Tag Archives: Google Ads

Grow your games business with a player-first approach

As an avid gamer, every year I look forward to spending time with developers at GDC to celebrate together and learn from their successes. We are all disappointed that this year's conference was postponed, but we applaud the organizers for taking steps to protect our global community. 

Although we won’t be gathering in person this year, the Google team is hosting the Google for Games Developer Summit, a free, digital-only experience where developers can watch the announcements and session content that was planned for GDC. We still wanted to share these updates with you because we think these new products will help developers succeed and are a direct response to feedback from our developer community. 

As we study emerging gaming trends one of the most consistent things we've noticed over the years is that those who build a strong games business always put players first. That means deeply understanding players at every stage of their app journey. Today, we’re announcing new solutions that help you launch a game people love, improve it based on player insights, and earn more during the time that someone is engaged with your game. 

Launch a game players love with scaled user testing

Appealing to players at launch is essential to the success of your game. Based on recent Google internal data, more than half of installs come within the first 8 weeks of an app’s release. To make the most of this influx of users, leading developers like Big Fish Games test their apps in beta before releasing them publicly.  That’s why last year we introduced open testing in the Google Play Console to help you get early feedback from real users before your full release. 

To get even more testers into your app, you’ll soon be able to promote Android games with open testing in Google Ads as well. By running open testing ads in App campaigns, you can drive early users to your app to test things like app stability, user retention, monetization, and effectiveness of ad creatives—then use the learning to improve your results when you launch. 

In one example, Chinese developer NetEase used open testing ads to reach more beta users that helped them optimize in-app purchase behavior based on open testing data.  For their new game, Dawn of Isles, Netease was able to double in-app purchases which ultimately led to higher lifetime value (LTV) at launch.

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Improve your game by learning from your players

Many developers use Google Analytics to understand how people are playing their game. Now, we’re taking it a step further by introducing a gaming-specific Analytics experience to help you get relevant insights even faster. Starting today, App + Web properties in Google Analytics will proactively surface gaming-specific user funnel metrics like acquisition, retention, engagement, and monetization in one place.


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With games reporting, you can see how players move through the lifecycle. Then, you can use that insight to improve the game experience and drive more revenue using both ads and IAPs. For example, you could group the players that have dropped off after one week in your game and share that audience to Google Ads to re-engage them with a tailored message and offer. There’s no extra work to set up games reporting in your Google Analytics App + Web property. Learn more to get started.  


In addition to Google Analytics games reporting, coming soon are a few other new ways for you to use Google tools to unlock more valuable insights about your players. 

  • Updated Google Ads asset report: Understand how your App campaign creatives are resonating with new users and optimize campaign performance more easily. 

  • AdMob cohort report: Understand the LTV of your players across their user journey.

  • AdMob mobile app:Quickly access ads monetization reports on the go via a new mobile app.

Earn more from your game

In addition to using player insights, another way to earn more from your game is with AdMob mediation. Leading developers like GameHouse, Playdots, and StickyHands, who use AdMob mediation have seen revenue increases of up to 30%—and now they can earn even more. 

We’re introducing a new tool called Mediation A/B testing, so you can test and refine your ads monetization setups directly in your AdMob account. For example, you’ll soon be able to run a test to see how much more you could earn by using Open Bidding compared to waterfall mediation. 

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Disclaimer: revenue results may vary. 

Using Google’s internal A/B testing engine, mediation A/B testing will split your traffic to run on your control group and the variant at the same time. This approach provides unbiased results that can help you maximize the value of every ad you show to players. 

To learn more about how these solutions will help you build a strong games business, tune into our broadcast keynote of the Google for Games Developer Summit on Monday March 23 9AM PT. Get all the details on the digital event at g.co/gamedevsummit. 

Join us for the digital Google for Games Developer Summit

Last month, Game Developers Conference (GDC) organizers made the difficult decision to postpone the conference. We understand this decision, as we have to prioritize the health and safety of our community. GDC is one of our most anticipated times of the year to connect with the gaming industry. Though we won’t be bringing the news in-person this year, we’re hosting the Google for Games Developer Summit, a free, digital-only experience where developers can watch the announcements and session content that was planned for GDC.  

Google for Games Developer Summit

The Developer Summit kicks off on March 23rd at 9:00AM PT with our broadcasted keynote. Immediately following, we’ll be releasing a full lineup of developer sessions with over 10 hours of content to help take your games to the next level. 

Here are some types of sessions to expect:

  • Success stories from industry leaders on how they’ve conquered game testing, built backend infrastructure, and launched great games across all platforms. 
  • New announcements like Android development and profiling tools that can help deploy large APKs to devices faster, fine tune graphic performance, and analyze device memory more effectively.
  • Updates on products like Game Servers (currently in alpha)—a fully managed offering of Agones, letting developers easily deploy and manage containerized game servers around the globe.

Sign up to stay informed at g.co/gamedevsummit. 

Support for the game developer community

We recognize every developer is impacted differently by this situation. We’re coordinating with the GDC Relief Fund to sponsor and assist developers who’ve invested in this moment to further grow their games.

We also understand many developers were looking forward to sharing their content with peers. To help with this, developers can use YouTube to stream events from small to large using tools like Live Streaming andPremieres. 

We can’t wait to share what we have in store for gaming. Discover the solutions our teams have been building to support the success of this community for years to come.

Source: Google Ads


Google for Games Developer Summit is coming to GDC 2020

We’re excited to see you at the upcoming Game Developers Conference (GDC) from March 16-20 in San Francisco. If you can’t make it in person, sign up to keep up to date with our announcements and view the livestream. You’ll learn about new products and solutions from Google that will help developers for all platforms take their game to the next level. 

Everything kicks off with the Google for Games Developer Summit Keynote on Monday, March 16th where product leaders from across Google will share the biggest announcements for game developers. After the keynote, join in on two days of developer sessions to learn how to use Google solutions to create great games, connect with more players, and scale your business. Check out the agenda today.

Starting Wednesday, March 18th, visit our booth in the GDC Expo to experience demos and meet one-on-one with Google product experts. 

If you can’t attend GDC in-person, you can still watch the Keynote and other Developer Summit sessions via the live stream at g.co/gdc2020.

We’ll be sharing more details about what we have planned at GDC in the coming weeks—be sure to sign up to be among the first to hear the latest updates. On-site events are part of the official Game Developers Conference and require a pass to attend.

See you there!

One year, three highlights: Google for Nonprofits looks back

Imagine ending homelessness, solving climate change, or guaranteeing a sustainable future for the world. Nonprofits work hard to make these goals a reality. They tackle the most urgent issues facing society, and Google products help make their missions more visible and far-reaching. Let’s look at three ways the nonprofit community thrived in 2019 with the support of Google for Nonprofits and partner teams.

1. Staying in the know

Followers of Google for Nonprofits’ monthly newsletters and livestreams enjoyed a steady stream of news and tips about Google products. They learned how to spread their messages on YouTube, how to make a bigger impact with Google Earth and Maps, and gained insights from Google Analytics. 

Nonprofits also learned from each other. Thrive DC shared their mission to end homelessness in Washington, D.C., and how Google for Nonprofits helped them drastically improve their efficiency and productivity. GoVolunteer described how Google helps them grow and develop inclusion programs for immigrants and refugees in Germany.

Along with hearing these inspiring stories, nonprofits asked questions and supported each other on the newly launched Google for Nonprofits community forum. And they discovered an updated Google for Nonprofits site that’s more useful for everyone, including visitors with accessibility needs.

Thrive DC culinary arts

Thrive DC clients attend Culinary Arts, a program to teach culinary skills and provide new job opportunities to vulnerable populations.

2. Connecting with the community

Sixty-five nonprofits attended a day-long workshop that Google for Nonprofits held at Google’s Community Space in San Francisco. They received training on using YouTube to spread awareness and heard Invisible People speak about building empathy and support for those affected by homelessness.

In April, attendees of Google Cloud Next listened to the Google for Nonprofits team discuss how G Suite empowers nonprofits to collaborate and communicate more effectively. Two nonprofits also shared their experiences and best practices (watch the recording).

3. Putting themselves (and trees) on the map

In 2019, around 2,000 nonprofits across 59 countries used Google Maps Platform credits to raise their profiles and encourage others to join their mission.

Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms USA, which helps travelers find and work on organic farms, added Maps to their site so visitors could zoom in on any area in the U.S., see all the available farms and filter their search to narrow in on the right farms for them. After the switch to Google Maps Platform, WWOOF-USA’s page views increased to 8 million and the number of paying members nearly tripled since May 2018. 

EcoFarm Florida

A cow in an WWOOF-USA eco farm.

People also relied on YouTube to get more eyes on fundraising campaigns. In October, YouTube creator Mr. Beast vowed to get 20 million trees planted by the end of the year. The campaign, #TeamTrees, engaged other YouTube creators to promote the effort. More than 200 creators either posted videos about #TeamTrees or promoted it by using YouTube Giving.

We’re looking forward to more partnerships and stories in 2020. To stay up to date on all the latest nonprofit news, you can subscribe to our newsletter and YouTube channel, and join us at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in Maryland this March where we’ll be a platinum sponsor.

Balance your spend across YouTube and TV with Reach Planner

YouTube is focused on helping brands reach their audiences and drive business impact. That’s why we launched Reach Planner in April 2018 to give advertisers a better way to plan their YouTube and video media. To help make it even easier for users to for users to discover the optimal mix of TV and YouTube to maximize the reach of a video based media plan, today we’re launching  Nielsen TV Data in Reach Planner. Now you can see how different distributions of spend on TV and YouTube can affect your reach.

Using this together with Nielsen Total Ad Ratings (TAR), you can compare YouTube and TV reach from the planning stages through to post campaign reporting.


With audiences shifting to digital, it’s important to plan TV and digital together

With audiences shifting to digital, it’s important to plan across channels. According to Nielsen, there are thirty one percent fewer available weekly 18-49 GRPs across broadcast and cable television compared to just five years ago. TV’s decline in reach to 18-49 year olds now requires a forty six percent increase in frequency for marketers to achieve the same GRP levels.1
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Advertisers can offset this decline and grow their business by adding YouTube to their overall video plan. Across the 20 Total Ad Ratings (TAR) studies we’ve commissioned with Nielsen, YouTube has consistently driven incremental reach at a more balanced frequency compared to TV.2


Get started in Reach Planner

By adding Nielsen TV data to Reach Planner, advertisers can optimize their mix of TV and online video to maximize reach, balance frequency, and reduce waste.  Advertisers can also change the mix of YouTube formats to see the effect on the overall campaign.

TV Data in Reach Planner is available to all users of Reach Planner in the US. This feature will be available in more countries in 2020.

To get started, reach out to your Google team to get TV Data in Reach Planner enabled for your planning team.

1. Nielsen, NTI, U.S., Npower Reach & Frequency Report, Sept. 30, 2013–Oct. 27, 2013 vs. Oct. 1, 2018–Oct. 28, 2018.

2. "Nielsen Total Ad Ratings (TAR) Meta Analysis, including all 20 TAR US studies inclusive of YouTube in-app traffic commissioned by Google running from January 2018 to March 2019 across desktop, mobile and TV. Incremental Reach Value calculated as YouTube’s on-target incremental reach / YouTube’s Total on-target Reach. Standard Deviation 22%. On Target Frequency calculated as On Target Impressions / On Target Reach. Standard Deviation 6.5

2019 holiday checklist: help shoppers find local stores

The holidays are a critical time of year for your stores, as shoppers stop in to get an item quickly or see it in person. Online research to find local stores continues to surge—search interest in local shops hit a record high last year, and we’re seeing 350 times more search interest in "local" + "near me" than there was 10 years ago. 

When holiday shoppers are deciding where to shop–to buy items for multiple people or for last-minute gifts after shipping cutoffs have passed–how can you help them find your store? 


You can do it in two ways:

  • Local campaigns help businesses with physical locations drive more visits to retail stores, restaurants, auto dealerships, and more. They also include new ways to promote your business on Google Maps.

  • If you’re a retailer, Shopping campaigns help you promote your entire ecommerce and local product inventory to drive sales across both your website and stores. Retailers should use Local campaigns to maximize store traffic and combine them with Shopping campaigns, which help you increase omnichannel reach and sales.

See our latest solutions to help advertisers with a physical presence, from big retail chains to small businesses, showcase your stores and give holiday shoppers more convenient ways to buy.

New ways to promote your locations with Local campaigns

Local campaigns are specifically designed to help businesses drive visits to your physical locations. We’re also making Local campaigns available for smaller businesses by allowing you to optimize for other local actions like calls or directions, even if you don’t have store visits reporting. To help you dial up foot traffic for the holidays, we’re introducing new ways to showcase your locations across Google Maps and other channels.

Whether people want to visit a neighborhood park, museum, local store, or restaurant, Google Maps connects them with the places they’re interested in. In fact, people tap on location pins in Maps hundreds of millions of times per week to explore and get information about the physical world around them. In the coming weeks, you’ll be able to feature your locations as users get directions to a destination. In just a few taps, they can add you as a convenient stop along their route to grab lunch, stop in for shopping, and more. 

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You can also promote your locations as shoppers browse content across over 3 million websites and apps in our Display network. They can now explore a curated selection of the products your store carries in a visual, catalog-like experience.

Local catalog ad on Display (Local campaigns).gif


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Saks Fifth Avenue is a luxury retailer increasingly using digital to achieve its in-store performance goals. The brand has successfully leveraged other Google solutions like local inventory ads to drive foot traffic. As a result, it was eager to become an early adopter of Local campaigns last holiday season to focus specifically on store visits. Using a randomized controlled geo-experiment, Saks Fifth Avenue saw a statistically significant, incremental lift in store sales and an incremental offline return-on-ad-spend of 7.7x. It’s now expanding Local campaigns to promote more of its store locations.

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Fun, a toy retailer in Belgium, also relied on Local campaigns last holiday season to bring more shoppers into its 29 locations. Local campaigns drove 24,000 additional store visits on top of its existing Google Ads campaigns at a strong 19x ROI. This helped lift total store sales and completely reversed a year-to-date decline.

Sephora logo.png

Sephora, a multinational retail chain, knows that customers who browse and buy in-store are more valuable. With a randomized controlled geo-experiment, the brand found that Local campaigns helped drive a statistically significant, incremental lift in store sales. For every dollar invested, Sephora generated a positive incremental return-on-ad-spend.

More flexible ways to buy and pick up purchases with Shopping campaigns

Shopping campaigns–which include both Shopping ads and local inventory ads–help you increase sales both online and offline, and highlight details about all of your product inventory. Through local inventory ads, we have over 2 billion offers mapped to physical stores across 12 countries. We’ve recently expanded to Sweden, Norway and Denmark to help more shoppers see which products are in stock at nearby locations. 


Now, we’re also giving consumers more flexible ways to collect the products they find through local inventory ads. 45 percent of global shoppers have used “buy online, pick up in store” to get their items from a local store. To make this process easier, we’re expanding store pickup on Google and showing consumers what fulfillment options you offer from your ad:


  • Pick up today:show which products are available for immediate store pickup, with the option of paying online first.

  • Pick up later: promote products that may not be available in store now, but can be quickly shipped to a nearby store within a few days. Reach out to your account team if you’d like to join the beta. 

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Local inventory ad in the U.S. highlighting the “Pick up today” option

We have other stocking stuffers for retailers. In the coming weeks, you’ll be able to pick the Shopping campaigns where you’d like to include store visits as a conversion goal alongside online sales. If you have products that are especially effective at driving consumers to stores—such as high-consideration products like furniture or luggage—you can add store visits bidding to your Standard or Smart Shopping campaigns. Store visits in Smart Bidding is also fully available for Search campaigns to help you maximize conversion value across your website and stores.

Whether you’re a small business or a major retail chain, holiday shoppers will be looking for nearby stores with the most compelling offers and products. We look forward to helping you capture the local holiday spirit to drive success during the biggest shopping season of the year.

Source: Google Ads


2019 holiday checklist: Inspire shoppers with gift-giving ideas

Whether they’re shopping for themselves or for others, 48 percent of today's shoppers say they're open to buying from new retailers during the holiday season. And increasingly, they’re leaning into videos and inspirational imagery to help them decide. Below, we’ll dive into how Google solutions can help you tap into and create shopping intent, and capture the attention of those undecided shoppers with richer, more interactive experiences

Make YouTube more shoppable 

Video has also become a favorite research tool for holiday shoppers. Nearly two-thirds of shoppers say online video has given them ideas and inspiration for their purchase. And more than 90% of these folks say that they’ve discovered new products and brands via YouTube. To tap into this shopping intent, we’re introducingShopping ads to the YouTube home feed and YouTube search results, making YouTube more shoppable and extending the reach of your Shopping campaigns. 

Shopping ads on the YouTube home feed


Shopping ads on YouTube search results

Shopping ads on the YouTube home feed (top) and YouTube search results (bottom)

Retailers like PUMA are excited to reach new customers on YouTube in advance of the holiday season to help them continue the shopping journey. “Consumers are continuing to watch more content on the YouTube platform and we want to be where they are, to reach and engage them,” said Rick Almeida, Vice President of eCommerce at PUMA Group. “This new opportunity will enable PUMA to extend our shopping strategy into a new property and inspire consumers.”

Now, people coming to YouTube to browse and research products may see visual Shopping ads, based on their interest. This means if a consumer expresses an interest in running, they could see ads from retailers that offer running apparel, like PUMA, highlighting different products and prices.  If you’re already using standard Shopping campaigns today and are opted-into YouTube on Display Network, you are eligible for this experience.

In addition, we’ve made YouTube video ads more interactive, giving viewers useful and actionable information like store location, interest forms and additional calls-to-actions to help you drive more conversions.  In the coming months, sitelink extensions will become available for TrueView for action ads. This makes it easy for viewers to navigate to additional landing pages like your holiday catalogs, your store hours, and more. In a beta test with 30 advertisers, adding sitelinks showed a 23% increase inconversions1.

YouTube Ads Sitelink Extensions

Example of how Sitelink extensions will work under your TrueView for action video

You can get started with these new extensions by heading to the extensions tab in Google Ads, and clicking on the extension you’d like to get started with. You can learn about these YouTube updates and more here.


Inspire more customers with rich imagery

In a recent Google / Ipsos study, we found that 85 percent of consumers will take action within 24 hours of discovering a product: reading reviews, comparing prices or purchasing the product—sometimes all at once! We offer multiple solutions to help you convert digital window shoppers into satisfied customers. 

Showcase Shopping ads, for example, are expanding to Google Images -- helping shoppers explore your brand and product selection. When people search for broader terms like “holiday party dresses”, they’ll see Showcase Shopping ads that group related products together, displaying a diverse range of offerings. They’re great for attracting new customers; on average, we see that about 85 percent of traffic from Showcase Shopping ads to retailer websites come from new visitors. In addition, these ads are now expanding to new search categories like beauty and electronics, when they’ve mainly appeared for apparel and furniture-related searches previously. 


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Urban Outfitters is one example of a retailer using Showcase Shopping ads to get into the consideration set and inspire those new to their brand. Urban Outfitters expanded their Showcase Shopping ads to 50 key categories across apparel, home decor, and beauty. Overall, they saw a 241 percent CTR lift across campaigns running Showcase Shopping ads, with 52 percent of those customers being new. Moreover, Urban Outfitters saw a 186 percent increase in sales from new customers via Showcase Shopping ads (compared to reactivated customers).

Urban Outfitters Showcase Shopping ad for beauty

Urban Outfitters Showcase Shopping ad for beauty

Scrolling through personalized feeds like news, video and social is a bigger part of today's consumer journey. And with Discovery ads (beta), you now have a new canvas to inspire hundreds of millions of people with your products as they explore their interests  across the feeds in Discover, YouTube and Gmail. 

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Nectar is one brand updating its Discovery ads with holiday-focused creatives to show off its mattress line and special offers, like its free 365-Night Trial and Forever Warranty™. To drive engagement, Nectar used a variety of high-resolution image assets featuring its mattress in well-lit, realistic settings, while also highlighting promotions in its ad text. Nectar has used custom intent audiences to connect with the right customers, like consumers in the market for bedroom furniture or interested in adjustable bed frames. And during testing, the brand saw an 8% lift in total sales at a 70% lower cost-per-acquisition compared to its paid social campaigns. As a result, Nectar’s parent company, Resident, plans to roll out Discovery ads across its full portfolio of home retail brands.

Reach out to your Google account team to join the global Discovery ads beta.

Discovery Ad Nectar

A Discovery ad for Nectar by Resident as shown on Discover, YouTube, and Gmail

Ready for more tips? Tune in next week to learn how you can drive more shoppers into your local stores.

1. Compared to the same ad without sitelinks. Source: Google data, US, June 2019. Beta experiment with n=30 TrueView for Action advertisers

Source: Google Ads


Shaping ad experiences to an evolving YouTube viewership

Think back … can you remember the first time you heard about YouTube? Or even better–can you recall the first video you watched? It’s a fun parlor game we YouTubers sometimes play–and an occasion to reflect on how far the platform has come since its earliest days.

And for those of us who have been on the ads team for more than a few years, it’s particularly remarkable to think about how our ad products have changed as well. Back when we introduced TrueView 9 years ago, people entered the site typically from a link and typically on desktop, watched a short form video and then left to do other things. In fact, desktop represented 90 percent of all YouTube usage in 2010. The appetite for in-stream ad experiences was extremely low in these contexts, which prompted us to introduce a skippable video format that put the choice to view an ad in the hands of the user. Advertisers only paid if viewers watched the complete ad or 30 seconds if longer, so it was a win-win.

In the years since then, YouTube has grown to accommodate not only diverse content types and audiences, but also a new diversity of viewing patterns. In 2016, mobile viewing eclipsed desktop, and in 2019 TVs are our fastest growing screen. Today, viewers may just as readily binge six or seven short videos on their mobile phone, before they switch on YouTube on their TV and watch several hours of longer form video.

In short, YouTube viewing has evolved to serve seemingly divergent consumer mindsets – active browsing sessions where they discover new content and more longer, more leaned-back sessions. This has required a reconsideration of how we serve ads in each of these varied contexts.

Our mission as an ads team is to build the right ad experience for each of these contexts – from active discovery through to more leaned-back sessions:

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Ad innovations to match viewer modes

The changing ways people watch YouTube also means that a view has different value in different contexts. This is why we continue to develop additional metrics beyond views and view-through rate–like Brand Lift, or direct actions and conversions – to quantify ad impact, while also developing new ad formats that are matched to viewing patterns and advertiser goals. While we work on these new ad experiences, our priority is to align pricing with anticipated advertiser value.

This led us to introduce Smart Pricing over a year ago, which aligns media costs with anticipated value of a given context. For example, if we know a user is watching content in a longer, TV-style session – we will price those ad impressions according to what our effectiveness models indicate is the typical value of that type of viewing mode. Smart Pricing delivers better results for advertisers – at launch we saw:

  • More efficient awareness—5 percent gain in brand awareness per dollar

  • Higher ROI for advertisers – 7 percent gain in ad recall per dollar

Beyond Smart Pricing, we are also working on ways to align YouTube media directly to your marketing objectives, and delivering value as you measure it. For instance, with video reach campaigns, you can optimize for your reach and awareness goals more easily using multiple video creatives and formats within a single campaign. Google’s machine learning will automatically serve the most efficient combination of those formats to help you reach your audience at scale.

The variety of viewing contexts is an asset, as YouTube increasingly meets the needs of viewers looking for short form, long form, TV screen experiences, a go-anywhere music player, social video, highly produced traditional video and more. And the continued evolution of our ad experiences means brands will see a benefit from each viewing mode. We take pride in continuously evolving our platform based on changing user behavior and will continue to experiment with delivering advertiser value across a variety of user contexts. And we invite you, our trusted customers, to partner with us as we build an effective video ad system for the age of choice.


Get your products in front of holiday shoppers

In three weeks, consumers will have their devices in hand and be ready to line up at stores to continue their holiday shopping over Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Will you be ready? We’ve made a list of recommendations and hope you’ll check it twice to help you dial up holiday performance. See our first pro tip below and check back next week for what’s next on the list.

Pro tip #1: Help shoppers discover more of your products through Merchant Center

The holiday season continues to be an important time for retail marketers and is growing more competitive every year. According to Mastercard Advisors, retail had its largest season ever ($853 billion) last year with ecommerce sales reaching their strongest growth in over a decade, at an 18.4 percent increase from the year before.

And while this year’s holiday shopping season is a week shorter than last year, there’s good news for marketers: research shows the period to influence shoppers starts earlier and extends longer than ever. 

To help you reach these eager shoppers, we’re introducing new features in Merchant Center to help you promote and sell your products this holiday season:

  • Expand your feeds to show on Shopping ads in 50+ new markets

  • Quickly upload your products globally through automated feeds

  • Strengthen your reviews with user-generated images for Product Ratings

  • Easily manage your inventory with the new Merchant Center experience and automatic image improvements

Reach more holiday shoppers around the world

70 percent of global consumers made at least one crossborder purchase according to a recent Pitney Bowes report. Promote the products you sell and find better qualified leads by putting your products in front of people searching on Google around the world. With Shopping ads now available in more than 50 new markets, and 95 total markets, you can expand your global footprint more than ever.

Start showing your products globally with multi-country feeds, which allow you to target multiple countries that share the same language by using a single feed in that language. For example, if you upload product information in German for Germany, those products may be automatically available to show in other German-speaking countries, such as Austria and Switzerland. You’ll just need to set up shipping and location targeting for these countries in your Shopping campaign in order to start promoting your products in these new countries.

If you don’t already have a feed, you can submit your products more quickly with automated feeds, available in all Shopping ads countries starting in November. Simply enable Merchant Center to crawl your website for structured data and extract your most up-to-date product information for your initial feed. 

Turn browsers into buyers with more visual reviews

A recent Google/Ipsos study shows that Google is the first place consumers go to research a purchase they plan to make. But beyond turning to search to read product reviews, shoppers are increasingly becoming inspired by images, with 50 percent of digital shoppers saying images helped them decide what to buy, according to Google’s Consumer Survey this year. 

To help shoppers feel more confident in their purchases, we’re introducing user-generated images in product reviews on Shopping ads. You can now include review images in your product review feeds, allowing customers to visually connect with what you sell through pictures of previous customers wearing or using your products. 

Mobile Mocks Holiday 2019

To get started, see our updated schema documentation, and ensure all images you submit are compliant with our policies for user-generated images. You can sign up for the Product Ratings program here. This experience is currently available on mobile in the US, with plans to expand across more Google properties and countries over the coming months. 

Manage your inventory across Google more easily

The new Merchant Center experience has been redesigned with clearer workflows, simpler navigation, and more program insights. You can use the updated interface to easily manage your products, like enabling automatic image improvements to remove promotional overlays on your product images to comply with Merchant Center policies. You can also discover additional opportunities to promote and sell your products. 

New Merchant Center

For example, you can opt your inventory into surfaces across Google in the US and India to allow your products to show across Google for free, including rich snippets in search results and product annotations in Google images. Surfaces across Google will be coming to additional countries before the end of the year.


Ready to get started? Get more tips and best practices for driving holiday sales.

Investing in the next generation of measurement on YouTube

Ad reporting and measurement is an important part of getting digital advertising right. We invest a lot to help our advertisers understand the value of running ads on services like YouTube. 

Advertisers use different tools to understand the effectiveness of their ad campaigns. One type, called pixels, has played an important role across the web for over a decade, but was built for a world of single screens, not for the ways many people watch YouTube today. While more than 70 percent of time spent watching YouTube globally occurs on mobile devices, pixels can’t report on the effectiveness of ads that appear in mobile apps. And many third-party pixels lack the privacy controls and user protections of newer technology. That’s why, for the past several years, we’ve been taking action to limit the pixels we allow on YouTube while investing in a cloud-based measurement solution called Ads Data Hub that allows our advertisers to understand the effectiveness of their ads in a secure, privacy-safe environment. 

Over the last year, we've been working with key measurement companies including Nielsen, comScore, DoubleVerify, Dynata, Kantar and Integral Ad Science to migrate their services to Ads Data Hub. Once the migrations are complete early next year, we will stop allowing third-party pixels on YouTube.

Unlike pixel-based measurement, Ads Data Hub allows advertisers to understand how their advertising is performing across screens, including mobile apps, through aggregated insights from Google ad platforms, including YouTube, Google Ads and Display & Video 360. Because Ads Data Hub limits the use of user data, it adds another layer of privacy protection for users while still enabling marketers to measure their YouTube ad campaigns. 

Ads Data Hub


Over the past year, we’ve invested significantly in infrastructure improvements to Ads Data Hub to make it faster, easier to use and more reliable. This has allowed us to dramatically increase the number of advertisers and technology providers we can serve and the use cases supported in Ads Data Hub. Advertisers have run millions of successful queries to date. 

While there is still more work to be done, we think this change will be beneficial to consumers and advertisers. With the migration from pixels to Ads Data Hub, our third-party measurement partners will be able to provide YouTube advertisers with more comprehensive reporting and measurement, using technology that’s built to enhance user privacy. 


Source: Google Ads