The end of 2017 is just around the corner, and for many marketers, the most important time of year is still to come: the holiday season. With mobile as their “anywhere” assistant, today’s researched-obsessed shoppers are more curious, demanding and impatient than ever before. Today, we’re introducing innovations to help you meet these rising consumer expectations and win more customers during the holidays and beyond.

Drive discovery of your brand and products

Consumers sometimes know exactly what they're looking for, but over 40% of shopping-related searches on Google are still for broad, research-oriented terms like "women's athletic clothing" or "living room furniture."¹ To help curious holiday shoppers discover your brand and product selection when they’re still in exploration mode, we’ve launched Showcase Shopping ads in the new AdWords experience, and made it available to more advertisers globally in 15 new countries. These ads let brands curate a collection of lifestyle images and products to help people explore and discover what they want to buy and who they want to buy from. We began testing Showcase Shopping Ads last year and found that shoppers who engage with them are more likely to consider your brand as they narrow down their search. On average, users search for a merchant’s brand terms twice as often after they’ve expanded that brand’s Showcase Shopping ad.²



Brands like Overstock.com are seeing the benefit: the team recently created 50+ Showcase Shopping ads and saw a 3x increase in brand searches and 32% more click-assisted conversions leading to a purchase compared to standard Shopping ads.

And to help you reach shoppers looking for just the right holiday outfits, we’re introducing a new apparel search experience which includes a visually-rich design alongside brand logos, and filters that let shoppers quickly narrow down options based on special sizing, price range and more. Additionally, "Similar looks" surfaces more recommendations based on a user’s previous clothing preferences.

Make it easy for shoppers to move between online and stores

While some consumers may get their holiday gifts shipped early, last-minute shoppers might need to head to a store to find the perfect present. To make it easier for them to find you, we’ll be launching local inventory on the Google Assistant so products from your local stores may be organically surfaced to users. By asking the Assistant, “Ok Google, where can I buy _____ nearby?” on Google Home or their phones, holiday shoppers can easily learn what’s available in a store around them. If you have a local product inventory feed, your products may begin automatically appearing in relevant results on the Assistant.
Marketers can also use promoted local experiences across Google to drive more foot traffic. Soon, we’ll be introducing a new local ad for Display so you can spotlight in-store products and promotions, much like you would with your print catalogs or circulars. Reach out to your Google account team to join this pilot and use the local inventory feed from your Shopping ads to get up and running quickly.

Drive incremental and higher-value store visits

With their smartphones in hand to do research, the customers walking through your doors are more ready to buy than ever before. For example, ‘shop with me’ videos are soaring in popularity, with watchtime growing over 10x in the past two years on mobile alone. Meanwhile, watchtime of ‘store tour’ videos on YouTube also grew by 10x in the same two years to help shoppers explore your store before they arrive.³

But as consumers move between channels, marketers often wonder which touchpoints and tactics are most impactful. To understand how Google Search and Shopping ads drive incremental store visits -- ones that wouldn't have happened if a user hadn't engaged with a Google ad -- we recently ran an in-depth study with over 140 advertisers globally, across a wide range of verticals. Here’s what we found:


Another study showed that people who click on a Google ad before visiting a store are over 25% more likely to buy something while they’re there and spend over 10% more, on average.⁴ Together, these studies help show the combined impact of investing in omni-channel marketing to drive a substantial number of new, incremental store visits and to influence higher-value purchases once someone gets to your store.

Get a deeper understanding of how your online ads connect people to stores

To help you capture the full offline impact of local ads and other formats on the Google Display Network, we’re enhancing store visits measurement for display advertisers. Impression-based store visits will become available in the coming months to give you a more comprehensive view of when seeing your display ad keeps your brand top-of-mind and drives users to take action later at a store, even when they don’t click through. Store visits are measured based on aggregated and anonymized data from users who opt in to activate Location History. This is done in a secure, privacy-safe way without sharing any personal location information.

Finally, after introducing distance and location reporting for store visits last year, we have three new reports to help you find more granular insights from your data:

• Time lag report (available now) - see how long it takes users to visit a store after clicking on your ad and understand how quickly they take action offline.
• New vs. returning customer report (coming soon) - understand how many of your store visits come from repeat customers.⁵ Together with the time lag report, this can help you gauge how your ads drive incremental visits.
• Demographic report (available now) - add store visits as a column to your existing demographic reports to see which groups are more likely to visit your locations.

For the holidays and beyond, we hope these new innovations will help you reach new customers and measure the impact to your business. Here’s to your best holiday season yet!

Posted by Jenn Liu, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping and Kishore Kanakamedala, Director of Product Management, Online-to-Offline Solutions

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1. Google Data, anonymized, aggregated searches that trigger a Product Listing Ad, US, November, 2015
2. Google internal data, Global, May 2017. Time period is measured four hours post-click compared to four hours pre-click.
3. YouTube Data, US, Classification as Store Tour video was based on public data such as headlines, tags, etc., and may not account for every such video available on YouTube, January - June 2015 and 2017.
4. Google data, U.S., Median percent difference comparing in-store purchase-per-visit and spend value between merchants’ search ad click-attributed and unattributed subgroups, Oct-Nov 2016, Advertisers = 25
5. You can set the window for defining a “returning customer” up to six months. If a user returns to any business location in your linked Google My Business account within that time frame, they will be counted as a returning customer.

As technology enables more assistive experiences, consumer's expectations for seamless web experiences are now higher than ever before. In fact, a one second delay in mobile page load can decrease conversions up to 20%.¹ But when someone clicks an ad with URL tracking, this can cause a delay that prevents them from reaching a website for hundreds of milliseconds.² While this may not sound like much, this lost time can impact campaign performance.

To avoid these delays and create better user experiences, we'll begin rolling out parallel tracking later this year. With parallel tracking, users will head immediately to your landing page after clicking your ad while their browser processes URL tracking requests in the background. We've seen this help users on slower networks reach landing pages up to several seconds faster.³ When more visitors can reach and engage with your site more quickly, this can help reduce wasted ad spend and increase conversions for your business.

Important next steps

Parallel tracking will finish rolling out to all AdWords accounts in early 2018. If you use a third-party provider, you should reach out to them as soon as possible to make sure your clicks will continue to be measured with parallel tracking.

Providers will need to make changes to their platform that could take several months to complete, so it's important to get started early. We're also working closely with key providers to help make the transition as easy as possible for all advertisers.

To learn more about parallel tracking and how to prepare, please visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Leo Sei, Product Manager, AdWords

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1. "State of Online Retail Performance," Akamai, April 2017
2, 3. Google Internal Data, Japan/India/US. Aggregated anonymized data from a sample of users that have clicked on an AdWords ad with URL tracking, August 2017

As technology enables more assistive experiences, consumer's expectations for seamless web experiences are now higher than ever before. In fact, a one second delay in mobile page load can decrease conversions up to 20%.¹ But when someone clicks an ad with URL tracking, this can cause a delay that prevents them from reaching a website for hundreds of milliseconds.² While this may not sound like much, this lost time can impact campaign performance.

To avoid these delays and create better user experiences, we'll begin rolling out parallel tracking later this year. With parallel tracking, users will head immediately to your landing page after clicking your ad while their browser processes URL tracking requests in the background. We've seen this help users on slower networks reach landing pages up to several seconds faster.³ When more visitors can reach and engage with your site more quickly, this can help reduce wasted ad spend and increase conversions for your business.

Important next steps

Parallel tracking will finish rolling out to all AdWords accounts in early 2018. If you use a third-party provider, you should reach out to them as soon as possible to make sure your clicks will continue to be measured with parallel tracking.

Providers will need to make changes to their platform that could take several months to complete, so it's important to get started early. We're also working closely with key providers to help make the transition as easy as possible for all advertisers.

To learn more about parallel tracking and how to prepare, please visit the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Leo Sei, Product Manager, AdWords

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1. "State of Online Retail Performance," Akamai, April 2017
2, 3. Google Internal Data, Japan/India/US. Aggregated anonymized data from a sample of users that have clicked on an AdWords ad with URL tracking, August 2017

Cross-posted from the Google Analytics blog.

In May, we announced Google Attribution, a new free product to help marketers measure the impact of their marketing across devices and across channels. Advertisers participating in our early tests are seeing great results. Starting today, we’re expanding the Attribution beta to hundreds of advertisers.

We built Google Attribution to bring smarter performance measurement to all advertisers, and to solve the common problems with other attribution solutions.

Google Attribution is:

• Easy to setup and use: While some attribution solutions can take months to set up, Google Attribution can access the marketing data you need from tools like AdWords and Google Analytics with just a few clicks.
• Cross-device: Today’s marketers need measurement tools that don't lose track of the customer journey when people switch between devices. Google Attribution uses Google’s device graph to measure the cross-device customer journey and deliver insights into cross-device behavior, all while protecting individual user privacy.
• Cross-channel: With your marketing spread out across so many channels (like search, display, and email), it can be difficult to determine how each channel is working and which ones are truly driving sales. Google Attribution brings together data across channels so you can get a more comprehensive view of your performance.
• Easy to take action: Attribution insights are only valuable if you can use them to improve your marketing. Integrations with tools like AdWords make it easy to update your bids or move budget between channels based on the new, more accurate performance data.

Results from Google Attribution beta customers

Last April, we shared that for AdWords advertisers, data-driven attribution typically delivers more conversions at a similar cost-per-conversion than last-click attribution. This shows that data-driven attribution is a better way to measure and optimize the performance of search and shopping ads.

Today we’re pleased to share that early results from Google Attribution beta customers show that data-driven attribution helps marketers improve their performance across channels.

Hello Fresh, a meal delivery service, grew conversions by 10% after adopting Google Attribution. By using data-driven attribution to measure across channels like search, display, and email, Google Attribution gives Hello Fresh a more accurate measurement of the number of conversions each channel is driving. And because Google Attribution is integrated with AdWords, Hello Fresh can easily use this more accurate conversion data to optimize their bidding.

"With Google Attribution, we have been able to automatically integrate cross-channel bidding throughout our AdWords search campaigns. This has resulted in a seamless change in optimization mindset as we are now able to see keyword and query performance more holistically rather than inadvertently focusing on only last-click events.
- Karl Villanueva Head of Paid Search & Display, HelloFresh

Pixers, an online marketplace, is also seeing positive results including increased conversions. Google Attribution allows Pixers to more confidently evaluate the performance of their AdWords campaigns and adopt new features that improve performance.

"By using Google Attribution data we have finally eliminated guesswork from evaluating the performance of campaigns we're running, including shopping and re-marketing. The integration with AdWords also enabled us to gradually roll-out smart bidding strategies across increasing number of campaigns. The results have significantly exceeded expectations as we managed to cut the CPA while obtaining larger conversion volumes." - Arkadiusz Kuna, SEM & Remarketing Manager at Pixers

Google Attribution can also help brands get a better understanding of their customer’s path to purchase. eDreams ODIGEO, an online travel company, knows that people don’t usually book flights or hotels after a single interaction with their brand. It often requires multiple interactions with each touchpoint having a different impact.

“Some channels open the customer journey and bring new customers, whereas other channels are finishers and contribute to close the sales. Google Attribution is helping us to understand the added value of each interaction. It enhances of our ability to have a holistic view of how different marketing activities contribute to success.”
- Manuel Bruscas, Director of Marketing Analytics & Insights, eDreams ODIGEO

Next steps

In the coming months we’ll invite more advertisers to use Google Attribution. If you’re interested in receiving a notification when the product is available for you, please sign up here.

Don’t forget, even before adopting Google Attribution, you can get started with smarter measurement for your AdWords campaigns. With attribution in AdWords you can move from last-click to a better attribution model, like data-driven attribution, that allows you to more accurately measure and optimize search and shopping ads.

Posted by Bill Kee, Group Product Manager, Measurement and Attribution

Cross-posted from the Google Analytics blog.

In May, we announced Google Attribution, a new free product to help marketers measure the impact of their marketing across devices and across channels. Advertisers participating in our early tests are seeing great results. Starting today, we’re expanding the Attribution beta to hundreds of advertisers.

We built Google Attribution to bring smarter performance measurement to all advertisers, and to solve the common problems with other attribution solutions.

Google Attribution is:

• Easy to setup and use: While some attribution solutions can take months to set up, Google Attribution can access the marketing data you need from tools like AdWords and Google Analytics with just a few clicks.
• Cross-device: Today’s marketers need measurement tools that don't lose track of the customer journey when people switch between devices. Google Attribution uses Google’s device graph to measure the cross-device customer journey and deliver insights into cross-device behavior, all while protecting individual user privacy.
• Cross-channel: With your marketing spread out across so many channels (like search, display, and email), it can be difficult to determine how each channel is working and which ones are truly driving sales. Google Attribution brings together data across channels so you can get a more comprehensive view of your performance.
• Easy to take action: Attribution insights are only valuable if you can use them to improve your marketing. Integrations with tools like AdWords make it easy to update your bids or move budget between channels based on the new, more accurate performance data.

Results from Google Attribution beta customers

Last April, we shared that for AdWords advertisers, data-driven attribution typically delivers more conversions at a similar cost-per-conversion than last-click attribution. This shows that data-driven attribution is a better way to measure and optimize the performance of search and shopping ads.

Today we’re pleased to share that early results from Google Attribution beta customers show that data-driven attribution helps marketers improve their performance across channels.

Hello Fresh, a meal delivery service, grew conversions by 10% after adopting Google Attribution. By using data-driven attribution to measure across channels like search, display, and email, Google Attribution gives Hello Fresh a more accurate measurement of the number of conversions each channel is driving. And because Google Attribution is integrated with AdWords, Hello Fresh can easily use this more accurate conversion data to optimize their bidding.

"With Google Attribution, we have been able to automatically integrate cross-channel bidding throughout our AdWords search campaigns. This has resulted in a seamless change in optimization mindset as we are now able to see keyword and query performance more holistically rather than inadvertently focusing on only last-click events.
- Karl Villanueva Head of Paid Search & Display, HelloFresh

Pixers, an online marketplace, is also seeing positive results including increased conversions. Google Attribution allows Pixers to more confidently evaluate the performance of their AdWords campaigns and adopt new features that improve performance.

"By using Google Attribution data we have finally eliminated guesswork from evaluating the performance of campaigns we're running, including shopping and re-marketing. The integration with AdWords also enabled us to gradually roll-out smart bidding strategies across increasing number of campaigns. The results have significantly exceeded expectations as we managed to cut the CPA while obtaining larger conversion volumes." - Arkadiusz Kuna, SEM & Remarketing Manager at Pixers

Google Attribution can also help brands get a better understanding of their customer’s path to purchase. eDreams ODIGEO, an online travel company, knows that people don’t usually book flights or hotels after a single interaction with their brand. It often requires multiple interactions with each touchpoint having a different impact.

“Some channels open the customer journey and bring new customers, whereas other channels are finishers and contribute to close the sales. Google Attribution is helping us to understand the added value of each interaction. It enhances of our ability to have a holistic view of how different marketing activities contribute to success.”
- Manuel Bruscas, Director of Marketing Analytics & Insights, eDreams ODIGEO

Next steps

In the coming months we’ll invite more advertisers to use Google Attribution. If you’re interested in receiving a notification when the product is available for you, please sign up here.

Don’t forget, even before adopting Google Attribution, you can get started with smarter measurement for your AdWords campaigns. With attribution in AdWords you can move from last-click to a better attribution model, like data-driven attribution, that allows you to more accurately measure and optimize search and shopping ads.

Posted by Bill Kee, Group Product Manager, Measurement and Attribution

Measurement is foundational to digital marketing. Heading into the holidays, it’s more important than ever to make sure all of your online sales, reservations and leads are measured accurately. To that end, we wanted to bring an important update to your attention: The recent introduction of Intelligent Tracking Prevention affects conversion measurement on Safari. It’s important to update your website tags as soon as possible so that you see all of your conversions from Safari. This is in line with Apple's recommendations for ad attribution. Without updating your tags, it will be difficult to measure the efficacy of your marketing campaigns.

Site-wide tagging preserves your visibility

There are multiple ways to measure the performance of your online advertising. The best options rely on site-wide tagging -- tagging that’s applied to every page on your site. Applying the tag to every page of your site keeps your measurement updated and helps to measure conversions more accurately, including in Safari's ITP environment. This article includes all of the necessary steps to properly tag your site.

Here are three different options when it comes to measuring conversions:

Option 1: Install the global site tag (gtag.js) on your entire site

We’ve introduced updated conversion tagging via the new AdWords experience: Our new global site tag (gtag.js) will now serve as the single tag for both AdWords and Google Analytics, with support for DoubleClick products coming soon. By setting it on every page of your site, and placing event tags on your active conversion pages, the global site tag will send conversion data whenever event calls are made.

1. Access the global site tag in the Conversions section of AdWords and install it on every page of your site.
2. Place event calls on each of your active conversion pages following the instructions in AdWords.

For step-by-step instructions, check out this Help Center article.

Option 2: Link your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts

Consider this approach if you're already using Google Analytics to measure your website engagement. Once you link your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts and meet some requirements, your conversions will be measured more accurately. This is true whether you're using the analytics.js tag or the new global site tag, gtag.js, for Google Analytics tagging.

Option 3: Use Google Tag Manager

For customers who are already using Google Tag Manager, there's no need to make any changes to your page -- simply add the conversion linker tag in the Tag Manager interface, and set it to fire on all pages.

If you're not yet using Google Tag Manager, you can get started with the global site tag (Option 1 above) and then easily upgrade to Tag Manager in the future.

If you’re using a non-Google tool for website measurement, check with your vendor to make sure your solution allows you to measure conversions in Safari's ITP environment.

Learn more

Head over to the Help Center for more information about site-wide tagging and conversion measurement. Finally, if you use DoubleClick Search, an update for the floodlight tag will be available in November.

Posted by Wilfred Yeung, Product Manager for Bidding and Conversions

When we first announced the rollout of the new AdWords experience, our goal was simple: to introduce a faster and more intuitive AdWords that's focused on helping you reach your business goals. Starting today, the new AdWords experience is available to all advertisers.

Get more done, faster

First, you’ll notice that your account pages load faster—on average, 20% faster—so you can quickly get to the information you need and get on with your day.

We’ve removed the clutter and made navigation a breeze so you can do more in less time, like adding multiple ad extensions to your campaigns in a single step. Customers like iProspect North tell us that the new design and layout saves them 30% more time on average when completing everyday tasks.

Finally, easy access to key insights about your customers, like visualizations of the days and hours they're most engaged with your business, help you take immediate action to drive better results.

Innovations to help you reach your goals

Whether it’s driving more valuable calls to your business or improving your mobile experience, you need tools that help you reach your unique business goals. Innovations like call bid adjustments and the “Landing pages” page were built exclusively for the new experience to do just that—with many more to come.

The faster AdWords in action

From a U.K. agency helping their client surpass its goals, to a small juicing business tripling its growth—we’re inspired by the stories we hear from businesses around the world, large and small. See some of these inspiring stories:

Getting started

To get familiar with the new experience, take the guided tour.

To find what you need, our how to videos are here to help you navigate, and the AdWords Help Center has been updated with all the latest features. You can also check out the Best Practices guide for recommendations and tips on how to make the most of the new experience. And we encourage you to leave feedback by clicking on the help icon in the top right corner of your account.

We look forward to hearing your feedback about how Google can continue building a better AdWords for your business.
Posted by Jerry Dischler, Vice President of Product Management, AdWords

This year, around 90% of global sales will happen in a physical store.¹ To bring more shoppers through the door, businesses need tools to efficiently reach nearby consumers and measure their campaign performance across channels. That's why we introduced store visits measurement back in 2014. Since then, businesses around the world have measured over 7 billion store visits in AdWords.

Unlock offline results with YouTube

As we shared at Shoptalk Europe today, location extensions and store visits measurement are now available on YouTube. With YouTube's first-ever ad extensions for TrueView in-stream and bumper ads, you can influence viewers to engage with your brand offline and drive more visits and in-store purchases. People watching your videos will see your address, directions and business hours—right in the ad. You can then use store visits measurement to see how your video campaigns drive foot traffic and measure their performance against other online and traditional marketing channels, like television, print and radio ads.




Says Darrin Kellaris, Executive Director, Marketing at IHOP, "Video has been an integral part of our digital strategy to optimize guest interactions online with relevant and distinctive content. We were happy to partner with Google to find new ways to measure the full value of our video campaigns. Through Google's store visits solution, we gained useful consumer insights that helped us drive visits from YouTube for less than $1 per guest. Insights like this have given us an innovative way to measure business impact beyond standard brand metrics and to understand how video helps drive lower-funnel actions. This is something we’d like to see become more prevalent across all media partners."

Jerome’s Furniture has included store visits in their Search measurement and optimization since 2015. It is now using location extensions and store visits for YouTube to drive more customers into stores and understand offline performance across channels. “YouTube has proven to send qualified visits to our stores at a very efficient cost. The visibility into YouTube's impact on store visits has opened our eyes and our investment in YouTube advertising has risen dramatically," says Scott Perry, Senior Vice President of Digital Marketing.

Elgiganten, a Swedish electronics retailer, turned to video to help drive its omnichannel marketing strategy. After the first half of 2017, the company found that its video campaigns brought 6-10% of users who viewed its ad on YouTube to its stores. Overall, the brand has seen an 8.8% increase in its sales, and learned that its mobile search traffic delivers a 21% higher return on ad spend on mobile phones versus desktop. “With store visits we are able to turn consumer insights into actions," says Niko Niva, Digital Specialist at Elgiganten. "We can see which products are more likely to drive people to the store rather than buying online, and how people who are close to a retail location and using a mobile device are more likely to visit the store."

Engage local consumers on sites and apps across the GDN

Earlier this year, we fully rolled out location extensions and store visits measurement to campaigns on the Google Display Network (GDN). Now, you can reach more nearby customers when they're ready to buy and get a better understanding of your offline performance across channels. Advertisers large and small across industries have seen success using display ads to drive customers to their physical businesses—even those who usually depend on traditional offline campaigns, like catalog and circular ads.

Lawson, a convenience store chain with nearly 15,000 stores globally, was the first advertiser in Japan to use store visits to measure the full value of its display ads. Historically, the company focused most of its advertising on offline campaigns. After testing store visits for Display, the brand learned that mobile ads were more effective and cost-efficient at driving foot traffic to their stores, saving them 45% more in costs per visit compared to desktop and tablet ads. Says Kazuya Nobe, Vice Chief Marketing Officer, "Understanding how effective our mobile display ads are and the profiles of the customers visiting our stores after seeing our online ads is a huge step forward for our business. This helps us better cater to customer needs and optimize our marketing ROI.”

The Home Depot Canada, Canada's leading home improvement retailer, used store visits insights to learn that 18% of people who clicked on its display ads visited a store within 30 days. It also discovered that 50% of these customers made an average in-store purchase of $65 Canadian dollars. "This is valuable data, and we look forward to relying on store visits insights like this to help us keep driving our online to offline marketing strategy," says Matthew Gangnier, Manager, Digital Media & Content.

In the coming weeks, we'll also begin introducing more local ad formats powered by location extensions to help people find the products they're interested in at nearby businesses. To start, we'll be rolling out affiliate location extensions for display ads, which allow manufacturing brands to show which retail chains sell their products.



If you're focused on engaging omni-channel customers, you can now use location extensions and store visits measurement across Video, Display, Search and Shopping to drive more visitors to your business offline.

Posted by Brad Bender, Vice President of Display and Video Advertising

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1. eMarketer, “Worldwide Retail and Ecommerce Sales: eMarketer's Estimates for 2016–2021,” July 2017

We recently announced that we'll be moving all AdWords app install campaigns to Universal App Campaigns (UAC). Starting on October 16th, all new app install campaigns created in AdWords will run on UAC. Existing Search, Display and YouTube app promo campaigns will stop running on November 15th, so it’s important to start upgrading to UAC as soon as possible.

Check out our UAC best practices for more tips on creatives, bidding strategies and conversion tracking options.

How UAC helps you find the customers that matter most

UAC uses Google’s unique machine learning technology to help find your “star” customers based on business goals you define like signing up for a free trial or even making a purchase — across Google’s largest properties like Google Search, Google Play, YouTube and the millions of sites and apps in the Display Network.

Advertisers across the world and in different industries have found more of their best customers with UAC. Here are some of their stories.

Maven is a new car-sharing service from General Motors (GM) that lets customers rent GM cars through the company’s app. “We’re always looking to grow the Maven user base with drivers who love great cars and convenient technology. UAC helps us find this unique, engaged audience across the scale of Google. UAC for Actions helped us increase month-over-month registrations in the Maven app by 41%,” says Megan Stooke, CMO of Maven.

STARZ is the second largest premium content provider in the U.S. that features movies and original TV series. Alison Hoffman, Chief Marketing Officer, says “A new slate of STARZ customers now use our mobile app to watch their favorite shows and movies. STARZ partnered with Google to support the new seasons of our hit series Power and Outlander. (We) used Universal App Campaigns to drive potential fans to sign up for the STARZ mobile app ... Universal App Campaigns helped STARZ nearly double the number of fans found through Google.”

Viber is a free messaging and calling app owned by Japanese online retailer Rakuten Inc. Viber’s growth team used UAC for Actions to acquire users with a 21% higher retention rate. “Using Universal App Campaigns with action optimization helped us acquire more high quality users with better budget utilization. It allowed us to directly optimize our campaign for our business goal, which is to acquire loyal users,” says Moshi Blum, Head of User Acquisition.

Looking for more balance and mindfulness? Then the personalized meditation training and guidance in the Headspace app may be for you. Universal App Campaigns makes it easier for Headspace to improve the health and happiness of the world. According to Head of Growth, Robert Lamvik, “Headspace has a small, yet ambitious team, so we partnered with Google and use UAC to create more scalable campaign activity that brings us higher quality users. What’s great is that UAC finds people likely to take the actions we care about — like starting a meditation session or subscribing.”

Read our best practices guide to learn more about how to get the most from your Universal App Campaigns.

Posted by Sissie Hsiao, Director of Product Management, Mobile Advertising

Shopping ads help retailers and brands connect with shoppers whether they’re at home, on the go or in the store. Starting today, Comparison Shopping Services have a new opportunity to use Shopping ads to advertise on Google.com in EEA countries¹ and Switzerland on behalf of retailers they represent. Google Shopping in these countries will operate in the same manner, bidding alongside Comparison Shopping Services on equal terms. If you run a Comparison Shopping Service and are interested in learning more, visit our help center.

European retailers of all sizes will still be able to reach consumers using the same Google Shopping tools and insights they use today. And as shopping intent begins to rise for the holiday season, we'll keep launching new innovations that make Shopping ads work even better for everyone.

Posted by Oliver Heckmann, VP Engineering

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1. Comparison Shopping Services in EEA countries where Shopping ads are available: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland , United Kingdom.