Author Archives: Stephen Kliff

Tune in on July 10, 2018 as we announce our latest product innovations

Sign up to join the live streamed keynote at Google Marketing Live:

When: Tuesday, July 10, 2018 at 9 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET

Duration: 1 hour

Where: Here on the DoubleClick Publisher Blog
It’s that time of year again! Join us as we unveil the latest Ads, Analytics and Platforms innovations at Google Marketing Live. Get a first look at new features and tools that will help you transform your business. Also gain access to the latest insights and trends that are shaping the future of the industry.

Register for the keynote live stream here. We’ll also make a recording available after the live stream for advertisers in other time zones.

Until then, subscribe to Think With Google, and follow us on Twitter, Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn for a sneak peek of what’s coming soon.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy
Senior Vice President, Ads & Commerce

Tune in on July 10, 2018 as we announce our latest product innovations

Sign up to join the live streamed keynote at Google Marketing Live:

When: Tuesday, July 10, 2018 at 9 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET

Duration: 1 hour

Where: Here on the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog
It’s that time of year again! Join us as we unveil the latest Ads, Analytics and Platforms innovations at Google Marketing Live. Get a first look at new features and tools that will help you transform your business. Also gain access to the latest insights and trends that are shaping the future of the industry.

Register for the keynote live stream here. We’ll also make a recording available after the live stream for advertisers in other time zones.

Until then, subscribe to Think With Google, and follow us on Twitter, Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn for a sneak peek of what’s coming soon.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy
Senior Vice President, Ads & Commerce

Helping publishers bust annoying ads

Cross-posted from The Keyword

At some point, we’ve all been caught off guard by an annoying ad online—like a video automatically playing at full volume, or a pop-up standing in the way to the one thing we’re trying to find. Thanks to research conducted by the Coalition for Better Ads, we now know which ad experiences rank lowest among consumers and are most likely to drive people to install ad blockers.

Ads, good and bad, help fund the open web. But 69% of people who installed ad blockers said they were motivated by annoying or intrusive ads. When ads are blocked, publishers don’t make money.

In June we launched the Ad Experience Report to help publishers understand if their site has ads that violate the Coalition’s Better Ads Standards. In just two months, 140,000 publishers worldwide have viewed the report.

“This report is great for helping publishers adapt to the Better Ads Standards. The level of transparency and data is incredibly actionable. It literally says here’s the issue, here’s how to fix it. I think it will be helpful for all publishers.”
Katya Moukhina, ‎Director of Programmatic Operations, POLITICO

We're already starting to see data trends that can give publishers insights into the most common offending ads. Here's a look at what we know so far.

It's official: Popups are the most annoying ads on the web

Pop-up ads are the most common annoying ads found on publisher sites. On desktop they account for 97% of the violations! These experiences can be bad for business: 50% of users surveyed say they would not revisit or recommend a page that had a pop-up ad.

Instead of pop-ups, publishers can use less disruptive alternatives like full-screen inline ads. They offer the same amount of screen real estate as pop-ups—without covering up any content. Publishers can find more tips and alternatives in our best practices guide.

Mobile and desktop have different issues

On mobile the issues are more varied. Pop-ups account for 54% of issues found, while 21% of issues are due to high ad density: A mobile page flooded with ads takes longer to load, and this makes it harder for people to find what they're looking for.

Most issues come from smaller sites with fewer resources

Our early reporting shows that most issues are not coming from mainstream publishers, like daily newspapers or business publications. They come from smaller sites, who often don’t have the same access to quality control resources as larger publishers.

To help these publishers improve their ads experiences, we review sites daily and record videos of the ad experiences that have been found non-compliant with the Better Ads Standards. If a site is in a “failing” or “warning” state, their Ad Experience Report will include these visuals, along with information about the Better Ad Standards and how the issues may impact their site.

We encourage all publishers to take a look at their report. Here’s how.

  1. Gaining access to the report
    The Ad Experience Report is part of Google Search Console, which means you need to be a verified site owner to access it. You can either ask your webmaster to add you as an owner or user, or verify ownership yourself. Learn more.

  2. Understanding the report
    If your site has been reviewed and the status is “Warning" or "Failing," the report will show videos of the ad experiences that are likely to annoy or mislead your visitors. Click on desktop or mobile reports to see the specific experiences identified.


  3. Fixing the issues and requesting a review
    Once you’ve identified the violating experiences, work with your ad ops and site design teams to remove the annoying experiences. After that, describe how you addressed each of the issues in the ‘Request review’ area and click ‘I fixed this’. You’ll receive a confirmation email saying your review is in progress. Learn more.

Looking ahead

Over the next few weeks we’ll begin notifying sites with issues. For even more insights on the types of sites and violations found, publishers can visit The Ad Experience Report API.

The good news is that people don’t hate all ads—just annoying ones. Replacing annoying ads with more acceptable ones will help ensure all content creators, big and small, can continue to sustain their work with online advertising. This is why we support the Coalition’s efforts to develop marketplace guidelines for supporting the Better Ads Standards and will continue working with them on the standards as they evolve.

Scott Spencer
Director of Product Management, Sustainable Ads

Helping publishers bust annoying ads

Cross-posted from The Keyword

At some point, we’ve all been caught off guard by an annoying ad online—like a video automatically playing at full volume, or a pop-up standing in the way to the one thing we’re trying to find. Thanks to research conducted by the Coalition for Better Ads, we now know which ad experiences rank lowest among consumers and are most likely to drive people to install ad blockers.

Ads, good and bad, help fund the open web. But 69% of people who installed ad blockers said they were motivated by annoying or intrusive ads. When ads are blocked, publishers don’t make money.

In June we launched the Ad Experience Report to help publishers understand if their site has ads that violate the Coalition’s Better Ads Standards. In just two months, 140,000 publishers worldwide have viewed the report.

“This report is great for helping publishers adapt to the Better Ads Standards. The level of transparency and data is incredibly actionable. It literally says here’s the issue, here’s how to fix it. I think it will be helpful for all publishers.”
Katya Moukhina, ‎Director of Programmatic Operations, POLITICO

We're already starting to see data trends that can give publishers insights into the most common offending ads. Here's a look at what we know so far.

It's official: Popups are the most annoying ads on the web

Pop-up ads are the most common annoying ads found on publisher sites. On desktop they account for 97% of the violations! These experiences can be bad for business: 50% of users surveyed say they would not revisit or recommend a page that had a pop-up ad.

Instead of pop-ups, publishers can use less disruptive alternatives like full-screen inline ads. They offer the same amount of screen real estate as pop-ups—without covering up any content. Publishers can find more tips and alternatives in our best practices guide.

Mobile and desktop have different issues

On mobile the issues are more varied. Pop-ups account for 54% of issues found, while 21% of issues are due to high ad density: A mobile page flooded with ads takes longer to load, and this makes it harder for people to find what they're looking for.

Most issues come from smaller sites with fewer resources

Our early reporting shows that most issues are not coming from mainstream publishers, like daily newspapers or business publications. They come from smaller sites, who often don’t have the same access to quality control resources as larger publishers.

To help these publishers improve their ads experiences, we review sites daily and record videos of the ad experiences that have been found non-compliant with the Better Ads Standards. If a site is in a “failing” or “warning” state, their Ad Experience Report will include these visuals, along with information about the Better Ad Standards and how the issues may impact their site.

We encourage all publishers to take a look at their report. Here’s how.

  1. Gaining access to the report
    The Ad Experience Report is part of Google Search Console, which means you need to be a verified site owner to access it. You can either ask your webmaster to add you as an owner or user, or verify ownership yourself. Learn more.

  2. Understanding the report
    If your site has been reviewed and the status is “Warning" or "Failing," the report will show videos of the ad experiences that are likely to annoy or mislead your visitors. Click on desktop or mobile reports to see the specific experiences identified.


  3. Fixing the issues and requesting a review
    Once you’ve identified the violating experiences, work with your ad ops and site design teams to remove the annoying experiences. After that, describe how you addressed each of the issues in the ‘Request review’ area and click ‘I fixed this’. You’ll receive a confirmation email saying your review is in progress. Learn more.

Looking ahead

Over the next few weeks we’ll begin notifying sites with issues. For even more insights on the types of sites and violations found, publishers can visit The Ad Experience Report API.

The good news is that people don’t hate all ads—just annoying ones. Replacing annoying ads with more acceptable ones will help ensure all content creators, big and small, can continue to sustain their work with online advertising. This is why we support the Coalition’s efforts to develop marketplace guidelines for supporting the Better Ads Standards and will continue working with them on the standards as they evolve.

Scott Spencer
Director of Product Management, Sustainable Ads

Building a better web for everyone

Cross-posted from The Keyword

The vast majority of online content creators fund their work with advertising. That means they want the ads that run on their sites to be compelling, useful and engaging--ones that people actually want to see and interact with. But the reality is, it’s far too common that people encounter annoying, intrusive ads on the web--like the kind that blare music unexpectedly, or force you to wait 10 seconds before you can see the content on the page. These frustrating experiences can lead some people to block all ads--taking a big toll on the content creators, journalists, web developers and videographers who depend on ads to fund their content creation.

We believe online ads should be better. That’s why we joined the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group dedicated to improving online ads. The group’s recently announced Better Ads Standards provide clear, public, data-driven guidance for how the industry can improve ads for consumers, and today I’d like to share how we plan to support it.

New tools for publishers

The new Ad Experience Report helps publishers understand how the Better Ads Standards apply to their own websites. It provides screenshots and videos of annoying ad experiences we’ve identified to make it easy to find and fix the issues. For a full list of ads to use instead, publishers can visit our new best practices guide.

“We’ve always put our users first and fully support the Coalition’s Better Ads efforts and standards. At the same time, we deal with so many different websites and ad experiences it’s hard to tell at a glance which ads experiences we need to replace. The report’s videos and screenshots are incredibly helpful and make the Coalition’s research actionable for our teams. We’re impressed with the level of detail and transparency Google is providing and are 200% behind this initiative.”
- Troy Young, President, Hearst Digital Media

As part of our efforts to maintain a sustainable web for everyone, we want to help publishers with good ad experiences get paid for their work. With Funding Choices, now in beta, publishers can show a customized message to visitors using an ad blocker, inviting them to either enable ads on their site, or pay for a pass that removes all ads on that site through the new Google Contributor.

“Over the past year we’ve lost a substantial portion of revenue to ad blockers across all of our properties. Funding Choices allows us to have a conversation with visitors using ad blockers in a way we weren’t able to before. We’ve found that people are generally open to whitelisting once they understand that adblockers negatively impact our ability to create content for them—you just need a way to start that conversation.”
- Sam Savage, CEO Comicbook.com

Funding Choices is available to publishers in North America, U.K., Germany, Australia and New Zealand and will be rolling out in other countries later this year. Publishers should visit our new best practices guide for tips on crafting the right message for their audience.

Chrome support for the Better Ads Standards

Chrome has always focused on giving you the best possible experience browsing the web. For example, it prevents pop-ups in new tabs based on the fact that they are annoying. In dialogue with the Coalition and other industry groups, we plan to have Chrome stop showing ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards starting in early 2018.

Looking ahead

We believe these changes will ensure all content creators, big and small, can continue to have a sustainable way to fund their work with online advertising.

We look forward to working with the Coalition as they develop marketplace guidelines for supporting the Better Ads Standards, and are committed to working closely with the entire industry—including groups like the IAB, IAB Europe, the WFA, the ANA and the 4A’s, advertisers, agencies and publishers—to roll out these changes in a way that makes sense for users and the broader ads ecosystem.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy
Senior Vice President, Ads and Commerce

Building a better web for everyone

Cross-posted from The Keyword

The vast majority of online content creators fund their work with advertising. That means they want the ads that run on their sites to be compelling, useful and engaging--ones that people actually want to see and interact with. But the reality is, it’s far too common that people encounter annoying, intrusive ads on the web--like the kind that blare music unexpectedly, or force you to wait 10 seconds before you can see the content on the page. These frustrating experiences can lead some people to block all ads--taking a big toll on the content creators, journalists, web developers and videographers who depend on ads to fund their content creation.

We believe online ads should be better. That’s why we joined the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group dedicated to improving online ads. The group’s recently announced Better Ads Standards provide clear, public, data-driven guidance for how the industry can improve ads for consumers, and today I’d like to share how we plan to support it.

New tools for publishers

The new Ad Experience Report helps publishers understand how the Better Ads Standards apply to their own websites. It provides screenshots and videos of annoying ad experiences we’ve identified to make it easy to find and fix the issues. For a full list of ads to use instead, publishers can visit our new best practices guide.

“We’ve always put our users first and fully support the Coalition’s Better Ads efforts and standards. At the same time, we deal with so many different websites and ad experiences it’s hard to tell at a glance which ads experiences we need to replace. The report’s videos and screenshots are incredibly helpful and make the Coalition’s research actionable for our teams. We’re impressed with the level of detail and transparency Google is providing and are 200% behind this initiative.”
- Troy Young, President, Hearst Digital Media

As part of our efforts to maintain a sustainable web for everyone, we want to help publishers with good ad experiences get paid for their work. With Funding Choices, now in beta, publishers can show a customized message to visitors using an ad blocker, inviting them to either enable ads on their site, or pay for a pass that removes all ads on that site through the new Google Contributor.

“Over the past year we’ve lost a substantial portion of revenue to ad blockers across all of our properties. Funding Choices allows us to have a conversation with visitors using ad blockers in a way we weren’t able to before. We’ve found that people are generally open to whitelisting once they understand that adblockers negatively impact our ability to create content for them—you just need a way to start that conversation.”
- Sam Savage, CEO Comicbook.com

Funding Choices is available to publishers in North America, U.K., Germany, Australia and New Zealand and will be rolling out in other countries later this year. Publishers should visit our new best practices guide for tips on crafting the right message for their audience.

Chrome support for the Better Ads Standards

Chrome has always focused on giving you the best possible experience browsing the web. For example, it prevents pop-ups in new tabs based on the fact that they are annoying. In dialogue with the Coalition and other industry groups, we plan to have Chrome stop showing ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards starting in early 2018.

Looking ahead

We believe these changes will ensure all content creators, big and small, can continue to have a sustainable way to fund their work with online advertising.

We look forward to working with the Coalition as they develop marketplace guidelines for supporting the Better Ads Standards, and are committed to working closely with the entire industry—including groups like the IAB, IAB Europe, the WFA, the ANA and the 4A’s, advertisers, agencies and publishers—to roll out these changes in a way that makes sense for users and the broader ads ecosystem.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy
Senior Vice President, Ads and Commerce

Making marketing easier with new tools for productivity

Making marketing easier with new tools for productivity

Mobile continues to raise the bar for marketers - as consumers increasingly reach for their smartphones to get things done, they expect fast and frictionless assistance. And to help them in these moments with more useful and personalized ads, you need scalable, easy-to-use tools that allow you to manage your marketing in smarter ways.

This morning at Google Marketing Next, we shared the next generation of AdWords, DoubleClick and Google Analytics tools, each of them shaped by your feedback and built to help you work as productively and efficiently as possible.

Below is a round-up!

The new AdWords experience will be available to all advertisers by the end of the year

The new AdWords experience marks the most powerful change we’ve made to how advertisers visualize and manage their campaigns in over 15 years. The redesign makes AdWords significantly easier to use to help you reach your unique marketing goals and get things done.

Earlier this year, we previewed a few of the new tools and features in the new AdWords experience. This includes the new Overview page, which automatically surfaces relevant insights about your performance so you can take action more quickly.

Here are some other new things to check out:

Campaign creation
Build campaigns designed around your marketing goals

Performance estimates
View performance estimates to help plan your display campaigns
Landing page report
See how your landing pages are affecting campaign performance
Since rolling out the new AdWords experience, we’ve seen some inspiring results. We see that pages load much faster -- on average, 20% faster. Customers like iProspect North also reported that the new design and layout saves them 30% more time when completing everyday tasks. Starting today, we’re rolling out the new experience to millions of additional AdWords accounts and it will be available to all advertisers by the end of the year. Get started by reviewing our Best Practice guide.

Better together: Google Optimize and Google Surveys 360 integrate with AdWords

Your marketing workflows should be seamless and integrated, from managing media to optimizing your site and collecting performance insights. This allows you to easily apply learnings from one step to another and take action faster. With new integrations for Google Optimize and Google Surveys 360 with AdWords, you'll be able to test landing pages and gain insights about your ads more efficiently.

Available globally to all advertisers at no cost, Optimize helps marketers test and deliver custom site experiences to improve performance. With the Optimize and AdWords integration, you can quickly and easily create new versions of your landing pages and then apply them to any combination of AdWords campaigns, ad groups, and keywords – no coding or webmaster required. For example, on a summer beachwear campaign, test whether a landing page that features an image of beachgoers performs better than one that showcases your latest swimsuit styles. Optimize will figure out which variation works best for your business and help you get more value from your AdWords campaigns.

Surveys 360 makes it easy for anyone to create a survey, find a specific audience sample across the web, and generate results in just a few days. With the Surveys 360 and AdWords integration, you can easily target surveys to people in your remarketing audiences to help you understand the “why” behind how consumers react to your marketing. For example, ask customers what they thought was the most compelling part of your ad. Or, if you want to know what customers thought of the landing pages you tested on your summer beachwear campaign, quickly launch a survey and ask site visitors what stood out to them on the page.

Smarter planning in DoubleClick Bid Manager

The programmatic revolution has focused on combining data, machine learning and automation to drive better performance. However, few of these benefits have carried over to the world of media planning. To help save you time and improve performance, we’re bringing the power of machine learning to campaign planning with a new workflow in DoubleClick Bid Manager.

Bid Manager uses machine learning to analyze your past campaigns and understand what's performed well for you before. With these insights, it will recommend the right inventory and targeting to reach your audience based on your unique marketing goals. The result is an optimized media plan tailored to your business, which you can then tweak, approve and activate with one click.
New workflow in DoubleClick Bid Manager
“Planning in DoubleClick Bid Manager helps us find the right inventory and strategies in a matter of seconds. Now we can invest even more time in understanding our audience rather than how we should reach them.”
- Louise Lévesque, Vice-President, Marketing & Sponsorship, National Bank of Canada

Unique Reach arrives for AdWords Display campaigns and DoubleClick

Once your ads are up and running, you want to know how many people are seeing them. Reach and frequency are hallmark metrics to measure the impact of display and video campaigns today. At the same time, you need to be thoughtful about how often you connect with a single user to avoid overloading them. 30% of people today use 5 or more devices1 - that means if you reach someone three times on each screen, you could be showing them fifteen ads!

We launched Unique Reach for YouTube in AdWords earlier this year and are soon expanding availability to Display campaigns in AdWords. We’re also bringing Unique Reach to DoubleClick for all your video and display ads, no matter where they run. Unique Reach helps you measure the number of unique users and average impressions-per-user you get from video and display ads. Metrics are de-duplicated across devices, campaigns, inventory and formats so you can see how many people you reached and how often you reach them.

We can’t wait to get these new tools into your hands to hear what you think and help you work faster and smarter. To get the full replay of new innovations at Google Marketing Next, watch the keynote here.

Until next year!
Posted by Paul Muret
Vice President of Display, Video and Analytics, Google
1 Google / TNS Connected Consumer Survey, US population 18+, n=1000, Q1 2016

Bringing the speed of AMP to search & display ads

Succeeding on mobile starts with getting the basics right. People choose brands that meet their needs instantly and seamlessly. That means no matter how great your site looks, if it loads slowly, users will leave and you’ll miss out.

The open source Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project launched 18 months ago to help make the web better with faster experiences. Since then, we’ve been expanding how we surface fast-loading AMP pages on Google Search — starting with the top stories carousel and extending to organic search listings.

Today we’re introducing two new ways to harness the speed of AMP to improve advertising performance. First, we’re launching a new AdWords beta that lets you use fast-loading AMP pages as the landing pages for your search ads. Second, we’re speeding up ads served across the Google Display Network by using the same technology that makes AMP pages so fast.

Improving campaign ROI with lightning-fast AMP landing pages

We’ve said before that the median page load time for an AMP page from Google Search is under one second. If that wasn’t already fast enough, last week we announced that these pages are now twice as fast. No wonder AMP has been so widely adopted – more than 2 billion AMP pages have been published from 900,000 domains. Advertisers like Johnson & Johnson, Toll Brothers and eBay have already seen increased engagement with their brand by directing people to AMP pages from organic search results.

The new AdWords beta brings the performance benefits of faster mobile pages to search campaigns. Now, when advertisers link their search ads to AMP landing pages, consumers will get the fast mobile web experiences they've come to expect from AMP pages on Google Search. If you’re interested in participating in the beta, sign up here.

“We understand the importance of speed in delivering effective advertising campaigns. That is why we're incredibly excited to apply the speed of AMP to our paid campaigns in AdWords."
-‎Aaron Cocks, Online Marketing Optimization Manager, Toll Brothers

“Johnson & Johnson has seen great results in testing AMP with our product information pages. For specific pages, we've seen page speeds improve by 10x and engagement rates improve by 20%. J&J is looking forward to expanding our application of AMP."
-‎Paul Ortmayer, Head of Digital Analytics - EMEA, Johnson & Johnson


Ensuring display ads are seen with AMP

When ads load fast, people are more likely to see them. That means media budgets work more effectively and messaging strategies realize their full potential. Fast-loading ads also create better experiences for users.

To make ad experiences on the web a lot better and faster, the AMP Project launched The AMP Ads Initiative last year. The Initiative applies the technology powering fast-loading AMP pages to ads.

As of today, a significant number of ads shown on AMP pages across the Google Display Network are automatically converted and served in the new AMP ad format. We’ve found these ads load up to 5 seconds faster than regular ads even though the creative looks exactly the same. Ultimately, this ensures that your messages are actually seen by your intended audience and that the experience users have with your brand is seamless.


Speed matters. To meet the needs of today’s customers, you have to be fast. Bringing the speed and performance of AMP to advertising will help you deliver more effective campaigns that keep up with accelerating consumer expectations.

Posted by Jerry Dischler
Vice President, Product Management

Powering ads and analytics innovations with machine learning

Good morning, San Francisco! As the city starts to wake up, my team and I are gearing up to welcome over a thousand marketers from around the world to Google Marketing Next, our annual event where we unveil the latest innovations for ads, analytics and DoubleClick.

A big theme you’ll hear about today is machine learning. This technology is critical to helping marketers analyze countless signals in real time and reach consumers with more useful ads at the right moments. Machine learning is also key to measuring the consumer journeys that now span multiple devices and channels across both the digital and physical worlds.

It's a growing and important trend for marketers today, and will continue to shape how you build for success in the future.

Below is a sneak preview of a few of the announcements I’ll be making. There are many more that I can’t wait to share with you. Be sure to tune in at 9:00 a.m. PT/12:00 p.m. ET.

Hello Google Attribution, goodbye last-click

Today, we're announcing Google Attribution, a new product to answer the question that has challenged marketers for ages, “Is my marketing working?” For the first time, Google Attribution makes it possible for every marketer to measure the impact of their marketing across devices and across channels -- all in one place, and at no additional cost.

With today’s complex customer journey, your business might have a dozen interactions with a single person - across display, video, search, social, and on your site or app. And all these moments take place on multiple devices, making them even harder to measure.

Marketers have been trying to make attribution work for years, but existing solutions just don't cut it. Most attribution tools:

  • Are hard to set up
  • Lose track of the customer journey when people move between devices
  • Aren’t integrated with ad tools, making it difficult to take action

As a result, many marketers are stuck using last-click attribution, which misses the impact of most marketing touchpoints. With Google Attribution, we’ll help you understand how all of your marketing efforts work together and deliver the insights you need to make them work better.

Here’s how it works:
Integrations with AdWords, Google Analytics and DoubleClick Search make it easy to bring together data from all your marketing channels. The end result is a complete view of your performance.

Google Attribution also makes it easy to switch to data-driven attribution. Data-driven attribution uses machine learning to determine how much credit to assign to each step in the consumer journey -- from the first time they engage with your brand for early research down to the final click before purchase. It analyzes your account's unique conversion patterns, comparing the paths of customers who convert to those who don’t, so you get results that accurately represent your business.

Finally, you can take fast action to optimize your ads with Google Attribution because it integrates with ads tools like AdWords and DoubleClick Search. The results are immediately available for reporting, updating bids or moving budget between channels.
“Given today’s multi-device landscape, cross-channel measurement and attribution is indispensable for HelloFresh to have a 360º panorama of our customer journey and gives us the best data to make the best decisions.” - 
-‎Karl Villanueva, Head of Paid Search & Display 
Google Attribution is now in beta and will roll out to more advertisers over the coming months.

Mobile-local innovations drive more consumers to stores

Mobile has blurred the line between the digital and physical worlds. While most purchases still happen in-store, people are increasingly turning to their smartphones to do research beforehand -- especially on Google.com and Google Maps.
To help consumers decide where to go, marketers are using innovations like Promoted Places and local inventory ads to showcase special offers and what’s in-stock at nearby stores. Now, you can also make it easy for them to find a store from your YouTube video ads using location extensions.

We introduced store visits measurement back in 2014 to help marketers gain more insight about consumer journeys that start online and end in a store. In under three years, advertisers globally have measured over 5 billion store visits using AdWords.

Only Google has the advanced machine learning and mapping technology to help you accurately measure store visits at scale and use these insights to deliver better local ad experiences. Our recent upgrade to deep learning models enables us to train on larger data sets and measure more store visits in challenging scenarios with greater confidence. This includes visits that happen in multi-story malls or dense cities like Tokyo, Japan and São Paulo, Brazil where many business locations are situated close together. Store visits measurement is already available for Search, Shopping and Display campaigns. And soon this technology will be available for YouTube TrueView campaigns to help you measure the impact of video ads on foot traffic to your stores.

Still, measuring store visits is just one part of the equation. You also need insights into how your online ads drive sales for your business. You need to know: are my online ads ringing my cash register? In the coming months, we’ll be rolling out store sales measurement at the device and campaign levels. This will allow you to measure in-store revenue in addition to the store visits delivered by your Search and Shopping ads.

If you collect email information at the point of sale for your loyalty program, you can import store transactions directly into AdWords yourself or through a third-party data partner. And even if your business doesn’t have a large loyalty program, you can still measure store sales by taking advantage of Google’s third-party partnerships, which capture approximately 70% of credit and debit card transactions in the United States. There is no time-consuming setup or costly integrations required on your end. You also don’t need to share any customer information. After you opt in, we can automatically report on your store sales in AdWords.

Both solutions match transactions back to Google ads in a secure and privacy-safe way, and only report on aggregated and anonymized store sales to protect your customer data.

Virgin Holidays discovered that when it factors in store sales, its search campaigns generate double the profit compared to looking at online KPIs alone. A customer purchasing in-store after clicking on a search ad is also three times more profitable than an online conversion.

“Store sales measurement gives us a more accurate view of the impact our digital investment has on in-store results, especially through mobile. This has empowered us to invest more budget in Search to better support this critical part of the consumer journey.”
-James Libor, Performance Marketing and Technology Manager
empowered us to invest more budget in Search to better support this critical part of the consumer journey.”

Machine learning delivers more powerful audience insights to search ads

People are often searching with the intent to buy. That’s why we’re bringing in-market audiences to Search to help you reach users who are ready to purchase the products and services you offer. For example, if you’re a car dealership, you can increase your reach among users who have already searched for “SUVs with best gas mileage” and “spacious SUVs”. In-market audiences uses the power of machine learning to better understand purchase intent. It analyzes trillions of search queries and activity across millions of websites to help figure out when people are close to buying and surface ads that will be more relevant and interesting to them.

This is an important moment for marketers. The convergence of mobile, data and machine learning will unlock new opportunities for marketers -- and I’m excited to be on this journey with all of you.

Please join us at 9:00 a.m. PT/12:00 p.m. ET to see the entire keynote at Google Marketing Next, and all the other innovations we’re planning to announce for ads, analytics and DoubleClick.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy
Senior Vice President, Ads & Commerce