What’s next for Shopping campaigns and retailers

In February, we made Shopping campaigns available to all Product Listing Ad (PLA) advertisers and, in March, we released AdWords API support to help you manage your campaigns at scale. Shopping campaigns offer the ability to browse your inventory directly in AdWords, report on your performance down to the product-level, and bid competitively with new metrics like benchmark data and impression share. We’ve received great feedback from you so far and are excited to share what’s next:

• Size your opportunity with Bid Simulator - To provide more actionable insight into your PLAs, we’ve been rolling out a Bid Simulator that’s now available in all Shopping campaigns. With a Bid Simulator, you can now estimate how bid changes could impact your impressions, clicks or costs.
• Options to create a Shopping campaign - In the coming days, we’ll be adding some options to help you get started. You would be able to create a Shopping campaign from scratch or, for many of you, use one of your regular PLA campaigns to create similar product targets, negative keywords or promotional text.
• Multiple ad groups for advanced retailers - While many of you will be happy with your Shopping campaign as is, we’ve heard from advanced retailers that they’d like to create multiple ad groups. It’s now possible to do this within a Shopping campaign.

Continued Retailer Success
Since we made Shopping campaigns available to all PLA advertisers, we continue to hear many examples of how it helps you manage PLAs and effectively grow your business. Here are a few:

“The benefits of Shopping campaigns can’t be overstated – the ease of setup, the transparency of data, the ability to group products into logical categories and manage to the product level make it a must. All of these contribute to our clients’ ROI almost tripling, and there’s still room to improve.” -JumpFly

“The new Shopping campaigns allowed us to achieve a much higher-level of profitability, cutting costs by 13% and increasing return on ad spend by about 22% on average. Not only that, the new campaign type trims about 2 hours of setup time.” -Exclusive Concepts 

“We used the product-level data from our Shopping campaign to fine-tune our bidding strategy, focusing on the products that acquired the most traffic & lowered the ones that are less important. This helped us increase visits 25% & ROI by 16%.” -Wiggle 

“Shopping campaigns effectively reduced the time spent setting up product-specific bids and optimizing in half. We can now invest even more time into each client, and the results we’ve seen have been no less than amazing. A client selling home accessories saw a 301% increase in revenue after only one month. As a result, we are now changing our agency standards within PLAs to only use Shopping campaigns.” -White Shark Media

Future of Shopping campaigns and retirement of regular PLA campaign type
Shopping campaigns offer a truly retail-centric and seamless approach to PLAs. We're very excited by the positive feedback we've heard so far and will continue to build tools and features into this new campaign type to help you manage your PLAs. Thus, we'll be retiring the regular PLA campaign type and asking all PLA advertisers to upgrade to Shopping campaigns by late August 2014, at which time all remaining PLA campaigns will be automatically upgraded. Over the next few months, we’ll share more information and release more tools to help you upgrade your campaigns and manage them at scale. We encourage you to start planning your upgrade to Shopping campaigns today to take full advantage of the new features as soon as possible.

For additional help, here are a few resources:

• Tutorial Videos to help you get started
• AdWords Help Center for more detailed information on Shopping campaigns
• Learn With Google Webinar (April 15) for upgrade tips
• Learn With Google Webinar (May 15) for more advanced upgrade best practices
• AdWords Ads Developer page for more AdWords API documentation

Posted by Eric Tholomé, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping

An important step by the Media Rating Council toward a viewable impression currency

On Monday, the Media Rating Council (MRC) announced that it is lifting its advisory on transacting on viewability for display advertising, originally issued in November 2012. In taking this step, the MRC is signaling that great strides have been made toward the goal of transacting display advertising using viewable impressions, and the industry is ready to begin the process of adopting viewable impressions as a standard metric. We applaud this move and are thrilled to see the industry move closer to the reality of a true viewability currency.

Google has been a longtime supporter of this effort and we’ve partnered with the industry, the Media Rating Council and the IAB, as part of the Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) initiative, to help guide the definition and adoption of a viewable impression standard. Last April our viewability measurement solution Active Viewreceived accreditation by the Media Rating Council and, in the coming months, we’ll be making Active View reporting available to all DoubleClick customers across our platform. We believe that giving marketers, agencies and publishers access to a common, integrated viewable impression metric will set the foundation for viewable impressions to become an actionable currency.

But measurement alone will not make viewable impressions a currency. To become a currency we need technology that allows advertisers and publishers to not only measure, but also transact on viewable impressions. In December, we took our first step toward making viewable impressions a true currency by giving advertisers the ability to target and buy only viewable impressions on the Google Display Network. We’ve seen a strong positive response as thousands of advertisers and brands have adopted viewable impression buying on our network, but we’re not stopping there. We’re investing heavily in Active View and working quickly to enable our DoubleClick platform clients to value, buy, sell, serve and optimize to viewable impressions across the web. 

The MRC announcement represents an important milestone in the journey towards a viewable currency. As marketers and agencies adopt the viewable standard we can start to build a new display market that is more transparent and actionable for brand marketers.

Posted by Sanaz Ahari, Senior Product Manager

Originally posted at http://doubleclickadvertisers.blogspot.com/

Upgrade to Search Network With Display Select for Better Performance

Last month we shared some stories about how Search Network with Display Select is driving strong performance for many advertisers including Elmo Learning, Wordstream and ShopPivot. This new, high performing hybrid campaign type helps advertisers, on average, see a 35% higher click-through-rate, and a 35% lower cost-per-customer purchase on the Display portion of their Search Network with Display Select campaigns.

Upgrade now for better performance
To start tapping into this opportunity, upgrade your “Search and Display Networks” campaigns to “Search Network with Display Select” today. You may be offered an option to create a ‘Display Network only’ campaign during the upgrade process. If you would like to maintain your click volume on Display, accept this option and we will automatically create a ‘Display Network only’ campaign for you. As we continue to invest in Search Network with Display Select and see strong adoption from advertisers, we will begin upgrading all ‘Search and Display Networks’ campaigns to ‘Search Network with Display Select’ campaigns starting on September 16th, 2014. Click here to upgrade.

We’re here to help
We want you to be successful with AdWords, so please visit the Help Center or Contact Us if you'd like assistance with your upgrade.

Posted by Ahmad Anvari, Product Manager, Google Display Network

+Post ads now available to all advertisers and support Hangouts on Air

Last December, we introduced +Post ads to a limited number of advertisers as a new way to amplify content and create conversations across the web. +Post ads let you to take a piece of your public Google+ content, like a photo or video, and turn it into an engagement ad that runs across the Google Display Network.

Starting today, +Post ads are available to all advertisers who meet a minimum threshold of Google+ followers. We’re also piloting two new features - promoted Hangouts on Air and automatic post promotion - to help you create compelling ad experiences and make it easier to extend the reach of your social content.

Partner success
+Post ads are already helping advertisers run creative campaigns that make the entire web their social stream. For example:

For the launch of the 2014 Corolla, Toyota USA sought to drive consideration from a younger audience by promoting their Google+ content with +Post ads. For this campaign, Toyota USA saw a 50% higher engagement rate than the industry average for rich media ads.

Click to see the Toyota case study

To raise awareness with their potential customers, prAna, a yoga and climbing inspired apparel company, incorporated +Post ads into their existing AdWords display campaigns. “We focused on highly targeted audiences that best reflect the interests of our core consumers, such as yoga, climbing, outdoor lifestyle etc. We chose the most hyper relevant Google+ content to promote to each targeted audience, to ensure high engagement rates,” says Karen Hardy Online Marketing Manager.

The European Parliament worked with Ogilvy Brussels to run a campaign in 11 countries encouraging European citizens to cast their votes in the upcoming EU elections. Koen Van Impe, CEO Ogilvy Brussels, found the combination of an easy to create ad, the potential reach and targeting of the Google Display Network, and the powerful ad format promising and saw engagement rates that were 50% to 100% higher, and at a lower cost-per-engagement, than previous campaigns.

Click to enlarge

Promoting Hangouts on Air across the web
You can now promote your Hangout on Air with +Post ads that lets users take specific actions before, during, and after the broadcast. Users can RSVP prior to the Hangout, watch the broadcast live, and view a recording after the event.

ASOS hosted a shoppable Hangout where fans could check out styles and make purchases from a collection created in collaboration with a global activewear brand. The event was promoted live in a +Post ad, driving awareness and live tune-ins of the event on relevant web sites. In total, 71% of live viewers for the Hangout watched from a +Post ad.

Promoted Hangout on Air

Automatically promote your most recent post
At any given moment, there is someone interested in your brand, but it’s challenging to make sure you reach people at every moment that matters. Now you can automatically promote your most recent Google+ post, and pay only when people engage with your content, extending the reach of your social content across the web. 

Lean more about +Post ads and Google+ by visiting the Google+ for brands site.

Posted by Eran Arkin, Product Manager, Social Display Ads

How Search Insights Can Inform Your Event Strategy

Oscar Night. The Olympic Games. Bonnaroo. We think of produced events as finite moments in time. But as we saw with Bob Costas’ eye and “Adele Dazeem”, many of these “finite” moments actually create a much larger window of interest—and opportunity—online. You could say that for every offline action, there is a digital reaction. And it starts with search.

By understanding search data and its role before, during and beyond an event, marketers can prepare to respond to consumers’ needs and desires in new and timely ways. Think with Google looks at how these search insights can help guide a thoughtful event strategy and provides tips for marketers to get the most value from events. Read the full article.

Check out Think with Google’s full collection of Search Insights articles for more examples of how to use search data to inform your marketing.

Posted by Think with Google

New upgrade option for Shopping campaigns

Earlier this month, we shared a few success stories on Shopping campaigns, our new campaign type for Product Listing Ads (PLAs), and that the regular PLA campaign type will retire in late August 2014.

To upgrade to Shopping campaigns, we encourage you to create a Shopping campaign from scratch and thencustomize your product groups and bids from there. That way, you can choose how granular you’d like to get and ensure all your inventory is included in your Shopping campaign.

However, if you would like to base your Shopping campaign on a regular PLA campaign, we’re introducing an option today to help you upgrade.

After setting up your Shopping campaign, you’ll be taken to a new page to create ad groups. Here, you’ll see two options: the ability to start fresh with one ad group or create one or many ad groups based on a regular PLA campaign.

Note that some parts of a regular PLA campaigns aren’t transferable to a Shopping campaign, like product targets that use AdWords labels or groupings. If none of your PLA campaigns are transferrable, you might not see this option.

Keep in mind
With Shopping campaigns, you no longer need to create separate ad groups or product targets to track your impressions, clicks and cost. You can analyze and report on your PLA performance by product attribute or by individual items in the Dimensions tab, regardless of your campaign structure.

As a reminder, all PLA advertisers will need to upgrade to Shopping campaigns by late August 2014, at which time all remaining regular PLA campaigns will be automatically upgraded. Over the next few months, we’ll continue to share more information and tools to help you upgrade your campaigns and manage them at scale.

To learn more about Shopping campaigns and how to upgrade, here are a few resources:

• Upgrade guide
• Learn With Google Webinar on May 15
• AdWords Help Center

Posted by Eric Tholomé, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping