“If there’s one thing that you take away from my talk today it’s this: it’s no longer about devices. It’s about connecting people to the content that they care about, whether they’re online, on mobile sites, or in apps”- Jerry
Google is in a unique position to measure and report on cross device user behavior and upcoming advancements will be centered on this cross-device experience for user and advertiser. Their first step towards this occurred last summer with the launch of enhanced campaigns that allowed advertisers to gain better insight cross device. In the coming months there are a number of new AdWords products and features that will give even greater insight and control. On April 22 Google hosted an hour long product update for the AdWords advertising platform. While there wasn’t one huge new opportunity, there are 5 key items that every marketer should know about:
1) New Innovative Ads for Mobile Apps –
On Google Play, as of May 2013, Google had 50 billion app downloads of more than a million applications, and every day users in 190 countries are downloading apps to their devices. Because of this Google AdWords is focusing on new ads types that will help consumers find mobile apps. As the app market is highly competitive these new ads will be focusing on driving awareness, installation, engagement, and conversion.
The ads themselves will be across the Google network, on YouTube, display, search, in-app, and of course will Google Play itself. Google’s goal is to help the 60% orphaned apps that are never installed currently on the app market will. Fortunately this will be all integrated into Google AdWords in the coming months.
2) Cross Device Estimated Reporting Update –
While this did roll-out last summer Google now has a study confirming that in you are shopping the number of total conversions increased 7% when you consider conversions across multiple devices and 32% more convergence when you consider activities that start on mobile event completed on another device. While this reporting data is an estimation it’s getting so better picture of user behavior and potentially where the dollars should be spent.
3) Two New Automated Bidding Options –
Google has updated some of their auto bidding rules one to maximize bids are number of conversions and the other to maximize on revenue. In the past he’s been useful as maximum and minimum governors of an account or campaign but often garnered lower number of conversions while seeking a lower cost per action. As any good marker I’m skeptical about auction bidding tools from the advertising platform itself.
4) Data Visualization and Pivot Tables –
Reporting directly in the AdWords user interface has always been difficult and usually leads a marketer to download the raw .CSV file to perform analysis. To help speed up the time of just “pulling the data” Google will be rolling out new enterprise reporting enhancements directly in the AdWords user interface, mainly a Pivot table tool and graphing report that Google is dubbing the multidimensional analysis tool. The tool will allow you to drag and drop all elements of an AdWords account and manipulate that life that in real time without having to download anything. This should greatly help data exploration across the entire AdWords interface and lead to faster recognition of trends. For the day-to-day search manager this is something that sounds insignificant but will have a huge impact on every account in AdWords potentially making the market overall smarter and more competitive.
5) Draft Experimental Campaigns –
“It’s really hard to know whether this change that I think I want to make is actually going to have the results that I think it should have.“- Every SEM marketer.
To help decrease the hesitation of testing new account structures, new adgroups, new keywords…, Google will be releasing a drafts experiments function that will allow marketers to see send a user defined percentage of site traffic to test key metrics prior to making a change 100%. As Paul F. Put it “It is essentially like a shopping cart for your AdWords changes.”
Watch Livestream Replay:Inside AdWords Livestream – April 22, 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5eXnF5RdFI
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Full April 22nd AdWords Update Video Transcription:
Announcer: Ladies and gentleman, please welcome Jerry Dischler.
Jerry: Hi everyone. Thank you to all of you who are here to join us in Half Moon Bay, and to the nearly 20,000 people who have tuned in to listen to our live stream.
I’m excited to share a number of new product announcements with you today, but before we do that I’d like to talk a little bit about the motivation that drives our product development efforts. For a couple of years we have been talking about the opportunity of mobile and mobile’s importance in your advertising, but today I’d like to tell you that it’s not really about mobile. It’s about consumers.
As consumers, what we really want to do is connect with the people and the things that matter the most, wherever we are, whenever, on any device.
If there’s one thing that you take away from my talk today it’s this: it’s no longer about devices. It’s about connecting people to the content that they care about, whether they’re online, on mobile sites, or in apps.
Marketers have always strived to get their messages to consumers at the right time and the right place, but consumers are often ahead of marketers in how they engage with the world.
Let’s look at the example of radio ads. The first radio broadcast was in 1906, and the first radio station was right down the road here in San Jose in 1909; but the first radio ad wasn’t until 1922 for an apartment complex in Jackson Heights, New York. We’ll hear a little clip from that now.
Clip: Visit our new apartment homes in Court, Jackson Heights, where you will enjoy community life in a friendly environment.
Jerry: The first radio ads were really primitive. Literally that was an announcer who took copy from the newspaper and read it over the airwaves. Although they were very primitive though, radio ads were incredibly effective with the ability for marketers to reach brand new audiences that they couldn’t before.
Over time, marketers started to learn more about radio as an advertising medium and now to connect with consumers. For example, in 1926 there was the first radio ad jingle from Wheaties. The jingle was a purpose-built ad format that leveraged the audio nature of radio to tell stories.
As radio evolved as a medium, radio ads progressed further still. When the Wheaties ad came out, radios were only available in the living room, but as technology progressed and radio became more pervasive, radio started to be available in cars, and on the go with the advent of the transistor radio.
As reach increased advertisers became more comfortable with the medium, and soon radio ads differed by day of week, time of day, type of content, or crucially, when users were available during that crucial rush hour period in their cars.
If you fast forward to the present day we have internet radio. Users can roll their own radio station on services like Pandora, Spotify, TuneIn, or iHeartRadio. This just provides even more powerful and personalized audio-based advertising opportunities for marketers.
As marketers, we’re all living this experience yet again in the world of constant connectivity. It’s a more exciting time than ever to be a marketer. People are living their entire lives online. Reaching them with the right messages, based on their context, in a way that takes them to what they’re looking for, is more important then ever.
Google is in a unique position to understand consumer behavior and use these insights as we build our products. Here are a few examples of how we see the impact of constantly connected consumers on Google today.
Yesterday users mapped over a billion kilometers in Google Maps. Last month users watched over 6 billion hours of video on YouTube, and 40% of those hours were watched on mobile devices. Last month users searched over 100 billion times on Google.com.
All of this amounts to billions of possible connections that you, as marketers, can have with consumers; but how do you deal with the complexity? The key is understanding context.
We at Google are here to help you connect with your consumers, to turn signals into stories to deliver more effective advertising.
The first step down this road was enhanced campaigns that allowed you to more effectively advertise across devices, and over the course of the past year we’ve been building on that success and making our advertising solutions even better. Today I’m going to announce a number of new products to help you better while there wasn’t any
As with many of our changes, it’ll take a few months for these solutions to roll out, and where we’re going to be announcing these products in more detail is on our Inside AdWords blog at AdWords.blogspot.com.
With that, let’s go to the product announcements. I’m going to announce products that sit under three pillars: #1) innovative ads, #2) insightful reporting, and #3) tools for efficiency and scale.
Let’s start with innovative ads. You as cross-device marketers know that mobile is more important than ever, and within mobile apps are more important than ever. On Google Play, as of May 2013, we saw 50 billion app downloads of more than a million applications, and every day users in 190 countries are downloading apps to their devices.
As a result, as marketers, apps are an increasingly large part of the landscape; but from a consumer perspective, people aren’t necessarily looking for apps. They’re looking for solutions to their problems, and they often don’t know what app they need to install or even if they need an app. We need to work together in order to allow users to focus on what they need to do rather than how they need to do it, whether on a website or application.
As marketers, you know the importance of apps in providing great experiences, so it should come as no surprise that 70% of the people in the room today have applications today. If you have an application you also know that using apps is a challenge. Driving awareness, installation, engagement, and conversions are constant struggles.
Today we’re announcing a holistic solution to help you advertise apps across the Google network, on YouTube, on display, and on search. You can manage this all within AdWords with a single integrated experience and simplified workflows.
We’ve been developing solutions to advertised apps for a long time, and we’re building on our success on AdMob and search. Hundreds of millions of applications have already been downloaded as the result of these products. Now we’re scaling this effort up, and we’re bringing it together into a single integrated solution.
Let’s talk a little bit more about this solution works. First let’s look at the problem of discovery and installation. By some third-party measures, 60% of apps are never actually installed, but we’ll help you drive installations through this integrated solution. Let’s walk through three ways that will help you with targeted offerings.
On search, we’ll suggest keywords based on unique insights that we have from Google Play. Let me run you through an example. Let’s say that you’re the advertiser Hotel Tonight, and you want to advertise on the most effective queries on Google.com. If we take a look at data from Google Play, what we’ve noticed is that last minute hotels, hotels, and hotel apps are the three most popular queries on Google Play that result in the most installations. We’ll then suggest these to you as keywords so that you can select these and related queries on Google search to drive more downloads.
Looking at display, we’re going to provide a solution to reach the rest users for your apps based on app usage statistics and in-app purchases that we know from our experience with Google Play. For example, let’s say that you want to drive downloads of a calorie-counting app. We might show your ads to users who’ve installed running apps or other health and fitness apps in the past.
Finally, when looking at YouTube, we’re building on the success of our existing TrueView video format to allow you not only to show your video content but also to encourage the download of applications alongside your existing videos.
Okay, so you’ve gotten your app downloaded on your device. Now what? Eighty percent of apps that are downloaded are only used once. Once the app is on the phone, we have a solution to help you drive usage. We call this new solution app deep linking, allowing consumers to focus even more on the what versus the how and driving more usage and more conversions for you as marketers.
Let me run you through some examples of how app deep linking works.
Let’s go back to our Hotel Tonight example. Let’s say that the user is on Google search, and they’re searching for hotels in San Francisco. Hotel Tonight is an advertiser. Using app deep linking can guide the user directly to the right page inside their app, showing the search results for “hotels San Francisco,” providing a great user experience and more conversions for the advertiser.
Let’s look at a display example. Let’s say I’m playing a game and a see an add for the Hulu show, Deadbeat. The ad knows that I’ve watched an episode, and it’s advertising the next episode in the series. Because of deep linking, I can go to the most relevant page for that episode directly within the Hulu app and can start watching with a single click. Again, a great user experience, but from the advertiser perspective drives more conversions.
All of this installation and usage is nothing without rock-solid measurement. As part of this integrated solution, we’re also going to help you measure conversions … from installation to reengagement to in-app purchases.
Apps are only one piece of the puzzle. We can help you as marketers do more to connect with consumers, to turn signals to stories and help people wherever, whenever, on any device.
That brings us to pillar two: insightful reporting. The desktop world used to be simple. You go to a website, you convert on the website, you’re done. In the world of the constantly connected consumers, measuring conversions is more difficult. That’s why last year we launched established total conversions, allowing you to estimate conversions across multiple devices as well as conversions that result from phone calls.
In the short time since launch, we’re seeing really strong traction from estimated total conversions. I’m going to share some stats with you today. In US shopping, as the result of established total conversions, advertisers are able to measure 7% more conversions when you consider conversions across multiple devices, and 32% more conversions when you consider activities that start on mobile but complete on another device. This is helping advertisers in shopping inform their bids in budgets.
Let’s take a look at a specific example. Shutterfly saw a 15% increase in AdWords conversions measured overall as the result of established total conversions, and a 60% in conversions measured when including mobile to desktop. As a result, Shutterfly chose to opt 100% of their keywords into mobile in order to access more customers across devices.
It’s not just about cross-device conversions, and it’s not just about call conversions. What many of you as advertisers have asked us to do is to help you track offline conversions. We’re starting to develop a solution with selected advertisers to do that today.
As we develop and roll out this solution, we need to keep in mind three key principles. First it needs to deliver great consumer value; second, we need to protect user privacy; and third, it needs to deliver actionable insights for you as marketers.
Today I’m happy to announce the results of a pilot of established total conversion enhancements that we’ve made in order to measure in-store transactions. Let’s look at a success story.
The agency, Rimm-Kaufman Group, working with the Retailer Express, was one of our established total conversions offline pilot advertisers. By measuring and including the effects of offline sales in established total conversions, their return on ad-spend increased by 102%. That’s right. The offline impact of their online advertising was even higher than their existing measured online impact.
With better information like this, advertisers can bid based on their full value and can deliver better, more relevant, better-targeted ads that are better for consumers. There are endless possibilities when you have hyper-local information to connect with users wherever they are online.
This brings me on to pillar three: intelligent tools. We here at Google are here to help you manage the complexity of connecting with consumers wherever, whenever, on any device. One way that we’re doing this is with bulk actions.
Many of you have told us that working with AdWords is just too complicated and that, often, you have to use offline tools, AdWords editor, or spreadsheets in order to deliver large changes across a number of campaigns. With bulk actions, we’ll allow you to do this directly within AdWords, with bulk editing of extensions and campaign settings and dramatic improvements to bulk changes that you can make via spreadsheets.
Let’s go through an example. Let’s say that you’re running a promotion for the holidays, and you need to upload thousands of campaigns all at once. With bulk actions, we’ll allow you to do this with only a few clicks directly within the AdWords interface.
You can also easily set up campaign settings like locations targeting and ad rotation across a number of campaigns quickly and easily.
Next let’s talk about automated bidding. Our goal in automated bidding is to bring an enterprise-class solution to every advertiser directly within AdWords. You can set specific program goals like return on ad spend, cost per acquisition, or clicks, and let Google do the hard work of setting up the right bids to meet your efficiency targets and budget requirements.
We’ve seen lots of momentum for our automated bidding solutions today. Tens of thousands of advertisers are already using it to commit over a billion bidding decisions per day.
Let’s go through an example. Autobytel is an automotive advertiser who connects car buys with dealers and manufacturers across the country. Using conversion optimizer and automated bidding, they increased conversions and profits by 60% versus their manual bidding approach.
Today I’m happy to announce two new additions to our automated bidding suite: first, the ability to automate bids to maximize the number of conversions. Let’s say that you’re an auto manufacturer and you want to drive traffic to your car site. With this automated bidding solution. With this automated bidding solution, we’ll allow to maximize the number of people who go to your site to design a car.
The second addition to our automated bidding suite is to automate bids to maximize revenue. Let’s say that you’re a retailer who wants to optimize based on the value of sales. We’ll allow you to do this automatically through automated bidding. We want to deliver state-of-the-art bidding, once only available in third-party tools, for all advertisers in AdWords, and we’re investing heavily to count everything that you care about and then optimize on it.
We have two additional exciting announcements, two new tools for power users: a beautiful and easy way to visualize your data, and a powerful way to test your insights with real-world data.
In order to show you more, I’d like to invite up Paul Feng, Director of Product Management for the advertiser platform, who will show you more about how these work. Thanks, Paul.
Paul: Thank you, Jerry. I lead the team that builds advertiser tools, and I’m excited to be here today to be able to show you sneak peaks and to do two great features that we’re working on to help you reach your users more efficiently and effectively, with great enterprise reporting enhancement and optimization tools right inside AdWords.
Let’s start with reporting. We know you spend a lot of your time in spreadsheets, analyzing your data, looking for opportunities in your data, truly trying to understand your data. We also know that you spend a lot of time getting your data into that spreadsheet.
We have this video here that we’re showing that just speeds up the daily ritual that many of you go through to get your data out of AdWords and into a spreadsheet. We started in AdWords. You had to spend some time getting the report just so. You had to download the CSV. You load it into the spreadsheet. You clean up the data. You delete some columns. You add some columns. You put the data into a pivot table. You might do some additional formatting.
All told, this video, which we obviously sped up, took about four minutes; but if you’re doing this multiple times a day, which we know some of you are, it gets really hard and really tedious really fast. We thought, “What if we could build a tool that would allow you to do this kind of analysis, including the multidimensional stuff, which to date you had to use spreadsheets for, but to do it directly in AdWords.
Let me show you what we came up with. What we’ve got here is a tool that looks … and should be familiar to anyone who has used pivot tables in the past. You can see how I have a very similar, very smooth and tactile drag-and-drop interface, and I can just drag some attributes, drag some metrics into the table and quickly and easily create a pretty simple campaigns table.
This isn’t a pivot table. This is a little bit more of what we think of as a multidimensional analysis tool. For one thing, the data that’s plugged into this tool is actually live AdWords data. There’s really two benefits to this. The first is that it makes changes really easy.
Let’s say that I didn’t want campaigns in this table and what I really wanted was ad groups. If this was a spreadsheet and this was a pivot table, what I would have had to do is actually download the data again and go through that whole process again; but because this is a tool that’s right in AdWords with live AdWords data, changes are really simple.
I’m going to go ahead here and drag campaigns out, and drag ad groups in, and I’m done.
Another huge benefit of the fact that it’s live data, and it’s related to this, is that it makes exploration so much easier. Now you don’t have this impedance and this difficulty of having to actually go through all the work of uploading and downloading your data.
Another attribute of this tool that we’re really excited about is the fact that it’s actually multidimensional. It’s very easy for me to drag attributes and metrics into this table, and now what was a pretty simple ad group table with a very basic set of columns easily and quickly becomes a much richer representation of my data, again allowing really seamless exploration.
Of course, a picture is worth a thousand words, so we’ve also invested in great visualization and graphing capabilities. I’m going to show that right here. What I’m going to quickly do is switch with the same user interface, the same really nice drag-and-drop interface, and create a pie chart.
Let’s say, because I’m in exploration mode, a pie chart is not what I really wanted. I’m going to easily and quickly be able to switch that over and make that a line chart. Let’s say I want to add conversions as a metric. You can see how easy it is for me to explore my data. Lets say that’s not what I really wanted. What I really want, I think, is a bar chart, so I’m going to go quickly, switch it to bar. I’m going to drag out conversions, and maybe I’ll do a segmentation by day of the week.
We’re very excited about the power and flexibility this tool provides. We’re excited to get this tool in your hands so you can spend less of your time in the rinse-and-repeat cycle of downloading data and loading it into spreadsheets, and more of your time looking for insights in your data.
That’s enhanced reporting. The next features I want to talk to you about is one we’re calling drafts and experiments.
Drafts and experiments is a feature that is inspired by conversations we often have with you as advertisers where you say something like, “It’s really hard to know whether this change that I think I want to make is actually going to have the results that I think it should have.”
Say you are a national hotel chain and you’re considering changing the way to you do bidding to optimize better, and maybe you’re thinking about adding some of the great automatic bid strategies, the automated bid strategies that Jerry was just talking about. Should you do it? Will the changes have the effect that you think that they’ll have? Will it really benefit your business?
The reality is it is sometimes difficult to know. That’s why we’re been working on drafts and experiments. Drafts and experiments turns all of AdWords into a laboratory where you can stage and test your ideas before fully committing to them. Let me show you how it works.
What I have here is what looks like a standard AdWords interface but with a key difference. I’m going to switch this interface into draft mode. You can see I went up to the upper right, selected new draft, and I’m giving this draft a name … now in this interface, and AdWords is not in draft mode. Any changes I make to this campaign right now go into the draft. It is essentially like a shopping cart for your AdWords changes.
Once I’m done with the changes and once I’m happy with what I’ve got, I can do one of two things with this draft. The first is … let’s say I review this draft and it looks great, and I’m happy with it. Maybe I reviewed it with some colleagues. I’m happy with it as is, and I just want this to be part of the campaign from which it came. I can just apply changes, and they’ll go right into the original campaign. It works just like you would expect a draft mode to. Pretty cool, right?
There’s another thing I can do, and this is where the fun really starts. That thing is that I can take this draft and actually turn it into an experiment, and run it with a percentage of my traffic. When I do that, I get these great tools to help me compare the results of that experiment against the results of the original campaign.
Now I have results. That’s really the key word here. I can make that decision about whether or not to make these changes not with a hypothesis but really with real-world data. When I’m happy with those changes and I’m happy with those results, then I can easily go and apply the changes in that experiment to the original campaign.
We’re really excited about drafts and experiments and really excited to get this feature in your hands as well because we think it’ll help you make more data-driven decisions, make better decisions, and ultimately make you more successful.
To recap, two features we’re working on that we’re really excited about: enhanced reported with a multidimensional analysis tool so you can spend more of your time exploring your data and less of your time processing it, and drafts and experiments to help you make better data-driven decisions.
Thank you, and now let me hand it back to Jerry.
Jerry: Pretty amazing, right? We’re hope you’re as excited as we are about today’s product announcements. Many of these announcements are the direct result of feedback from you, our advertisers and partners, so thank you.
It’s an exciting time to be a marketer. People are living their entire lives online, and helping them connect to the people and things that matter the most is more important than ever.
Google in a unique position to help you as marketers do that, wherever people are online, across the web, mobile sites, and in apps.
Just to recap, today we walked through innovations in three key pillars: first, innovative ads with a new offering around apps; second, insightful reporting, including a new solution around offline measurement; and third, a host of new powerful tools to manage complexity.
Remember, it’s no longer about devices. It’s about connecting with people, and together we can bring marketing back to people and give consumers great experiences. The future of marketing is using technology to reach people in the right context, in the right moment.
