Tag Archives: Google Marketing Platform

Deliver consistent site experiences with Google Optimize

Consumers expect connected shopping experiences from research to purchase. But their journeys aren’t linear; they move around, visiting—and revisiting—multiple sites and apps, multiple times a day. 


This makes it challenging for businesses to deliver a coordinated site experience, especially if they are running an experiment or personalization on their site. How do they make sure that the version of their site someone saw in the morning is the same version they see in the afternoon? 


Google Optimize can now understand when a customer has returned to a site they visited before and deliver a consistent site experience. Let’s see how this works.


Imagine you’re a hotel business running a marketing campaign that promotes a 20 percent discount for the upcoming holiday season. When people visit your site in response to the campaign, you want to make sure you offer this discount to them throughout their entire booking experience, even if they come back multiple times before they make a reservation.


One part of your marketing campaign is paid media you buy through Google Ads. In this case, you would use Optimize to create a custom web page featuring the discount and then add the Google Ads rule to ensure this page is shown to people who first arrive to your site from your Google Ads campaign. There are likely many people who click on an ad, explore your site, then come back later to complete the reservation. Now, no matter how many other pages on your site people visit, or how many times they return over 24 hours, Optimize will automatically display that custom page to them each time. 


Another way you promote this sale is through email. For this part of your campaign, once you create a custom web page with the discount offer, add a utm_campaign parameter named “holiday-sale” to the URL in the email. Then in Optimize, add a UTM parameter rule for “holiday-sale.” Optimize can now use that parameter to display the correct experience every time people who received the promo email visit your site. In addition to email, you can also use the UTM parameter rule in advertising campaigns managed with Display & Video 360 and Search Ads 360, or any other campaigns you are running that support UTM parameters.


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Create a UTM parameter rule to focus your experiment or personalization on a particular marketing campaign.


Royal Bank of Canada is an Optimize 360 customer that has already begun using UTM parameter rules. 


Together with their Google Marketing Platform Partner, Bounteous, they often use Optimize 360 to run personalizations across their entire website. Because most of these personalizations are focused on delivering the right content to the right user from their marketing campaigns, they were excited to start using the UTM parameter rule. 

"The customer journey at the Royal Bank of Canada is rarely linear. We need experiments that can react as customers frequently engage and navigate our website. The UTM parameter rule gives us that flexibility, and it is changing the way we approach our campaigns.” 

- Arnab Tagore, Senior Manager of Digital Analytics, Royal Bank of Canada

Both the Google Ads rule and UTM parameter rule are already available to use in Optimize and Optimize 360. We encourage you to go into your account and check them out and we look forward to sharing more new features that help you better meet your customers’ expectations and get the most out of your website.

A privacy-safe approach to managing ad frequency

At Google, we believe it's possible to improve user privacy while preserving access to the ad-supported web. Back in August, we shared an update on the progress we’re making toward this vision. Chrome put forward a series of proposals inviting the web standards community to start a discussion on how to advance user privacy while meeting the needs of publishers and advertisers. We also shared an initial proposal for practices that we believe would give people more visibility into and control over the data used for advertising.


Since then, we’ve engaged with product and engineering experts from across the digital ads ecosystem—including at the IAB Tech Lab’s Innovation Day on Data Responsibility, heard from brand and agency leaders during Advertising Week in New York, and met with our publishing and ad technology partners at the Google Ad Manager Partner Summit. This week, we’ll be holding discussions with our advertising and publishing partners in Europe at a series of events in London.


In all of these forums, the conversations have centered on how to reshape marketing and measurement solutions to be more privacy-forward for users, while ensuring they remain effective for the publishers and marketers that fund and sustain access to ad-supported content on the web.


One example is how advertisers manage the number of times someone sees an ad, a critical step to delivering a better user experience. When third-party cookies are blocked or restricted, advertisers lose the ability to limit the number of times someone sees their ads. This means that users may be bothered with the same ad repeatedly, advertisers may waste spend or decide to exclude certain media altogether, and publishers may earn less revenue as a result.

Using machine learning to manage ad frequency while respecting user privacy

That’s why, in the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out a feature in Display & Video 360 that uses machine learning to help advertisers manage ad frequency in a way that respects user privacy when third-party cookies are missing. And in the future, we plan to bring this capability to our display offerings in Google Ads.


Using traffic patterns where a third-party cookie is available, and analyzing them at an aggregated level across Google Ad Manager publishers, we can create models to predict traffic patterns when a third-party cookie isn’t present. This allows us to estimate how likely it is for users to visit different publishers who are serving the same ads through Google Ad Manager. Then, when there is no third-party cookie present, we’re able to optimize how often those ads should be shown to users.


Since we aggregate all user data before applying our machine learning models, no user-level information is shared across websites. Instead, this feature relies on a publisher’s first-party data to inform the ad experience for its own site visitors. It’s an approach to managing ad frequency that’s more privacy safe than workarounds such as fingerprinting, which rely on user-level signals like IP address, because it respects a user’s choice to opt out of third-party tracking.


This is a step in the right direction as we work across Google to raise the bar for how our products deliver better user experiences while also respecting user privacy. And this approach to ad frequency management can be a model for how the use case might one day be solved industry wide at the browser level. It’s consistent with Chrome’s explorations of new technology that would advance user privacy, while ensuring that publishers and advertisers can continue to sustain access to content on the open web.


As we continue engaging with users and key industry stakeholder groups, we look forward to sharing more of what we learn. Stay tuned for more updates on our blogs.


Manage tags easily and safely with the new Community Template Gallery

Businesses often work with trusted partners to conduct a variety of important functions on their websites. These partners can help businesses accurately measure their online conversions or determine which product reviews to display. For all this to work  businesses need to implement tags, or code written by their partners, directly on their sites. It’s critical for businesses to trust that these tags are working as intended to protect their customers and brand. 


With that in mind, we’ve created the new Community Template Gallery for Google Tag Manager. Community Template Gallery is an open platform where partners can share their tag templates. Businesses can then customize these templates to easily implement tags on their websites.


Not only does Community Template Gallery help businesses quickly implement and manage tags, but it also provides more transparency into how these tags will behave—making the whole tagging process easier and safer.

Less code is more 

In the past, if your business needed to implement a partner tag that wasn’t already integrated with Tag Manager, getting that tag up and running would take a lot of manual work. You might have to consult with your partner to determine how to correctly customize and place the tag on your website so it was tailored for your business needs. Not only did this take a lot of time, it also required heavy involvement from developers, leaving lots of room for error.


Community Template Gallery reduces the potential for incorrect implementation. Once your partner shares their tag template in the gallery, you can find it and simply enter the required information in an intuitive UI. You do not need to customize any HTML or Javascript.
Businesses can add tag templates to their workspace and then tailor the tag by completing the form.

Businesses can add tag templates to their workspace and then tailor the tag by completing the form.

Community Template Gallery also helps partners keep tag templates up-to-date. Whenever partners make updates to their tag templates, the latest version will quickly become available. And if you’ve already implemented that tag template,  we’ll notify you that there is a new version that you can review before making the update.

Increased transparency 

When you publish a partner’s tag on your website, you need to understand what it does and trust that it won’t do anything unexpected. That’s why we’ve built a permissions system into Community Template Gallery.


Before you implement or update a tag from the gallery, you will now be able to review and approve the actions it will take when it becomes live on your website. This gives you more control and transparency over the tags on your sites.


Businesses can review and approve how a tag will behave when implemented on a website.

Businesses can review and approve how a tag will behave when implemented on a website.

Community Template Gallery is now live in both Tag Manager and Tag Manager 360. You’ll find many tag templates already included and ready to use. If you’re a tag developer, we encourage you to build and submit your template today.

Google Ads auction-time bidding comes to Search Ads 360

Smart Bidding in Google Ads uses machine learning to set bids at auction-time by factoring in a wide range of signals that help predict performance. Now you can take advantage of Google Ads auction-time bidding in your Search Ads 360 bid strategy. By activating auction-time bidding you can enhance your performance when bidding on Google Search, while still maintaining your cross-channel bidding strategy powered by Search Ads 360. During beta testing hundreds of Search Ads 360 advertisers enabled Google Ads auction-time bidding and saw an average lift in conversions of fifteen to thirty percent at the same or better ROI.

Identify more opportunities with auction-time signals

Every day billions of people turn to Google to find answers. While people are often searching for the same things, their searches are unique thanks to their context. This includes their device, browser, language, location, time of day, and other factors. Google Ads auction-time bidding automatically sets bids based on these signal combinations.

For Vodafone, factoring these signals into its bidding strategy was mission critical. Vodafone is one of the world’s largest telecom companies with mobile operations in 25 countries. During the beta period, Vodafone enabled Google Ads auction-time bidding in Search Ads 360 to ensure the right bid was being set for each auction across every location in which they operate. Now the team plans to activate Google Ads auction-time bidding across their Search Ads 360 bid strategies.

Auction-time bidding in Search Ads 360 has enabled us to leverage the full potential of Google’s Smart Bidding technology in combination with Search Ads 360 Floodlights. As a result we have been able to lower our cost-per-conversion by 15%. Samantha Mikula
Marketing Specialist, Vodafone

Reach more customers when they are ready to convert

Google Ads auction-time bidding anticipates when a conversion is likely by analyzing your account history, Floodlight conversions, and exclusive signal combinations. This unique approach improves Search Ads 360 bidding results by helping you reach more customers when they are ready to convert.

Head of Marketing, Jamima White, at Australian energy company AGL, discovered that Google Ads auction-time bidding helped drive results for her business in a competitive environment. With Google Ads auction-time bidding enabled, AGL saw conversion volume increase nineteen percent at the same cost per acquisition.

With Search Ads 360 and Google Ads auction-time bidding we have been able to increase conversions by 19% while maintaining the same cost per acquisition efficiency. Jamima White
Head of Marketing, AGL

Give Smart Bidding time to learn and improve

Google Ads auction-time bidding performance improves over time with more data. When enabling auction-time bidding, plan for a one-week window where Google Ads Smart Bidding learns about your business and doesn’t set auction-time bids. After the initial learning period, Google Ads will begin setting auction-time bids while continuously learning and adapting to changes in your performance. 

How to enable Google Ads auction-time bidding functionality in Search Ads 360

Auction-time bidding in Search Ads 360 is generally available for Google Search campaigns, and launching in open beta for shopping campaigns. If you’d like your shopping campaigns in Google Ads added to the beta, reach out to your account representative.

To get started with Google Search campaigns navigate to an existing bid strategy. Then, under “Engine features”, check the box for “Auction-time bidding.”

bid strategy

Enable Google Ads auction-time bidding with one click

To learn more about Google Ads auction-time bidding in Search Ads 360 visit the Help Center, or contact your account representative.

Improve campaign performance with new automated bidding solutions

Automated bidding in Display & Video 360 helps you make sure you’re present when consumers are most likely to respond to your ads. Using Google’s advanced machine learning, it evaluates and tailors your bids for every auction to help predict the likelihood of a conversion and deliver the best results for advertisers. 

To give you more choices for your automated bidding strategies, we’re introducing a new way to pay for your campaigns, expanding support for non-guaranteed deals, and allowing you to manage automated bidding setting at the insertion order level.

Pay only for the outcomes you care about

Today, automated bidding only supports buying on a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) basis. But we know that when you have a campaign with a goal such as clicks, conversions, or installs, our automated bidding technology could deliver better returns if it allowed you to buy based on these goals, instead of on impressions. That’s why we’re introducing outcome based buying in Display & Video 360 which allows you to pay only for the results you are seeking.

Outcome based buying supports cost per click buying for campaigns that use either target cost per acquisition (CPA) or maximize conversions strategies. For example, if you’re an online retailer planning a back to school campaign with a $15 target CPA, you can have Display & Video 360 deliver conversions at or below $15. Or, if you want to make sure you spend all your budget, you can have Display & Video 360 generate as many conversions as possible within that budget at any CPA. In both cases, Display & Video 360 will optimize your bids to help get more of the actions you care about, and you'll only be charged for clicks.

PPO UI

Select outcome based buying when setting up a new insertion order

We've seen that advertisers who have tested outcome based buying have been able to get better results from their performance focused campaigns. For example, our agency partner, PMG, used outcome based buying to increase sales for an apparel brand’s re-engagement campaign.

With outcome based buying we're able to improve returns and only pay for the results we want to achieve. In a recent test, we've seen 90% more conversions compared to our previous bidding strategy. Justin Scarborough
Programmatic Media Director, PMG

Outcome based buying is now available for all display campaigns with a post-click conversion goal in Display & Video 360.


Use automated bidding in more campaigns

Automated bidding delivers better returns for both your branding building and performance-oriented campaigns, however until now it has only worked with your open auction buys.

 To help you get better performance with automated bidding on more campaigns, we’re expanding its availability to all non-guaranteed deals. If the deal has a floor price, you will be able to have Display & Video 360 take that into consideration and ensure your ads are showing as planned.

Choose an automated bidding strategy for your non-guaranteed deals and specify if a bid floor is to be taken into consideration

Choose an automated bidding strategy for your non-guaranteed deals

In addition, you can now set your automated bidding strategy at the insertion-order level instead of at the line-item level. By taking into consideration the performance across multiple line items, automated bidding will be able to shift spend to the high performing line items and deliver better returns for the same spend. 

With outcome based buying and expanded support for automated bidding, marketers can tap into Google’s advanced machine learning to get better results across a broad variety of buying scenarios.

Next steps to ensure transparency, choice and control in digital advertising

Ads play a major role in sustaining the free and open web. They underwrite the great content and services that people enjoy and support a diverse universe of creators and publishers. But the ad-supported web is at risk if digital advertising practices don’t evolve to reflect people’s changing expectations around how data is collected and used. 

The mission is clear: we need to ensure that people all around the world can continue to access ad supported content on the web while also feeling confident that their privacy is protected. As we shared in May, we believe the path to making this happen is also clear: increase transparency into how digital advertising works, offer users additional controls, and ensure that people’s choices about the use of their data are respected. 

Working together across the ecosystem

The web ecosystem is complex—it includes users, publishers, advertisers, technology and service providers, advocacy groups, regulatory bodies and more. We’ve seen that approaches that don’t account for the whole ecosystem—or that aren’t supported by the whole ecosystem—will not succeed. For example, efforts by individual browsers to block cookies used for ads personalization without suitable, broadly accepted alternatives have fallen down on two accounts. 

First, blocking cookies materially reduces publisher revenue. Based on an analysis of a randomly selected fraction of traffic on each of the 500 largest Google Ad Manager publishers globally over the last three months, we evaluated how the presence of a cookie affected programmatic revenue. Traffic for which there was no cookie present yielded an average of 52 percent less revenue for the publisher than traffic for which there was a cookie present. Lower revenue for traffic without a cookie was consistent for publishers across verticals—and was especially notable for publishers in the news vertical. For the news publishers in the studied group, traffic for which there was no cookie present yielded an average of 62 percent less revenue than traffic for which there was a cookie present.1

Second, broad cookie restrictions have led some industry participants to use workarounds like fingerprinting, an opaque tracking technique that bypasses user choice and doesn’t allow reasonable transparency or control. Adoption of such workarounds represents a step back for user privacy, not a step forward.

Exploring new privacy-forward standards for the web

Today, Chrome shared an update on their efforts to explore new foundational technologies for the web that will deliver on the vision laid out above—widespread access to free content and strong privacy for users. Chrome has offered a number of preliminary proposals to the web standards community in areas such as conversion measurement, fraud protection and audience selection. The goal of these proposals is to promote a dialog on ways browsers could advance user privacy, while still ensuring publishers can earn what they need to fund great content and user experiences, and advertisers can deliver relevant ads to the right people and measure their impact.

Getting the web standards community to work on developing a new set of technologies is a tall order, but it’s not unprecedented. The community has worked together on a number of similar challenges over the years—such as gaining consensus to phase out browser plug-ins and reaching agreement to move away from Flash. We expect this will take years, not months, and we don’t anticipate any near-term changes to how our ads products work on Chrome. But this is important work and we support the effort. 

Pursuing a new level of ads transparency and user control

While Chrome explores new technologies for the web, we’re also acting on the commitment we made in May of this year to increase the transparency of digital ads and offer users more control. Over the past few months, we’ve been listening to feedback from users and partners, and have arrived at an initial proposal to give people more visibility into and control of the data used for advertising. We’ve begun sharing this proposal for discussion to key industry and stakeholder groups and we’re eager to hear and incorporate feedback.

Whether it’s working with the standards community to explore a new set of technologies, or getting feedback from participants across the digital ads industry on a proposal to increase transparency and offer users more control, Google is committed to partnering with others to raise the bar for how data is collected and used. Only by working together can we define and implement new practices that result in better, more privacy-focused experiences for users while addressing the requirements of publishers and advertisers that fund and ensure access to free content on the web.

1.  Google Ad Manager data; n=500 global publishers; Analysis based on an A/B experiment where cookies are disabled on a randomly selected fraction of each publisher's traffic; May-August 2019

Growing in-app viewability coverage with Open Measurement

People are spending more time on their mobile phones, especially in apps, and move across screens frequently. As people’s usage of mobile apps has grown, so has the importance of standardizing the way viewability is measured on mobile devices.

Today we’re sharing how we’ve made in-app inventory more measurable through the IAB Tech Lab’s Open Measurement standard. Integrating the Open Measurement Software Development Kit (SDK) into both our Google Mobile Ads (GMA) and Interactive Mobile Ads (IMA) SDKs has allowed us to enable Open Measurement on 85+ percent of in-app display and video impressions on Google AdMob and Google Ad Manager publishers. This means that buyers of this inventory can now take viewability measurements using solutions like Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify, Comscore, and Moat in addition to measurement that was previously available with Active View.  

“IAB Tech Lab’s Open Measurement (OM) initiative makes it easier for ad buyers and sellers to work together for viewability measurement and other verification needs,” said Dennis Buchheim, Executive Vice President and General Manager, IAB Tech Lab. “The sell-side has been adopting OM quickly, and we ask brands, agencies, and Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) to get more active and take advantage of what OM offers.” 

Advertisers can get started today by appending Open Measurement enabled tags from their viewability vendor of choice to their creatives.

Measurement vendors are lauding this development as progress for a more measurable future. Joseph Ranzenbach, Director of Product Management, IAS says, "Google's adoption of the Open Measurement SDK is a huge step in moving the industry forward and creating more transparency for advertisers." Sumit Shukla, SVP, Strategic Partnerships, Comscore says, "It’s important for Brands to consistently measure viewability across the entirety of their media buys. With Comscore’s cross-platform campaign measurement as a trusted market currency, this close partnership with Google further helps Brands measure what matters."  

Viewability measurement unlocks high-performing In-app inventory for advertisers

Viewability continues to be an integral part of measuring ad effectiveness—it helps advertisers understand if their ad had the opportunity to be seen and it helps publishers offer more high-quality inventory.

In-app viewability means that advertisers can confidently take advantage of this high-value inventory. In 2018 we worked with Ipsos MORI to understand the impact of in-app advertising and found it was successful in driving action. People were 50 percent more likely to interact with a brand, buy a product or service, follow a call-to-action or recommend a brand to their family or friends after seeing its ad in an app, compared with those who saw it via a browser. Display & Video 360 customers can now confidently extend their brand campaigns to apps knowing they are able to measure ad viewability at the impression level as they would in other environments.

Publishers like Pandora recognize the importance of holistic viewability measurement. Maria Breza, VP, Ad Quality Measurement and Audience Data Operations at Pandora said, “Advertisers should be able to seamlessly use one viewability provider to measure their buys across all publishers and platforms. Open Measurement has allowed Pandora to make this a reality for our clients with less latency, less maintenance and more stability.”

What’s next for Open Measurement

We’re continuing to work with the IAB’s Tech Lab Open Measurement Working Group to expand Open Measurement to use cases beyond viewability, as well as to other environments such as web video. We believe Open Measurement has the potential to create a more transparent and accountable digital media ecosystem across all screens. Reach out to your measurement partners and Google representative to find out how you can take advantage of this new measurement technology.



Source: Google Ads


A new way to unify app and website measurement in Google Analytics

People expect to interact with businesses when and how they like, such as browsing a brand's website to research a product and then purchasing it later using the brand's app. Getting insight into these cross-platform journeys is critical for businesses to predict customer needs and provide great experiences—but it can be very challenging.

Currently, many businesses measure app engagement with Google Analytics for Firebase and website engagement with Google Analytics. While each of these products separately offer powerful insights, getting a more unified picture of engagement across your app and website can be a manual and painstaking process. 

To make this simpler, we’re announcing a new way to measure apps and websites together for the first time in Google Analytics.

Unified app and web analytics  

First, we’re introducing a new property type, App + Web, that allows you to combine app and web data for unified reporting and analysis.

Onboarding

 Measure your app and website together in Google Analytics

Reports for this new property use a single set of consistent metrics and dimensions, making it possible to see integrated reporting across app and web like never before. Now you can answer questions like: Which marketing channel is responsible for acquiring the most new users across your different platforms? How many total unique users do you have, regardless of which platform they use? How many conversions have occurred on your app and website in the last week—and which platform is driving most of these conversions?

User Overview

See combined metrics across your app and website

You can also go deeper to understand the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns across platforms. For example, you can see how many users started on your app then visited your website to make a purchase.

Flexible event measurement

Understanding how people engage with your app and website means that you need to measure a diverse range of user interactions like clicks, page views, app opens, and more. We’re making it easier to measure those actions on all of your platforms in a consistent way. The new property type utilizes a more flexible event-based model for collecting the unique interactions that users have with your content, allowing you to measure any custom event that you set up. 

This event-based model also allows you to automate the manual work of tagging some of the events on your site with no additional coding required. In addition to page views, enhanced measurement allows you to measure many common web events like scrolls, downloads, video views and more with the flip of a toggle in the admin settings for your property.

Enhanced measurement helps you measure events with the flip of a toggle

Enhanced measurement helps you measure events with the flip of a toggle

Cross-platform analysis

Given the many different ways people interact with your brand between app and web, you need flexible tools to make sense of your data and discover insights unique to your business. The new Analysis module enables you to examine your data in ways that are not limited by pre-defined reports.

There are a number of techniques you can use including: 

  • Exploration: Conduct ad-hoc analysis by dragging and dropping multiple variables—the different segments, dimensions, and metrics you use to measure your business—onto a canvas to see instant visualizations of yourdata.

The Exploration technique allows you to visualize your data with drag and drop ease

The Exploration technique allows you to visualize your data with drag and drop ease

  • Funnels: Identify important steps to conversion and understand how users navigate among them—where they enter the funnel, as well as where they drop off—with both open and closed funnel options. 

Understand how users engage with a sequences of key events on your app and website using the Funnels technique

Understand how users engage with a sequence of key events on your app and website using the Funnels technique

  • Path analysis: Understand the actions users take between the steps within a funnel to help explain why users did or did not convert.

Visualize actions taken on the users’ path to conversion with the Path analysis technique

Visualize actions taken on the users’ path to conversion with the Path analysis technique

Once you’ve surfaced insights from your analysis, you can use the results to create audiences and use those audiences to deliver more relevant marketing experiences to your customers. 

Start measuring across platforms

The first version of this new app and web experience—including the new event model and new analysis capabilities—will be available to all Analytics and Analytics 360 accounts in beta in the coming weeks. If you use Google Tag Manager or the global site tag for Google Analytics today, there’s no re-tagging required for your website. To include your app data, you’ll need the Firebase SDK implemented in your app. See how to get started in Google Analytics, or if you’re an existing Firebase customer, here’s how to upgrade.

If your business has both an app and website, and is looking for a more complete view of how your customers engage across both, we encourage you to participate in this beta and share your feedback. We are working to make Google Analytics the best possible solution for helping you understand the customer journey and create great customer experiences across platforms. Your partnership is essential to help us get there.

Capture the attention of sports fans with Display & Video 360

Watching sports brings friends and family together to cheer on their favorite teams and enjoy a shared experience. For decades, live sports have given marketers the opportunity to reach these engaged audiences at scale and associate their brand with the teams, players, and moments fans are excited about.

What makes sports so compelling for marketers hasn't changed, but the formula for capturing the attention of sports fans has. Historically, marketers could buy commercial airtime on live sports broadcasts and be sure that their message was reaching a passionate and broad audience. But as our viewing options have increased, brands have had to find new ways of engaging potential customers. Display & Video 360 helps brands reach these engaged audiences where and when they are watching.

Reach engaged fans on connected TV

I’m a die-hard Dodgers fan but live outside of Los Angeles so I only watch baseball games on the MLB.tv connected TV app. This means that connected TV is the best way to reach me in these moments. This is also true for an increasing number of sports fans who turn to connected TV to find exclusive sports content or to catch up with games they missed.

With Display & Video 360, you can use Programmatic Guaranteed deals to secure a wide variety of valuable connected TV sports inventory and build a deeper relationship with a fan base. For instance, as the excitement builds-up for the second half of the Major League Baseball season and the race to the postseason, you can tap into MLB.tv’s premium content on connected TVs. Sling TV’s always-on sports deal is another source of high-profile in-game spots as well as surrounding coverage on leading broadcast and cable networks. 

Be there during peak moments with real-time triggers

The game clock is winding down. The underdog scores to win as time expires. Wouldn’t it be impactful to capture this moment by boosting your reach and updating your ad message right away?

Now available to all advertisers and agencies, real-time triggers in Display & Video 360 is an automated tool that allows marketers and agencies to instantly activate specific display and video messages in response to live TV or real-world events. Ad delivery can be accelerated across devices as soon as these pre-defined “triggers” or moments happen. 

The real-time triggers workflow makes event-based campaigns scalable and easy to build. You simply define the triggers you care about in Display & Video 360 and then specify which ad creative you want to go live immediately following that event. For example, you could set-up a trigger that would serve a specific ad for fifteen minutes during halftime of any NFL game. Or you could be even more specific and run ads for two hours after the New England Patriots win a game or for twenty minutes whenever the Patriots or a specified player scores a touchdown. 

Sports trigger set-up in Display & Video 360

Sports trigger set-up in Display & Video 360

AirAsia used Display & Video 360’s real-time triggers to reach a massive audience of engaged fans in Southeast Asia during the most memorable moments of the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Their #StillGotIt campaign featured soccer start Roberto Carlos showing off the skills he still has even after retiring, from his signature curling free kick to non-stop Samba dancing. AirAsia focused on reaching fans in Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand — countries with avid soccer fan bases — and doubled the ads’ frequency during Brazil’s matches and the World Cup Final to ramp up engagement. By synching its ads with the most crucial moments and partnering with a world-renowned winner like Carlos, AirAsia’s campaign resonated with millions of fans. As a result, AirAsia built a strong positive connection between their brand and their ambassador, exceeding industry averages for celebrity association according to third party research.

In the past, it was a tedious and manual task to reach so many different markets in precisely the right moments with the right message Ravi Shankar
AirAsia’s Group Head of Digital Marketing

Real-time triggers in Display & Video 360 supports all English Premier League, Champions League, National Football League (NFL) and National Basketball Association (NBA) games and we’re adding more on a regular basis. In fact, a number of marketers used real-time triggers during the FIFA Women's World Cup this year.  


In addition to Display & Video 360’s automated sports triggers, we’ve added custom triggers to help you time your ads with any tentpole moment that may be relevant to your brand. For example, if your audience is passionate about the Oscars or a reality TV show like The Bachelor, you can now decide to trigger your campaigns to launch when the first award is given or when the rose ceremony begins. You can also set-up your trigger to accelerate the delivery of your ads right at the moment when you kick off a flash sale or announce a new product.


Building your brand with sports fans requires a smart game plan. To break through and ensure your message sticks, you need to connect with people at the right time and on the right device. Access to smart buying techniques and high-quality connected TV inventory in Display & Video 360 will help you stay ahead of the competition.

How Rituals used Google Marketing Platform to become a global brand

One year ago we introduced Google Marketing Platform to help marketers drive better results for their business. Google Marketing Platform brings together our advertising and analytics solutions, allowing you to create, buy, measure, and optimize your marketing in one single place. This enables a better understanding of the customer journey and more effective campaigns. 

We’ve seen companies around the world use this unified approach to deliver business growth. Rituals, a fast-growing European bath and body company, is one success story that stands out. Although popular across Europe, Rituals is thinking bigger—and is using Google Marketing Platform to achieve its goal of becoming a global brand.

Google Marketing Platform: Rituals Case Study

Google Marketing Platform: Rituals Case Study

Rituals accelerates growth with an automated audience strategy 

Rituals has a loyal customer base in Europe, but wanted to reach more people in other regions. To support this growth, Rituals needed a marketing strategy that could scale quickly.

Previously, in order to reach potential customers, the Rituals team would manually build audience lists that they would later use in their marketing campaigns. But as Rituals entered into more new countries, the amount of manual work that went into creating these audiences became excessive. Their team turned to Google Marketing Platform and its machine learning capabilities for help.

Today, Rituals uses Google Marketing Platform to predict which visitors to its website are most likely to purchase and then automatically create audiences of those people. This makes it easier for Rituals to quickly reach them across its marketing campaigns. 

The result? A faster and smarter approach to marketing, driving an 85 percent increase in sales and a 15 percent decrease in cost-per-acquisition.

The results are incredible. It actually helped us transform our whole vision. We want to be a global brand and Google Marketing Platform facilitates that growth. Martijn van der Zee
Digital Director at Rituals

To learn more about how Rituals automated its marketing strategy, read the full case study here.

As Google Marketing Platform enters its second year, we’re excited to continue to work with brands around the world and share their success stories.