January 2017

In 2016 we introduced a new AdWords experience and even shared an early look at it in action. From the beginning, we asked ourselves, “How can we make AdWords as relevant for the next 15 years as the first 15?” And during this multi-year journey, we met with many of you -- across industries and around the world, from power users to beginners -- to learn what's working, and what could be improved.

We learned a lot, and it’s helped shape what we’ve built. First, AdWords should focus on your business, and not around features. The data you care about should be available at your fingertips. And finally, the tools you use to get things done should be simple yet powerful.

This comes together in the new experience in many ways. For example, the new Overview page surfaces relevant insights about your account and helps you visualize them so you can take action. We’ve removed the clutter and made navigation a breeze so you can do more in less time. And in the coming months, we’re introducing new tools, unique to this experience, that will help you reach customers in new ways.

I recently sat down with a few advertisers who told me the new experience "is faster," “more intuitive,” and that “it’s easier to get things done.” It’s so inspiring to hear this feedback because we’re aiming to do exactly that -- build a platform that’s easy to use and helps you reach your unique business goals.

We’ve made so much progress since our announcement last March, and I’m happy to share that we’re rolling out the new AdWords experience to more of you within the next few months. Some of you will automatically see it when you sign in to AdWords, while others will see a message to try it out.* Though not everyone will have access to the new experience at the same time, we encourage those who do to explore it, discover new insights, and provide feedback as we continue to refine and roll it out to more advertisers.

To get started, I recommend taking the guided tour to familiarize yourself with the new experience. The AdWords Help Center is also being updated to provide additional support as you get acquainted with all the new features.

We look forward to continuing this journey in 2017 and can’t wait to share the new AdWords experience with more of you.

Posted by Jerry Dischler, Vice President of Product Management, AdWords

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* Invites are sent based on a number of factors, including the features you use
** Campaign performance, Auction Insights, and Locations cards are coming soon

Consider this: Gmail reaches over 1 billion users globally¹. By using Gmail ads, you can reach the right audiences and grow your business.

We’ve published a new guide that will help you get the most out of Gmail ads campaigns. It covers topics such as:

• Showing your Gmail ads to the right people
• Enticing people to click on your collapsed ad
• Designing an expanded ad that converts
• Optimizing your Gmail ads for success

Learn how to create and set-up an effective Gmail ad strategy and make the most of your Gmail ad campaigns.

Want to stay on top of even more Best Practices? Sign up to receive our monthly newsletter.

Posted by Matt Lawson, Director, Performance Ads Marketing

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1. Google Q4 2015 Earnings Call.

A free and open web is a vital resource for people and businesses around the world. And ads play a key role in ensuring you have access to accurate, quality information online. But bad ads can ruin the online experience for everyone. They promote illegal products and unrealistic offers. They can trick people into sharing personal information and infect devices with harmful software. Ultimately, bad ads pose a threat to users, Google’s partners, and the sustainability of the open web itself.

We have a strict set of policies that govern the types of ads we do and don’t allow on Google in order to protect people from misleading, inappropriate, or harmful ads. And we have a team of engineers, policy experts, product managers and others who are waging a daily fight against bad actors. Over the years, this commitment has made the web a better place for you—and a worse place for those who seek to abuse advertising systems for their own gain.

In 2016, we took down 1.7 billion ads that violated our advertising policies, more than double the amount of bad ads we took down in 2015. If you spent one second taking down each of those bad ads, it’d take you more than 50 years to finish. But our technology is built to work much faster.

Last year, we did two key things to take down more bad ads. First, we expanded our policies to better protect users from misleading and predatory offers. For example, in July we introduced a policy to ban ads for payday loans, which often result in unaffordable payments and high default rates for users. In the six months since launching this policy, we disabled more than 5 million payday loan ads. Second, we beefed up our technology so we can spot and disable bad ads even faster. For example, “trick to click" ads often appear as system warnings to deceive users into clicking on them, not realizing they are often downloading harmful software or malware. In 2016, our systems detected and disabled a total of 112 million ads for “trick to click,” 6X more than in 2015.

Here are a few more examples of bad ads we took action against in 2016:

Ads for illegal products

Some of the most common bad ads we find online are ads promoting illegal activities or products. Although we've long had a policy against bad ads for pharmaceuticals, last year our systems detected an increase online. We disabled more than 68 million bad ads for healthcare violations, up from 12.5 million in 2015.

Similarly, we saw more attempts to advertise gambling-related promotions without proper authorization from regulators in the countries they operate. We took down more than 17 million bad ads for illegal gambling violations in 2016.

Misleading ads

We don't want you to feel misled by ads that we deliver, so we require our advertisers to provide upfront information for people to make informed decisions. Some ads try to drive clicks and views by intentionally misleading people with false information like asking, “Are you at risk for this rare, skin-eating disease?” or offering miracle cures like a pill that will help you lose 50 pounds in three days without lifting a finger. In 2016, we took down nearly 80 million bad ads for deceiving, misleading and shocking users.

Bad ads on mobile

If you’ve ever been on your phone and suddenly, without warning, ended up in the app store downloading an app you’ve never heard of, a “self-clicking ad” could be to blame. In 2015, we disabled only a few thousand of these bad ads, but in 2016, our systems detected and disabled more than 23,000 self-clicking ads on our platforms, a huge increase year over year.

Ads trying to game the system

Bad actors know that ads for certain products—like weight-loss supplements or payday loans—aren’t allowed by Google's policies, so they try to trick our systems into letting them through. Last year, we took down almost 7 million bad ads for intentionally attempting to trick our detection systems.

In 2016, we saw the rise of tabloid cloakers, a new type of scammer that tries to game our system by pretending to be news. Cloakers often take advantage of timely topics—a government election, a trending news story or a popular celebrity—and their ads can look like headlines on a news website. But when people click on that story about Ellen DeGeneres and aliens, they go to a site selling weight-loss products, not a news story.

To fight cloakers, we take down the scammers themselves, and prevent them from advertising with us again. In 2016, we suspended more than 1,300 accounts for tabloid cloaking. Unfortunately, this type of bad ad is gaining in popularity because people are clicking on them. And a handful of scammers can pump out a lot of bad ads: During a single sweep for tabloid cloaking in December 2016, we took down 22 cloakers that were responsible for ads seen more than 20 million times by people online in a single week.

Promoting and profiting from bad sites

When we find ads that violate our policies, we block the ad or the advertiser, depending on the violation. But sometimes we also need to suspend the website promoted in the ad (the site people see after they click on it). So, for example, while we disabled more than 5 million payday loan ads last year, we also took action on 8,000 sites promoting payday loans.

Here are some examples of common policy violations we saw among bad sites in 2016:

• We took action on 47,000 sites for promoting content and products related to weight-loss scams.
• We took action on more than 15,000 sites for unwanted software and disabled 900,000 ads for containing malware.
• And we suspended around 6,000 sites and 6,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods, like imitation designer watches.

Publishers and website owners use our AdSense platform to make money by running ads on their sites and content, so we have strict policies in place to keep Google's content and search networks safe and clean for our advertisers, users and publishers. When a publisher violates our policies, we may stop showing ads on their site, or even terminate their account.

We've had long-standing policies prohibiting AdSense publishers from running ads on sites that help people deceive others, like a site where you buy fake diplomas or plagiarized term papers. In November, we expanded on these policies, introducing a new AdSense misrepresentative content policy, that helps us to take action against website owners misrepresenting who they are and that deceive people with their content. From November to December 2016, we reviewed 550 sites that were suspected of misrepresenting content to users, including impersonating news organizations. We took action against 340 of them for violating our policies, both misrepresentation and other offenses, and nearly 200 publishers were kicked out of our network permanently.

In addition to all the above, we support industry efforts like the Coalition for Better Ads to protect people from bad experiences across the web. While we took down more bad ads in 2016 than ever before, the battle doesn’t end here. As we invest in better detection, the scammers invest in more elaborate attempts to trick our systems. Continuing to find and fight them is essential to protecting people online and ensuring you get the very best from the open web.

Posted by Scott Spencer, Director of Product Management, Sustainable Ads

Throughout the day, people turn to their nearest device for help making choices about what to do, what to watch, or even what to buy. More than anywhere else, these moments happen on Google and YouTube, and more often than not, they happen on mobile.

With over 50% of YouTube views now on mobile, we’re focused on building scalable solutions that will work across screens. To do this, we're announcing changes today that allow advertisers and agencies to better measure their campaigns and reach their audience on YouTube across screens, while continuing to offer users control over their ads experience on YouTube.

Next generation insights and reporting

We’re developing a new, cloud-based measurement solution over the next year that will be at the cutting edge both in generating advertiser insights and in protecting privacy and security across Google and YouTube. With this new solution, advertisers will have access to more detailed insights from their YouTube campaigns across devices, so they can better understand the impact of their campaigns on their highest-value customers. For instance, a car manufacturer could get a rich understanding of how YouTube ads across devices influenced a specific audience (like previous SUV buyers).

As we build this new measurement solution, we will continue to work closely with leading MRC accredited vendors including comScore, DoubleVerify, IAS, MOAT, and Nielsen. Together, these vendors account for the vast majority of third-party measurement on YouTube. These collaborations will enable agencies and advertisers to continue to independently measure and verify the performance of their campaigns.

Improved ways to reach your audience

As more viewership on YouTube shifts to mobile, we’re making it easier for advertisers to deliver more relevant, useful ads across screens. Now, information from activity associated with users’ Google accounts (such as demographic information and past searches) may be used to influence the ads those users see on YouTube. So, for example, if you’re a retailer, you could reach potential customers that have been searching for winter coat deals on Google and engage with them with your own winter clothing brand campaign at just the right moment. In addition, we're creating new ways for advertisers to use their customer data to reach their highest-value customers on YouTube using Customer Match. For example, that same retail advertiser could reach customers that signed up to receive special offers in their stores.

User controls built for the mobile world

In addition to the advertiser solutions announced above, users will continue to have control over what ads they see on YouTube and across Google with the controls in My Account, and as always, we maintain strict policies against sharing personally identifiable information with advertisers. In the coming weeks, we’ll enable a user control that was built with cross-screen viewing in mind: if a user mutes an advertiser on Google Search, ads from that advertiser will also be muted when they watch on YouTube. For example, if you see a gym membership ad but have already signed up for a gym as part of your New Year’s resolution, you can mute that ad in Search, and you won’t see ads from that advertiser on YouTube.

Paving the path for the future

As we roll out these changes, we’re supporting the platforms where the majority of users watch today rather than continuing to invest in the legacy technologies of the desktop web. As a result, we’ll be limiting the use of cookies and pixels on YouTube starting this year.

While technologies like pixels and cookies still have a role in the broader ecosystem, most were built for a single screen—neither pixels nor anonymous cookies were designed for the ways in which users increasingly watch content on YouTube, like on the mobile app or in the living room. This can lead to inconsistent measurement and less relevant ads across screens, making it harder for people to control the ads they see or the data used to show them.

By investing more in the mobile first solutions we’re announcing today, users will have more choice and transparency over how they experience ads on Google and YouTube, and advertisers will have more opportunities to be present and relevant in the moments their audience chooses to watch.

Posted by Diya Jolly, Director, YouTube Product Management

• Feed Rules help you make product data changes directly in Merchant Center without the hassle, like adding custom labels or transforming attributes into the correct format.
• Using the Google Sheets Merchant Center add-on and structured data markup on your site, you can automatically populate, update, and submit your product data to Merchant Center, making feed management a breeze.
• Merchant Center received a brand new look with a comprehensive Diagnostics dashboard that processes more quickly to give you a better snapshot of your product data across Shoppings ads, Dynamic Remarketing, Local Inventory Ads and other programs.
• We made updates to the Product Data Specification with the goal of helping you understand what product data Google needs to run your Shopping ads, including new structured data markup and GTIN specifications. Merchants who added correct GTINs to their product data saw conversion rates increase up to 20%.

• Implement multiple versions of your ads. Aim for at least 3-5 per ad group.
• Leave your standard text ads running.  You can’t create new ones, but the old ones can still serve. Don’t delete them until they stop receiving impressions on their own or the message is no longer accurate.
• Plan to optimize your ad rotation for clicks or conversions. These options give preference to ads that are likely to perform better.
• Focus your testing on headlines. They’re the most important part of your ads.
• Consider shorter headlines on things like brand terms where someone might not need more info.
• Iterate new ads based on previously successful creative. Learn from what already works.
• Add terms from user queries and your keywords in your longer headlines whenever appropriate.

Posted by Senthil Hariramasamy, Senior Product Manager, Ad Formats