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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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