Passwords have historically been the gateway to accounts; however we’ve shown that some of the most common passwords and security questions are easy to guess, which leaves accounts potentially vulnerable to hijackers.

Keeping our users and partners secure is a top priority for us and we continue to work hard to help you keep the bad guys out. 2-Step Verification (2SV) is one of the best ways to protect your account from hackers. 2SV combines both ‘something you know’ (like a password) and ‘something you have’ (like your phone or security key). Think of it like withdrawing money from an ATM/cash machine, where you need both your PIN and your bank card.

Millions of businesses use our advertising service, Google AdWords to display their businesses in Search and improve their reach globally. As part of our commitment to our AdWords customers and to demonstrate how easy it is to adopt better security standards, we distributed 2SV security keys to 60 of our largest ad agencies across four countries (UK, Spain, USA, Mexico). The agencies found the keys to be a useful security feature and have implemented 2SV into everyday practices. Here’s the story of two UK ad agencies that piloted this program.



Jellyfish is a full service digital marketing agency with offices in the UK, US and South Africa, and with over 250 staff, Jellyfish prides itself on its dynamic approach—responding to clients’ needs in an ever-changing digital landscape. Ranked the number one digital agency in the UK by The Drum Digital Elite in 2015, Jellyfish boasts an influential client roster including: Nestle, Motors.co.uk, Gatwick Airport, National Geographic, Zipcar etc.

As an agency with paid search as its heritage, Jellyfish utilises Google AdWords to help clients run efficient campaigns and generate the maximum return on investment through search and display opportunities. With the bulk of its clients utilising AdWords accounts, Jellyfish wanted to establish good security practices. Richard Hartley, PPC Director at Jellyfish notes: “AdWords has been the most effective means of running campaigns for our clients. With so much data and personal information involved, we wanted to make the safety of these campaigns a priority.”

Jellyfish consulted with Google’s Trust & Safety team on the best way to protect their clients. Tariq Mohammed, PPC Manager at Jellyfish notes: “Security is always of utmost importance to ourselves and our clients. Any of our accounts being hacked could have a massively harmful effect on our clients, and hence it is something we take very seriously. Anything at all that we can do to help safeguard the security of our clients’ data and spend will be grasped by Jellyfish with both hands.”

Google provided 2SV via security keys, to all Jellyfish clients who were AdWords account holders. “Account hijackers are highly motivated and equipped. The best added protection for accounts is 2SV as it prevents unwanted, third party access,” says Zeyneb Temnenko, Accounts Analyst within Google’s Trust & Safety team. “Enabling 2SV will undoubtedly give Jellyfish the security needed to run clients’ campaigns safely without any concerns about unauthorised account access.”

The introduction of the security keys has had a real impact on the Jellyfish team. “Having already rolled the 2-step verification across every single one of our AdWords logins, we already knew the great benefits of using features like the Authenticator app. Having a physical key that we could link to multiple AdWords accounts, even in the case of us not having our phones, helps us run the account easier,” says Hartley. “The security key emphasises deeper security culture and because it’s a physical device, our staff members are always conscious of it,” added Mohammed.

Jellyfish has rolled out the security keys to all team members in the UK and South Africa, with plans to roll it out across the US office. “When winning new business, I’ve no doubt the keys show just how seriously we take security and therefore the careful management of their accounts and data – it sets us apart from other agencies in the market,” says Hartley.


Based in Regent’s Place, the thriving heart of London’s commercial sector, iProspect is a global digital marketing agency, driving digital performance for some of the world’s largest advertisers across over 50 markets. Its heritage lies in paid search, with 100% of its UK clients taking advantage of search and display opportunities through the Adwords platform.

With Google AdWords accounts playing such an important part in the organisation’s business, it was critical to ensure the security of the clients’ data and their campaigns. Scott Abbott, Head of of Global PPC notes: “The activity we run through AdWords—be it in Google Search, through YouTube, Google Display Network or in Gmail—is crucial to our clients’ business. With over 80 clients and over 900 AdWords accounts, it’s imperative that we take our clients’ data and security seriously. A maliciously compromised login has the potential to put our clients’ business and reputation at risk so security is a big priority for us.”

Google’s Trust & Safety team provided iProspect with security keys to enable 2SV to keep clients’ accounts safe. “2-step verification provides an extra layer of security to prevent unwanted third party access to an account. This in turn prevents the phishing of login credentials and access codes through lookalike sites,” says Google’s Zeyneb Temnenko. “By enabling 2SV, iProspect are securing their clients’ accounts and guaranteeing peace of mind with regards to the safety of their data.”

The introduction of 2SV has dramatically mitigated the risk of logins being compromised through malicious attack. Maeve Ayton, PPC Account Director notes: “Adding 2-step verification with the security keys has given us peace of mind that our Google accounts are secure. It has also increased our clients’ confidence that we are continuing to take every opportunity to protect their data. Another benefit is that one key can be used across multiple accounts ensuring all accounts a user requires access to remain as secure as possible.”

“Introduction of the security keys has been a valued initiative. Even though we anticipate a future with more sophisticated phishing attempts and aggressive tactics to compromise accounts, we are confident that together with Google, we are up to the task of ensuring the safety of our clients’ accounts,” says Abbott.

You can find out more about Google’s 2SV process here. And if you are an AdWords user, you can purchase security keys for your account from several manufacturers such as Yubico or buy them on Amazon.

Reaching your most valuable and engaged customers at the moment they’re ready to act is critical in moving them along the path to a purchase. Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) and Customer Match can help you do that by customizing your campaigns for people who’ve previously interacted with your business. However, getting started can be time-consuming, especially if you have a lot of ad groups. To make it easier for you to manage your audience lists at scale, you can now apply them at the campaign level. 

Campaign-level audience lists also make it easy to measure and change your bid adjustments. Instead of trying to change your bid adjustments for each individual ad group, you can confidently optimize at the campaign level where you’re more likely to have enough data to make an informed decision. Learn more audience bid adjustment best practices here.

Many advertisers are already using campaign-level search audiences to save time and make better optimizations:

“Campaign-level audiences have proven to be a great way to apply our remarketing lists at scale. Our campaigns often contain so many ad groups - using RLSA in the past required hours spent applying audiences to each one and analyzing the results by ad group. By applying them at the campaign level, we can be confident that no ad group is overlooked, while saving us time that can be better spent on helping our customers find their new home.”
– Debra Carroll, Senior SEM Manager at Redfin 

“Being able to apply all of our audiences at the campaign level has drastically simplified the process of adding lists to multiple campaigns, as most of our campaigns have hundreds of ad groups. This allowed us to apply our bid adjustments in bulk, which has resulted in smarter spending and increased ROAS from our search campaigns.”
– Nathan Eagan, PPC Specialist at Webstaurant

With campaign-level search audiences, you now have more flexibility than ever in how to engage with your customers. Learn more about using campaign-level audiences in the Help Center, and read our best practices guide to learn how you can reach the right audience with a message that resonates.  

Posted by Bhanu Narasimhan, Director of Product Management, AdWords

Last week we covered how mobile has changed shopping behavior during Black Friday weekend. But its effects don’t stop there. Mobile is making it easier to find sales and great deals, encouraging shoppers to browse during traditionally lower traffic seasons; in fact, 22% more mobile shoppers visited retailers via Google in the January after the holiday season, than in the October before.1 For certain categories, like Furniture or Home & Garden, January visits increased up to 39% over their October levels.2 Optimize your strategy to keep your Google Shopping lights on for these savvy shoppers and start the year off with a bang.

Categories seeing higher traffic from Google in January 2016 than October 2015 (UK categories available here)

Optimization tips for key traffic-driving categories in January

There are five categories where retailers saw more traffic coming from Google in January of 2016 than in October 2015. If you sell products in these categories, use the following best practices to expand your reach to shoppers.

1. Use click share to drive more engagement. Products in top positions may see better engagement from shoppers, especially on mobile. The following benchmarks highlight the mobile click share by category you’ll need to be competitive in reaching the top positions. To grow your click share, start by increasing your bids and ad relevance for your priority products.

Category	Mobile Click Share Benchmark3
Electronics	19%
Home and Garden	26%
Health and beauty	30%
Vehicles and Parts	15%
Furniture	22%

2. Create a strategic seasonal campaign. Separate strategic products or items on sale with a separate campaign with a higher campaign priority. A separate campaign enables more flexibility in managing bids and budgets for these products without affecting the rest of your campaigns.

3. Use custom labels to create seasonal product groups. If you plan to sell high-value products in a given category, like winter accessories for vehicles and parts, use custom labels to create a segmented product group in your campaign. This way, you can specifically adjust the bids for winter accessories and then monitor the click share to reach top positions in Google Shopping results.

4. Remarket your products to previous shoppers. Increase the visibility of your products to shoppers who visited your site during the holidays but didn’t convert. Create a remarketing list of previous visitors who may have abandoned their carts at checkout. Chances are, these shoppers are still looking for the best deal available. If you’re having a clearance sale, highlight your lower prices to these shoppers as they continue to browse.

Whether it’s to gear up for the winter or take advantage of clearance sales, these shoppers were eager to continue shopping online last January. Continue adjusting budgets, especially in categories that saw increased traffic last year to reach these shoppers in the New Year.

For more best practices on driving a successful holiday season, visit the help center.

Consumer expectations are higher than ever before. And thanks to mobile, your customers are connected, informed and savvy– they’re becoming supershoppers overnight. As they go shopping this holiday season, it’s more important than ever to connect with your most valuable customers at the exact moment they’re looking for a gift.

Customer Match makes this connection easy by helping you to engage these valuable holiday customers as they’re searching on Google, watching videos on YouTube, and checking promotions on Gmail.

Starting today, we’re rolling out an easier way to manage your customer lists, giving you more flexibility in reaching your customers during the busy holiday season.

Let’s say that you manage marketing for an online clothing store, and you’re interested in connecting with your active newsletter subscribers. To make it easy for you to keep this customer list up to date, you can now add and remove specific email addresses, or even replace your entire list without having to create a new one. Learn more in the Help Center.

Brands large and small are using Customer Match in different ways to boost performance:

To save you time before the holidays, we created an upload service to help you get started with Customer Match. We’ve partnered with Merkle, Sailthru, LiveRamp, PMG, Neustar, Epsilon and others to make the upload process turnkey. Some of these partners can even help you expand your customer lists and match rates, too.

We’ve also partnered with Salesforce and Adobe, who have made it easy for you to upload your customer lists directly from within their customer relationship management platforms. If you’d like to learn more about these services, contact your Google account team.

Understanding your customers and being present in the moments that matter to them is critical. Marketers who adjust their plans accordingly with tools like Customer Match will be positioned for a happy holiday season– and a successful 2017.