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For a window into culture and content, go to YouTube. You'll see what people love now — reflected in what they are watching and sharing. One of the areas where this is especially the case is media and entertainment. Devoted fans race to watch the latest teaser, extended trailer, or gameplay demo as soon as it's available. These coming-soon clips have become can't-miss content. And for brands, they serve as a powerful barometer of audience appetites.


We created the 2012 YouTube Top Trailers Leaderboard to recognize the U.S. trailers that audiences chose to watch this year. As with our 2012 Ads Leaderboard, we compiled this list by tuning into YouTube’s strongest signals of viewer preference: number of views, view rate (how much of an ad people choose to watch), and percentage of organic views (at least as many as paid). The resulting list reflects content that got rave reviews from U.S. audiences and shows why online video is key to any successful entertainment launch strategy.

Posted by Tara Walpert Levy, Director Ads Marketing, YouTube
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As the year comes to a close, check out the 2012 YouTube Ads Leaderboard, a celebration of the ads that people chose to watch and share on YouTube this year. As ad formats like TrueView continue to grow on the YouTube platform, we’re moving to a world where users choose the ads they want to see. The Leaderboard reflects that new world, compiled using some of YouTube’s strongest signals of viewer choice – number of views, view rate (how much of an ad people choose to watch), and percentage of organic views (at least as many as paid).


As you can see, people chose ads of all stripes – long form and short, from big brands and smaller businesses, some adapted from TV spots and some built specifically for YouTube. Some of these ads are still seeing hundreds of thousands of views, embeds, and shares many months after the initial upload, a testament to your passionate activity on YouTube and the stickiness of great brand content. Stay tuned throughout the new year as we recognize new ads you love each month. We can’t wait to see what you choose in 2013!

Posted by Tara Walpert Levy, Director Ads Marketing, YouTube
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This is the second in a series of 7 blog posts about our bid optimization white paper, Seven factors to consider when choosing a bid optimization platform.

At Google, we recognize that the freshness and accuracy of data is paramount to any data-driven system. And since bid optimization platforms are essentially decision engines, data lies at the center of the process, with the engine considering and analyzing data before deciding on the best bid for a given keyword. It’s no surprise, then, that low-quality and stale data going in often means poor results coming out.

To learn about our position on the quality of fresh data in the bid optimization process, and how the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite fits in, follow the full blog post series on the DoubleClick Search Blog.


Posted by Kim Doan, Product Marketing Manager, DoubleClick Search
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The Google+ platform provides a fresh canvas for building and strengthening your digital brand, tying into all the marketing you already do with Google. From launching a new product using Google+ pages to engaging with your community of enthusiasts over Hangouts, join our Learn with Google webinar this Thursday for a look at ways your company can build its brand using social. Sign up on our webinar page to attend: Building a Digital Brand with Google+ (Thurs, Dec 6, 10am PT / 1pm ET)

After the Hangout, we’ll host a live Q&A with members of the Google+ team to answer questions about building a brand with Google+. RSVP on the Google+ Event page and add your questions as comments on that page.

With more than 100 monthly million active Google+ users, the time is right to focus on building your digital brand presence via the platform. Google+ has seen a wealth of brands engaging with users in creative, interactive ways. In fact, brands created more than 1 million Google+ pages in just a few months. For instance:

  • H&M -- The retail clothing company, with more than 2 million Google+ followers, uses tailored content, images and video to bring its fashions and lifestyle to life on the platform. They’ve also utilized Ripples to identify their trendsetters and saw a 22% clickthrough rate boost after implementing social extensions in AdWords.
  • Cadbury -- The chocolate maker has reached a following of nearly 3 million users with a combination of creative posts, Hangouts on Air and even the launch of their Dairy Milk Bubbly bar. They’ve also installed the Google+ badge on the company’s web homepage, making it easy as chocolate to follow the brand.
Like the ideas here? Log on Thursday to learn more about how to create, capture and sustain demand for your brand using Google+. And if you’re going to miss this while you’re at SMX Social in Las Vegas next week, check back at the webinars page later for a recording of the webinar.

Posted by Becky Bowman, Senior AM
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Cross-posted; follow the full series on the DoubleClick Search blog

Last week, we kicked off our bid optimization blog post series by inviting you to a ClickZ webinar on how to choose the right bid optimization tool to drive paid search results for your business. Today, we’ll continue the conversation by tackling the first of seven questions you should ask when choosing a bid optimization platform for your business:

Question 1: Can I state my goals to match how my business really works?

We believe that effective search campaigns start with a clearly-defined advertiser goal. A clear definition of your goal affects every aspect of your campaign. For example, on DoubleClick Search, it influences the signals that are evaluated by our bid optimization system, the data analysis we perform, and ultimately, the results you get from the bid optimization system. As such, poorly-defined goals can mean missed opportunities and lackluster results.

The figure below illustrates how a marketer’s goal plays a critical role in influencing every step of the bid optimization process:



That’s why the flexibility to express individual campaign goals is so important -- it helps ensure that all bids work toward and maximize business results that matter to you. So when choosing a bid optimization platform, look for one that’s comprehensive in the goals it supports, offering the option to express basic goals, as well as combine goals, and to optimize against unique business data.

You may find that most tools offer a way of defining a set of basic campaign goals:
  • Position - the ad position (rank) you want to achieve on the page, expressed as a whole number (1), a range of numbers (1-3), a decimal (2.5), or any combination.
  • Cost Per Action (CPA) - The average cost per action, where action can be a conversion, sale, signup, or other marketer-defined event.
  • Effective Revenue Share (ERS) - the total cost of a campaign divided by the total revenue generated by that campaign, expressed as a percentage
  • Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) - The total revenue generated by an SEM campaign divided by the cost, expressed as a percentage
  • Spend (Budget) - A precise monthly budget to spend while maximizing results on a specific metric (clicks, impressions, conversions, or other)
However, every campaign has unique objectives, and it’s likely you want flexibility beyond the basics. You may need a way of expressing a combination of goals, based on your unique objectives. To achieve this, look for a solution that offers the flexibility to express bidding goals in a rich language. For example, can you set a CPA goal while still maintaining a top position? Can you achieve a target position while staying within a specified budget? Does the platform support full flexibility to express a unique goal for each different type of conversion -- setting more aggressive goals for those conversion types you value more? Can the tool also optimize off your unique business data, including offline conversions or website data?

These are the types of considerations that inform our investments in the DoubleClick Search Performance Bidding Suite, where we wanted to put advertiser goals at the center of the bid optimization process. So whether you have a goal that’s based on a CPA, revenue, return on ad spend, budget, or a combination of these, the Performance Bidding Suite lets you easily define and optimize to your precise business objectives, and express a unique bid goal for every conversion type. In addition, the Performance Bidding Suite offers the option to integrate offline data, and have this data expressed in bid decisions to ensure that the entirety of your business is usable for bid optimization consideration.

Of course, defining the goal is just the first step. Once it’s been set, what kind of data does the bid optimization tool analyze to make bid decisions? Next week, we’ll take a closer look at the second question to consider when choosing a bid optimization platform: How fresh is the data that’s used in making bid decisions?

To learn more about the 7 factors to consider, download our white paper here.
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Remember how much fun pop-up books were to explore as a kid?

With the Digital Creativity Guidebook, we’ve brought the format into the digital age to help brands connect with today’s consumers using Google’s products.

The Guidebook lets you play with Google’s products whilst learning more about the creative opportunities of digital. It highlights great campaigns from the Creative Sandbox Gallery to show what YouTube, mobile, Maps, search, and social can add to your creative palette.

Start flipping on www.creativesandbox.com/guidebook.
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New product launches trigger an enormous amount of online activity, and cause consumers to shop. And we know that search volume can predict all sorts of things, from unemployment to auto trends. Putting those together, we took a look at the smartphone industry. In our Smartphone Launch Predictor study, we uncovered factors that can maximize and predict product success.
One key takeaway is that aggregate search predicts smartphone sales, with over 90% accuracy.

Here are the key findings that show how marketers can predict, and increase, smartphone sales:
  • Early buzz is a good sign: Maximize official press and marketing efforts early. Why? Pre-launch buzz, like online news stories is a top factor in propelling long-term search interest. We found that an extra 1,000 news stories in the weeks before launch will likely lead to a 9% boost in smartphone sales (compared to the situation if there are no news stories).
  • Customers are searching earlier than you might expect: A whopping 52% of purchase-related searches occur before launch. This is a prime opportunity to reach customers when they’re interested in learning more about the product, as fewer marketers are running ads at this time.
  • End of the week availability rules: Some days of the week work better than others. The strongest sales figures correlate with Thursday and Fridays on-sale dates, so schedule messaging when it will generate the most interest. 
  • Video is a key channel: Shoppers are taking a sneak peak at products before choosing a device: video views for smartphones increased 60% from 2010 to 2011. Video views during launch week generates great results. If a smartphone accrues 1 million video views during launch week launch, it will likely sell over 1.2M units in the 12 weeks after launch.
  • Ad clicks correlate closely: The higher the number of clicks on your search ads, the higher your sales - both online and in-store. How much? If a smartphone accrues 100,000 paid clicks during the 12 weeks after launch, it will likely sell over 1.3M units over the same period.
  • User research cycle: Before launch, shoppers tend to compare brands to explore the smartphone landscape. More detailed searching increases during the week of launch, when searches for smartphone reviews peak. And then, after launch, people dig into the details: searches for specific smartphone features and product issues hit their high points in the weeks after launch. Tailoring ad campaigns to this cycle is a big opportunity.
  • Buying one screen on many screens: As smartphone retailers know, screens are blurring and campaigns are becoming integrated. At launch week, an extra 25,000 searches for smartphones, from smartphones, predicts an increase in sales of 17%.
For more insights, download the full research on smartphone sales predictors at Think With Google.

Posted by Matt Seitz, Technology team, Sr. Analytical Lead
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Have you ever struggled with implementing new marketing and measurement tools on your website? For many people, deploying data collection “tags” (like conversion tracking, remarketing, audience reporting and analytics) can take weeks or months. Worse, the tag implementation is often incorrect, meaning you’re missing out on valuable information about your site and its users.

It doesn’t need to be difficult. We recently held a webinar to introduce users to Google Tag Manager, a free tool that helps marketers and IT departments manage their marketing and measurement tags quickly and easily. Watch the video here to learn more about:
  • Overall benefits and features of using Google Tag Manager
  • A quick demonstration of how to deploy a new tracking tag
  • Tips for getting your company started with Google Tag Manager



In addition to this webinar, we’ll be hosting a technical webinar in January to help new users through the nuts and bolts of installing Google Tag Manager (with lots of concrete examples). Stay tuned -- we’ll share registration information in a future blog post, or you can check back on the Learn with Google webinar site.

Read on for responses to some of the top questions we received during the webinar.

Questions and Answers

Where can I find out more about the core concepts described in the webinar?

To learn more about the Google Tag Manager management interface, please visit our Help Center -- you may want to start with our Before you Begin article. There you can find more information about key concepts like Tags, Rules, and Macros. For developers interested in how to implement Google Tag Manager, please visit our developer documentation. Or if you’d like help with implementation, you can contact one of our Partners. You can also ask questions (and find responses to questions from others) on the Google Tag Manager product forum.

What happens to historical data if we move to Google Tag Manager?

All of your historical data should be preserved when you move to Google Tag Manager. Google Tag Manager only changes the way that tags are deployed and managed on your site, it does not change the way data is collected.

How would you migrate a tag?

Follow these steps to migrate tags -- whether it’s a single tag or all the tags on your site. If you’re just getting started, take a look at our Before you Begin article.
  • Create a Google Tag Manager Account and a Container associated with that account.
  • Install that Container code snippet on every page of your website (so that it appears immediately after the opening <body> tag). The container should be empty.
  • Map your site - thinking about what data you want to collect, what events you want to track, and which tags you want to use to track that data. You should think about where your current tags are implemented, but now is a great time to rethink your overall data collection goals and start fresh.
  • (Optional) If you would like to make use of the Data Layer functionality, create a data layer on the pages where you wish to pass information or fire tags
  • Create Tags, Rules and Macros within the Google Tag Manager interface according to the map you just created. Make sure to apply the correct Rules to your Tags to make sure they fire in the right place.
  • Test the changes you’ve made in Google Tag Manager using debug and preview mode.
  • Then push a version of your site live that has removed the hard-coded tags from within the page. At this time, also Publish your changes using the Publishing feature of Google Tag Manager, which pushes the changes live to the site.
For more precise details on these steps, read our developer documents about migration.

Can you add tags to events or buttons?

Definitely! In order to use Google Tag Manager to fire tags on events and buttons, follow these steps (for more detail, read our developer document on event handlers):
  • On your page, proactively add the dataLayer.push({ ‘event’: ‘myEventName’}) to the event handlers for all events and buttons you might want to track.
  • Create a new rule where “event equals myEventName”.
  • Associate this rule with any tag you’d like to fire when the specified event happens.
Can hard-coded tags and tag manager co-exist? Do I have to remove my other tracking tags?

We strongly recommend that you completely migrate all your tags, so you can take advantage of the benefits of managing and updating those tags within Google Tag Manager. However, if a full migration seems too hard, you can use Google Tag Manager in parallel with hard-coded tags. Some of our users use Google Tag Manager to only manage adding new tags.

If you choose to do a partial migration to Google Tag Manager, you need to be very careful to make sure you don’t accidentally start double-counting your tags. If you decided to deploy a tag via Google Tag Manager, make sure that you don’t have a version of the same tag firing on the same page.

Can you build your own custom tag templates? And how do I become a recognized Tag Vendor within Google Tag Manager?

Custom Tag templates within Google Tag Manager allow you to copy/paste any HTML or Image tags directly into Google Tag Manager and fire it based on your predefined rules and macros. To turn it into a template, use the {{macro_name}} syntax to populate the tag code with dynamic values. We will also do a syntax check to ensure that when you copy your 3rd party tag, it will fire as intended.

If you’re interested in having your tag added to the list of predefined templates, apply to become a Tag Vendor within Google Tag Manager by completing this interest form.

How does this work with Google Analytics? How do you do things like track pageview and track event within Google Analytics?

Google Tag Manager is a convenient way to correctly deploy Google Analytics across your site. To use Google Analytics within Google Tag Manager, simply create a Tag with the Google Analytics tag template. You can select the “Track Type” as either a pageview, an event, or a transaction.

Make sure you have some version of the Google Analytics tag firing across all pages on your site. A good way to do this would be to have a basic tag firing on all pages, but blocking on pages where your more customized tags are firing (like the thank you page where you’d be firing a specialized transaction tag type).

Can the Google Tag Manager snippet be placed in How about in my footer?

The recommended best practice is to have the Google Tag Manager snippet at the top of the to maximize data collection, but some clients may find it easier to implement the Container snippet elsewhere in the in the page, like the footer.

Do not place the Google Tag Manager snippet in (for the IT folks: this is because there is an iframe in the <;noscript> case, which can have unpredictable results in some browsers).

No matter where you install the container snippet, you will need to make sure that this snippet of code is on every page of their site. Google Tag Manager will still work if you only deploy it on part of your site, but Google Tag Manager’s rule based system will only work on pages where the snippet is deployed. For more details, read our developer documents.

Does Google Tag Manager replace Doubleclick Floodlight?

No, Google Tag Manager does not replace Floodlight -- they are complementary. Floodlight is a conversion pixel for DoubleClick products (Floodlight tags can now be deployed within Google Tag Manager), and Google Tag Manager is a tag management system or “container tag” for multiple tagging technologies. Floodlight has previously been used by some users as a container tag as well, but moving forward, Google Tag Manager is a way to deploy all tracking technology.

You also have the ability to pass custom floodlight variables through Google Tag Manager into Floodlight, through the Data Layer. For more information, please review the material in the Developers Guide.

We hope this webinar and this blog post will help you as you get started with Google Tag Manager, and we look forward to seeing you at our technical webinar in January. (Registration details coming soon).

Posted by Laura Holmes, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager (cross-posted from the Google Analytics blog)
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Today, agencies are looking for ways to continue running high-performing search campaigns across different search engines, geographies, formats, and devices. To turn this complexity into opportunity, many look to SEM platforms as a single place to manage, optimize and measure all their campaigns - on many search engines across the world.

Choosing a platform to manage all this isn’t easy. There’s lots of advice and suggestions about how to choose one, (such as this and this). But we’ve learned that every client has different needs - some only want to manage search ads, some want a real integration with their display and mobile campaigns, some have dedicated teams, some are more budget conscious. Through our formal and informal customer feedback sessions we‘ve taken onboard marketers and agencies’ key questions and requests, and used that to revamp DoubleClick Search version 3. And through these same sessions over recent years, we see and hear the factors that are important to marketers and agencies in their choices - these are the questions that most commonly come up in RFPs, in our discussions and in our feedback sessions.

We created a guide with the factors that clients consistently tell us are most important. These guide our investment in DoubleClick Search, and we hope they might be a useful summary for you if you are looking for, or testing out, an SEM platform partner. See the entire guide on the DoubleClick Search blog or download it here.

Posted by Ariel Bardin, Product Management Director
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Looking for fresh inspiration to start off the holiday season? We’ve invited a few of the creatives and developers who have campaigns featured on the Creative Sandbox gallery to join a series of Google+ Hangouts on Air, in conversation with Google product experts. They’ll talk about what they did, how they did it and explain their hangups and breakthroughs. To RSVP for the series, visit the Google+ Event.

We love seeing the work our agency partners come up with using digital tools, bringing brands and ideas to life. We hope that the Creative Sandbox Hangouts will fuel your creativity. Sometimes all it takes is an example to inspire the next big idea.

Here’s the detailed schedule:

Monday: Mobile | 2:30pm EST | featuring Beattie McGuinness Bungay | Watch at http://goo.gl/ITC17

Tuesday: YouTube API | 2:30pm EST | featuring Saatchi & Saatchi LA, Stoop LA, and Ogilvy Paris | Watch at http://goo.gl/0OlFr

Wednesday: DoubleClick Rich Media | 2:30pm EST | featuring Grow and Spinnaker | Watch at http://goo.gl/xKvKp

Thursday: Google+ API | 2:30pm EST | featuring Resn, Goodby Silverstein & Partners and Hook | Watch at http://goo.gl/kdqlW

Friday: Geo API | 2:30pm EST | featuring McCann New York, Goodby Silverstein & Partners and Famous Interactive | Watch at http://goo.gl/AwQT6

Posted by Hope Friedland, Associate Product Marketing Manager
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With 29% of shoppers planning to purchase smartphones this holiday season, there’s no doubt that some of the shiniest new mobile devices will be wrapped up under the tree this Christmas. Little time will be wasted before happy new smartphone and tablet owners begin searching for the best apps to fill these new devices. So it’s no surprise that according to Google Trends, during the week following Christmas last year, searches for “best tablet apps” rose by more than 70%, while searches for “free phone apps” jumped by about 37%. The holidays are prime time for app promotion, so it’s important for marketers to make sure their app stands out from the crowd.

Maximizing reach with search and display ads
Whether you have a shopping companion app, a banking app, or a mobile gaming app, it’s important to reach the right audience to drive downloads and increase awareness. Many marketers have made mobile work for them by using search and display strategies together to raise interest and drive downloads of their app.

TripIt, a mobile travel organizer, used click-to-download ads on Google Search and the Google Display Network to promote their app to business travelers on the road. By creating and optimizing display ads within other apps, TripIt increased downloads by more than 75% and slashed cost-per-download by more than 96%. According to Rhonda Hanson, senior director of search marketing, promoting their app with mobile ads allowed TripIt to, “redirect the dollars we've saved on app promotion to improving our app and providing a better trip-organizer service to our business travelers.” Download the full case study here.



Maximizing ROI with Conversion Optimizer
Savvy advertisers also know they can take app promotion to the next level with optimization tools. Leading mobile game developer GREE promoted their apps to gamers using Google Search click-to-download ads along with image and text ads on the Google Display Network. To make sure they were getting the best return on investment for their in-app display ads, they used Conversion Optimizer for apps to reach their cost-per-download targets. This automated campaign optimization helped them improve app download rates by 150%, decrease cost-per-download by 52% and improve click-through rates by 49%. Download the full case study here.



If you haven’t already created your holiday app strategy, it’s not too late. Here are some things you can do to win across search and display:
  1. Make sure you’re reaching people when they search for apps like yours and help them easily download your app with click-to-download ads and mobile app extensions 
  2. Reach relevant users within over 300,000 premium apps on the Google Display Network with image and text ads 
  3. Track downloads on Android and iOS with AdWords conversion tracking and optimize ROI with the automated bidding feature, the Conversion Optimizer for apps
  4. Measure in-app user activity with Mobile App Analytics in order to optimize
  5. Increase app promotion campaign budgets for the holidays to account for additional ad clicks
For more on how you can drive cost-effective app downloads with Google AdWords, check out this recorded Learn with Google webinar.


Posted by Jessica Sapick, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile
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Over the next few weeks, we’re offering five opportunities to learn more about Google+ for your business. We kick off with a Learn with Google Hangout on Air with bestselling author +Chris Brogan on November 5th at 10am PT / 1pm ET. Chris will cover tactics for successful social marketing and discuss his new book, “Google+ for Business: How Google's Social Network Changes Everything.” RSVP for the Hangout on the Google+ Event page.



Learn Chris’s recipes for how to grow and engage your Google+ community to build your brand and drive your business’s visibility and conversions. Hear about Chris’s own experiences helping companies succeed in their content marketing and social projects. Chris Brogan is a New York Times bestselling author, CEO of Human Business Works, and advises companies on marketing, business strategy, communications and more.

If you have a question for Chris, leave your question as a comment on the Google+ Event.

Boost your success with Google+

Want to learn more about using Google+ for your business? Sign up for our Learn with Google webinars. Here are some great upcoming webinars to help you get the most out of social for your business:
  • Social Media Best Practices for a Successful Holiday Season (Wed, Oct 31, 10am PT / 1pm ET)
  • Social that Adds Up: Performance and Measurement (Thurs, Nov 8, 10am PT / 1pm ET)
  • Supercharge your Social Media Initiatives with Video (Wed, Nov 14, 10am PT / 1pm ET)
  • Building a Digital Brand with Google+ (Thurs, Dec 6, 10am PT / 1pm ET)
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Apps are a powerful way to keep your most loyal users engaged, and can also be a real driver of revenue for marketers big and small. When advertising apps, the key is to know what’s working and what’s not. While advertisers have already been able to measure their Android app downloads within AdWords, we’ve now launched the ability to track iOS downloads that were driven by in-app display ad campaigns.

To set up iOS conversion tracking, advertisers need to create a single code snippet in their AdWords account and install it in their app. This snippet is accessible in the AdWords interface in the same place where advertisers have been able to codelessly track Android downloads. With iOS conversion tracking, marketers can better understand which campaigns are most effective at driving app downloads. These enhanced insights help marketers iterate on app promotion strategies to reach their return on investment goals, with the help of features like the Conversion Optimizer for apps.

Figuring out what ads are working is key for marketers like Sho Masuda, Vice President of Player Marketing for GREE, a leading mobile social game app developer. GREE has used click to download and in-app advertising solutions with AdWords to promote their app, and Masuda says, "Google’s host of tracking and optimization tools help us quickly iterate and maximize ROI across our app promotion campaigns. iOS conversion tracking will help us gain even deeper insights into our Google app promotion efforts for our iOS apps.

If you’d like to learn more about how to track value beyond the app download, you can watch a recording of our Learn with Google webinar “Understanding your App Users with Google Analytics” here.

Posted by Morgan Hallmon, Product Manager
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As we’re nearing the end of 2012, we’ve all got business goals to meet. Some of you might even be prepping for your busiest season. Today, we’re announcing our next series of Learn with Google webinars, which will arm you with the tools you need to get the most out of your holiday ad dollars. We’ve got a special series on remarketing as well as a few holiday-specific strategies to help you navigate the season successfully. Over the next couple of months, 20 webinars will teach you tips and how-to’s to help make the web work for your business.

Check out the full schedule of webinars below:
  • 10/16 [Search] Drive Traffic to your Locations with your Online Campaigns
  • 10/18 [Video] TrueView Video Advertising Strategies for the Holidays
  • 10/23 [Mobile] Understanding your App Users with Google Analytics
  • 10/24 [Research] Real-Time Insights with Google Consumer Surveys
  • 10/25 [Display] Remarketing Series: Getting Started with Remarketing
  • 10/30 [YouTube] TrueView Video Advertising for Agencies
  • 10/31 [Social] Social Media Best Practices for a Successful Holiday Season
  • 11/01 [Video] Optimizing TrueView Video Ad Campaigns
  • 11/02 [Analytics] Attribution Modeling for Digital Success 
  • 11/06 [Video] YouTube Analytics for Advertisers
  • 11/07 [Video] Remarketing Series: YouTube and Video Remarketing
  • 11/08 [Social] Social that Adds Up: Performance and Measurement 
  • 11/13 [Analytics] Getting Started with Google Tag Manager
  • 11/14 [Social] Supercharge your Social Media Initiatives with Video 
  • 11/15 [Display] Remarketing Series: Getting Started with the New Remarketing Tag
  • 11/27 [Display] Remarketing Series: Getting Started with Similar Audiences
  • 11/29 [Mobile] New Tablet Research: How to Win on the Third Screen
  • 12/05 [Mobile] Capturing the Full Value of Mobile with Click-to-Call and Call Metrics
  • 12/06 [Social] Building a Digital Brand with Google+
  • 12/12 [Analytics] Remarketing Series: Remarketing with Google Analytics
All webinars are at 10 PT/ 1 ET.

Visit our webinar page to register for any of the sessions and to access past webinars on-demand. You can also stay up-to-date on the schedule by adding our Learn with Google Webinar calendar to your own Google calendar to automatically see upcoming webinars.

Learn with Google is a program to help businesses succeed through winning moments that matter, enabling better decisions and constantly innovating. We hope that you’ll use these best practices and how-to’s to maximize the impact of digital and grow your business. We’re looking forward to seeing you at an upcoming session!

Posted by Erin Molnar, Marketing Coordinator
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Calling designers, web developers, and the curiously creative! We have just launched GDL Presents, a new series of exclusive online education videos from GDL. Presents kicks off this month with Design Ignites the Web, a family of episodes that takes you on a journey from back-end to front-end, showing you how to create compelling experiments in the browser. The series features exclusive interviews with the developers behind select Chrome Experiments, Movi.Kanti.Revo (Cirque du Soleil), DevArt, and Chrome Web Lab, Movi.Kanti.Revo.

Here’s the detailed schedule:

AIRED: Make Web Magic: The Minds Behind the Most Popular Chrome Experiments | Tuesday, October 9 - Part 1, 1PM PDT [Event page] | Part II, 2PM PDT [Event page] | Part III, 3PM PDT [Event page]
Using the latest open web technologies, the developers creating some of the most inspired Chrome Experiments showcase their latest web experiments and discuss how they are making the web faster, more fun, and open in this 3-episode hangout.
Host: Paul Irish, Developer Advocate, Google Chrome
Guests: Hakim: G+, Website | Michael Deal: G+, Website | Mark Danks: G+, Website

All the Web’s a Stage: Building a 3D Space in the Browser | Thursday, October 11 - 10:30AM PDT [Event page]
Meet the designers and creative team behind a new sensory Chrome experiment, Movi.Kanti.Revo, in a live, design-focused Q&A. Learn how Cirque du Soleil and Subatomic Systems worked to translate the wonder of Cirque into an environment built entirely with markup and CSS.
Host: Pete LePage, Developer Advocate, Google Chrome
Guests: Gillian Ferrabee, Creative Director, Images & Special Projects, Cirque du Soleil | Nicole McDonald, Director/Creative Director, Subatomic Systems

Van Gogh Meets Alan Turing: The Browser Becomes a Canvas with DevArt | Friday, October 19 - 10:00 AM PDT [Event page]
How can art and daily life be joined together? Host Ido Green chats with creators Uri Shaked & Tom Teman about tackling this question with their “Music Room” – a case study in the power of Android – and with Emmanuel Witzthum on his project “Dissolving Realities,” which aims to connect the virtual environment of the Internet using Google Street View.
Host: Ido Green, Developer Advocate
Guests: Uri Shaked, Tom Teman, and Emmanuel Witzthum

Push the Limits: Building Extraordinary Experiences with Chrome | Week of October 29 [Event page]
The experiments in Chrome Web Lab are pushing the limits of what developers can build in a browser. Explore the design and technical mastery that went into making extraordinary experiences, directly from the experiments’ home, the London Science Museum.
Hosts: Pete LePage, Developer Advocate | Paul Kinlan, Developer Advocate
Guests: Tellart & B-Reel representatives for Universal Orchestra, Sketchbot, Teleporter, LabTag, DataTracer

If you can’t make a live show, you’ll still be able to see recordings of these and past sessions at our YouTube channel. For more information on our monthly schedule, add +Google Developers to your circles and follow @googledevs on Twitter.

Posted by Peter Lubbers, Program Manager, Google Chrome Developer Relations
(Cross-posted from the Google Developer Blog and the Chromium Blog.)
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How could you improve your community or local government? How could it run better? How could you solve health problems or fight crime in your neighborhood?

In our first Google Places API Developer Challenge, we’re inviting developers, designers and tech savvy individuals around the world to make something that improves their communities or governments by using the Google Places API. The developers who create winning applications will receive a VIP ticket to Google I/O 2013 where the app will be showcased.

You can use any platform as long as you feature and build with the Google Places API. So start channeling your most creative and innovative ideas because the deadline to submit is in three weeks on October 31st, 2012.

Enter now at https://developers.google.com/places/challenge/ to help solve some of the greatest civic challenges that we face everyday. We look forward to seeing what can happen when your imagination and the Google Places API come together.



Posted by Hope Friedland, Associate Product Marketing Manager
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Earlier this year, we launched The Mobile Playbook in the US to help brands and agencies develop winning mobile strategies. At the time, most marketers had already moved beyond the “why mobile?” question, but didn’t know where or how to get started. Now it’s become clear that, when done right, mobile works for marketers. As the industry has evolved, we’re seeing examples of marketers designing compelling mobile creatives, and how savvy advertisers are finding ways to measure the real value that mobile has on their businesses. These are two areas that have been top of mind for the thousands of marketers that we’ve talked with and we’re excited to expand the playbook to delve deeper into these topics.

In The Full Value of Mobile section, we dive into the range of mobile conversions possible today and how they provide economic value to businesses in ways that marketers may not realize. For example, Adidas worked with iProspect to evaluate how mobile clicks on their store locator links were driving in-store sales, and ultimately found that each mobile store locator click was worth $3.20.

With mobile debuting as a new category at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity this year, it’s clear that mobile has truly arrived as a creative platform. According to Terry Savage, Chairman of Cannes Lions, "We're now starting to see some marketers build incredibly engaging and immersive creative for mobile. We sought out to celebrate these great mobile creatives at Cannes Lions this year and inspire others to think about how to bring their brands to life on mobile." The Mobile Creativity section explains why mobile is unique and powerful from a creative perspective, and shares examples of how marketers from around the world have used mobile to bring their brands to life.

The Mobile Playbook was created as a one-stop resource to spotlight brands that are making mobile work for them and to reflect our latest recommendations on how marketers can approach mobile strategically. We’ve also rolled out international versions of The Mobile Playbook across different countries, including Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, France, and the UK, and will bring the playbook to Japan, Australia and Italy over the coming weeks. We welcome your input, and will keep adapting the playbook as the industry continues to evolve.

Posted by Jason Spero, Head of Global Mobile Sales & Strategy
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When creativity and technology work hand in hand, brands can build amazing things online...not only helping them connect with their customers in the right moment, but also funding digital content and creating dazzling ads that users love. I spoke yesterday at Advertising Week about how we can partner more closely with brands to win the moments that matter. And today, we’re adding a few new tools to the toolbox for brand marketers.

A large canvas, at scale
We’re introducing our lightbox ad format, the first of a new family of display ads that allow marketers to pay only when a user engages. The lightbox starts as a standard display ad, making it scalable, but after a two-second hover, expands to a super-sized canvas. In internal tests, we’ve seen that this smart hover feature eliminates nearly 100% of accidental expansions and increases engagement by 6-8X over standard click-to-expand ads. The result: users only engage with the ads they really want to see and brand marketers only pay for truly engaged views.



Engagement matters
We also have some new insights on how our existing engagement-driven formats on YouTube and the Google Display Network, such as the TrueView family of video ads, have effectively helped brands reach their audience online. We looked at the sales impact during and two weeks after 92 different ad campaigns, and found that on average every $1 invested in YouTube delivered a $1.70 return in sales--2.4x more efficient than the television spend for these campaigns. These ads also help achieve branding goals: we found, on average, that ads on YouTube and the Google Display Network drive a 36% increase in visits to your website and a 36% increase in searches for your brand online (Google Internal Data, 2012).

Google BrandLab brings brands to life on the web
Finally, while we believe magic moments can happen online, sometimes, nothing beats a face-to-face conversation. To help more brands harness the full potential of the web, we’ve recently created a physical space where we can collaborate with brands and agencies on winning all the moments that matter -- the Google BrandLab at our YouTube headquarters. We’ve already had a number of advertisers at BrandLab including Capital One, Coca-Cola, Nissan, and Toyota, and look forward to helping even more brands use Google technologies in creative and impactful ways.



We hope these new tools take their place in the brand-building toolbox alongside some of our other offerings like our platform for crowdsourced creativity, the Creative Sandbox Gallery; brand-friendly metrics, and YouTube Original Channels. We want to make the web work for brands in a big way, these are just a few early steps. Look for more to come on this front in the months to come.

Posted by Jim Lecinski, Vice President, Brand Solutions
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In this increasingly mobile world, it’s important for marketers to understand what consumers are doing on their mobile devices. We recently took a close look at this question in a number of different research studies - Our Mobile Planet, The New Multi-Screen World, What Users Want From Mobile Sites Today. But as we talked with marketers and agencies, especially creative agency folks, we realized there was another important question to answer: why is the mobile space so powerful at a deeper, more emotional level? And how are people finding and making meaning there? These are important questions because it’s hard to tell emotionally resonant stories about brands on mobile unless we understand the resonance of the mobile space itself.

So what is the meaning of mobile? That’s a big and complex question, but to start scratching the surface we sought the help of an anthropologist who went into the homes of mobile users and spoke with them at length, observing their device interactions and asking them to keep “mobile diaries” to understand the role mobile is playing in their lives. From this investigation, we gained some valuable insights that we hope will help strategic planners and creatives better understand how to make use of the mobile space. For example: Have you ever thought about how miniature items tend to possess the power to unlock imaginations, and how this dynamic plays out with the smallness of our phones? Or how our smartphones enable us to indulge in our innate desire to “read” and “write” meanings onto our physical surroundings? (We hadn’t either.)

We’ve shared our findings with strategic planners and marketers at Cannes, Advertising Week, and at a handful of creative agencies. Today, we are excited to share our insights with you through a new whitepaper that tells the story of what we found -- how mobile is helping us achieve our self-ideals, co-create culture with our communities, and make sense of the physical world around us.


We invite you to put on your anthropologist's hat and to think about mobile in a new and different way. Perhaps some of the findings will inspire you to think about the ways that you can connect with your customers in the mobile space. We’d love for you to join the dialogue and share your thoughts.

Posted by: Jesse Haines, Head of Marketing, Mobile Ads, and Abigail Posner, Head of Strategic Planning, Agency Development
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Over the past few years, we’ve seen massive improvements in digital marketing sophistication and capabilities. Today there’s a rich suite of tools allowing marketers to gain better insights, reach audiences in new ways, and develop improved marketing campaigns so users have better web experiences. Yet many modern marketing tools—like web analytics, conversion tracking, remarketing, and more—depend on adding "tags" to your website.

Website tags help enable today’s sophisticated digital marketing technologies
Tags are tiny bits of website code can help provide useful insights, but they can also cause challenges. Too many tags can make sites slow and clunky; incorrectly applied tags can distort your measurement; and it can be time-consuming for the IT department or webmaster team to add new tags—leading to lost time, lost data, and lost conversions.

We’ve been hard at work to help take the pain out of tagging for everyone. That’s why today, we’re announcing our first release of Google Tag Manager. We’re launching globally in English, and the product will soon be available in many other languages.

Google Tag Manager is a free tool that consolidates your website tags with a single snippet of code and lets you manage everything from a web interface. You can add and update your own tags, with just a few clicks, whenever you want, without bugging the IT folks or rewriting site code. It gives marketers greater flexibility, and lets webmasters focus on other important tasks. Take a quick look at how easy it is to set up an account and manage your tags:




Google Tag Manager is built to handle your tagging needs, and it works with Google and non-Google website tags. We’ve packed in lots of great features, including:
  • Asynchronous tag loading—so your tags can fire faster without getting in each other's way, and without slowing down the user-visible part of the page
  • Easy-to-use tag templates, so marketers can quickly add tags with our web interface, as well as support for custom tags
  • Error-prevention tools like Preview mode (so you can see proposed changes before implementing them), the Debug Console, and Version History to ensure that new tags won’t break your site
  • User permissions and multi-account functionality to make it easy for large teams and agencies and clients to work together with appropriate levels of access
  • Plus we have exciting plans to add great new features over the next several months

We’re also happy to announce our tag vendor program: If your company provides tag technology and you’d like Google Tag Manager to include a template for your tag, please contact us here to become a tag vendor.


Dozens of companies have already begun using Google Tag Manager and have seen great results. Ameet Arurkar, Director of Search Engine Marketing at QuinStreet, reports:

“Google Tag Manager took one big chunk of time out of the tagging process. What took 2 weeks now takes less than a day—sometimes just hours. We, the campaign managers, now make the call on which tags to use, and we can implement the tags ourselves.”


“Google Tag Manager just makes business sense. Why would we want to manually add hundreds of tags for our pages?”


Setting up Google Tag Manager is quick and easy—you create an account, add one snippet of code to your site, then start managing tags. If you want more help, contact a Google Certified Partner—they’ve been carefully vetted and meet rigorous qualification standards.

Get started today at www.google.com/tagmanager.

 Posted by Laura Holmes, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager

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SMX East kicks off in early October, and we hope to see you there. Stop by Learn with Google’s in-conference event on Wednesday, October 3; we'll have speakers across Google Search, the Google Display Network, and DoubleClick Search, with question and answer sessions following each presentation. Come hear how Google can help make the web work for you!

Day 2, Wednesday, October 3
  • Evolving Paid Search (10:45am - 11:45am): In our opening session, Head of Search Ads Marketing Mark Martel will be sharing Google’s perspective on the direction of paid search, and what search marketers will need to be doing in the coming years to stay on the cutting edge and capture the greatest share of opportunity.
  • Richer Tools for Targeting: Search and Display (1:30pm – 2:30pm): Elliot Nix, Head of Media Solutions, Technology, will share how remarketing can help you extend beyond your normal search, and help refine your messaging plus boost relevance for customers and potential customers – wherever they’re browsing – to see even higher returns.
  • DoubleClick Search: The power of platform for the next step in search marketing management (3:30pm – 4:30pm): Sr. Product Manager Anthony Chavez will dive deep into how DoubleClick Search helps marketers and agencies running some of the world's largest search campaigns more efficiently and effectively with DoubleClick Search’s campaign management, reporting, and optimization tools. 
  • Winning the moments that matter with local, social and mobile strategies (5:00pm – 6:00pm): Close the day with heavy snacks, drinks, and a presentation with Tim Reis, Head of Mobile & Social Solutions, who will cover how you can reach users in the moments that matter with effective social, mobile and local solutions from Google AdWords.
Also, you can hear from other Google speakers throughout the event:

Day 1, Tuesday, October 2
  • How To Play In The Exploding Mobile Ads Universe, 3:30pm - 4:45pm
    Google speaker: Tim Reis, Head of mobile and social solutions, Google

Day 2, Wednesday, October 3
  • Getting Ahead With Google+, 10:45am - 12pm
    Google speaker: Kari Clark, Product Marketing Manager, Google+, Google
  • Pagination & Canonicalization For The Pros, 3:30pm - 4:45pm
    Google speaker: Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google Inc. (@maileohye)

The full SMX East agenda can be found here.

Still haven’t registered? Enter discount code googleEast12 (case sensitive) and save 10%. Expo passes are free and get you into the Learn with Google in-conference event.

See you in New York!

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In this world of constant connectivity, consumers expect to find the information that they want, when they want it - especially when they’re on the go. We know that this applies to their web browsing experiences on mobile, so we took a deeper look at users’ expectations and reactions towards their site experiences on mobile. Most interestingly, 61% of people said that they’d quickly move onto another site if they didn’t find what they were looking for right away on a mobile site. The bottom line: Without a mobile-friendly site you’ll be driving users to your competition. In fact, 67% of users are more likely to buy from a mobile-friendly site, so if that site’s not yours, you’ll be missing out in a big way.



Discover these and more findings from, What Users Want Most From Mobile Sites Today, a study from Google (conducted by Sterling Research and SmithGeiger, independent market research firms). The report surveyed 1,088 US adult smartphone Internet users in July 2012.

The problem (and opportunity) is big...
While nearly 75% of users prefer a mobile-friendly site, 96% of consumers say they’ve encountered sites that were clearly not designed for mobile devices. This is both a big problem and a big opportunity for companies seeking to engage with mobile users.

Mobile-friendly sites turn users into customers
The fastest path to mobile customers is through a mobile-friendly site. If your site offers a great mobile experience, users are more likely to make a purchase.
  • When they visited a mobile-friendly site, 74% of people say they’re more likely to return to that site in the future
  • 67% of mobile users say that when they visit a mobile-friendly site, they’re more likely to buy a site’s product or service
Not having a mobile-friendly site helps your competitors
A great mobile site experience is becoming increasingly important, and users will keep looking for a mobile-friendly site until they find one that works for them. That means your competitors will benefit if your site falls down on the job (and vice versa).
  • 61% of users said that if they didn’t find what they were looking for right away on a mobile site, they’d quickly move on to another site
  • 79% of people who don’t like what they find on one site will go back and search for another site
  • 50% of people said that even if they like a business, they will use them less often if the website isn't mobile-friendly
Non-mobile friendly sites can hurt a company’s reputation
It turns out that you can lose more than the sale with a bad mobile experience. A site that’s not designed for mobile can leave users feeling downright frustrated, and these negative reactions translate directly to the brands themselves.
  • 48% of users say they feel frustrated and annoyed when they get to a site that’s not mobile-friendly
  • 36% said they felt like they’ve wasted their time by visiting those sites
  • 52% of users said that a bad mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a company
  • 48% said that if a site didn’t work well on their smartphones, it made them feel like the company didn’t care about their business
Takeaways
While the research confirms what we already suspected -- that mobile users actively seek out and prefer to engage with mobile-friendly sites -- it’s a sobering reminder of just how quickly and deeply users attitudes about companies can be shaped by mobile site experiences. Having a great mobile site is no longer just about making a few more sales. It’s become a critical component of building strong brands, nurturing lasting customer relationships, and making mobile work for you.

To learn more about our study

  • Click here and join our free webinar on September 26 at 1 p.m. EST / 10 a.m. PST
  • Get help on building a mobile-friendly site, visit howtogomo.com.
Posted by: Masha Fisch, Google Mobile Ads Marketing
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As more people go online to research, compare, and shop, brands have evolved the way they launch new products. While this impacts nearly every field, we took a microscope to the video game industry with a new research paper “Understanding the Modern Gamer.” As new technologies and faster web access proliferate, the video game market is in the midst of a transformation.

Here’s the bottom line: the digital “shelf life” of video games now spans almost a full year.

Users are planning, researching, and considering their video game purchases a lot earlier (6 months before a title’s released), and continuing to engage with the game - by downloading reviews, discussing game strategies and purchasing extra game features online - for about 4 months after their initial purchase. And of course, they’re doing it across multiple devices.

At the same time smart video game companies, like Electronic Arts (EA), are transforming their marketing and product launch strategies, promoting titles earlier - and for longer - to drive sales and engagement.

Here are the key findings from the study:
  • Gamers search earlier, longer, and more often. Overall, game-related searches increased by 20% on desktops and laptops, and jumped 168% on tablets and smartphones over the last year. Why? In part, there’s a bigger search window, as gamers sift through an increasingly competitive world of great video game titles.
  • Gamers take a sneak-peak at video games before they purchase. We found that 40% of game-related searches occurred during the pre-launch phase, 6 months before a title’s release. Top searches include trailers, game art, and short versions of the game available for play. 
  • Gamers score with help from multiple screens. Tips are the most-searched content during launch month, and more than 1 in 4 tips searches take place on a mobile device after launch. While players cast an eye toward the TV screen, the other is looking at tips, cheats, hints, and walkthroughs on their tablets or smartphones.
  • Gamers rely on mobile for purchase information. Mobile devices have become an indispensable second screen for gamers as people look to learn more about their new purchase. We found that 1 in 5 purchase-related searches occur on a mobile device. 
  • Gamers stay connected with video games after release. Video game information continues to be in high demand up to four months after a title’s release. Undecided buyers seek reviews, while purchasers search for ways to enhance their gaming experience, like downloadable extension content. 
  • Digital engagement can predict physical sales. The extended launch cycle provides a longer opportunity to influence purchase decisions. We found that 84% of game sales were predicted by ad clicks in a 10 month period. If a game accrues 250,000 clicks in the 10 months surrounding a launch, it will likely sell between 2 and 4 million units in the four months after the release.
Smart marketers like EA made the most of this by:
  • For marketers, this longer, more engaged research phase is a key moment to influence users’ purchase decisions. For titles like Medal of Honor: Warfighter, out in 2013, EA has already kicked off its digital marketing efforts, leveraging media ads on search and YouTube video ads to ensure trailers for the game are in front of people actively seeking content on new titles.
  • Connecting with consumers throughout the launch cycle and across all devices is incredibly important, whether it’s helping gamers complete a purchase or providing access to downloadable content. To keep gamers engaged after launch, EA has offered content updates, game enhancements, and other consumer engagement opportunities online for franchises like Madden NFL, FIFA, Battlefield, NCAA Football, and more. 
  • Approaching each title release with the extended research phase framework has paid off for EA. Digital marketing and other efforts drove a 347% increase in searches Battlefield 3 compared to Battlefield 2.
Learn more
To learn more about gamer search activity across the lifecycle of a game and how we created our predictive model, download the full whitepaper from Think with Google.

Posted by James Getomer, Senior Analytical Lead
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Cirque du Soleil stages impressive live performances that challenge the laws of physics and the limits of the human body. Last Thursday, at Google’s Big Tent event in New York, the wonder of Cirque du Soleil transcended the confines of real world performance and embraced the entire web through Movi.Kanti.Revo, a new sensory Chrome experiment crafted by Cirque du Soleil and developed by Subatomic Systems.

Movi.Kanti.Revo comes from the Esperanto words for moving, singing and dreaming. In the experiment, you can follow a mysterious character through a beautiful and surreal world to encounter enchanting Cirque du Soleil performances and live an emotional journey made of love, doubts, hopes and dreams.



Breaking with the tradition of point and click web browsing, you can navigate through this unique experience simply by gesturing in front of your device’s camera. This was made possible using the getUserMedia feature of WebRTC, a technology supported by modern browsers, that, with your permission, gives web pages access to your computer’s camera and microphone without installing any additional software.

To bring the creativity of Cirque du Soleil to the browser, we mixed traditional HTML and CSS with 3D transitions and HTML5 APIs. If you’re more technology-curious, you can get a backstage tour via our Chromium blog and a brand new technical case study.

Chrome Experiments like Movi.Kanti.Revo demonstrate how the web has evolved into a beautiful creative canvas underpinned by continuously evolving web technologies. For optimal viewing, you’ll need to use a computer that has a camera and a browser that supports WebRTC, like Chrome. You can also access the experiment from a tablet or a mobile phone for a slightly different yet still beautiful experience.

Start your journey at www.movikantirevo.com.

Posted by Christos Apartoglou, Marketing Manager

(Cross-posted from the Google Chrome blog)
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As we announced in June, AdWords Editor versions 9.5.1 and 9.7.1 will no longer be supported after October 28, 2012. If you continue using version 9.5.1 or 9.7.1 after this date, you'll encounter errors downloading accounts, posting changes to campaign settings, or checking changes. To avoid these issues, please upgrade to the latest version (9.8.1) at your earliest convenience.

You can upgrade to version 9.8.1 through the auto-update prompt that appears when you run AdWords Editor. To preserve unposted changes and comments, select the "Backup then Upgrade" option in the prompt. You can also download the latest version from the AdWords Editor website.

For a complete list of version-specific changes, please see our release notes. To see which version you're using, go to the Help menu > About AdWords Editor (Windows) or the AdWords Editor menu > About AdWords Editor (Mac).

Posted by Geoff Menegay, Product Manager
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Earlier this summer we announced we were bringing together DoubleClick’s advertising technology products into the unified DoubleClick Digital Marketing (DDM) platform for advertisers and agencies.

Over the coming months we’ll be giving you regular updates on this journey as we launch upgrades of the DoubleClick products, implement cross-product integrations, and deliver innovative, new features within the individual products.

We’ve had a busy summer, and are excited to share the following details:
  • Platforms upgrades - An important first step to delivering on the vision of DDM is upgrading the individual DoubleClick products to take advantage of Google’s technology. Today we’re highlighting the progress we’ve made upgrading two platforms: DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick Studio.

  • DoubleClick Bid Manager -- Google acquired the Invite Media demand-side platform in 2010, and since then we have completely rebuilt the platform to take advantage of Google's technology. We announced during the summer that Bid Manager was going into beta and now, with a notable volume of traffic flowing through the system, we’ll be making this new version available to all customers in October. Customers using the new Bid Manager to target, optimize, and buy display media have seen improved performance, including seeing 16% more inventory due to infrastructure improvements that reduce our latency with exchanges.

  • DoubleClick Studio version 2 -- We have also upgraded our rich media production tool, DoubleClick Studio, which facilitates a streamlined workflow between media and creative agencies for the web’s most engaging ad formats. Almost 80% of creative agencies using DoubleClick Studio have already transitioned to the new version, which delivers a faster and more responsive UI and integrated dynamic content capabilities.

    Upgrading the individual platforms also gives us the opportunity to make sure that they work better together to unlock even more opportunities for our customers.

  • Streamlining cross-product interactions: When we asked leading agencies and advertisers how much time their staff could save by working in an integrated ad platform, they estimated they could save about a third of hours spent per week -- or about an extra month every year each team member could invest in other activities -- just by reducing manual processes and working in a single system.

    With the DoubleClick Bid Manager upgrade and its integration with DDM, buyers can now access cross-channel opportunities that are only available through a unified system. For example, we’re excited to announce the ability for agencies and marketers using DoubleClick Search to show consumers display ads via DoubleClick Bid Manager based on their interactions with paid search ads. Marketers have struggled to coordinate their search and display marketing efforts, and this new integration makes it easier, with no new site tags and no new products to learn.

    Another subtle step toward cross-product interaction is the rollout this week of a new universal navigation bar and application switcher for users of DoubleClick Search, DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick Studio. While a simple change, we believe this new UI will facilitate seamless switching between DoubleClick products, saving time for marketers who are using our platform to manage their campaigns across multiple channels.

    Innovation across the platform: In addition to integrating our platforms, we are continuing to invest in our existing products. As an example of this, we’re excited to announce the launch later this month of Attribution Modeling in Multi-Channel Funnels in DoubleClick for Advertisers.

    Advertisers use a variety of channels, messages and ads to engage customers. Determining which of these efforts is most effective in converting customers can be difficult (see related post here). Attribution analysis can help identify what is driving customers, but until recently it’s only been practical for the most sophisticated advertisers. By the end of September, we’re making attribution modeling available to anyone using DFA -- for free.

    Some benefits of this approach include:
    1. Ready to use data -- the attribution modeling data will live within DFA, so there’s no delay between when you want to run an analysis, and when you can actually start.
    2. Flexible, customizable, transparent models -- you can take advantage of five standard attribution models in DFA, or build your own custom model tailored to the needs of your business
    3. It’s free -- no need to build your own system for this kind of analysis. We’re giving it to you as part of DFA, with your data loaded and ready to go.
We're rapidly delivering on our vision for a fully integrated experience and common workflows across DoubleClick solutions -- from ad serving to buying and analytics. We’re excited to be on this journey with our customers and believe that by delivering an integrated experience, we can help the industry truly unlock the full potential of digital marketing. Stay tuned for more updates, there’s a lot more to come!

Posted by Jason Miller
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In the past 10 years the number and variety of new technologies in display advertising have more than doubled, effectively creating new - and better - ways to buy display across the web. With this influx of new display targeting technologies available to advertisers (contextual, remarketing, demographics, interest categories to name a few), our clients often wonder which targeting method performs better: audience or contextual advertising? We've said in the past that the combination of audience and contextual buying work better together, and now we have some new insight into how advertisers are thinking about these tools.

We worked with Forrester Consulting and surveyed 150 interactive marketers to evaluate their perceptions on the effectiveness of combining audience & contextual targeting with respect to display buying. The findings from the new whitepaper, Display Media Buyers Value Audience in Context, were presented during a special joint Learn With Google webinar featuring Forrester’s Joanna O’Connell and Google’s Woojin Kim. Register here to view the recording.

Key findings from the research include:
  • 50% of respondents use a full range of targeting types including: Remarketing, Demographic, Behavioral and Contextual
  • Contextual and behavioral targeting dominate: Used by the vast majority - 82% in the case of contextual, 71% in the case for behavioral
  • 94% of marketers combine contextual & audience buying for higher performance and greater accuracy
  • Audience targeting has become the norm in display buying: The majority of marketers surveyed are bullish on audience targeting, and few see it as overhyped.
  • Most marketers plan on maintaining increasing spend on combined audience & contextual targeting.
Interested in learning more? Download the whitepaper on Think Insights with Google.

Posted by Katie Hamilton, Product Marketing Manager Google Display Network
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