Becoming a digital advertising expert takes time, and it’s important to get off to a good start. Only 50 percent of marketers say they’re confident in their knowledge of digital advertising,¹ despite the wide range of educational materials available – sometimes “more” isn’t the same as “better.” You’ve told us that you want quick, bite-sized training in more interactive formats. And we heard you.

We’re pleased to announce Academy for Ads, a new digital training platform designed to help you learn how to use Google’s ad products in a mobile-first world. We built Academy for Ads to promote learning on-the-go, whether you’re on a laptop, a desktop, or a mobile device.

Grow your Google product know-how
Guided by input from our team of product experts, Academy for Ads courses cover the topics that matter most to Google advertisers – from AdWords basics and the essentials of campaign management to bid strategies, reporting, optimization, and more ways to successfully advertise with Google.


Learning paths, Assessments, and Achievements
We’ve organized the courses into “Learning paths” that you can walk through at your own pace. At the end of each path, take an Assessment and earn an Achievement to show that you know your stuff. Earning an Achievement for AdWords helps prepare you to take the AdWords Certification exam in Google Partners, or try deeper education offerings such as AdWords Academy.
A few example Learning paths:

• Digital concepts: Learn the essentials of online ads, including third-party ad-serving, programmatic buying, remarketing, and more.
• Get started with AdWords: Learn the basics of AdWords and prepare for the AdWords Certification exam offered by Google Partners.
• Get started with AdWords Display: Learn how you can show ads to your online audience via the Google Display Network.
• Get started with Video for Brand: Get an overview of digital video landscape and the benefits of Google’s online video offerings, including Google Preferred. Learn how Google's advertising solutions map to awareness, consideration, and brand lift, along with more detailed steps on implementation and policy.
• Get started with DoubleClick Bid Manager*: Learn your way around Bid Manager, what it offers and how you can use it to manage your online marketing campaigns.

Academy for Ads also offers training for DoubleClick clients, with Learning paths covering Bid Manager and Ad Exchange – and more to come.

Get started
If you already use Google Partners, you can sign in through the Partners portal at g.co/learnwithpartners — or, you can go directly to g.co/AcademyforAds to sign up and start sampling courses and Learning paths. We’re constantly adding more content, so if you like what you learn, keep coming back for more.

Posted by Tracy Bizelli, Head of Academy for Ads

1. 6 Fundamentals to Managing Digital Marketing in 2015, TFM Insights (January 2015)

Last week, we shared examples of how direct response marketers are driving strong results with display advertising. But you’ve heard it before -- beyond driving immediate clicks and conversions, display builds brands. And as digital budgets accelerate, we’re seeing that for an increasingly growing number of brands, display advertising has become an ever-important part of their strategy. In fact, in the recently conducted Advertiser Intelligence Reports study, by Advertiser Perceptions, advertisers are planning on spending more digital display dollars in the next 12 months for brand goals than direct response (1).

So this week, we’re turning our attention to pioneering brands who used display advertising as a critical component in their overall marketing mix to connect with their audience, engage them emotionally, and as a result, drive meaningful results. Let’s take a closer look.

Animal Planet attracted 1.6MM viewers for the season premiere of River Monsters, putting it in the #1 spot among its target audience, by running an integrated video and rich media campaign across YouTube, AdMob, and the Google Display Network. (read case study)


Volvo drove an 88% lift in purchase intent for its new S60 sedan by leveraging the YouTube homepage and masthead unit, interactive video ads on AdMob, and standard IAB ads on the Google Display Network. (read case study)


Sealy reinvented its Posturepedic brand using YouTube promoted video ads and in-stream video ads, which drove 46% of its website traffic during the first week of the campaign. (read case study)


At OMMA Global this week, we shared a simple framework for brand building that we developed after analyzing the campaigns of our most successful brand advertisers. These “better practices” focus on three key areas: connecting with the right consumer at the right moment, delivering an engaging message, and measuring the metrics that matter.

Connecting with the right consumer at the right moment. As consumers continue to access the internet more frequently throughout the day, from a multitude of devices, it’s increasingly important for brand marketers to create device-inclusive, rather than device-specific, campaigns. And by targeting a combination of audience and contextual signals, it’s now easier than ever to reach the right person, at the right time, on the right device through the Google Display Network or DoubleClick AdExchange.

Engaging them emotionally. The best display ads don’t just leverage sight, sound, and motion, but also harness display’s interactive capabilities that drive deep engagement with a brand. Our research shows that rich media ads drive significantly better brand performance than standard Flash ads--1.7X for brand awareness, 2.7X in purchase intent, and 5X increase in brand favorability (2). We also see that newer ad formats, like mobile display and in-stream video, are even more effective at moving consumers down the brand funnel. Lastly, we’ve seen masthead ads on the YouTube homepage garner an 11% interaction rate and drive a 4X lift in engagement compared to standard ads (3).

Measuring more robustly. Looking beyond simple clicks and conversions, brand marketers use Campaign Insights to measure increased awareness and interest through the lift in search queries and website visits. Paired with Google Analytics and Multi-Channel Funnels, advertisers can see a complete picture of the chain of online and offline media that drives brand engagement. And to close the loop, many of our brands match geo-targeted display campaigns to offline sales to measure the true impact of a display ad campaign.

More and more studies show that brand marketers who focus on these three levers see the the greatest return on their display ad investment. With display’s ability to connect more precisely with your target consumer, engage more emotionally with interactive messages, and measure robust metrics along all parts of the purchase funnel, it’s no wonder that display builds brands.

Watch this space.
google.com/watchthisspace

(1) Advertiser Intelligence Reports (AIR) study, Advertiser Perceptions, August 2011
(2) The Brand Value of Video and Rich Media Ads, DoubleClick, September 2011
(3) YouTube Homepage Impact Study, Compete, December 2010

Posted by Brian Zeug, National Sales Director, Display and Video

YouTube’s Promoted Videos recently passed the 1 billion mark in the number of video views delivered to advertisers. Promoted Videos allows any advertiser to promote a video against search results on YouTube or against related videos on YouTube or content across the Google Display Network. Search engine marketers already skilled with Google AdWords have used YouTube Promoted Videos to increase brand awareness and drive sales.

Contextual. Audience. Remarketing. Demographic. Marketers have many options when it comes to targeting their display campaigns. The emergence of these powerful technologies has transformed display into a powerful direct response medium, delivering measurable performance at scale for marketers. But with the plethora of options to choose from, where do advertisers and agencies begin?

Please join Google for an upcoming webinar to learn more about how to approach targeting strategy for your campaigns on the Google Display Network. Specifically we’ll cover:
The “targeting toolbox” for direct response campaigns
Strategies for prioritizing and applying the available targeting options to maximize campaign performance and efficiency
Tools, tips and best practices for maximizing ROI for your campaigns


Register here for the webinar to be held on August 4, 2011 at 11:00am PST / 1:00pm CST / 2:00pm EST.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Marketing Manager, Google Display Network

If you're as excited out about all things digital as we are, then you're probably also excited about Internet Week going on now in New York. We, in particular are looking forward to hearing the latest in the world of online video from the best and the brightest, including our own Baljeet Singh, who is about to deliver the keynote speech at OMMA Video. As Senior Product Manager for YouTube advertising, Baljeet has some exciting insights about how online video is getting bigger, smarter, and better. He'll give audiences a view into why online video is increasingly valuable, how it reaches new audiences, and how it gives viewers choice.

Specifically, Baljeet will walk through YouTube's TrueView video ads which let users decide whether to watch or skip ads, and unveil First Watch, our latest offering reaching 15M people per day.Not familiar with First Watch? Think of it this way - every advertiser knows that YouTube’s homepage is a great way to reach a massive audience at scale. In fact, a daily reach of 50M impressions in the US, rivaling that of Glee's season premier this Fall. Yet many people don't immediately go to YouTube homepage, or come directly to video watch pages, missing the homepage entirely.

Now with First Watch, advertisers can make sure they capture people coming through the ‘side door’, as they watch their first YouTube video of the day. We developed First Watch as a broad reach opportunity for advertisers to engage with viewers at the start of the video viewing experience. First Watch displays an advertiser's InStream or InVideo ad on the first YouTube partner video a viewer sees.

We're thrilled to see the industry innovating in the online video space, and even more excited to be a part of that by bringing you new ways to reach your audiences. Are you at OMMA Video today? Make sure to ask Baljeet about First Watch or TrueView Video Ads.

Posted by Neha Mandal, YouTube team

Our friends at the Inside AdWords Blog recently posted about the new look and fee of the Ad Innovations site. Visit it to view new marketing technologies, watch demos and try the latest tools.

Whether you’re most interested in search, display, mobile, or performance measurement, find a number of AdWords features to help you stay on top of the newest advertising developments.

It's also live in six new countries: the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, and Brazil. For the full post click here.

Posted by Agency Blog Team

Creative people on YouTube love turning an idea into a brilliant production. They want their work to matter.

With this in mind, we’ve partnered with the 58th Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity on Good Work, a new program that gives creative professionals the opportunity to use their skills to make a difference and gain recognition their work. Learn more in this video:



Through Good Work, nonprofits from all over the world can submit a brief for a video ad promoting their cause. These organizations often lack the resources and time to create a truly great ad for their cause - and this is where you can help. Pick a brief you want to work on from the Good Work briefs gallery and make an ad for that organization. Your ad can be inspirational, thought-provoking, funny, or serious - just make sure it’s innovative and compulsively watchable.

If you succeed, you might be strutting your stuff at this year’s Cannes Festival - five talented people will win a trip to Cannes and have their work showcased there. Could it be you?

The deadline to submit your entry here is May 9, 2011. A jury of top industry experts chaired by Craig Davis, Chief Creative Officer Publicis Mojo and founder of Brandkarma, will announce the winners on May 21, 2011.

Posted by Supriya Sharma, YouTube Product Marketing Managaer

[This has been cross-posted from the Inside AdWords Blog]

As part of our Google Images redesign this July, we introduced Image Search Ads, which include a thumbnail alongside your ad text. We learned that on Google Images, image-based ads provided great results for our advertisers. They are also a highly useful format for users because they show commercial content directly related to the user's query.

Today we're expanding the image ad formats available on Google Images by testing rich media leaderboard units that appear above Google Images search results and invite you to try new products and services. With the introduction of this display ad format on Google Images, you now have a great opportunity to reach users with engaging ads, whether your goal is to build brand awareness, or to drive clicks and conversions.

Advertising on Google Images allows you to reach hundreds of millions of users around the world who use the site to find relevant photos and images every week. Today display ads on Google Images are available on a small fraction of queries in the US and UK only. Over time, we hope to make display ads on Google Images available on more queries globally.

Display ads on Google Images work the same as they would on other sites in the Google Display Network. They're triggered by the content on the page - in this case, that’s defined by the category of the search term that the user enters. If, for example, you target your ad to appear on Google Images on travel-related content, your ad may appear on Google Images if a user searches for related terms like [travel], [vacation], [beach] or [summer holiday].

It’s easy to start running display ads on Google Images. Just use the AdWords placement targeting tool to target Google Images like any other site on the Google Display Network, and choose the type of content you want to advertise alongside. You can upload your own leaderboard format ad or create one using Display Ad Builder. Pricing can be either CPM or CPC, depending on your goals. If you want more information about the advertising options on Google Images, visit the Help Center.

We’re invested in making display advertising work better for both users and advertisers. We look forward to introducing new, innovative placements and formats on the Google Display Network to help you reach your advertising goals.

Posted by Nathan Beach, Product Manager

This is our third post in a series on the Google Display Network (GDN). Today, we’ll look at the robust targeting options available to help you reach your audience with your display campaigns.

Reaching just the right audience is at the crux of every successful campaign. We continue to invest in powerful targeting technologies that enable this. Let’s look at what you can do today to reach your audience on the GDN.

Contextual targeting. What consumers read, right now at this very moment, says a lot about what they’re thinking about, making it a great opportunity to connect them with your message. Our sophisticated contextual targeting algorithm continually scans the millions of web pages in our network, understanding what they’re about, in real-time. Using this information, we automatically show your ads to the right users at the right time. It’s similar to our search technology that does a good job of finding relevant web pages for searches, increasing advertising engagement and reducing the clutter of irrelevant advertising. Contextual targeting works well for advertisers looking to generate conversions (like sales) through always-on direct response campaigns. However, you can also use contextual targeting for branding. For example, an advertiser who wants to associate their brand with environmental consciousness can contextually target their ads to appropriate pages with keywords like “green energy” or “green living”.

Placement targeting. What if you already know your audience is concentrated on specific websites? Placement targeting allows you to specify individual placements where you’d like to show your ads. Unlike contextual targeting, keywords aren't required; you simply choose the placements you’d like to target. A placement can be a website, or a subset of a site. For instance, if you're selling tennis gear and you’d like your ad to appear on a particular tennis website, or only on sports pages of a newspaper, you can specify that. Ad Planner or the Placement Tool can help you identify placements for your campaign.

Remarketing. Earlier this year, we announced remarketing, to help you reach users on the GDN based on their past interactions with your website. Remarketing is extremely effective because it targets a highly-relevant audience. With it, you can target users who:

• have visited your website or viewed specific product categories on your site
• didn’t convert or who abandoned their shopping cart
• have converted (in order to up- or cross-sell to them)
  

If you’re already driving traffic to your site through other means, like contextual targeting or your search ads, remarketing is a great complement to those efforts to increase your return-on-investment (ROI).

Interest category marketing. Currently in beta, interest category marketing allows you to reach people based on their interests. Leveraging the technology behind our contextual targeting engine, user interests are determined based on the type of web content they previously viewed. You can select from a list of interest categories (such as sports enthusiast or travel enthusiast) and we’ll show ads to people whose interests we think map to those categories. You can use interest categories in conjunction with contextual, placement and remarketing campaigns. Additionally, the Ads Preferences Manager gives users transparency and choice, enabling them to see the interest categories we think they fall into, add and remove categories, or opt out altogether.

Fine-tune targeting by adding geography and language, time, and demographic bids, or focus your brand presence with above-the-fold targeting. Further, you can apply a robust set of exclusions at the site, category or keyword level based on your goals and performance.

Whichever targeting options you choose, with the Google Display Network, precision doesn't have to come at the cost of scale. There is an Internet of opportunity, across mass-media, brand-name sites, all the way down to blogs, social networks, and local news. For every site you can name about a particular topic, there are dozens more you've never heard of that attract tens of thousands of monthly visitors.

We’ll see you next week, when we’ll talk about measuring and optimizing your display campaigns.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Marketing Manager, Google Display Network

In last week’s post of our Google Display Network series, we showed how DoubleClick Ad Planner can help you effectively plan your display ad campaigns and reach the right audience. Today we’ll talk about creating compelling display ads and the options available on the Google Display Network (GDN). Let’s look at each category of options you have today:

Great impact through rich media and video. Rich media and video formats engage users at a whole new level, drawing them in and encouraging interactivity in a way not possible with other ad formats.

Example of a great rich media ad run by Volvo and the agencies Euro RSCG New York and Media Contacts:


If you use rich media and video formats to engage your customers, here’s what we offer through our DoubleClick Rich Media and Video solutions:

• Choose from a variety of rich media formats, based on your campaign objective.
• Access DoubleClick Studio, a free rich media production and workflow tool.
• Analyze data on more than 100 unique interactions in every creative unit with Audience Interaction Metrics.
• Integration with DoubleClick for Advertisers, a robust ad management, serving and reporting solution, simplifies trafficking, reporting and billing of your rich media campaigns.

If you’re already working with another rich media vendor, we have many approved vendors we work with.

Build display ads in minutes. Creating display ads can be resource-intensive, and for many marketers, it may not be in the budget. So we introduced Display Ad Builder in 2008, a free tool for creating professional-looking display ads in minutes. Here’s what you can do with Display Ad Builder:

• Create image, video (InVideo, Click-To-Play), Flash and rich media (including expandable) ads using hundreds of fully customizable templates or templates tailored for specific industries.
• Stay true to your brand with your own images, text, videos and logos.
• We automatically convert the ads you design into most standard IAB ad sizes.

Display Ad Builder is also great for testing different messages and creative elements, or to get insights for more complex display campaigns managed by your in-house team or agency.

Stand out by blending in. Text ads are a versatile ad format that are easy to create and edit, in minutes. They’re especially effective as an extension of your existing search campaigns. Simply opt your search campaign into the GDN and your ads will show to users as they surf relevant web pages via our contextual targeting technology. Text ads also complement display campaigns by engaging users who ignore display ads (i.e. banner blindness). Further, they give your campaign wider reach since not every publisher may accept display ads, or may only accept a limited number of display ad formats and sizes on their site.

Whether your goal is to drive awareness, or to generate immediate sales, learn how the robust creative toolbox available on the Google Display Network can help. We’ll see you next week when we talk about how you can reach your audience with the targeting technologies available on the GDN.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Marketing Manager, Google Display Network

Our "Coffee break" series has provided us the chance to have great conversations with clients across industries, who have successfully used Google solutions to meet their marketing goals.

This time we sat down with Patrick Wang, Manager Online Marketing & Technologies from the search engine marketing company LeadQual, which implemented View-through conversion tracking to successfully demonstrate the positive impact of display advertising to Chegg, an ROI-driven textbook rental company founded in 2007 to help college students reduce their book purchase costs.

Here's what Patrick shared:

What was the client's goal?
Chegg was looking to expand its customer base for both rental and buy-back orders. It had more than doubled its growth year / year and had already heavily invested in search, yet had not been satisfied with the success of past display campaigns. We therefore needed a solution that provided reach while also being measurable and cost-effective.

Posted by Aitan Weinberg, Product Manager