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)

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

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

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.)

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

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

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

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

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

• 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

“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.”