Whether it’s do-it-yourself spider napkin rings for Halloween or tips on planting an edible garden, HGTV provides ideas and entertainment to people passionate about home improvement. When promoting the next season of Selling New York, it made sense that HGTV try out YouTube TrueView video ads to reach the right audience - paying only when a viewer has chosen to watch its ad.

More brands like HGTV are using TrueView ads to reach engaged viewers than ever before. Last year, we predicted that 50 percent of all online display advertising campaigns would include a cost-per-view video ad by the year 2015. One year later, it’s looking like it wasn’t such a crazy prediction. TrueView video ads have become one of our fastest growing YouTube ad formats, with 50 percent of all in-stream ads now being skippable - a 4X increase since February.

TrueView in-stream now delivers more than 18 years of video each day for advertisers - that’s a lot of interested viewers. You can see what one looks like here.

Viewer’s choice
With TrueView video ads, we’re focused on developing an ecosystem that benefits everyone - partners, advertisers, and viewers. TrueView ads give viewers choice and control over which ads they want to see and when. From research conducted with market research firm Ipsos, only 2 percent of viewers surveyed preferred ads they watch from start to finish without the option of skipping. In fact, 9 in 10 survey participants felt that TrueView in-stream ads lead to a more enjoyable YouTube experience.

For advertisers, TrueView combines the brand engagement of video with the precision of online advertising. We are seeing view rates - or the percentage of viewers who choose to watch an advertiser’s message - hold steady at 15-45 percent. And, similar to search ads, campaigns can be easily controlled and managed with Google AdWords for video.

Viewer choice has translated into real benefits for our YouTube partners, helping partners such as The Onion, Michelle Phan, Machinima, and Howcast, make more money from their content. On average, TrueView in-stream ads reduce audience drop-off by 40 percent when compared to regular pre-roll ads.

Expanding TrueView
Today, we’re unveiling more ways viewers, advertisers, and partners can benefit from TrueView. We’re now working with publishers on the Google Display Network to run TrueView in-stream ads within their own video content.

We will also bring two existing formats to TrueView - YouTube Promoted Videos and Google Click-to-Play, beginning November 17. With this change, cost-per-view ads will span YouTube, video.google.com, and the Google Display Network.


Who’s getting results from TrueView?
Back to HGTV - by reaching the right audience on YouTube with creative ad content, HGTV achieved a 45 percent view rate for their TrueView in-stream ads, meaning that 45 out of every 100 people chose to watch their ad. Hear more about how HGTV used TrueView in this video:

Political marketers have also been early adopters of TrueView in-stream video ads, testing a wide range of creatives to understand which messages resonate with which audiences. Communications firm Harris Media has used TrueView ads for US Senate candidate Ted Cruz (Texas) and Florida Governor Rick Scott. The New Media Firm built awareness for the New Jersey Education Association and Senate Bill 2718 with TrueView ads.

Advertisers and agencies including HP, Lionsgate, Morpheus Media, O2, HISTORYTM, and Vodafone have all used TrueView to reach their marketing objectives, from launching a product to increasing brand awareness.

To learn more about our TrueView family of ad formats, visit here or watch this introductory video.

Posted by Baljeet Singh, Senior Product Manager at YouTube

Yesterday, we announced Dynamic Search Ads, a new way to target relevant searches with dynamic ads generated right from your website. We hope you’ll find Dynamic Search Ads to be a useful tool in your toolbox to scale up clients’ campaigns quickly, discover unwanted gaps in keyword coverage, or keep search campaigns in sync with your clients' fast-changing inventory.

In addition to the details on the Inside AdWords blog and in the AdWords Help center, we wanted to share a few answers here to common questions that you or your clients might have.

Q. So Dynamic Search Ads are typically producing incremental traffic gains of 5-10% with satisfactory ROI. What’s typical implementation look like?
A. During our pilot, a typical implementation would have max CPC bids initially set at approximately 75% of a campaign’s average, budgets were not constrained, the whole site was targeted, and negatives were used. For these implementations, it was typical to see increases in traffic of 5-10% with satisfactory ROI across a wide range of clients.

Q. Which clients are most likely to see greatest results?
A. Dynamic Search Ads have greater potential for advertisers with large, fast-changing inventories where it can be challenging to keep AdWords campaigns in sync with what’s actually in-stock.

Q. How do Quality Scores for Dynamic Search Ads relate to Quality Scores for keyword-based campaigns?
A. They’re tracked independently and do not affect one another.

Q. Are there any mechanisms to avoid inadvertent policy violations with the dynamic ad headlines?
A. Filtering technology is used to help avoid inadvertent trademark and other policy violations in the ad text headlines.

For another perspective on Dynamic Search Ads from an agency involved in the pilot, please visit the RKG blog for their analysis and usage strategies.

Dynamic Search Ads are available in all languages and countries, but are in limited beta. To get Dynamic Search Ads enabled in your clients’ accounts, please contact your Google representative. If you don’t have a representative, you can sign up using our interest form.

We’ll be listening closely to how you’re using Dynamic Search Ads, as well as your results, suggestions, and unanswered questions. As with all our betas, we value and welcome your feedback.

Posted by Baris Gultekin, Director, AdWords Product Management

Not sure how to most effectively leverage and measure your mobile marketing campaigns? Well, you’re not alone. While mobile is an incredible new way to distribute content and reach customers on the go, it also presents a unique challenge when it comes to measuring the impact of our mobile efforts (like applications, advertisements or mobile-optimized websites).

Tune in on November 2nd for Google’s Think Mobile webinar, Mobile Advertising: Right Person, Right Time, Right Message - Finally!, led by Avinash Kaushik, Digital Marketing Evangelist. Avinash will share tips and best practices for mobile marketing campaigns, new metrics unique to mobile, and how best to measure mobile ads and websites.

                 • When: Wednesday, November 2, 2011 9-10:30am PST/ 12-1:30pm EST
                 • How: Register here

Posted by Jaime Mayer, Large Advertising Marketing Manager

Advertising is about getting your message in front of the right people. Whether you need to increase brand awareness or maximize ROI on direct response campaigns, your challenge continues to be about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. How can you do this intelligently, and at scale? Audience Solutions on the Google Display Network (GDN) provides the insight you need, connecting potential customers by with exactly what they are looking for -- when they are ready to buy.

Please join Google in our upcoming webinar to learn more about audience targeting strategies for your campaigns using Audience Solutions on the Google Display Network. We’ll discuss:

Last week at OMMA Global, Aitan Weinberg, Sr. Product Manager for Audience Solutions, presented on “Raising Awareness & Driving Sales with Audience Solutions.” The session discussed the ability to reach the right customer at the right time with the right message as being one of the most important elements of a campaign. See it here:


When selecting a vendor for audience targeting, Aitan reviewed 5 ways to help increase ROI for your campaigns:

1) Remarketing complements search campaigns
2) Use demographics to tailor every creative
3) Leverage Audience Insight reports
4) Review a collection of campaigns for a blended CPA
5) Understand your share of user and determine levers to reach everyone

To hear more tips on how to leverage audience data, make sure to watch the full presentation.

Posted by Desiree Motamedi, Product Marketing Manager

Since we announced the new version of Google Analytics in March, you may have noted an acceleration of new features and improvements. It’s part of our ongoing goal to make Google Analytics even more robust, flexible and powerful, and to enable you and your clients to get from data to insight to action more quickly.

We’re pleased to announce the availability of Google Analytics Premium - it’s everything customers value today in Google Analytics - with the addition of the guarantees, support and extra power that some of our largest customers have asked for. You can read more about it on the Google Analytics blog.

One of the new features soon available through Google Analytics Premium is a suite of attribution modeling tools that enable marketers to test their attribution hypotheses. As strategic advisors to brands that are investing and optimizing digital strategies, we want to keep you up to date with Google Analytics as you may see increased demand for Google Analytics skills and knowledge.

We’ll be offering additional training specifically for agencies, but in the meantime we’re hosting a webinar to introduce you to the features, explain options to partner with Google Analytics, and provide an opportunity to ask us questions. You can sign up here for the UK friendly time zone and here for the NA friendly time zone.

Title:  Introducing Google Analytics Premium
Date:  October 12th, 2011
Time:  8am PST / 11am EST / 4pm GMT - register for this time
             11am PST / 2pm EST / 7pm GMT  - register for this time

If you would like to continue to be notified of future Agency webinars on Google Analytics, please subscribe to the brand-new Google Group: Analytics for Agencies.

There are exciting developments ahead in analytics, and the value of insight to drive optimization and investment is just beginning. We’re building Google Analytics to help solve marketer challenges, and we really hope you’ll join us on this journey.

Posted By: Enrique Muñoz Torres, Product Manager, Google Analytics Premium