a travel destination, the Hong Kong Tourism Board used out-stream video ads to reach a broad set of potential travelers across Asia. Outstream video ads delivered strong results for our global brand campaign: 30% incremental reach with a 40% lower cost per completed video view and 85% lower CPM.”

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Google Marketing

Helping Publishers Recover Lost Revenue From Ad Blocking

16 April 2018 by

Today, the majority of the internet is supported by digital advertising. But bad ad experiences—the ones that blare music unexpectedly, or force you to wait 10 seconds before you get to the page—are hurting publishers who make the content, apps, and services we use every day. When people encounter annoying ads, and then decide to block all ads, it cuts off revenue for the sites you actually find useful. Many of these people don’t intend to defund the sites they love when they install an ad blocker, but when they do, they block all ads on every site they visit.  

Last year we announced Funding Choices to help publishers with good ad experiences recover lost revenue due to ad blocking. While Funding Choices is still in beta, millions of ad blocking users every month are now choosing to see ads on publisher websites, or “whitelisting” that site, after seeing a Funding Choices message. In fact, in the last month over 4.5 million visitors who were asked to allow ads said yes, creating over 90 million additional paying page views for those sites.

Over the coming weeks, we’re expanding Funding Choices to 31 additional countries, giving publishers the ability to ask visitors from those countries to choose between allowing ads on a site, or purchasing an ad removal pass through Google Contributor. Also, we’ve started a test that allows publishers to use their own proprietary subscription services within Funding Choices.

How Funding Choices works

Funding Choice gives publishers a way to have a conversation with their site visitors through custom messages they can use to express how ad blocking impacts their business and content. When a visitor arrives at a site using an ad blocker, Funding Choices allows the site to display one of three message types to that user:

A dismissible message that doesn’t restrict access to content:

A dismissible message that counts and limits the number of page views that person is allowed per month, as determined by the site owner before the content is blocked.

Or, a message that blocks access to content until the visitor chooses to allow ads on the site, or to pay to access the content with either the site’s proprietary subscription service or a pass that removes all ads on that site through Google Contributor.

On average, publishers using Funding Choices are seeing 16 percent of visitors allow ads on their sites with some seeing rates as high as 37 percent.

Ad blockers designed to remove all ads from all sites are making it difficult for publishers with good ad experiences to maintain sustainable businesses. Our goal for Funding Choices is to help publishers get paid for their work by reducing the impact of ad blocking on them, and we look forward to continuing to expand the product availability.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

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

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