- Have you heard the good news about YouTube’s six-second bumper ads? These little wonders have swept the globe for three simple reasons: they provide wide reach, they drive brand results and they’re a great canvas for creativity.
And we’re ready to mark the one year anniversary of bumpers by giving them their star turn – for the 2017-2018 upfront season, we’re making bumpers available for Google Preferred buys. This format is a perfect match to the sought-after content included in Google Preferred and will help advertisers drive reach and build awareness during increasingly mobile viewing moments.
Let’s take a closer look at this little format that could, built to capture attention wherever and whenever it’s available.
Bumpers drive efficient reach
Sold on a simple CPM, bumpers aren’t just an easy way to get your brand in front of a lot of people – they also effectively drive upper funnel results. We looked across 122 bumpers campaigns in the US last year and found that 70% drove a significant lift in brand awareness, with an average lift of 9%.1 On ad recall, they perform even better – over 9 in 10 drove ad recall globally, with an average lift of over 30%.2 Given their high success rate and ease of use, bumpers can be a great building block for your YouTube campaigns.Bumpers work for brands
Thanks to their efficiency and efficacy, many brands are weaving bumpers into their campaigns. For instance, Busch used bumpers to continue the story from their first-ever Super Bowl ad. Busch worked with their creative agency Deutsch to collect extra footage from their Super Bowl shoot and create bumpers with different themes. This approach resulted in a double-digit lift in both purchase consideration and brand awareness among viewers. Knowing how well its bumpers performed across various brand lift metrics, Busch was also able to optimize its campaign in real-time, tailoring its creatives to audience segments most likely to consider buying the beer after seeing a particular ad. As Anheuser-Busch's Senior Director, Digital Victoria Vaynberg points out, "Capturing consumers’ attention is always a challenge, so short and contextually-relevant content is key to getting over this hurdle. By using YouTube bumpers, we were able to tap into a great product that is built to address this challenge and successfully break through with consumers."Under Armour also turned to bumpers for a recent product launch. They took a strategic hybrid approach for advertising on YouTube, leading with a TrueView ad, which helped to engage the audience through an emotional narrative, followed by bumpers that highlighted the innovation of the new product.
“Under Armour is committed to making all athletes better through performance and innovation, while inspiring the next generation of athletes with powerful storytelling,” said Jim Mollica, Vice President of Consumer Engagement at Under Armour. “Our forward-thinking strategy guided our athletes through a unique engagement funnel, which was evidenced by double the lift in product interest among people who saw our YouTube bumper ad and our TrueView ad combined, compared to those who only saw our TrueView ad."
We’ve also seen strong results in third party studies when using a comparable approach to Under Armour's – using bumpers to remarket to TrueView views produced a significantly higher lift in ad recall vs TrueView alone, with an average higher lift of 42% for the skipped views and 104% for the paid views.3 We’re excited to see other brands follow a similar playbook, orchestrating their storytelling across ad lengths to maximize results."
Bumpers offer a great canvas for creativity
It’s no surprise that some of bumpers’ earliest fans have come from the creative community. Part of the reason bumpers are such a fertile format for storytelling is that creativity thrives in constraint. At SXSW, we challenged artists, filmmakers and agency creatives to re-imagine classic works of literature in six seconds – effectively re-telling these stories in miniature. The results were by turns evocative, funny, poignant and beautiful, and they showed that six seconds is a natural and adaptable ad length. For more insights into how to build bumpers that work, check out our new article “Success in Six” on Think with Google.For more information on bumpers, including how to set up a campaign, check out the Help Center and don’t forget to #bumpitup.
Posted by
Zach Lupei, Product Manager
Jim Habig, Product Marketing Manager
1. Google Bumper Ad Brand Lift Meta Analysis, 2016 [US]
2. Google Bumper Ad Brand Lift Meta Analysis, 2016 [Global]
3. Google/Eye Square Experiment 4 ads (n=4000 YouTube weekly users, 18-64 years old). March 2017, U.S.
- There are now over 3 million apps and websites on the Google Display Network (GDN), from popular news websites to the latest gaming apps. No matter what your customers are doing to stay informed or entertained across the GDN, it’s important to reach them with timely and relevant messages. In order to do that, you need to find the right customers, tailor your creative to them and set optimal bids.Starting today, Smart display campaigns begin rolling out to all advertisers, letting you reach more customers easily on the GDN. Smart display campaigns use the power of Google’s machine learning to automatically:
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Connect your business to prospective customers who may be interested in your products, using insights from millions of apps and sites
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Create beautiful image, native and text ads that fit anywhere across the GDN
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Set the right bids to meet your performance goals
Only Google provides automation like this at scale, helping you deliver richer experiences to consumers and better results for your brand. In fact, advertisers who use Smart display campaigns are seeing an average 20% increase in conversions at the same CPA,1 compared to their other display campaigns.trivago, a hotel search platform, is using Smart display campaigns to help travelers around the world find hotel rooms that meet all their travel needs—like a room large enough for a family of four, one with hi-speed Wi-Fi for a business trip, or one with an ocean-front view for that well-deserved beach vacation. The travel brand provided:-
Creative assets: Headlines like “Find Great Hotel Deals,” descriptions of its hotel listings, beautiful images of destinations like Rome and London, and its logo
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Business goals: A target CPA and daily budget
AdWords did the rest—creating over 25,000 tailored ads and showing them to travelers shopping for hotel deals. For instance, people browsing a travel blog might see a message with trivago’s “Find Great Hotel Deals” headline and a breathtaking image of the Coliseum. With Smart display campaigns, trivago drove 36% more conversions at the same CPA, compared to its other similar display campaigns. The brand now uses Smart display campaigns across markets in Europe, Asia and North America.
Smart display campaigns automatically created over 25,000 versions of trivago’s adand showed them to people across 55 countries shopping for hotel deals
Credit Karma, a free credit and financial management website, used Smart display campaigns to get more signups and drove 37% more conversions at a similar CPA.2 “Smart display campaigns help our team save time, engage new customers and scale our marketing efficiently,” says Andrew Tam, Senior Director of Marketing at Credit Karma.
Hulu Japan, a subscription video service, turned to Smart display campaigns to reach new subscribers and drove a 37% higher conversion rate.3 “Smart display campaigns make it simple to set up and manage our campaigns using the power of automation. They're a really effective way to promote our service to prospective customers,” says Mue Hasegawa, Online Communication Senior Manager of Hulu Japan.Posted by David Margines, Product Manager, AdWords1 Google internal data2 Based on initial launch in 20163 Compared to other similar display campaigns
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- There are more moments throughout the day for businesses to connect with consumers than ever before. It’s critical for marketers to know which moments matter, and which ones don’t.The search process doesn’t start and end with “buy the exact product I already know I want.” People tend to click on multiple ads before converting. This process makes it challenging to assign the proper credit where it’s due. Last-click attribution, the default choice in AdWords, ignores everything except for the final, “buy the exact product I already know I want” ad click.As marketers, it’s crucial to understand which of your clicks are the most impactful, whether or not they’re the last click before a conversion.Data-driven attribution (DDA) uses Google’s machine learning technology to determine how much credit to assign to each click in the user journey. With DDA, you can understand how much credit should be assigned to the click on an ad for “features for product I think I want.” Even though it doesn’t convert immediately, you might see that people who click on that ad are much more likely to become customers later on.DDA was introduced to AdWords back in May 2016, and since then, we’ve been studying how it affects performance. A recent analysis of hundreds of advertisers using DDA revealed that performance improved when compared to last-click attribution:When compared to last-click attribution, DDA typically delivers more conversions at a similar cost-per-conversionFor Search, data-driven is now the recommended model for all eligible advertisers. It is a better way to measure and optimize performance.How data-driven attribution worksDDA is different from rules-based attribution models. It uses your account’s conversion data to calculate the actual contribution of each search ad click along the conversion path. By comparing the paths of customers who convert to those who don’t, DDA determines what truly matters for each conversion path.As long as your account has enough clicks and conversions, you’re eligible for DDA. We automatically train a model that’s unique to each of your conversion types. The model observes what your customers do before converting, and what they do when they don’t convert, to measure what’s important. Using Google’s machine learning, the models continue to improve over time. Read more about DDA.The benefits of knowing which clicks matterHere’s how DDA has already created value for other companies:
Select Home Warranty, which provides warranties to homeowners for household repair projects in the United States, saw a 36% increase in leads and a 20% decrease in cost-per-conversion after making the change to DDA.“Switching to a data-driven attribution model unlocked growth for our business because it allowed us to give proper credit on mobile devices and non-brand keywords, resulting in a significant increase in overall conversions.” - Joseph Shrem, Founder, Select Home Warranty
Medpex is one of the largest mail-order pharmacies in Germany. Using Smart Bidding and data-driven attribution, they drove 29% more conversions while reducing cost-per-conversion by 28%.“An algorithm is better equipped than any manual optimization to react to dynamic changes such as price changes of competitors or delivery bottlenecks.” - Frank Müller, Chief Marketing Officer, medpex
H.I.S., a travel agency with global presence in over one hundred cities worldwide, combined DDA with Smart Bidding and Dynamic Search Ads to grow conversions by 62% at a constant cost-per-conversion.“Data-driven attribution helped us to acquire new users because we could strengthen our approach to users in the consideration phase.” - Ryoko Kume, Customer Communications, WEB Promotion , H.I.S. Head Office WEB DivisionUpdating your modelMaking this change is straightforward. When you change your conversion action settings, use the dropdown in the Attribution Model section to select Data-driven as your attribution model:
Going forward, your “Conversions” column in AdWords will report your conversions based on the new DDA model. Smart Bidding will automatically adjust to this new way of measuring conversions. If you’re bidding manually, use the “current model” columns to make the initial set of adjustments. You can find these under the set of attribution columns.Making the most of DDAUpdating your “Conversions” column is a big step, but there are a couple of other steps to ensure that your account sees the most potential improvement:-
Adjust bids considering your new DDA-based conversions. Once you’ve updated your attribution model, your “Conversions” columns will begin to populate with stats that reflect your choice. From there it’s easy: Optimize your bids to account for the numbers in those columns. The recommended approach is to adopt an AdWords Smart Bidding strategy, like Target CPA or Target ROAS. Historical performance for that model can be found in the “current model” columns, which you should use as you make initial bid changes.
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Give DDA some time. Those multiple clicks in a user’s conversion path take some time to happen. Give users a chance to convert or make a purchase before evaluating results. Once your account has settled into the new method, allow a couple of weeks to pass where you gather results.
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Re-evaluate keywords that tend to be earlier in the click path. Last-click attribution could have favored some keywords at the expense of others. Now that you’re doing a better job measuring what matters, you may find that some campaigns make a big difference in the user journey. That difference may not have been measured appropriately in the past.
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Stop reviewing assisted conversion metrics. In the coming months, we’ll be removing columns that reference assisted conversions from your statistics tables and reports.
Watch this video for more information about getting started with data-driven attribution. For more detailed guidance, including the steps to follow to properly test a new attribution model, check out our best practices for going beyond last-click attribution.DDA is recommended for all Search ads, and we’re dedicated to improving DDA elsewhere. You can also take action on DDA if you use DoubleClick Search. In addition, DDA is also available in Google Analytics 360 and Attribution 360. We’ll continue to invest in DDA to make it even better across platforms.Posted byJoan Arensman, Product Manager, AdWords AttributionWilfred Yeung, Senior Product Manager, Bidding
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Thousands of merchants have long been using our Google Trusted Stores program to gain their customers' confidence. Today, we’re excited to introduce Google Customer Reviews, which will replace the Google Trusted Stores program.
Google Customer Reviews offers more ways to customize the Google badge and opt-in on your site, better account management tools that save your time, and new insights into your seller rating.
Google Customer Reviews Badge showing seller ratingWith Google Customer Reviews, you can collect valuable reviews about your business for free. After you sign up and complete the brief setup process, customers who make a purchase on your site can opt-in to receiving an email survey to rate their buying experience. The reviews collected will contribute to your seller rating, which represents aggregated consumer reviews from multiple sources, including independent data providers and our own Google surveys. Your seller rating shows up on Google Shopping, AdWords text ads, and your website if you choose. Showing seller ratings on your text ads can boost your ads’ click through rate by up to 10%.
How to enable Google Customer Reviews
1) Sign in to your Merchant Center account (or sign up if you do not have an account).
2) Select “Merchant Center programs” from the dropdown in the upper right-hand corner.
3) Click “Get Started” in the Google Customer Reviews card and accept the Program Agreement.
4) Add the survey opt-in code to your website.
5) [Optional] Add the badge code to your site wherever you want. This will make the badge appear on your site, allowing you to display your seller rating and show customers that you’re integrated with Google Customer Reviews.Learn more
Google Customer Reviews is now available in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Czechia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Indonesia, Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Netherlands, Norway, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United States, and the United Kingdom. To learn more about the program, please visit our Help Center.
Posted by Aaron Berger and Jorge Cueto, Product Managers for Google Shopping
When people are deciding where to go—like where to shop, eat or have fun—they turn to their smartphones to explore and find nearby places. We introduced store visits measurement two years ago to help advertisers measure these consumer journeys that span the online and physical worlds. Since then, advertisers globally have measured over 4 billion store visits in AdWords.
Today, we’re excited to announce new innovations that will make store visits available to thousands more advertisers around the world. These innovations will also allow us to report more store visits for advertisers already using these insights to give a more complete view of performance.
Richer store visits data at the same high level of accuracy
We know measurement insights like store visits help you make business-critical decisions about how you manage and optimize your marketing campaigns. That’s why we uphold strict, conservative confidence thresholds for the data you see in AdWords and only report on store visits when we’re sure the data meets the highest standard of accuracy. This is also done in a secure, privacy-safe way without sharing any personal location information at an individual level. Store visits are calculated based on aggregated and anonymized data from users who opt in to activate Location History.
As we continue to evolve our measurement technology with new strides in machine learning, mapping technology and survey quality, we are able to increase the number of store visits we can report while still achieving that same high bar for accuracy you’ve come to expect.
Deep learning helps us better predict store visits in challenging scenarios
In the past month, we’ve upgraded to deep learning models to improve how we measure store visits. We’re now able to train on larger data sets and increase our accuracy in prioritizing which location signals are most predictive of true visits. This allows us to reliably measure more store visits in contexts that are typically tricky, such as in multi-story malls and dense geographies where many business locations are situated close to each other.
These are the innovative machine learning techniques at the core of powerful Google features that help people solve complex problems in their everyday lives -- they can help automatically curate images in Google Photos to create an album of your favorite college memories. Or process entire sentences at a time in Google Translate to give you translations that sound much closer to what a fluent speaker would say.
New mapping initiatives improve how we define location geometry
We’ve also scaled our efforts to map the precise geography and geometry of more business locations. We’ve refreshed imagery from Google Earth and Google Street View to get the most up-to-date, external views of where different buildings begin and end. Around the world, on-the-ground teams are also partnering with more businesses to scan Wi-Fi strength inside buildings to figure out their true boundaries.
Higher-quality survey data to verify store visits
When our systems detect that potential visits have occurred, we add an extra layer of verification by surveying select users about their store visits. We directly ask which locations they’ve visited, see how this checks out against our predictions, and then use this data to calibrate our machine learning models. We’ve continued increasing the reliability and quality of these surveys using real-life audits and location visits from our own teams. For example, we’re now verifying more visits that happen in areas with high store densities to give our models more data to learn from. This strengthens accuracy and allows us to report on more store visits that may have been previously excluded.
New innovations for measuring store visits will allow more AdWords advertisers to get these insights for the very first time, and deliver a richer and more complete data set to advertisers already using store visits. We’re excited to continue partnering with you to build better online-to-offline experiences for your customers and help you measure the direct impact to your business.
Posted by Kishore Kanakamedala, Director of Product Management, Online-to-Offline Solutions
Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) help you reach people who are searching for your products and services—without the need for you to actively manage keywords or ads. Today we're introducing three improvements to DSA: page feeds, expanded ads and quality enhancements.
Control the products you advertise
Page feeds give you additional control over your DSA campaigns to ensure only relevant products and services are shown to your customers. Simply provide us with a feed of what you want to promote and select the landing pages that you want to include in your auto targets. We’ll use this information to determine when your ads will show, and where to direct your customers to on your website.
You can also apply custom labels in your page feeds to keep your ads organized. For example, create a label called “Holiday Promotion” and apply it to a group of products to easily activate and pause all ads within that promotion at the same time. Mark out of stock products with an “Unavailable” label to prevent driving traffic to them.
Hot Pepper Beauty, one of Japan's top salon booking services, uses page feeds and has reduced its time spent managing DSA campaigns by 90%:
“DSA with page feeds helps us expand our audience reach and dramatically reduces operational overhead while maintaining targeting control at the URL level.” - Tomoyuki Ishii, Manager of Digital Marketing at Recruit Lifestyle Co., Ltd.
Booking.com, the world leader in booking accommodations online, has also experienced positive results with page feeds:
“DSA Page Feeds has provided us with better ad performance through more relevant ads and allows us to reach more potential customers.” - Richard Gradwell, Director Marketing PPC Innovation at Booking.com
Expand your Dynamic Search Ads
Earlier this year, Search and Display campaigns fully transitioned to expanded text ads. Over the next month, we’re rolling out support within DSA campaigns for this expanded format. Longer headlines and description lines allow you to show more information about your business before people click your ad. When you create a new ad, use the expanded description field to provide deeper messaging that focuses on what consumers care about.
Show more relevant ads
It’s important that your ads only show when they’re most relevant to what people are searching for. For example, if you're a baker in Palm Springs, your ads should only show to people who are looking for baked goods in Palm Springs. That’s why we’re always improving the effectiveness of our DSA campaigns. With our latest updates, advertisers are seeing on average an increase in conversion rate and a decrease in CPA.
Posted by Walter Vulej, Product Manager, AdWords
