Author Archives: Alex Chen

Find your next customer with new audience solutions for Search and Shopping

Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) help you reconnect with people who’ve been to your website before, but engaging both new and loyal customers is just as important to your business. Starting today, we’re rolling out similar audiences for Search and Shopping along with Customer Match for Shopping to help you use your own data to reach the right customer with the right message.

Find similar customers

Similar audiences helps you find people who share similar interests with your best customers, right when they’re searching for products and services like yours. This makes it easy for you to expand your reach by connecting you with more people who want what you have to offer.

Imagine you’re marketing a hotel in Hawaii using RLSA, and you want to connect with summer travelers. The people in your “Recent Converters” list might be searching for things like ‘flights to Maui,’ ‘scuba classes,’ and ‘flip-flop sandals.’ Powered by Google’s machine learning, similar audiences uses these search trends to help you find people who are looking for the same things as your existing customers, even if they’re not on your remarketing lists.

By connecting you with more qualified customers, similar audiences can help unlock new opportunities to grow your business. For example, you may discover generic terms work better with a similar audience applied to them. You can also use it as a bid modifier to be more competitive in a crowded auction, tailoring your bids to reach people who are more likely to buy.

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, a leading global auto company, used similar audiences for Search to increase conversions by 22%.
“Similar audiences for search has helped us reach auto shoppers more efficiently while improving our ability to connect with them in critical moments throughout their purchase journeys. In less than two months, similar audiences for search delivered an 11% increase in clickthrough rate and 22% more conversions across our test campaigns.” - Amy McNeil, Head of Digital Marketing at Fiat Chrysler Automobiles US
John Deere, a leader in farming machinery, used similar audiences for Search to drive a 300% increase in clickthrough rate.
“We’ve been really pleased with the outcome of similar audiences for search after witnessing a 300% increase in clickthrough rate and a 31% increase in conversion volume. It’s been a huge help in reaching brand new consumers throughout the research and purchase process.” - Jennifer Cox, Agriculture & Turf Segment Manager, Property Care at John Deere 
And video game retailer GameStop used similar audiences for Shopping to find customers who were 30% more likely to buy.
“Similar Audiences helped us find new customers who are just as enthusiastic as the gamers who regularly visit our site. Since using Similar Audiences with our shopping ads, we’ve seen a 30% increase in conversion rate.” - Matthew Gordon, Multi-Channel Acquisition Manager at GameStop

You’ll now see Search list size estimates for your similar audiences, letting you know how many people they can reach. These audiences can be applied to both your Search and Shopping campaigns. Learn more about similar audiences.


Customer Match available for Shopping campaigns

Start connecting with your most valuable customers as they shop on Google.com with Customer Match for Shopping campaigns, rolling out globally. By using your email lists, Customer Match makes it easy for you to focus Shopping campaigns on your high-value customers–like previous purchasers, newsletter subscribers, rewards members and in-store shoppers.

Let’s say that you manage marketing for an online apparel retailer, and you’re interested in connecting with your rewards members. To make it easy for you to reach these customers when they’re shopping, you can now use your “Rewards Members” customer email list to show them relevant Shopping ads featuring your latest spring styles.

ULTA Beauty, a premier beauty retailer, used Customer Match for Shopping to improve engagement with online shoppers.

“We were excited for the chance to re-engage with our loyalty members on the web by highlighting top sellers from the wide range of brands we carry. With Customer Match for Shopping, we could connect with our high-value email list subscribers, resulting in a higher clickthrough and conversion rate with these shoppers.” - Dominic Manna, Senior Manager of Digital Marketing at ULTA Beauty

Posted by Cedric Dupont, Group Product Manager, AdWords

Source: Inside AdWords


Say It in Six: Why marketers and creatives are embracing the newest video ad length

Have you heard the good news about YouTube’s six-second bumper ads? These little wonders have swept the globe for three simple reasons: they provide wide reach, they drive brand results and they’re a great canvas for creativity.

And we’re ready to mark the one year anniversary of bumpers by giving them their star turn – for the 2017-2018 upfront season, we’re making bumpers available for Google Preferred buys. This format is a perfect match to the sought-after content included in Google Preferred and will help advertisers drive reach and build awareness during increasingly mobile viewing moments.

Let’s take a closer look at this little format that could, built to capture attention wherever and whenever it’s available.

Bumpers drive efficient reach
Sold on a simple CPM, bumpers aren’t just an easy way to get your brand in front of a lot of people – they also effectively drive upper funnel results. We looked across 122 bumpers campaigns in the US last year and found that 70% drove a significant lift in brand awareness, with an average lift of 9%.1 On ad recall, they perform even better – over 9 in 10 drove ad recall globally, with an average lift of over 30%.2 Given their high success rate and ease of use, bumpers can be a great building block for your YouTube campaigns.

Bumpers work for brands
Thanks to their efficiency and efficacy, many brands are weaving bumpers into their campaigns. For instance, Busch used bumpers to continue the story from their first-ever Super Bowl ad. Busch worked with their creative agency Deutsch to collect extra footage from their Super Bowl shoot and create bumpers with different themes. This approach resulted in a double-digit lift in both purchase consideration and brand awareness among viewers. Knowing how well its bumpers performed across various brand lift metrics, Busch was also able to optimize its campaign in real-time, tailoring its creatives to audience segments most likely to consider buying the beer after seeing a particular ad. As Busch's Senior Director, Digital Victoria Vaynberg points out, "Capturing consumers’ attention is always a challenge, so short and contextually-relevant content is key to getting over this hurdle. By using YouTube bumpers, we were able to tap into a great product that is built to address this challenge and successfully break through with consumers."

Under Armour also turned to bumpers for a recent product launch. They took a strategic hybrid approach for advertising on YouTube, leading with a TrueView ad, which helped to engage the audience through an emotional narrative, followed by bumpers that highlighted the innovation of the new product.

“Under Armour is committed to making all athletes better through performance and innovation, while inspiring the next generation of athletes with powerful storytelling,” said Jim Mollica, Vice President of Consumer Engagement at Under Armour. “Our forward-thinking strategy guided our athletes through a unique engagement funnel, which was evidenced by double the lift in product interest among people who saw our YouTube bumper ad and our TrueView ad combined, compared to those who only saw our TrueView ad."

We’ve also seen strong results in third party studies when using a comparable approach to Under Armour's – using bumpers to remarket to TrueView views produced a significantly higher lift in ad recall vs TrueView alone, with an average higher lift of 42% for the skipped views and 104% for the paid views.3 We’re excited to see other brands follow a similar playbook, orchestrating their storytelling across ad lengths to maximize results."

Bumpers offer a great canvas for creativity
It’s no surprise that some of bumpers’ earliest fans have come from the creative community. Part of the reason bumpers are such a fertile format for storytelling is that creativity thrives in constraint. At SXSW, we challenged artists, filmmakers and agency creatives to re-imagine classic works of literature in six seconds – effectively re-telling these stories in miniature. The results were by turns evocative, funny, poignant and beautiful, and they showed that six seconds is a natural and adaptable ad length. For more insights into how to build bumpers that work, check out our new article “Success in Six” on Think with Google.

For more information on bumpers, including how to set up a campaign, check out the Help Center and don’t forget to #bumpitup.

Posted by
Zach Lupei, Product Manager
Jim Habig, Product Marketing Manager


1. Google Bumper Ad Brand Lift Meta Analysis, 2016 [US]
2. Google Bumper Ad Brand Lift Meta Analysis, 2016 [Global]
3. Google/Eye Square Experiment 4 ads (n=4000 YouTube weekly users, 18-64 years old). March 2017, U.S.

Source: Inside AdWords


Introducing Chrome Music Lab

This year, for Music in Our Schools Month, we wanted to help make learning about music a bit more accessible to everyone by using technology that’s open to everyone: the web. We built a set of experiments that let anyone explore how music works. It’s called Chrome Music Lab, and you can check it out at g.co/musiclab.

You can play with sound, rhythm, melody, and more. Chrome Music Lab is all built for the web, so you can start playing instantly, whether you’re on a tablet, phone, or laptop. Just like today’s Clara Rockmore doodle, the experiments are all built with the Web Audio API, a freely-accessible, open web standard that lets developers create and manipulate sound right in the browser. We’re also providing open-source code so that others can build new experiments based on what we’ve started.

Exploring music can help spark curiosity in all kinds of ways. We hope these experiments inspire you – whether they give you a new perspective on music, make you more curious about math and science, or even make you think of new ways to teach or code. 


So crank up the volume and start playing at g.co/musiclab.

Source: Google Chrome