Author Archives: Nicole Burgan

Step Inside AdWords on April 22 and be the first to see the newest innovations

Cross-posted from the Inside Adwords blog.

It’s an exciting time to be a performance marketer. When we combine the creative magic of marketing with technology that’s available anytime, anywhere, and on any device, we can connect with customers in more innovative and relevant ways than ever before.

We are constantly working to improve AdWords, and on Tuesday, April 22, 2014 at 9am PT, Jerry Dischler, VP of Product Management for AdWords will share a brand new set of innovations with you live on the Inside AdWords blog. Register for the livestream here.

Building on the success of enhanced campaigns, Jerry will announce a number of new features that help you use context to reach customers in even more effective ways. We’ve designed new tools so you can increase awareness and engagement everywhere your customers are online – from the web, to the mobile web, to mobile apps. And when it’s time to manage your campaigns and measure performance, we want to help you do so efficiently in AdWords with new functionality designed for the multi-screen world.

These AdWords innovations are the result of countless conversations we’ve had over the past year with advertisers, both large and small. Based on your feedback, hundreds of product managers and engineers worked hard to build these new products. Simply put, we built these new products for you.

We hope you’ll join the April 22 livestream of our announcements featured here on the Inside AdWords blog.Register for the livestream here. Until then, follow us on our +GoogleAds page for sneak previews of what’s to come. Use hashtag, #StepInsideAdWords, to join in on the conversation.

Posted by Your Inside Adwords Team

Beyond the Cable Box: The New Face of TV Viewership

It’s been called the “New Golden Age of Television,” but today’s TV ecosystem differs greatly from that of the era of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone. People now turn to their laptops, smartphones, and tablets to view trailers and research cast information before tuning-in, to use social media for real-time conversations about their favorite programs, and to binge watch episodes on demand. In fact, 90% of TV viewers also visit Google and YouTube, signaling the shared audience between both digital and television.*

In an effort to identify how digital has impacted viewer behavior in this new era, we analyzed search queries, video views, and engagement metrics from a sample of 100 cable and network television shows. From this analysis we published a new report called “The Role of Digital in TV Research, Fanship, and Viewing,” which outlines how online behavior is a clear indicator of a show’s popularity.

To view the full report, visit Think with Google. At a quick glance, here are a few of the key findings from the study:

  • TV related activity is growing on Google and YouTube. Searches have grown by 16% and 54% YoY* on Google and YouTube search respectively. We’ve also seen a rise in video views, watch time and engagement on YouTube around TV-related content, suggesting that TV viewers are increasingly using these platforms to interact with other fans and engage in a show - in fact, watch time on YouTube for TV-related content has grown 65% YoY.
  • Mobile and tablet searches are spearheading growth. Searches for TV content on Google and YouTube have increased 100%+ YoY on mobile devices, where users are looking for quick bits of information like premiere-date, plot, and cast-related information, and on tablets where users are looking for watch-related information.
  • Activity on Google and YouTube is correlated with tune-in. Our analysis of Google searches, YouTube searches, and YouTube video views show positive .72, .74 and .67 correlations with “live plus three day” viewers, respectively.*
  • The YouTube “community” actively creates TV-related content. In 2013 for every piece of content uploaded by a show’s network on YouTube in 2013, there were more than seven pieces of community-generated content related to a show. Some fan favorites far exceed that benchmark: Game of Thrones, for example, had 82 community-generated videos per video uploaded by the network and The Vampire Diaries had 69.
  • Subscribers are vital to driving awareness for new content. TV networks have been gaining subscribers for their official YouTube channels at a blistering rate, with an average per channel subscribership increase of 69% from the beginning of 2013 to the end of the year. These subscribers are vital to spreading content on YouTube.
  • Catching-up on seasons is on the rise, and drives tune-in. We found that 70% of viewers catch-up on prior episodes before tuning-in to a new season. And this intent appears to be on the rise - catch-up related searches on Google in the pre-premiere timeframe have grown by 50% YoY. For people who catch up on past seasons of returning shows, about half will start more than two months in advance. Analyzing behaviors around catch-up are important, since 4 in 5 viewers say they are more likely to tune-in to a season premiere after catching up on prior seasons*.

In summary, today’s TV audiences use Google, YouTube, and digital overall to extend and inform their TV-watching experience.  To learn more, download the full whitepaper from Think with Google.

Posted by Mahlet Seyoum, Industry Analyst, Media and Entertainment

What March Madness Trends Mean for Marketers

The country has been going mad for college hoops over the past few weeks. This year, we saw an 80% jump in mobile use for college basketball news searches during March Madness. As the Final Four prepare to duke it out, Think with Google takes a look at the latest trends they’re seeing in Google and YouTube data and explores what they mean for your next event strategy in a new infographic. As live events increasingly lend to mobile use, make sure your related content is easy to access on all devices.

What’s next for Shopping campaigns and retailers

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


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

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

JumpFly
“The benefits of Shopping campaigns can’t be overstated – the ease of setup, the transparency of data, the ability to group products into logical categories and manage to the product level make it a must. All of these contribute to our clients’ ROI almost tripling, and there’s still room to improve.”
Exclusive Concepts
“The new Shopping campaigns allowed us to achieve a much higher-level of profitability, cutting costs by 13% and increasing return on ad spend by about 22% on average. Not only that, the new campaign type trims about 2 hours of setup time.”
Wiggle
“We used the product-level data from our Shopping campaign to fine-tune our bidding strategy, focusing on the products that acquired the most traffic & lowered the ones that are less important. This helped us increase visits 25% & ROI by 16%.”
White Shark Media
“Shopping campaigns effectively reduced the time spent setting up product-specific bids and optimizing in half. We can now invest even more time into each client, and the results we’ve seen have been no less than amazing. A client selling home accessories saw a 301% increase in revenue after only one month. As a result, we are now changing our agency standards within PLAs to only use Shopping campaigns.”

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

For additional help, here are a few resources:


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

YouTube Brand Channel Leaderboard

The YouTube audience is more than just viewers—it’s fans. While viewers sit back, fans lean forward, forming passionate communities around their favorite channels. As brands continue to blur the line between advertiser and creator, we want to recognize those brands that regularly publish content—paid or otherwise—to build an engaged fanbase. That’s why we’re excited to launch the first-ever Brand Channel Leaderboard. Want to see which brands made the cut? Check out the standings on Think With Google.

Introducing the YouTube Creator Playbook for Brands

Ever wonder why Smosh gets millions of views on every video posted to their channel? Or how Michelle Phan is able to attract and retain an audience of more than 6M subscribers who tune into her videos every week?

To demystify what makes these top channels tick and help you better understand how to create a successful strategy for your brand on YouTube, we developed the new YouTube Creator Playbook for Brands. Similar to the Creator Playbook, which has helped over 2 million of our creators grow their audiences, the Creator Playbook for Brands walks you through the steps to help you create, plan, and implement a YouTube content creation strategy; from tips on how to create videos to video promotion.

To dive right in, download the full playbook here. But to give you a taste of what you'll find, we thought we’d do some myth busting on the five most commonly misunderstood fundamentals about creating content for YouTube:

Myth #1: Virality is the only measure of YouTube success. The most successful creators release episodic series to generate high sharing and viral activity, as one video will often break out and then introduce massive audiences to the entire series.

Myth #2: I can only be successful on my own. While you should optimize your own channel for discovery, authentic collaborations with YouTube creators can be a hugely impactful way to help new viewers discover your brand.

Myth #3: All videos must provide utility. Don't get us wrong, how-to and informational videos play a key role in a content strategy, but tapping into the cultural moments and memes that your audience is a part of on YouTube is an integral part of reaching new viewers.

Myth #4: People will watch my video where I want them to. In reality, a significant percentage of your audience will discover your video from a social feed, search result, or a related video placement. You’ll know you’ve done your job when every episode of your show can be fully appreciated by a first time viewer.

Myth #5: To keep viewers interested, I need to constantly reinvent my videos. Most top creators agree that consistency is crucial to success on the site. Stay true to who you are and be consistent - in format (a recurring series), elements (intros and outros), and voice. This will set a clear point of view that accurately reflects your brand and keeps your fans coming back for more.

Check out Think Insights for more tips on how to build your audience and engage them over time.

Posted By Vanessa Pappas, Global Head of Audience Development, YouTube

Get Your Business Online Week starts today

Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog

Since getting online, Green Mountain Bee Farm in Fairfax, Vt. experienced a 5x increase in sales, and Christine Fitzpatrick Hair and Makeup in Birmingham, Mich. attracted 50 percent more clients. Getting online can make a big difference for small businesses—and stronger businesses makes for stronger communities. Online businesses are expected to grow 40 percent faster and create twice as many jobs as those that aren't online,* but more than half of America’s small businesses currently don't have a website. That’s the inspiration behind Get Your Business Online Week, when we come together with local partners to get businesses in our communities online and growing. Starting today, we’ll broadcast free virtual workshops for business owners, available to anyone with an Internet connection. Here’s a glimpse of what you can look forward to:
  • Conversations with businesses that have prospered online, like Barkbox, GoldieBlox and Dollar Shave Club
  • Step-by-step demos on building a website and getting found on Search and Maps
  • Interviews with small business experts like SmallBizLady Melinda Emerson
  • Workshops on Google tools for businesses (Google Apps, Google Trends, Google Alerts), online advertising (AdWords), and measuring your success online (Analytics)
  • Free help and advice from experts over Helpouts by Google
We’re also teaming up with small business organizations across the country including local chambers of commerce, Small Business Development Centers and SCORE chapters to host live broadcasts of our trainings. You can find a screening closest to you on our website. We’re excited to welcome small business everywhere to join us for this special week. Even if you don’t own a business, we encourage you to take part by spreading the word and inviting your favorite businesses to sign up.


See you on the web!

Posted by Amber Shapiro, on behalf of the Get Your Business Online team,

*Source: BCG Report, "The Connected World: The $4.2 Trillion Opportunity," March 2012

Merge the art and science of brand advertising by learning to build Engagement Ads

Studio Certified developers, do you want to tell the world that you can create innovative ads designed for users to connect with brands? With DoubleClick Studio's Engagement Ads Certification, you can get certified in building ads that marry the art of brand building with the science of performance display.

Engagement Ads are tuned to user engagement – not clicks, letting brands connect with users through multiple creative formats. Ads are available on a cost-per-engagement (CPE) basis, allowing advertisers to bid and pay only for user engagement.

Watch this video:


Engagement Ads fit in standard display units, allowing them to scale across the web and then expand to a larger format after an innovative two-second hover delay. This delay eliminates nearly all accidental expansions, providing a better user experience and more accurate reporting to advertisers.

With this flexibility, the richness of a campaign using Engagement Ads depends on the story the brand wants to tell and the type of content they want to promote. Creatives can range from rich, interactive videos built in DoubleClick Studio to immersive brand experiences using HTML5, CSS3, and WebGL – all without leaving the ad format on the publisher's website.

Check out an Engagement Ad format in action.

Engagement Ads badge certification gives you:
  • A badge that identifies you as a Studio Certified user able to create Engagement format ads
  • Promotion as a via DoubleClick Rich Media properties and associated sites
You also receive the benefits of the Studio Certification Program, including exclusive access to betas and product features, DoubleClick hosted events and workshops, and a badge you can use for self-promotion.


Pass the exam and get the badge to demonstrate your expertise in creating rich ads to boost user engagement. Take the Engagement Ads exam and get certified.

Note: You must be Studio Certified in Core Flash or HTML5 to take the Engagement Ads certification exam.

Not Studio Certified? No worries! Get Certified today. We have these Studio Certification badges available:
  1. Core Studio Certification exam for Flash and HTML5 developers
  2. Integrated QA Certification
  3. Advanced Badge Certification for Dynamic creatives, VPAID creatives, and YouTube Mastheads
    Learn more about Studio Certification in the Rich Media Gallery.

    Posted by Paige Birnbaum, Program Manager, DoubleClick Studio Certification

    YouTube and TED present Ads Worth Spreading 2014 Honorees

    What makes an ad worth spreading?

    For the fourth year, TED’s Ads Worth Spreading and YouTube are partnering to celebrate advertising that goes beyond a simple commercial message. Each year, TED speakers and stars from the advertising industry select 10 ads that tell a story and forge a connection with their audiences, prompting them to share that story with friends and family around the world.
    This year, we’ve added a new component that focuses on identifying the ad submissions that are “spreading” on YouTube. We passed the nominees through our YouTube Ads Leaderboard algorithm to determine which of these ads have already caught on with the YouTube community.

    See the Special Edition TED Ads Worth Spreading YouTube Ads Leaderboard here and the winning TED Ads Worth Spreading honorees here.

    TED’s Ads Worth Spreading is a call to action for all of us who are in the profession of communicating ideas to elevate our game from creating messages that are memorable to those that are shareable.

    Does ad tech stack up? How it’s working at VivaKi

    Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertisers blog
    Marketers and agencies have countless opportunities to engage audiences with rich formats across channels and devices. But today, organizations are using an average of 4.7 ad tech platforms to execute what should be a seamless experience across search, display, video, mobile, and more.

    Many forward-thinking organizations know the real opportunity lies in creating unified, cross-channel experiences that span multiple touchpoints. In a new Think Insights article, Marco Bertozzi,     Executive Managing Director at VivaKi, explains the benefits of adopting a unified solution to unlock the full potential of digital marketing. Check out the article on the Think Insights page here.
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