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Last year we created the Google Partners platform to provide tools and resources to help agencies learn more about Google's advertising solutions. Through Google Partners, individuals can get certified in AdWords and agencies can earn the Google Partner badge. Today we’re very excited to extend the Google Partners certification offerings to include a new Google Shopping exam in the United States.

If you are an agency specializing in Merchant Center and Shopping campaign management, you can now get certified in AdWords by completing both the Shopping and AdWords Fundamentals exams. A certification shows to potential business partners that Google recognizes you as an online advertising professional that can successfully manage Shopping campaigns.



The Shopping exam will test your proficiency in Merchant Center account creation, product data, Shopping campaigns management and optimization best practices. To take the test, start by creating a profile on Google Partners today. All exams will be listed under the "Certifications" section.

Worried about studying for the exams? Join us in the Google Partners community to get access to webinars, special events and trainings from your peers and the Google team. Also, use these helpful study materials:
If you’re ready to take the test, sign in to Google Partners and get started. The Google Shopping exam will be expanding to other countries soon -- stay tuned!

Alex Chen, Product Marketing Manager, Google Shopping

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertiser blog

 With 2014 drawing to a close, we’re getting excited about what’s ahead in the new year. We’ll be ringing in 2015 at the International CES (Consumer Electronics Show) the first week of January. If you’re planning to go too, we’d like to invite you to come by C Space, the new destination at CES for advertisers, publishers, agencies, and content creators.

On the first day of the event (Tuesday, January 6th), Neal Mohan, Google’s VP of Display and Video Advertising Products, will be headlining C Space. In his keynote he’ll talk about how brands can make the most of video in a climate where consumers are easier to reach but harder to influence. He’ll discuss not only how to drive engagement but also how to measure the impact that it has on brand metrics.

 Following his keynote, Neal will join Meredith Levien, EVP Advertising at The New York Times, in a fireside chat.

 Learn more about C Space and check out the full agenda here.

 Hope to see you there!

Tuesday, January 6th 2015
1 - 2 PM PT




Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Advertiser blog

 A lot has changed for marketers over the years. But one thing remains constant: the need to connect with and move an audience in the moments that matter. Brand marketers are beginning to truly embrace programmatic buying to do just that. The challenge is, many marketers don’t know where to start in order to successfully embrace programmatic for their brand campaigns.

 To help address this challenge, we’re pleased to share our five-step guide: "Programmatic: A Brand Marketer’s Guide," to provide context and ideas for how marketers and their agencies can successfully embrace programmatic buying. It covers the essentials that brand marketers need to know in order to:
  1. Organize audience insights
  2. Design compelling creative
  3. Execute with integrated technology
  4. Reach audiences across screens
  5. Measure the impact

Our guide includes seven case studies with brands including Nike, KLM, Talk Talk, Kia, GOL, Burberry, and Kellogg so that brand marketers new to programmatic can learn from their peers.



 We hope this guide can help you realize the ultimate promise of advertising in the digital age: to effectively run highly relevant, creative, and measurable campaigns, at scale. To make the most of programmatic buying, we invite you to explore the five steps to programmatic success.

 You can stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on our Google+ page.

Posted by Kelly Cox, Product Marketing Manager

1 billion minutes watched. 425 million views. 2 million likes. These are just a few of the massive numbers driven by the top ten ads on YouTube in 2014. It’s been an amazing year for digital advertising, with some of the most popular content on YouTube coming from brands. Even in the age of the skip button, viewers are now choosing to watch ads more than ever before. That’s because brands are making entertaining, original, and inventive videos—ads that are truly worth watching.

Think with Google is celebrating the best of the best with its year-end recap—featuring the top 10 ads and top 10 movie trailers of the year, along with the annual YouTube Ads Rewind video, which identifies the biggest themes from the year in digital video advertising, and shows a few ways that brands are breaking the traditional advertising mold:

  • Creating longer videos. The rising length of successful ads is a remarkable new trend, counterintuitive to advertising of the past. Conventional wisdom tell us brands must be brief—but when people choose to watch an ad, there’s no time limit. The top 10 ads on YouTube this year averaged 3 minutes in length—that’s 47% longer than the videos on the Leaderboard in 2013.
  • Shaping the cultural conversation.  While yesterday’s ads reinforced social norms, today’s top ads often rethink them. For instance, when Always embraced the phrase “Like A Girl” in its 2014 video, they earned 300,000 likes, shares and comments in 30 days on YouTube alone. Today's viewers are looking for bold, provocative campaigns. Brands are responding with content that makes people think.
  • Utilizing live events. Brands are increasingly trying to reach consumers online before, during and after live sporting events. And for good reason—the top 10 Super Bowl and World Cup ads this year earned a remarkable 14 million hours of watch time, with 75% of those hours consumed before or after the events themselves. 
  • Collaborating with creators. Marketers are looking to partner with experienced YouTube creators to develop original content that best suits the platform. Friskies, for instance, teamed with BuzzFeed (no stranger to adorable cat videos), to create its “Dear Kitten” ads—which is now the most-watched video on BuzzFeed’s channel.

See more of the year’s top ads on Think With Google, and learn how to create content that people actually choose to watch.

Cross-posted from the Inside AdWords blog

Creating ads that can run -- and look beautiful -- across the ever-expanding universe of the world’s more than 2 billion smart phones and tablets1 is complex to say the least. Last month, we announced that we'd be bringing our popular Lightbox format to mobile devices. Today we're happy to share that these reinvented Lightbox ads are now available for all AdWords advertisers globally.

Bringing Lightbox Ads Across Screens

With Lightbox ads, it's easy to use existing creative assets to create beautiful, engaging ads that look great on any screen size. These ads pull assets from your YouTube channel, can use uploaded images, or your Google Maps listings to build full screen experiences within a standard Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) ad size. The ability to integrate content from other Google products - like Shopping listings, G+ pages -  is coming soon. Because these ads are built in HTML5, using responsive design, the assets dynamically fill the publisher site, mobile app, screen, or device -- desktop and mobile.

Lightbox ads are great at driving brand consideration because they’re billed on a cost-per-engagement (CPE) basis. This helps your digital display dollars go further because your brand’s experience automatically finds a qualified audience -- and you don’t pay if people don’t expand and engage with the creative experience. This expansion happens when people hover over your ad for two seconds to expand it on a desktop, or tap to expand it on a mobile phone or tablet. Plus, the optimization engine behind Lightbox ads learns over time so your campaigns get better at reaching the audience most likely to engage with your message as your campaign runs. Like all of Google's display ad offerings, Lightbox ads work seamlessly with our audience solutions and can be measured using Brand Lift reporting.

See how seamless it is to build Lightbox ads with images, videos, and maps, by watching the video below.



Testing Lightboxes with Important Purchases

For 12 years, Universal McCann and Sony have been working together to tell the stories of everything from the newest box office releases to cutting edge consumer technology. They joined our beta test for Lightbox ads to market both.

Sony Electronics is using Lightbox ads to advertise their 4K Ultra TV, their Xperia smartphone, their Playstation, their soundbar, and more. Sony Pictures is offering people the preview of their new movie, Annie, in theaters on December 19th, featuring the trailer as well as an awesome emoji inspired sing-along video.

"We chose to use Lightbox ads for our Q4 campaigns because we needed our content to achieve scale across the web. Our clients spend a lot of time, money and energy creating video assets and making sure they get seen by the most qualified, engaged users is our top priority. Google’s new Lightbox ads help us make sure that happens." said Deborah Gaudette, Senior Vice President, Digital, Universal McCann.




Kate Spade, Ford Italy, Boots UK, Jabong India and Pepsi Australia are also running successful Lightbox campaigns.

By launching this update to Lightbox ads, our goal is to free brand marketers to spend less time dealing with mobile  complexity, so you can do what you do best -- engage users with a compelling brand story. We’ll be adding more functionality to this format over the course of 2015. Stay tuned for more enhancements to Lightbox ads in the near future!

Learn more about building your own Lightbox ads in the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by James Beser, Group Product Manager, Display Ads
1http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Smartphone-Users-Worldwide-Will-Total-175-Billion-2014/1010536

Cross-posted from the Inside AdWords blog

Whether you’re building out new campaigns or making critical budget decisions, we want to help you start off the new year with everything you need to connect with your customers, wherever they may be online: across the web, on mobile-sites, and in apps.

On December 10, 2014 at 12:30pm PT / 3:30pm ET, AdWords product managers and I will be hosting a half hour livestream to review product innovations that were announced in April that are now fully available for advertisers to use in the AdWords UI.


Join us to:

  • Understand how app developers are driving installs and re-engagement across search, display, and YouTube on all those shiny new devices people will unwrap this holiday season.
  • Learn how LendingTree and Blinds.com are making more informed business decisions by measuring cross-device conversions and phone calls.
  • Discover essential best practices for automated bidding and app promotion.
  • Wrap up the year with an announcement you won’t want to miss. We think you’ll like it.

We hope you’ll join us December 10th, here on the Inside AdWords blog as we click through AdWords in 2014.

Posted by Jerry Dischler, Vice President, Product Management, AdWords

Yesterday, we revamped DoubleClick Verification to provide marketers a robust solution to understand and control where their campaigns appear, including if they were viewable. Today, we’re releasing new data from our ad platforms to shed light on the state of ad viewability.

With the advancement of new technologies we now know that many display ads that are served never actually have the opportunity to be seen by a user. In fact in a recent study of Active View data by Google, we found that 56.1% of all ads served were not measured viewable. Yet, the average publisher’s viewability is 50.2%. This means a small number of publishers are serving the majority of non-viewable impressions and dragging down the served impression viewability average by almost 6%.


As advertisers shift to paying for viewable, rather than served impressions, it’s more important than ever to understand what drives the viewability of ads. To see all “5 factors of viewability” check out the full infographic and study at thinkwithgoogle.com.

Posted by Sanaz Ahari, Group Product Manager

Cross-posted from the DoubleClick blog

Today we’re excited to announce a complete revamp of DoubleClick Verification to help marketers protect their brand and budget, and empower them with confidence to invest in digital.

As a digital marketer today, you can deliver the right message to the right user at the right time and place. But with the rich options in formats, inventory sources, and types of buys, it’s crucial that your messages reach your audience as intended, and that you're getting what you planned and paid for.

We launched DoubleClick Verification in 2012 to ensure just this. Seamlessly integrated into the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, DoubleClick Verification was built to give advertisers more confidence with their  digital investment. It’s designed to be a natural extension of campaign workflow, to be a part of every campaign to ensure that brands and budgets are protected. Today we’re excited to share with you 8 major new features in DoubleClick Verification.

Robust insights: Verification covers all the potential brand safety and waste issues that can hamper a digital campaign. This means you get insights about contextual and geographic issues, viewability, and spam and fraud.
  • Custom classifiers allow you to create custom categories based on what’s suitable for your brand. DoubleClick Verification has always reported on a rich set of predefined, industry-standard categories that give you contextual insight into where your ads served - like adult, violence, alcohol, politics, etc.  Custom categories go beyond this by allowing you to specify more granular categories. For example, an airline may want to avoid advertising next to content about plane crashes specifically.
  • Digital Content Labels: Just as movies are given ratings such as PG, PG-13, and R, websites, videos, and mobile apps are classified according to the brand safety of the content. You can now target inventory in DoubleClick Bid Manager with labels that range from "DL-G", which corresponds to content that's suitable for general audiences, to "DL-MA", which corresponds to content suitable only for mature audiences. Digital Content Labels provide a consistent definition for brand safety across all Google advertising products - including DoubleClick, YouTube, GDN & AdMob.
  • Viewability and Report Builder integration: Active View, Google’s solution for measuring and buying viewable impressions, is now built directly into DoubleClick Verification, as an important part of the solution to analyze and eliminate all potential waste. In addition, you can now add Verification data to Report Builder reports, allowing for more customization and the ability to schedule reports.
Coverage across formats, screens, and channels: DoubleClick Verification works in all the ways your campaigns work - protecting your brand in all scenarios across formats, screens, and channels.
  • Video verification (coming soon): With double-digit growth predicted for digital video advertising for the next four years*, video verification is critical for marketers. You will now have access to insights unique to video like player size and location. This means you’ll know whether your video ads are mostly displayed in large players, front and center, or in little players off to the side.
Objectivity and transparency: We’ve built DoubleClick Verification to ensure utmost objectivity and  transparency.
  • Updated spam filtering & fraud detection: At Google, we take fraud protection very seriously. With over 100 engineers committed to this effort, we removed more than 350 million bad ads from our system last year**, and in February, we acquired spider.io, a company that has built a world-class ad fraud fighting operation. DoubleClick Verification draws from Google’s extensive spam and fraud expertise, and we’ve recently updated spam filtering with pre- and post-bid filtering capabilities. With a growing set of sophisticated filters, pre-bid blocking avoids buying fraudulent impressions in the first place, and post-bid filtering automatically purges fraudulent impressions from reporting and billing, so you get accurate reporting and don’t have to pay for these impressions.
Action in real-time: DoubleClick Verification empowers action in real-time through automation.
  • Ad blocking automatically prevents ads from serving in unwanted locations and contexts across display, mobile web, and video inventory. Serve-time blocking protects your reservation-based campaigns in real-time. Pre-bid blocking protects your programmatic buys by blocking the bids on impressions that would serve in undesired contexts. And your settings are synced between your reservation and programmatic buys.
  • Custom alerts and notifications deliver straight to your inbox exactly the information you need to know to ensure that your campaigns are running as expected and that you're getting what you paid for. For example, you can set a preference to receive an alert if more than 5% of your ads appear on violent content, or if more than 3% of your campaign is serving in off-target geographies.
MEC, one of the world’s leading media agencies, has been testing many of these features - including ad blocking - and has already seen great success. Nick Foord, Analytics Consultant, told us, "Buying digital media is much more complex today than it used to be. Transparency into where ads are serving is critical to ensuring our ads are being served in the right place, and next to the right content.” Steve Richards, Digital Technology Manager added, “Appearing in an inappropriate place online could really damage a brand’s reputation. Ad blocking has removed a huge amount of risk for us, and allowed us to take a proactive approach to protecting our clients’ brands.” Look for more details on MEC's success story in the coming weeks.

To learn more about DoubleClick Verification:
  • Download the new whitepaper, “5 Keys to Protecting Brand and Budget,” which guides marketers through the process of evaluating a winning verification solution.
  • Watch the training videos on Ad Blocking and Active View in Verification, and look out for additional deep dives on the blog in the coming weeks.
Stay on top of new updates by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on Google+ and Twitter.

*“US TV Ad Market Still Growing More than Digital Video,” eMarketer, June 12, 2014. http://www.emarketer.com/Article/US-TV-Ad-Market-Still-Growing-More-than-Digital-Video/1010923
**“Busting Bad Advertising Practices — 2013 Year in Review,” Google, January 2014. http://adwords.blogspot.com/2014/01/busting-bad-advertising-practices-2013.html