Succeeding with enhanced campaigns

About two months ago, we launched enhanced campaigns to help you more simply and smartly manage your campaigns in today’s multi-device world. Recently we’ve been hearing some great stories about ways that advertisers have improved their performance and saved time with enhanced campaigns. While every advertiser’s business and potential gains may be unique, here are a few examples that highlight actual strategies and results achieved so far with enhanced campaigns. 

e-Travel has improved CTR and conversion rate with context-optimized ads, mobile app downloads, and upgraded sitelinks.

e-Travel is one of the leading online travel agents in Greece, Cyprus and Russia, and has presence in other markets in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. After upgrading to enhanced campaigns, Managing Director Nikos Goulis reported, “We can now show our ads according to people's context like location or time of day [... and] count app downloads as conversions in AdWords reports, which is very important for us because so many of our new customer leads come from our mobile app. These features along with the upgraded sitelinks helped us boost clickthrough rate by 43% and conversion rate by 88%."

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American Apparel has doubled its volume of phone leads with enhanced campaigns, improving return on ad spend.

American Apparel, a multi-channel fashion retailer, upgraded all its campaigns to take advantage of new features like upgraded call extensions and sitelinks. By extending call extensions across all device types, and counting calls over 10 seconds in duration as a conversion, American Apparel has seen their conversion volume from phone calls double. Return on spend has improved significantly. 

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A luxury online shopping brand has grown sales by 20% by tapping into secondary markets, thanks to the ease of optimizing bids in multiple locations in a single enhanced campaign.

A luxury online shopping destination had been focusing its search engine marketing efforts on optimizing bids in location-specific campaigns aimed at primary markets like New York City and Los Angeles. Since upgrading to enhanced campaigns, the company started using location bid adjustments to test and expand its AdWords presence in new geographies, including affluent areas of Delaware, South Carolina, and New Mexico. Already, the company has grown total conversion volume by 20% while achieving target return on ad spend. 

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Hotwire’s SEM analysts are saving 5-10 hours per week with more efficient campaign management.

Hotwire.com, a leading discount travel website upgraded all of their paid search accounts to Enhanced Campaigns, both domestic and international, within the first month. Clay Schulenburg, Director of Search Engine Marketing at Hotwire shared that upgrading to Enhanced Campaigns really helped his team manage AdWords more efficiently because all the key adjustments for location, time of day and device are now managed in a single campaign: “Time saved per SEM analyst is somewhere in the range of 5 – 10 hours per work week that can now be reallocated to either new strategic SEM initiatives or more granular account/campaign optimizations.”
Get started in 3 steps 
If you’re among the 95% of advertisers whose legacy campaigns currently run across all device types, you can upgrade in just three steps to take advantage of enhanced campaigns: 

1. Click the “Get started” button when you log into the AdWords interface
2. Select a mobile bid adjustment
3. Click “Complete upgrade”

Here's a short video illustration. 

If you have questions about upgrading to enhanced campaigns, please contact AdWords support, ask for advice from your fellow advertisers in our AdWords community, or check out our comprehensive upgrade guide (.pdf download). 

Share your results and feedback 
Once you’ve started using enhanced campaigns, please let us know about your results and any suggested improvements using our feedback form. 

Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Group Product Manager

4 days left for Google Shopping promotional credit

In December, we announced a promotional credit for all eligible merchants in Australia, Japan, Brazil, Czech Republic, Spain, Italy, France, Netherlands, U.K., Germany and Switzerland who create a Product Listing Ad campaign promoting all the products in their Merchant Center account before April 12, 2013. This credit is designed to help international merchants transition to Google Shopping's new commercial model, built on Product Listing Ads. This transition will be complete in June 2013.

With only 4 days left until the April 12th deadline, we encourage merchants in the countries below to learn more about the promotional credit and apply before it’s too late!

$100 AUD Australia	R$120 Brazil	1000 Kč Czech Republic
€ 75 France	€ 75 Germany	€ 75 Italy
7,500 JPY Japan	€ 75 Netherlands	€ 75 Spain
100 CHF Switzerland	￡75 United Kingdom

In addition to the promotional credit above, eligible merchants with a Product Listing Ad campaign promoting all products will receive a monthly credit for 10% of their total Product Listing Ad spend up to to June 30, 2013.

To get help setting up your Product Listing Ads, please visit this quick guide, email us through this form or call one of our specialists at your country’s number below.

Google Shopping global phone support:
Australia - 1800 087 124
Brazil - 0800 727 8947
Czech Republic - 800 500 353
France - 805 540 727
Germany - 0800 5894933
Italy - 800930819
Netherlands - 0800 2500026
Spain - 900 814 539
Switzerland - 0800 002539
United Kingdom - 0800 169 0711

You can also join  Google Engage for Agencies on April 10, 9:00AM PST/12:00PM EST to learn how you can help your clients use this beautifully simple experience to better promote their products and attract more customers.

We'll share an overview of Google Shopping, insights into new features, and optimization tips and best practices.

RSVP for the Hangout on Air here.

Posted by Erica Sievert, Product Marketing Manager, Google Shopping

Ad group mobile bid adjustments available soon in enhanced campaigns

People are constantly connected and moving between devices to communicate, shop and stay entertained. Their context – like location, time of day, and device – is an increasingly important signal for advertisers. In February, we launched enhanced campaigns to help you reach people with ads based on their context as well as their intent, all from a single campaign. In just a few short months since launch, we are already hearing enhanced campaigns success stories from businesses of all sizes. 

Ad group mobile bid adjustments
To provide more control and precision over bids in an enhanced campaign, advertisers will soon be able to set a mobile bid adjustment at the ad group level. This functionality will be available to all advertisers in mid-May. We think this may be useful if you’ve been operating large scale campaigns and found that your optimal bids for some keywords would require significantly different mobile bid adjustments within an enhanced campaign.

Example: A nationwide retail chain currently uses mobile-only campaigns to optimize bids for several hundred thousand keywords. They’ve found that 95% of their keywords in mobile-only campaigns have bids that are 10% lower than in the equivalent desktop campaigns. The remaining 5% of their keywords have very different bid ratios (ranging from 40% lower to 100% higher) based on differences in performance and competition on mobile and desktop. By using the new ad group bid adjustments for mobile, this retailer can better maintain their desired bids and ROI on different devices as they upgrade to enhanced campaigns.

The majority of advertisers will still see the most value in using the existing campaign level bid adjustments in enhanced campaigns, so we recommend that you upgrade now to access all the new features. Upgrading takes an easy 3 steps for most advertisers [video]:

1. Click the “Get started” button when you log into adwords.google.com
2. Select a mobile bid adjustment
3. Click “Complete upgrade”

Upcoming dates
We’ll share more details and tips here on the AdWords blog when ad group level mobile bid adjustments are generally available in mid-May. API access for this feature will be available in early May and announced on the developer blog.

We will begin automatically upgrading all AdWords campaigns to enhanced campaigns starting on July 22, 2013. 

Feedback
Thank you for your feedback on enhanced campaigns. Please continue to share your thoughts with us using this form so we can continue to improve the product.

Posted by Bhanu Narasimhan, Group Product Manager

A healthy advertising ecosystem

Online advertising helps to support the services we all enjoy and enables businesses to grow.  The vast majority of our online publishers are terrific partners we love working with.  But, as always in life, there are a few bad apples.

So, we invest a lot of time and effort in keeping them off our systems. 

1. Policies

Our publisher partners are required to adhere to strict policies, which we regularly update to deal with new issues.  These policies cover how how ads are displayed and how end users view them, as well as what site content is prohibited.  We also work to make sure publishers are treated fairly and know the rules.

2. Automated Technology

Our main line of defense against these bad apples is technology — which enables us to monitor the clicks and impressions we receive, and also to scan both our partners’ sites and downloadable software. These tools operate at the click- and page-levels, so we can pick up bad content and bad practices (like artificial traffic) at a very granular level. 

3. Human Review

We have hundreds of employees around the world who review web pages, test our partners’ downloadable software, and prevent ads from showing on sites that violate our policies. Depending on the severity and persistence of the offense, they may stop ad serving on that page or site, or across the publisher’s entire account.

4.  Advertiser Transparency and Controls

We believe that marketers should have transparency into where their ads are being placed, and control over where their ads appear.  Our clients regularly get reports that show what their ads looked like in the context of a given page. We offer tools such as DoubleClick Ad Verification and Active View, which enable marketers to check whether their ad was served and seen. We also offer granular control, such as the ability to buy various pre-vetted packages of inventory on high-quality sites, and tools to exclude particular sites or categories.  This transparency gives advertisers the power to have their ads appear on the websites that are most appropriate for them. 

Trends and recent developments

The numbers show we continue to make good headway.  We have doubled the rate at which we review publisher inventory — enabling us to deal with bad sites and practices more quickly.  In 2012, we found 17% fewer bad actors than in the previous year — even though we increased enforcement and tightened our policies.

Advertisers are recognizing that we offer a high-quality environment for their ads; this helps to support great experiences for everyone.

To illustrate one ongoing effort, I want to highlight our recent changes in the area of downloadable software.

Downloadable software, such as toolbars that operate in your browser, offers a wide variety of services to users.  Our Software Principles have long guided our approach.

In recent years there have been increased reports of software applications that:

• Unexpectedly change your default browser, search engine or homepage;
• Clutter up your browser and screen, or interfere with your web browsing experience — for example unexpectedly inserting ads into your browser;
• Make it very difficult to remove downloaded software from your device or to restore your defaults;
• Load additional unwanted software applications to your device; and
• Access personal information or infect your machine with malware.

For example, in the last 90 days, we have seen over 100,000 complaints about software that changed users’ browser settings or about toolbars that they couldn’t uninstall.  We want to avoid these kinds of bad user experiences.  So we recently updatedour policies and enforcement to ensure that software accessing our services complies with the following rules.  It must:

• Be pre-approved by Google;
• Offer one-click, complete uninstall;
• Provide clear, full disclosure and transparency to people about what is being installed and what changes are being made to their devices;
• Install itself on only one browser per download;
• Be bundled with and distributed by only reputable parties who comply with our policies.

It’s simple — we don’t want our programs or services abused in ways that can harm users. We believe that our ongoing efforts to fight abuse will ensure our advertising ecosystem continues to work in the best interests of users, publishers and advertisers.

Posted by Vinay Rao, Ad Traffic & Publisher Quality Operations

Learn from Google at #SESNY 2013

SES New York (#SESNY) is coming up next week, and just like last year, we hope you’ll join us again in the Big Apple.

During day 1 of SES New York, we’ll be on the expo floor with a custom-built Google classroom as well as part of the main conference sessions. Join us where you’ll learn about the newest need-to-know tools, features, and solutions from Google Analytics, AdWords, Mobile, GDN and DoubleClick Search to help you win in a constantly connected world. Following is a listing of our sessions to help you plan your SES experience. 

Google Solutions for a Constantalny Connected World

Day 1 - Tuesday, March 26th all day in the Expo Hall

10:30-11:30am: Reaching customers whenever, wherever, across any device. Surojit Chatterjee, Lead Product Manager for Enhanced Campaigns

11:45-12:45pm: Understanding the Full Value of Mobile. Brendon Kraham, Director, Global Mobile Solutions

2:00-3:00pm: Engaging with your audience in a multi-screen world. 

3:30-4:30pm: Using DoubleClick Search to manage campaigns across channels and devices. Anthony Chavez, Product Manager for DoubleClick Search

Don’t have a pass yet? Don’t worry. Expo Only passes are free and get you access to our Google classroom. You can also use the code NYGOOGLE which is redeemable for up to $700.00 off a full conference pass.

For attendees of the main conference, Google Analytics team members will be participating in the following sessions:

Landing Page Optimization

Day 1: Tuesday, March 26 from 11:45-12:45pm

Are your search landing pages working hard or hardly working? Landing pages can be the hardest-working part of your search campaigns, or they can kill your lead generation and sales conversion rates. Testing insignificant details such as button colour and headline size won't lead to real lift in your conversion rates. This session will show you what to test, how to analyse your landing pages, and how to get significant revenue lift quickly.

Moderator:

Andrew Goodman, SES Advisory Board; President, Page Zero Media

Speakers:

Justin Cutroni, Analytics Advocate, Google

Angie Schottmuller, Director of Interactive Strategic Planning & Optimization, Three Deep Marketing

The Dawn of Convergence Analytics

Day 1: Tuesday, March 26 from 3:30-4:30pm

The combination of "big data," access to cloud computing, powerful algorithms, and unprecedented visualization capabilities has created an emerging new class of analytics tools for the marketer. It's being called "Convergence Analytics". It's the marketing equivalent of "one ring to rule them all." Though still in its infancy as a discipline, there are many vendors in the market, and their goal is to pull together data sources from multiple touch points from the web and beyond. They're also using advanced data gathering and data regularization strategies to create a correlative dashboard-like experience for the marketer.

Moderator

Adam Singer, Product Marketing Manager, Google Analytics

Speakers:

Andrew Edwards, Managing Partner, Efectyv Marketing

Rand Schulman, Managing Partner, Efectyv Marketing

We hope to see you out at the event, you can find out more details on the conference site. 

Can’t make it to NY? Be sure and follow Google Analytics on Twitter and Google+ for real-time updates on sessions throughout the day sharing interesting bits from the conference. Google give you more information abouth this event.

The brand revolution is underway

As we’ve said before, we’ve entered the next wave of digital marketing, as major brands like L’Oreal, Audi and Kay Jewelers embrace digital media and make it a core part of their marketing strategy.  We’ve seen a 65 percent increase in the last quarter alone in the number of brand advertisers using our brand formats and buying tools.

This influx of brand investment is translating into meaningful results for digital publishers.

• We looked at the 50 top publishers that enable brand-friendly ad formats on their sites.  Over the past three months we found that, on average, they experienced a CPM increase of 2x or more when running these engagement-driven ads, such as our Lightbox ad, which expands to a full page only after a user has deliberately engaged with the ad. "We've seen CPM increases of more than 3X, and our advertisers love the large canvas and pay for engagement model," says Rich Dredge, Answers.com's Chief Revenue Officer.
• We’ve seen an overall increase in higher CPMs across our exchange -- in the U.S., CPMs over $5 have increased 24% year-over-year while those over $10 have increased 23% year-over-year. Brand spend is a critical piece of these increases.

Fueling brand adoption
To continue this momentum, we’ve been investing in a suite of brand solutions over the past year to help these advertisers make the most of what digital marketing has to offer:

• New Ways to Buy -- Last year, we introduced Active View, offering for the first time the ability to not only measure whether ads are viewable, but actually buy based on it. Brands are able to “reserve” a guaranteed number of impressions on brand-friendly sites across the web -- and they pay only for impressions that are viewed. 


• Over the past year, the number of advertisers using the reserve option has increased fourfold.
• Nearly two-thirds of those are Ad Age top 100 brands.


• New Ways to Engage -- Last year, we introduced a new family of brand-friendly, engagement-focused ad formats. Engagement formats are already showing terrific early returns.  For example, L’ORÉAL PARiS was one of the first brands to run a campaign using engagement ads. They ran an expandable ad in Germany as part of their “Beauty Minute” campaign and found that 30% of those who expanded the ad watched the entire 30-second embedded video. 

• New Ways to Measure -- We’re committed to providing meaningful metrics for brands, measurement that goes beyond just clicks and conversions. Earlier this week, we introduced Brand Lift in AdWords, which will enable marketers to run surveys along with their ad campaigns, to determine how their ads helped their marketing objectives (i.e., whether their ads helped build awareness, increased favorability towards their brand, etc.). Brand Lift complements our other investments in brand measurement, like ActiveView and Active GRP.

Digital media represents an amazing opportunity for both brands and publishers, bringing together sight, sound, motion, interactivity and measurement in ways we’ve never seen before.

Over the coming year, we’ll be continuing to invest in our products and systems that will help brands thrive in the digital space, as well as help publishers capitalize on the shift...so stay tuned for more to come.

New ValueTrack parameters for enhanced campaigns: managing keyword level URLs by device

In a multi-screen world, it’s increasingly important for advertisers to show relevant ads based on a user’s context: location, time of day, and device. We launched enhanced campaigns to help advertisers take full advantage of user context, maximizing the effectiveness of their ad campaigns.

We’ve been listening to your feedback, and in the next few weeks we’ll be launching new ValueTrack features for advertisers using keyword level URLs.  These features will help advertisers achieve specific conversion and ROI goals, and make theupgrade to enhanced campaigns easier by:

1. Directing users to a device-specific landing page at the keyword level.
2. Enabling measurement of the effectiveness of campaigns by device.

What’s new

We’ve added a new parameter, {ifnotmobile:[value]}, where you can replace [value] with text that will then show up in your URL when the user clicks on your ad from a computer or tablet. We’re also changing the existing ValueTrack parameter {ifmobile:[value]}.  This parameter will now insert the specified value into the URL only if the user clicks from a mobile device.

In this post, we will discuss using the ifmobile and ifnotmobile parameters to direct users to a device-specific landing page.  We will also discuss performance tracking by device, and how the ifmobile and ifnotmobile parameters differ from the existingdevice parameter. 

Example 1: Redirecting users to device-specific landing pages

Responsive web design is often a good fit for advertisers who provide device-optimized experiences to their users. If you must specify different landing pages depending on device, you have two options. If the landing page varies by creative, you can simply create mobile-optimized ads by setting the device preference to “Mobile.”  If the device-specific landing page varies for each keyword, then you can use the ifmobile and ifnotmobile parameters in the keyword-level destination URL.  It is important to remember that if you are using the ifmobile parameter today, it will no longer insert a value into the URL for tablet clicks.  The new parameter ifnotmobile will now insert a value into the URL for tablet and desktop/laptop.

Let’s say you want to send mobile users to "m.example.com/widgets," and desktop and tablet users to "www.example.com/widgets" for the keyword “widgets.”  In this scenario you could set the destination URL for this keyword to:

{ifmobile:m.example.com/widgets}{ifnotmobile:www.example.com/widgets}

Example 2: Tracking performance by device

If you want to track performance by device, the existing device parameter will work for most cases.  Using device inserts an “m”, “t”, or “c” into the destination URL, depending on whether the user clicked from a mobile device, tablet, or desktop/laptop computer. If your tracking system requires different internal ids for the same keyword on different devices, then you may need to use the ifmobile and ifnotmobile parameters.

For the keyword “widgets”, let’s say you have assigned an internal keyword id of “df32” for desktops and tablets and “df33” for mobile devices. You can set the keyword-level destination URL to:

www.example.com/widgets?kwid={ifnotmobile:df32}{ifmobile:df33}

Then, if the user clicks from a desktop or tablet, the landing page is:

  www.example.com/widgets?kwid=df32

and for a mobile click:

www.example.com/widgets?kwid=df33

Success in action

Advertisers are upgrading to enhanced campaigns and seeing strong results.  VivaStreet in France, the 4th largest free classified website in the world, upgraded all of their campaigns within the two weeks after launch.  When they upgraded, they increased their mobile bid adjustment to 125% and saw overall conversions increase by 34%.  After seeing the positive results, VivaStreet went on to increase their mobile bid adjustment to 140%.  By using ValueTrack parameters, you can also direct users to device-specific content and measure the effect it has on conversions.

We appreciate the feedback we have received on enhanced campaigns and encourage you to continue helping us understand how to make a great product.  Please join us on March 21st at 10:00AM PST (1:00PM EST) for the latest in our enhanced campaigns webinar series, EC 205, covering enhanced campaigns and the Google Display Network.

Mobile’s immediacy effect: Half of mobile search conversions happen in one hour

In this era of mobility, our smartphones are always with us, keeping us connected anytime and anywhere. With this constant connectivity, we’ve come to expect information (literally) right at our fingertips just a search away - whether it’s locating the nearest sushi restaurant or booking flights for your upcoming trip. In “Mobile Search Moments: Understanding How Mobile Drives Conversions”, we set out to understand when and why people turn to mobile search, the actions they take as a result, and how marketers can capitalize on every mobile search moment. We found that there’s an immediacy effect of mobile search, with more than half of the resulting conversions (going into a store, calling a business, or making a purchase) happening within just one hour.

Working with Nielsen, we also wanted to push the standard of mobile research. It’s traditionally been difficult to quantify mobile’s full impact on driving conversions, particularly since consumer surveys are often constrained to broad recall questions. Instead, we asked participants to log their mobile searches over two weeks in a diary smartphone app - logging more than 6,000 mobile searches in total. We followed up to ask them what actions resulted from those searches, helping us draw more precise, measurable connections between mobile searches and the conversions that they drive online and offline.

click to expand

Here are the highlights of the research:

Mobile search is both always-on and on-the-go
Mobile has traditionally been considered an out-and-about or on-the-go context, used on the bus or while in a store. While that’s certainly true, the research showed that mobile’s role is also much more than that. People turn to mobile devices throughout the day to find information because of its speed and convenience, with 77% of mobile searches happening at home or at work. What does this mean for marketers? Mobile is always-on for consumers, so marketers should make sure their mobile search strategies are reaching people in these different customer contexts.

Mobile searchers take a variety of actions... and they act quickly
We also found that three of four mobile searches trigger additional actions. These range from open-ended actions like additional research (36%) or a website visit (25%), to more concrete conversions like a store visit (17%), a purchase (17%), or a phone call (7%). On average, each mobile search triggers nearly two actions, so in order to understand the full value of mobile, marketers must evaluate the different ways that their customers convert, both online and offline, and measure accordingly.

Most interestingly, not only do mobile searchers take action - they act fast. In fact, 55% of conversions from mobile searches happen within one hour. We see this immediacy effect with mobile because not only are people potentially closer in physical proximity to a purchase, but they’re also closer to the crucial decision moments. Forty-five percent of mobile searches are conducted to help make a decision, and that number jumps to two-thirds when happening in a store. And when people use mobile search to help make a decision, they’re more likely to convert. So it’s important for marketers to be present during those searches, while also creating ads and experiences that are relevant to this immediacy.

Context is key to mobile searches
The research also showed that the types of searches people conduct on mobile are strongly tied to their specific context, like location and time of day. For instance, shopping searches are twice as likely to be done in-store. Mobile searches made in stores are a key opportunity for marketers to reach someone who’s looking to take action. And since searchers are also 55% more likely to notice ads when they’re in a store, there’s a huge opportunity for marketers to capitalize on these mobile-led moments.

Mobility continues to change the way that we search, explore and shop, and as consumer behavior comes further into focus, there are clear opportunities for marketers to take advantage. Check out all of our findings by downloading the full report here.