When your goal is to get the most conversions from your marketing budget, it can be challenging to set the right bid and bid adjustments. Where do you spend your next dollar to get your next customer? To help you make the most out of your budget, we’re introducing Maximize Conversions: a new Smart Bidding strategy that automatically sets the right bid for each auction to help get you the most conversions within your daily budget.
For example, if you’re a clothing retailer trying to quickly sell last season’s styles, Maximize Conversions will help you get you the most number of sales from your existing budget by factoring signals like remarketing lists, time of day, browser and operating system into bids. Smart Bidding uses Google’s machine learning technology to optimize for conversions across every ad auction—also known as “auction-time bidding”.
Trex, a luxury composite decking company, used Maximize Conversions to build brand awareness and saw a 73% increase in conversion volume:
“We wanted to increase the conversion volume of our high-priority campaigns without raising budgets. In our first test campaign, we saw a 73% increase in conversion volume, 59% increase in CVR , and 42% decrease in CPA, with no change in our spending.” - Chris LaRoche, PPC Team Lead at Seer Interactive
It’s easy to set up Maximize Conversions. Simply go to your campaign’s settings page, click “Change bid strategy” and select Maximize Conversions. You can test Maximize Conversions, get insights and monitor your bid strategies to understand their performance.
Set your bid strategy to “Maximize Conversions” to get the most out of your budgetLearn more about maximizing conversions with Smart Bidding in the AdWords Help Center.
Posted by Josh Moser, Product Manager, AdWords
AdWords users get two new ways to understand and better serve their customers
Here's good news for AdWords advertisers: as you heard yesterday at Google Marketing Next powerful new integrations with Google Optimize and Google Surveys 360 are coming soon to your accounts. The Surveys 360 integration is now live in the U.S. and Canada; the integration with Optimize will be available in the coming weeks.Optimize is a A/B testing and personalization tool that makes it easy to see which changes to your web pages work best for your users and your business. Surveys 360 is a market research tool that helps enterprises gather fast, reliable insights from real people online and on mobile.
Both new integrations with AdWords are designed with a simple goal: to make it easier than ever to understand and serve your potential customers. Here's some detail on both.
Better landing pages, better results
Advertisers naturally spend a lot of time thinking about their ads. What gets people to click? Will the words "free shipping" sell more than "10% off"? AdWords has always made it easy to create many different ad campaigns to see which performs best. But the ad is only part of the experience.The new integration between Optimize and AdWords makes it easier than ever to take the next step: to improve and personalize the landing pages those ads lead to. The integration gives marketers a fast way to create and test custom landing pages based on the keyword, ad group, or campaign associated with an ad – with no need to deal with destination URLs or messy query parameters.
It's worth it. 90% of organizations that invest in personalized consumer experiences agree that they contribute significantly to more business profitability.1
Suppose a hotel wants to improve its landing page for the keyword family friendly hotels. Using Optimize, the hotel can create and test a new variation of the landing page, one that features an image of a family enjoying themselves at the hotel pool, instead of a generic image of the hotel exterior. If the new page leads to more reservations, they've got a win. Then it's easy to keep testing headlines and images that might also do well.
Target any combination of your AdWords account, campaign, ad group, and keywords directly in Optimize.The AdWords integration will be available for both Optimize and Optimize 360 and will be available to start using in the coming weeks. If you haven’t tried Optimize, you can get started for free here.
Why not ask your customers?
We all need faster insights these days. That's one reason we added Surveys 360 to the Google Analytics 360 Suite last year. Surveys 360 lets you ask questions directly to a pool of 15 million real people as they browse the web or use their smartphone. The results arrive in days, or sometimes in just hours.
Now, what if you could combine that kind of speedy real-world feedback with the wealth of data that you already have in AdWords? Then you could understand both what users do and why they do it.
That's what we're announcing today: remarketing lists published in AdWords are now available in Surveys 360 for surveys targeting. That means you can survey the users on your remarketing lists to find out what worked best for them (or didn't).
Want to know why shoppers abandoned their shopping carts? Ask them! Curious about how many customers converted due to your new free shipping offer? Ask them!
Easily target your survey to remarketing audiences published in AdWordsThen change your marketing message on the spot to match what you learn. If your survey shows that the words "family friendly" are what brought customers to your hotel, you can build new ad groups to take advantage of this information. (You might even use Optimize to test new landing pages with that phrase!)
Here's an early report from the online shopping site Jet:
"Google Product Listing Ads (PLAs) have been an effective way for Jet.com to drive website traffic, but we needed to optimize for conversions. Surveys 360 connected us directly to our customers through remarketing audiences to determine which factors influence their purchase decisions most. The results were clear: customers care most about free, fast shipping and our free returns. We used this insight to revise our messaging in PLAs and across Jet.com which quickly improved performance."
- Ben Babcock, Director of UX Research at Jet.comGetting started is easy: Just log into your Surveys 360 account with the same credentials used for your AdWords account. When you select "remarketing audience" for survey targeting, your AdWords remarketing lists will be automatically pulled into Surveys 360 and ready for use. Learn more.
All together now
These new integrations are one more way for Optimize and Surveys 360 users to make the most of their AdWords investments. We hope you'll find them a fast and simple way to understand what works for your customers and give them more of what they want.
Posted by Michael Cumberbatch, Product Manager, Surveys 360 and Rotimi Iziduh, Product Manager, Optimize
1. Econsultancy and Google, Marketing and Measurement Survey, March 2017
Mobile has fundamentally changed how we live our lives. With our devices never more than an arm’s length away, people can find, watch or buy anything at anytime. That’s why earlier this year we shared that we’re developing a new, cloud-based measurement solution for YouTube, designed for a mobile world. Today, we’re announcing the beta for this solution, Ads Data Hub, to help advertisers get more detailed insights from their campaigns across screens while also protecting user privacy.
We are also announcing that Ads Data Hub is a solution not just for YouTube, but a tool that offers access to more data and helps unlock actionable insights across Google ad platforms, including the Google Display Network and DoubleClick. And with Ads Data Hub now in beta, we’re expanding who can use it.
Built on infrastructure from Google Cloud, including BigQuery, Ads Data Hub gives advertisers or their preferred measurement partners access to detailed, impression-level data about their media campaigns across devices in a secure, privacy-safe environment. Data from other sources, such as a CRM system or marketing database, can be incorporated as well. With this full view, advertisers or their partners can analyze the data and draw out insights specific to their business.
For example, if an e-commerce retailer wants to understand what the path to conversion looks like, they can bring additional online data about their customers into BigQuery, and Ads Data Hub will enable them to combine that data with their ads data so they can see what a typical journey is from first encountering a user until conversion.
Consistent with our commitment to privacy, no user-level data can be removed from the secure Cloud environment. Impression-level data is only accessible for the purposes of analysis and generating insights. In the future, advertisers will be able to act on the insights they get from Ads Data Hub and buy media with greater precision.
As an early alpha partner, Omnicom Media Group helped to define the solution and has seen significant value from both the amount of data available through Ads Data Hub and the broad set of analyses and custom queries that are possible.
"With the complexity of today's consumer journeys, we are seeing that marketers are looking to solve harder business challenges than ever before. Through our partnership with Google and our use of Ads Data Hub, we will be able to answer a broader range of questions and expand our analytical services." - Slavi Samardzija, Global CEO, Annalect, An Omnicom Media Group Company
With the shift to mobile, consumer behavior has changed for good. Marketers need tools to help them make sense of this new world, and Ads Data Hub is a key step forward.
Posted by Geoff Samek, Senior Product Manager, Ads Data and Privacy
- 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 contact 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.
"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
1. Google / TNS Connected Consumer Survey, US population 18+, n=1000, Q1 2016
- 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," says Aaron Cocks, Online Marketing Optimization Manager at 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,” says 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
- Welcome to the Google Marketing Next live stream! Tune in live at 9:00 a.m. PT/12:00 p.m. ET to learn about Google’s latest marketing innovations, the moment they’re announced.
Join the conversation at #GoogleMarketingNext.
