Google Partners Blog: April 2012

Reaching your audience with online video

Monday, April 23, 2012

Each day, people are turning to online video for news, entertainment, and information. More than 800M unique users visit YouTube each month, and 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute. So it’s no wonder that video ads are one of the fastest growing online ad-formats this year.
Many brands are already using video ads to reach their marketing objectives, from launching a product to building brand awareness. Video ads can not only increase brand recall, but can help your client reach niche or hard-to-reach audiences. In fact, research shows that YouTube and TV ads work better together.

To make it easier to create and manage video advertising campaigns at scale, we’re introducing a number of new products, resources, and tools today:

Google AdWords for video now available to all. Similar to search advertising - where you pay for clicks and set budgets with bids - we created a new model for video advertising. With Google AdWords for video, you only pay when someone chooses to watch your ad and you can create and manage video campaigns from the same platform as your search and display ads. You can create an account and start promoting your first video in less than 5 minutes. With AdWords for video you can:

Find the right audience: AdWords for video provides a range of options to reach the right audience. For example, you can promote your video by keyword to appear in YouTube search results, or you can choose to show your ad against content your customers are most interested in - such as sports or music. Connect with your audience on YouTube and the Google Display Network, which includes millions of websites. AdWords for video links to your YouTube account so you can easily start a video campaign with your existing videos.

Measure the effectiveness of your spend: On average, we’ve found that YouTube video ads drive a 20 percent increase in traffic to your website and a 5 percent increase in searches for your business (Google Campaign Insights, 2011). With AdWords for video, you can find out how viewers are engaging with your brand during and after they watch your ad. You can see how many viewers watched your entire video, visited your website, stayed on your channel to watch another video, or subscribed to your channel, after viewing your ad.

Only pay for engaged views: With TrueView video ads you only pay when viewers choose to watch your ad so you aren’t charged when viewers skip your ad if they aren’t interested or have already seen your video. This means your ad budget is focused on viewers interested in your video. By displaying a call-to-action overlay on your video you can talk about a sale or specific offer to your viewers, share more information about your business, or drive traffic to your website.

Advertiser Playbook and support. To share best practices and tips on how video can be a core part of your client’s business toolkit, we created a YouTube Advertiser Playbook. The Playbook covers everything from creating interesting content to promoting a video with ads. If your client needs help making a video, our My Business Story is a free tool they can use to create their first video. AdWords advertisers can also call our free phone support line, 866-2-GOOGLE, to get started with AdWords for video.

$50 million in free advertising. We’re giving away $50 million in free Google AdWords advertising to help more than 500,000 businesses get into video. If your client is new to AdWords, they can receive a $75 credit when they sign up. To put that into context, with $75 a video campaign can reach more than 1,500 of your client’s most valuable customers on YouTube for one month. Request the free credit here.

YouTube Ambassador program. To recognize business owners that are already using YouTube to grow their business, we’re naming 9 businesses from across the country to our first ever YouTube Ambassador program. These businesses have seen outstanding success in reaching new customers, building a brand, and engaging their fans with video. Hear their stories and learn more about the YouTube Ambassador program.

Hear from GoPro, who built a brand -- and a business -- on YouTube

If your client has a video you want to promote, get started with AdWords for video. And, join our YouTube for Marketers page on Google+ to stay up-to-date on our latest video marketing innovations.

Posted by Baljeet Singh, Group Product Manager, YouTube

Making the Web Work for Brand Marketers

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Learning from the past

In the 1950s, brands slowly moved to TV, just as they have started to move online today. In both instances, buying and selling systems improved; audiences and new content quickly moved to the new medium; and the creative possibilities inspired great ad campaigns.
However, a key moment for TV came in the 1950 with dramatic improvements in measurement—like ratings and quantitative market research. Once major brands could see who they were reaching and what impact their campaigns were having, they fully embraced the medium, creating a multi-billion dollar industry...and TV’s golden age began.

Making better decisions with actionable brand metrics

Unlike the early days of TV, digital advertising is already incredibly measurable. The only problem is a very old and well-known one: the standardized metrics today are largely clicks, user interaction rates and conversions.

But as brand advertisers - such as movie studios or consumer goods companies - know, it’s a challenge to measure changes in brand favorability of a movie or whether an online campaign is driving more consumers to the store. And it’s even harder to take quick action on any such insights.
That's why today, at the Ad Age Digital Conference I'll be introducing the Brand Activate Initiative, an ongoing Google effort to address these challenges and re-imagine online measurement for brand marketers. With this initiative we're partnering with the industry and supporting the cross-industry Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative. We believe that the industry’s significant investment in brand measurement efforts can substantially grow the online advertising pie, for all.

Is a particular ad in your campaign especially useful at improving brand recall in Illinois? You should be able to immediately increase your coverage throughout the Midwest. Is one ad slightly less effective at driving purchase intent and in-store sales? Tweak the creative, straight away.

The first Brand Activate solutions
We’re working to build truly useful brand metrics into the tools that advertisers already use to manage their campaigns, so they’ll be actionable within seconds, not months.

Here’s a video describing the Brand Activate Initiative:

The first two Brand Activate solutions are rolling out today:

Active View: Advertisers have long looked for insight into whether consumers saw an ad on page 145 of a magazine, or switched the channel during a TV commercial break. It’s similar online, so we’re rolling out a technology, which will be submitted for Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation, that can count “viewed” impressions (as defined by the 3MS coalition's proposed standard, this is a display ad that is at least 50% viewable on the screen for at least one second).

Called Active View, this will first be available in coming weeks within Google Display Network Reserve. We’ll also be making this metric a universal currency, ultimately offering it within DoubleClick for Advertisers, as well as to our publisher partners. Active View data will be immediately actionable—advertisers will be able to pay only for for viewed impressions. Going forward, we’re working on viewed impression standards with 3MS, and our agency and publisher partners.

Active GRP: GRP, or a gross rating point, is at the heart of offline media measurement. For example, when a fashion brand wants their TV campaign to reach 2 million women with two ads each, they use GRP to measure that. We’re introducing a new version of this for the web: Active GRP. Active GRP has two key features:

Built-in: Active GRP is built right into the ad serving tools that our publishers and marketers already use every day. Active GRP will enable real-time decision making, allowing advertisers to make adjustments to their campaigns at the speed of the web. We’ve kicked off a pilot program for DoubleClick for Advertisers clients as a first step, and will roll it out to other products, with brands able to specify a range of audience GRP segments.
Robust methodology: Active GRP is calculated by a statistical model that combines aggregated panel data and anonymous user data (either inferred or user-provided), and will work in conjunction with Active View to measure viewed impressions. This approach overcomes problems of potential panel skewing and reliance on a single data source. This approach also has the advantage of never using personally identifiable information, not sharing user data with third parties, and enabling users, through Google’s Ads Preferences Manager, to opt-out. We will be submitting our methodology for MRC accreditation.

More to come

We look forward to bringing other measurement initiatives into our suite for brand marketers, including a brand impact survey pilot with Vizu, our brand lift measurement product (Campaign Insights) and various cross-media measurement research projects globally.

This is just the beginning of the Brand Activate Initiative, with much more to come for brands and publishers. We think that with brand new metrics comes a new brand moment - one that will encourage brands to invest in the web, help publishers show the value of their digital content, and stimulate digital media’s own golden age.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Display Advertising

Mark your calendar for a Hangout On Air with mobile thought leaders introducing The Mobile Playbook on April 25th 3pm EDT

Monday, April 16, 2012

half of all Americans now owning a smartphone

Joao Machado - Director of Mobile, OMD

Michelle Ogle - Digital Marketing and Affiliate Strategy Manager, Starwood Hotels and Resorts

Joshua Palau - VP of Digital Sales and Marketing, Comcast

Amit Shah - Director of Online, Mobile and Social Media, 1-800Flowers.com

Think with Google Think with Google Think with Google

On April 25, look for the Hangout on Air post like the image above on the Think with Google +page and click to tune-in!Posted by: Jason Spero, Head of Global Mobile Sales and Strategy

Project Re: Brief Continued...

Monday, April 16, 2012

Project Re: BriefAlka-Seltzer:I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.re-imagined displaymobileThe tech behind the Alka-Seltzer ad:Avis:We try harder.re-imagined displaytabletThe tech behind the Avis ad: www.projectrebrief.comGrow InteractiveJohannes LeonardoPosted by Aman Govil, Project Re: Brief Lead

Toward a simpler, more beautiful Google

Thursday, April 12, 2012

lots of other places

Navigation you can make your own

You can drag apps up or down to create the order you want

You can hover over certain apps to reveal a set of quick actions

You can show or hide apps by moving them in and out of “More”

Conversations you’ll really care about

Full bleed photos and videos that'll make you really proud to post

A stream of conversation "cards" that make it easier to scan and join discussions

An activity drawer that highlights the community around your content

Bigger, more beautiful photos. A new home for hanging outheartwarmingbreathtakingmusic-making

An always-updated list of invitations from the people in your circles

Quick access to every public and On Air hangout, for those times when you want to meet someone new, or watch a live broadcast

A rotating billboard of popular hangouts, pro tips and other items you don’t want to miss

A place to see all the hangouts you can join or watch.hangout appsGetting there from here

A place to see what the world is talking about.this overviewPosted by Vic Gundotra, Senior Vice President (cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Get Local with AdWords

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Get organized this spring with new location features in AdWords and share your stories

Over the past 30 years, California Closet Company has grown from the brainchild of a college student organizing his dorm room closet to a successful business with more than 77 franchise locations. To reach customers across the U.S. and internationally, the company centered their digital marketing strategy on creating locally relevant campaigns.

It’s no surprise that local campaigns are a focus for many businesses--from finding directions to looking up a phone number, more people are going online to find local information. In fact, more than 20% of searches on Google are related to location, and people often act quickly on local searches. Research shows that using smartphones, 88% of people who search for local information take action within a day.

To help you organize your local ad campaigns this spring, we’re introducing three new features in AdWords to help you create ads that are more relevant to local customers.

Target customers by zip code

If you customize your direct mail, outdoor ads, or newspaper ads at a postal code level, you now can easily do the same in AdWords in the US. We are introducing the ability to target more than 30,000 US ZIP Codes with your AdWords campaigns.

You will be able to add up to 1,000 postal codes at a time to your search ad campaigns with AdWords Location Targeting. Plus, you can get feedback on the performance of your local campaigns by viewing campaign performance statistics at the postal code level.

"Location targeting within AdWords helped us double lead volume and cut the cost to acquire new customers in half,” said Lois Erbay, Director of Marketing, California Closet Company. “We plan on building on that success by using ZIP Code targeting to create even more locally relevant campaigns for our customers.”

More locally relevant ads in less time

To help you easily create a custom ad title, text, display URL, and/or destination URL for all of your locations at scale, we’ve developed location insertion for location extensions. You’ll no longer need to create multiple ads for multiple locations--this new feature automatically inserts the city, phone number, or zip code of your local business into your ad text.

For example, if your ad text says: “Find a {lb.city:Local} Store or Shop Online,” a user viewing your ad in Chicago would see: “Find a Chicago Store or Shop Online.” This new feature cuts out all the work to building out ad text featuring local information for all your locations.

Ad with location insertion in the text and display URL

“We’ve had amazing success manually customizing our creative with local information for our top markets, which shows us that customers want locally-relevant results when it comes to a service like storage,” said Chris Laczi, Advertising Director, Uncle Bob's Self Storage. “That’s why we’re very excited about location insertion. It will simplify the task of creating locally customized ads for our 400+ locations, and we expect it will greatly enhance conversion rate of our ads.”

You must have location extensions set up and running in order to enable location insertion. Location insertion will work even if your location extensions don’t show because of other extensions. We detect location based on where your customer is physically located or by the geographic locations she may have shown interest in.

Find out more about location insertion and location extensions.

Better clarity and control

When we launched advanced location targeting in March 2011, we provided you with more control over how you geographically target your ads. Based on advertiser feedback, we’re implementing four additional enhancements that will make location targeting options clearer and more powerful. Read more about these enhancements in the Help Center and in this blog post.

There is significant opportunity for businesses to reach local customers online and win moments that matter by delivering the right ad in the right context. Stay tuned for more information on how ZIP Code targeting can help you grow your business.

We want to hear from you about your success in getting local with AdWords--share your story here and we might reach out to you to participate in our upcoming blog posts.

Posted by Richard Holden, Product Management Director (cross-posted from the Inside AdWords blog)

Google Ads - now on Google+

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

launched Google+ Pages last November

Click to view page

Stay ahead of the curve with the latest launches and updates for Google's advertising solutions, including search, display, mobile, social, YouTube and Google AnalyticsReceive how-to information, best practices, and recommendations

Learn about upcoming trainings and events

Attend Hangouts with product experts

herePosted by: Christina Park and Katie Miller, Ads Product Marketing (cross-posted from the InsideAdwords blog)

Better results, (still) early adoption: Marketing attribution in a complex digital landscape

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

EconsultancyMarketing Attribution: Valuing the Customer JourneyIt’s still a new craft, but early results show positive impact Attribution leads to improved ROI, better budgeting

Last click attribution dominates; agencies are leading the way in experimentation

Robust attribution leads to confident digital decisionsPerforming marketing attribution with GoogleSearch FunnelsMulti-Channel FunnelsAttribution ModelingAttribution PlaybookJoin us for an Attribution HangoutFriday, April 6, at 9:00am PDTGoogle+ Pagethis formPosted by Sara Jablon Moked, Product Marketing Manager, Conversion and Attribution

Get Inspired with Think Quarterly’s Creativity Issue!

Monday, April 2, 2012

onehereThink QuarterlyThe Curious Case of CreativitySir John Hegarty of BBHAjaz Ahmed of AKQA most envy-inducing digital campaignsLean Communications“Brand Impressions” toolThink Quarterlycheck it out+Think With Google
Posted by Allison Mooney, Think Quarterly Editor

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