Throughout the summer, we’ve been sharing 10 simple tips for utilizing Google+ over at Creative Sandbox. We know our agency partners juggle a lot at once, between the RFPs and last-minute campaign launches, traffic reports and research studies -- and we’ve been on the lookout for ways that Google+ can make your day a little easier.

You can check out today’s final post on Google+ -- and we wanted to share the full list here:

Get inspired

• Follow interesting people -- See what industry experts, colleagues, peers and competitors -- as well as celebrities, photographers and your friends -- are sharing publicly. Check out these suggestions: google.com/+/whotofollow
  
  
• Host focus groups -- Get immediate feedback and insights from consumers via a Hangout. Have a face-to-face conversation online, as if you were in the same room.
  
  
• See how your work gets shared -- See the earned media effects of a campaign by entering a URL or YouTube video into Ripples, which show how posts are shared and reshared on Google+. 
  
  
• Review portfolios -- Can’t visit every job fair? Host a Hangout to give live feedback on advertising and marketing students’ work. Announce ahead of time on your Page.

Make communication easy

• Meet with clients -- Connect with your clients on a Hangout to review new initiatives, get feedback on creative or even hold a planning meeting. Utilize Screenshare or Google Docs to jointly view proposals.
  
  
• Manage projects -- Trying to keep everyone informed on your most recent project? Keep the team in the loop by creating a Circle just for everyone involved.
  
  
• Communicate with clients -- Organize your contacts by client or even industry in Circles so you can share insights with the most relevant audience.
  

Build your brand

• Lead the way -- Host a Hangout On Air featuring influencers in your agency to shine a spotlight on research, share case studies or provide insights on trends.
  
  
• Show and tell -- Have a piece of stellar creative you’ve completed or a great insight you just discovered? Share it on your Page and start a discussion with others who might learn from your experience. 
  
  
• Be seen on search -- Give your stamp of approval to articles, videos and research that you would recommend with the +1 button. Your friends will see your recommendations when they search.
  

Want more? Download the full booklet and share it with your coworkers -- or even hang it at your desk! And if you have your own tips and tricks for using Google+ as an agency, share them today over at Creative Sandbox with hashtag #g+toptips.

Posted by Becky Bowman, Google+ for Business

90% of media consumption today is screen based, and the growing number of digital devices is rapidly changing the way people search, shop, and connect with people or businesses. To make the most of all of their devices consumers have developed common patterns of multi-screen behavior, and this multi-screening has quickly become the norm. In order to gain a deeper understanding of this changing consumer media behavior, we conducted some new research.

Join Google on Thursday, August 30th (10am PT/1pm ET) for a webinar about our recently released research, "The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behavior."



The webinar will share our research findings on how the growth of device ownership has changed the way that people consume media. We will also discuss specific strategies that businesses and advertisers can employ to take advantage of these multi-screen behaviors and more effectively connect with their target audience.

Sign up for our webinar today by registering here.

We look forward to seeing you on August 30th!

Posted by Samantha Podos Nowak, Product Marketing Manager, Google Mobile Ads

As a search marketer, you know that bid optimization is one of the critical aspects of managing search at scale, providing sophisticated technology to meet your unique business goals. Over the past 18 months, the DoubleClick Search team has been focused on enhancing our automated bidding tools -- understanding that this is the engine that drives campaign performance. We've rebuilt our bid optimization platform from the ground up -- no single line of code is the same! -- and our users are already seeing some impressive results: 88% have experienced significant improvements in campaign performance, with 50% doubling their conversions at half the CPA (1).

Our investments in bid optimization span beyond revamped technology and algorithms. We wanted to make it easier for you to state your goals and monitor performance, to better harness and discover the power of automated strategies. The result is our new Performance Bidding Suite, which includes updates to the user interface (UI), new strategy options, and increased transparency into bid engine decisions. With our Performance Bidding Suite, you can:

• Quickly find the right goal with a refreshed user interface. Easily express bid optimization goals that match your business objectives. Whether you’re looking to maximize revenue or target a position, the new UI makes it even easier to find the right strategy for your unique goals. Our updated UI is designed to capture new bid strategies as they are released.
• Easily enter your Target Spend goals. With our new Target Spend strategy, maximize important KPIs like actions, transactions, revenue or clicks within a given monthly spend. Learn more
• Efficiently set default minimum and maximum bids on a strategy. Spend more time managing bid limits for the keywords you care about most, while DoubleClick Search handles the rest through a bid strategy-wide setting.
• Exercise even more advanced controls. The Advanced Configuration tab in the new bid strategy UI is designed for those who want to even further influence bid strategies. The first option we’re releasing gives you control over how a bid strategy handles high-traffic or low-converting keywords in ROI strategies. Stay tuned for more advanced controls. Learn more

In addition to a cleaner interface, new strategies, and advanced controls, the Performance Bidding Suite provides increased transparency into bid decisions and impact. Drive more insights with features that allow you to:

• Chart your Max CPC bids to visualize trends over time. You can now chart keyword bids for a defined date range, alongside any other metric in our UI to easily analyze bidding frequency and bid changes.
• Better understand our decision-making with bid rationale summary. As part of the change history tool, our new bid rationale feature (beta) reveals the reasoning behind any changes to specific bids.
• Preview intended bids. Our bid preview feature shows the target bid DoubleClick Search intends to submit for a particular keyword. This provides insight into the range of bids the system is likely to submit, based on the current bid and performance, to offer guidance in setting bid limits.

With these transparency features from the Performance Bidding Suite, you have powerful insights into how different settings impact campaign performance, and can tweak these settings if needed.

If you'd like to get started exploring the Performance Bidding Suite, you can check out the latest release notes and updated articles in the Help Center, or view our recorded webinar here.

Posted by the DoubleClick Search team

1. Google internal data, 2012

Join social media power influencer +Lynette Young for a look at ways your business can kick start its presence on Google+ in a Learn with Google Hangout on August 23rd at 1pm EDT/10am PDT.


Companies big and small are using social media to interact with customers and build digital brands. Even if your business wasn’t an early adopter of social, Lynette will guide you through ways to kick start this channel with Google+. In this hangout, she’ll talk through examples of businesses using hangouts, pages and unique content to grow their audience. As a Learn with Google program, you’ll also hear lots of tips and strategies you can use to build a community from scratch on Google+.

Lynette Young is a digital media specialist helping entrepreneurs and businesses put social ideas into action. She is the founder of Women of Google+ and CEO of Purple Stripe Productions. Kari Clark of the Google+ Marketing team will moderate the conversation with Lynette and other social media specialists including:

• +Esteban Contreras from +Samsung 
• +Kip Wetzel from +Comcast 
• +Ricky Cadden from +RadioShack

We hope you can join us to begin using Google+ for your business. Sign up for the Hangout on Air on the Learn with Google webinar page. If you have a question for the panel, leave your questions as a comment on our Google+ event page. 

To get yourself geared up for the hangout, check out the two newest Google+ business case studies. Toyota Global has been engaging its Google+ community with content of the latest car models and a hangout with a Toyota engineer. By incorporating Google+ badges on its website and YouTube channel, the car manufacturer has grown to over one million followers. In the education space, ES Corporation is teaching English lessons in hangouts. Using social extensions, the business also saw a 46% increase in click-through rate on search ads.

Posted by Lindsay Rumer, Google+ for Business

There's no question that technology has fundamentally transformed the business of advertising. We think the really exciting changes come when we are able to re-imagine not just the ads themselves, but the whole process of conceiving and developing them. The "Mad Men" of the future will not only be fluent in technology, but also in the evolving, highly adaptable, "launch and iterate" style that has become the signature of Silicon Valley.

Developed in close partnership with ad industry executives, Agile Creativity is a playbook that agencies can use to brainstorm ways to be faster and more collaborative in their organizational structures and creative processes. Explore the best practices.

Last week we hosted a G+ Hangout on Air “Coders and Creatives: 2 Angles on Agility” featuring Google engineers and ad executives. The discussion centered around new models of collaboration, how creativity can thrive in a condensed timeline, and the power of prototyping both products and ideas. If you missed it, watch the highlights video. If you’d like to see the full 50-minute hangout, head here.

Also, check out Ad Age’s article on Agile Creativity for more information.

Posted  by Torrence Boone, Managing Director of Agency Business Development - Americas

The second event in our Spark education series we co-hosted with GroupM Next was hosted today,
focusing on trends, research and digital opportunities in Retail and QSR. Launched in June, Spark is a series of custom, co-programmed events created to deliver unique education and innovation experiences in an intimate setting for GroupM clients and media agencies.

Spark: Retail & Restaurants took place in New York with brand marketers from retailers and
restaurants, and media professionals from Maxus, MEC, MediaCom and Mindshare in attendance. After a welcome from GroupM Next CEO Chris Copeland, Google’s Torrence Boone, Managing Director, Agency Business Development, and Brett Goffin, Emerging Business Lead, Mobile, as well as Pat Monteleone and Jesse Wolfersberger from GroupM Next, Bryan Gildenberg of Kantar, Steven Rosenblatt of Foursquare and Tim Zagat, co-founder and CEO of Zagat, took the stage to share insights into the intersection of retail and digital, and ways that brands in these industries can benefit from what’s taking place.

Hot topics included:

• Shopper/consumer trends
  
• Converting consumer demand and desire into action
  
• New research from GroupM Next on showrooming and how to keep buyers in-store
  
• Using digital innovatively to build brands and reach customers 1:1 through marketing

In-store shopping. E-commerce. A digital footprint. Mobile. Local visibility. Price comparison…and more. These are all things retail and restaurant marketers should be factoring in their marketing strategies to maximize traffic, engagement and revenue. With these in the forefront, retail and QSR companies will prosper in today’s digitally-driven world. For the future, as brands engage more strategically and proactively via channels and emerging platforms that enable hyper-targeting across digital media, social interaction and location-based targeting, they’ll attract and retain loyal customers, while emerging ahead of the competition.

It’s almost back-to-school time, but students aren’t the only ones who are getting geared up to learn. 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 Google’s advertising products and solutions. Over the next couple of months, 12 webinars will teach you tips and how-to’s to help make the web work for your business.

Check out the full schedule below:

• Aug 23 at 10am PDT How to Kick Start Social with Google+ (Hangout on Air)
• Aug 28 at 10am PDT Optimizing your Video Ad Campaigns
• Aug 29 at 10am PDT Google+: Enhancing Marketing and Making Social Accountable
• Sept 5 at 10am PDT Go Bigger, Faster with AdWords Editor
• Sept 6 at 10am PDT Making the Most of Recent AdWords Updates
• Sept 12 at 10am PDT Driving Cost-Effective App Downloads with AdWords
• Sept 13 at 10am PDT Go Bigger, Faster with AdWords Scripts
• Sept 18 at 10am PDT Better Together: Combining Targeting Strategies in Display
• Sept 19 at 10am PDT The Importance of Search Advertising
• Sept 20 at 10am PDT Measuring the Impact of Online Advertising on Offline Sales
• Sept 26 at 10am PDT GoMo: Mobilize your Site and Maximize your Advertising
• Sept 27 at 10am PDT Optimizing Display Campaigns: Tips, Tricks, & Tools

Visit our webinar page to register for any of the sessions and to access past webinars on-demand. We’ll be adding new webinars as they’re scheduled, so check back regularly for updates. 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.

Whether your goal is to engage the right customers in the moments that matter, make better decisions, or go bigger, faster, 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 having you in class at an upcoming Learn with Google webinar!

Posted by Erin Green, Marketing Coordinator

Join us tomorrow, August 8th, at 10am PDT/1pm EDT for a special Google+ Hangout On Air featuring advertising industry executives in conversation with Google engineers.

Over the past year we’ve had many discussions with ad agency executives about how they are reinventing their business models to excel at the pace of digital. Many of our agency partners are applying practices inspired by the tech world in order to work faster and more collaboratively.

Tomorrow, August 8th, we will be hosting a live streamed panel called “Coders and Creatives: Two Angles on Agility”, where we'll uncover the links between agile practices at play at Google and in the advertising world. Torrence Boone, Managing Director of Agency Business Development at Google will moderate the conversation between:

• Greg Andersen, CEO BBH NY
• John Boiler, CEO, 72andSunny 
• Engineers from Google+ and Google[x], the group that developed Google Glass and the self-driving car

We hope you’ll be there and be inspired to maximize the agility of your agency with some of the concepts discussed. RSVP for the event to have it appear in your calendar. If you have a question for the panel, leave your questions as a comment on our hangout announcement post.

On August 8th at 1pm EST, to view the Hangout on Air, visit the Think with Google Google+ page, look for the “Hangout on Air” post within the stream, and click “Play” to tune in. Don’t forget to be signed into Google+!

Posted by Torrence Boone, Managing Director of Agency Business Development, Americas