Throughout the day, when people want to go somewhere, watch something, or buy something, they reach for their mobile phones for help. And it's often a mobile app that delivers what they need — whether it's a new pair of running shoes or puzzle game to pass the time during a flight delay.
We launched Universal App Campaigns (UAC) two years ago to make it easier for you to grow your app business. UAC uses Google’s unique machine learning technology to help find the customers that matter most to you, based on your business goals — across Google Play, Google.com, YouTube and the millions of sites and apps in the Display Network.
Since then, UAC has delivered unprecedented growth and app engagement for developers and marketers. Advertisers that optimize for in-app actions with UAC, on average, drive 140% more conversions per dollar than other Google app promotion products.1
To help more advertisers take advantage of these benefits, we'll be focusing our efforts and moving all AdWords app install campaigns to UAC later this year. Starting on October 16th, all new app install campaigns created in AdWords will run on UAC. Existing Search, Display and YouTube app promo campaigns will stop running on November 15th, so it’s important to start upgrading to UAC as soon as possible.
Three easy steps to help you move your campaigns to UAC
- Review your current AdWords app promotion campaigns: log into AdWords > click the Ads tab and identify your top performing text, banner and video ads.
- Tip: export your campaign performance to make it easy to determine baseline UAC bids.
- Create a new UAC and set the right performance goal: build a new UAC by clicking the +Campaign drop-down menu from the "Campaigns" tab > select Universal app. Copy and paste any top performing creatives, especially images and videos, into your new UAC.
- Set up AdWords conversion tracking through Google Analytics for Firebase, Google Play or one of our third-party App Attribution Partners to find more of your high-value users. Learn more
- Then, choose the bidding option that best supports your business or campaign goals:
- Set the right bids: calculate the average CPI, CPA or ROAS of your existing campaigns as the starting point for your UAC performance goal. Then, monitor your new UAC and adjust bids over time to meet your goal, as there may be some natural changes in performance as you transition between campaign types.
Check out more Best Practices here.
How UAC helps you find more of the right app users
UAC uses machine learning to make the smartest decision for each ad, analyzing hundreds of millions of potential signal combinations in real time — like where people are engaging with your ads and which creatives and keywords perform best.
For example, we may learn that active PayPal users tend to search on Google Play for apps to transfer money to their friends. So, we’ll show more ads on those types of queries and related content.
Over the coming months, we'll deep dive into new features and continue to share best practices to help you get the most out of UAC.Posted by Sissie Hsiao, Director of Product Management, Mobile Advertising
1. Google Internal Data, July 2017
With more searches now happening on mobile than any other device, expectations for the mobile experience are higher than ever. In fact, over 65% of smartphone users now expect to get immediate information while using their smartphone.1 However, mobile constraints can make this difficult–smaller screens and higher latency often get in the way of you showing your customers what they want to know or buy.
Updates like expanded text ads have already helped to make mobile ads more useful and informative, and we’re continuing to build on those principles with extensions. That’s why, starting later this month, we’re changing how mobile ads show sitelinks, callouts and structured snippets.
Useful, tappable sitelinks
Sitelinks help you send people to specific pages on your site directly from your ad, like your store hours page, product pages and more. Going forward, we’re simplifying how mobile sitelinks will show by using both horizontal buttons and larger vertical links.
This makes it easy for you to send people to more relevant, deeper parts of your site–all while giving them the kind of tappable mobile experience they’ve come to expect. Early results show that people are twice as likely to interact with your sitelinks in this new format.2
Making callouts and snippets more readable
Callouts and structured snippets are extensions that provide additional information below your ad copy. Whether it’s to promote a unique offer or highlight a specific aspect of your business, they can be a great way to show off all that your business has to offer.
Previously, both of these extensions appeared in a separate line below your ad. Now, they’ll appear in-line with your ad copy in paragraph form. This means that, on average, more of your callouts and structured snippets will be available to show with your ad. Based on our user studies, people have found this new formatting to be more informative and engaging.3
Learn more about ad extensions in the Help Center, and read our best practices guide to learn how to make your extensions as appealing as possible.
Posted by James Parker, Product Manager, AdWords
1. Google / Ipsos Connect, Rising Consumer Expectations in the Micro-Moment, U.S., Dec. 2016
2. Google internal data
3. Google internal data
